Herman Daly, 84, Who Challenged the Economic Gospel of Growth, Dies

"Perhaps the best-known ecological economist, he faulted his mainstream peers for failing to account for the environmental harm growth can bring.

Herman Daly, who for more than 50 years argued that the economic gospel of growth as synonymous with prosperity and progress was fundamentally, and dangerously, flawed because it ignored its associated costs, especially the depletion of natural resources and the pollution it engenders, died on Oct. 28 in Richmond, Va. He was 84.

The death, at a hospital, was caused by a brain hemorrhage, his daughter Karen Daly Junker said.

Dr. Daly, an ecological economist, was almost surely his field’s chief popularizer through his more than a dozen books and many journal articles, his faculty positions at the University of Maryland and, earlier, Louisiana State University, and his somewhat incongruous six-year stint at the World Bank.

Although he was branded a heretic for his theories — or, worse, ignored — among traditional economists, he had plenty of adherents, who saw him as prophetic for anticipating climate change’s increasingly harmful impact and the vast sums of money needed to address it.

“His ideas are really relevant now, unlike most other economists, whose ideas tend to lose relevance as time passes and circumstances change,” Peter A. Victor, an ecological economist and the author of the 2021 biography “Herman Daly’s Economics for a Full World,” said in a phone interview.

One of Dr. Daly’s key principles was that growth is “uneconomic” when its costs outweigh its benefits. That idea was tied to another: Earth, once empty, is now full — of people and what they produce — and charting a more sustainable path requires the use of fewer natural resources and the making of less waste.

“That’s not really hard to understand,” Dr. Daly said in a 2011 video interview with WWF Sweden. “I can explain that to my grandchildren.”

Yet another foundational concept was that the economy does not exist apart from the Earth’s biosphere but within it, and that its scale is limited by its reliance on finite natural resources.

Such propositions might seem simple, but arguing against economic growth, Dr. Daly wrote in a foreword to Mr. Victor’s book, was like poking “a big hornets’ nest with a short stick.”

“It rudely upsets a very large and comfortable consensus,” he added.

He urged politicians, governments and other economists to abandon the relentless pursuit of growth in favor of a so-called steady-state economy, which would achieve a stable balance between supporting human life and preserving the environment. He employed an aircraft metaphor to explain his preferred approach.

“The failure of a growth economy to grow is a disaster,” he told The New York Times Magazine in a profile of him this year. “The success of a steady-state economy not to grow is not a disaster. It’s like the difference between an airplane and a helicopter. An airplane is designed for forward motion. If an airplane has to stand still, it’ll crash. A helicopter is designed to stand still, like a hummingbird.”

He proposed replacing gross domestic product with metrics like an “index of sustainable economic welfare,” which would tally not just the value of goods and services produced but also the ecological harm done in the process. To him, “sustainable growth” was nonsensical; “sustainable development” was the goal.

In an interview, Joshua Farley, an economist and co-author with Dr. Daly of “Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications” (2004), boiled his colleague’s animating philosophy down concisely: “More isn’t always better.”

Dr. Daly’s economic beliefs were grounded in hard sciences like the laws of thermodynamics, but also in ethical ideals, like the fair distribution of wealth, and in his faith as a Methodist who saw the Earth as the handiwork of an almighty creator.

Even as his theories gained currency in recent years, they remained outside economic thinking’s mainstream. He did not seem to mind.

“My duty is to do the best I can and put out some ideas,” he said in The Times Magazine interview. “Whether the seed that I plant is going to grow is not up to me. It’s just up to me to plant it and water it.”

Herman Edward Daly was born on July 2l, l938, in Houston to Edward Joseph Daly, who owned a service station in Beaumont, Texas, where the family lived at the time, and Mildred (Herrmann) Daly, a homemaker who had worked as a bookkeeper before marrying. The family later moved to Houston, where Ed Daly opened a hardware store.

Shortly before Herman turned 8, he contracted polio, which rendered his left arm useless. After unsuccessful efforts to repair it over several years, he opted for amputation when he was about to enter high school.

“As traumatic as this was, it stopped me from wasting my time hoping I would recover and saved me from using lots of energy going through treatment that would be of little or no benefit,” he wrote in a 2014 personal history. “This painful experience taught me to concentrate on what I am able to do and not waste energy on things that I can’t do.”

After graduating from high school in 1956, he entered what was then known as the Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston. When the time came to declare a major, he chose economics because, he said, he felt it merged science and the humanities.

“As he later discovered,” Dr. Victor wrote in his biography, “that turned out not to be true.”

Dr. Daly earned his bachelor’s degree in 1960 and then enrolled in a doctorate program at Vanderbilt University with a focus on development in Latin America.

Two people he met while at Vanderbilt would play major roles in his life.

One, his original thesis adviser, the Romanian mathematician and economist Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, helped lay the groundwork for what became ecological economics with his 1971 book “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process,” which argued that all natural resources are permanently degraded when used for economic activity.

The other was Marcia Damasceno, a Brazilian college student whom he married in 1963. Along with his daughter Karen, she survives him, as do another daughter, Terri Daly Stewart; his sister, Denis Lynn (Daly) Heyck, professor emeritus of Spanish language and literature at Loyola University Chicago; and three grandchildren.

By the time Dr. Daly received his doctorate from Vanderbilt in 1967, he was teaching at L.S.U. There, he began to focus more closely on the interconnections between the economy, the environment and ethics, with an emphasis on the steady-state principles articulated by the 19th-century British economist John Stuart Mill. Dr. Daly published his first book, “Toward a Steady-State Economy,” in 1973.

He remained at L.S.U. until 1988, when, in an unlikely move, he joined the World Bank in Washington as a senior economist in the environment department. “It was a big surprise for me that the World Bank, whose basic policy was economic growth, offered me a job,” he wrote.

While there, he developed his “three rules for sustainable development” and worked with others to try to change the bank’s system for measuring G.D.P. to reflect environmental costs. The efforts, he wrote, were “to little or no avail.” He moved to the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy in 1994, taking emeritus status in 2010.

Dr. Daly’s other notable books include “For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future” (1989), written with the theologian John B. Cobb Jr.

John Fullerton, a former commercial banker who now leads the Capital Institute, a research organization based in Stonington, Conn., whose work is aligned with the book’s prescriptions, is among those who have been influenced by “For the Common Good.”

In an interview, Mr. Fullerton said one of Dr. Daly’s most important contributions was his focus on “a pursuit of development that was not physical to achieve prosperity.” Another, he said, was to argue that traditional approaches to finance and economics “lead us off a cliff.””