Herman Daly’s Economics for a Full World | Book launch event, Nov 2021

Good evening everyone my name is tim jackson i'm the director of cusp the center for the understanding of sustainable prosperity and we are delighted to welcome you to this webinar this evening the webinar forms part of the economic and social research council's festival of social science which runs throughout november and in which cusp has participated a Number of times in a number of different events and this is if you like our grand finale from those festival of social science events and it's a webinar dedicated to the launch of a book written by one of our

co-investigators peter victor about the life and work of the man who in some sense can be said to be the source of many of the ideas that we work with in cusp herman daly and i'm delighted to say that both peter And herman are with us tonight on the webinar and we're also joined by a couple of people um as panelists on on the webinar tonight in particular i'm delighted to welcome professor patricia perkins who is a teaches ecological economics and um feminist economics at the university of york and uh katherine trebek dr catherine trebek

who is the co-founder as many of you will know of the well-being economy alliance she Worked for for oxfam for some time before that and is also on our advisory committee for uh cusp so it is um it is a cusp event it's an ecological economics event it's very definitely a university of york event as both ellie and peter are from the university of york and in some sense it's a a mark in the tide of history to celebrate the Work of of hermann daly and i i know that one of the themes certainly from

the speakers as we go through the evening will be the extent to which herman's work has influenced what we have done uh during our careers and i would just like to pay right at the beginning my own my own homage to that um herman's was one of the first pieces of work that i came across um when i was Looking at the question of economic growth and the question of sustainability and without even knowing it actually becoming involved in the field of ecological economics which to some extent can be said to have been founded by

the work that herman has done throughout his life so it's a it's an enormous pleasure and a privilege to be sharing this discussion tonight towards The end of the evening we'll have plenty of time for discussion and i i'd like to invite you to pose any questions or comments in the uh q and a box which you should see beneath your screens and i will keep a close eye on that q a and we will bring some of those questions into the discussion we may even bring one or two of you personally to ask those

questions into the discussion if you would like to Do that and be ready to do that that would be a great addition to our conversation but to start the meeting let me just turn to you peter and ask you to introduce this wonderful book which is just been published by routledge and it is uh herman daley's economics for a full world his life and ideas peter perhaps you Could just talk to us for um 10 minutes or so about the book itself and the process of writing it hopefully a little as well thank you very

much tim uh before i start i just have to make a small correction to your very kind introduction as much as uh professor perk and ellie as i know her admire the university of york we are actually at york university in canada and don't want to be confused With our good friends at the university of york my apologies york university in canada who are a partner in cusp exactly so look what i'm going to do is um give you a a like a trailer to a movie a trailer to a book i'm going to tell

you um about the plot and some of the uh main ideas that are in the book and if you want to know more well it's clear what You would have to do so i'm just going to share my screen now [Music] so the book um begins with a couple of chapters about herman's life uh and then i weave some of those um my experiences into my interpretation of his ideas later on uh like all of us uh herman started as a child he was born in houston texas in 1938 just before the Second world war

um the influences on hermann as he grew up uh were many but the ones that stand out were his regular visits to church with his his mother mildred and uh religion remained a very important part of herman's life throughout uh you'll see there a picture that many of you may not in fact recognize if you're not old enough but those are iron lungs used to Treat people with polio back in the 1950s before they had a vaccine hermann was a polio victim fortunately he did not have to go into an iron lung but um he

he did lose the use of one of his arms and in his teenage years persuaded his parents that he would like to have it removed um then you'll see um oh a slide showing uh that sorry the division between people In texas texas was segregated when herman grew up there uh and uh that of course influence on everybody's on anybody's life in that in those circumstances one thing that worked in his favor if you like is he worked for his high school years in his father's hardware store and one of the things his father taught

him was in fact not to discriminate amongst the customers and i Think herman learned an important lesson from that and then in the in the middle of this you see herman at 18 he's driven down to acapulco with a good friend uh in a truck lots of personal freedom in those days uh and then i think um he would say this he made the mistake of catching that beautiful fish but at the time he was rather proud herman went to university first at rice university 1956-1961 that's where he first Discovered economics um for him he

thought it was going to solve a problem he was very keen on the humanities and the sciences and he thought economics had its feet in both of those uh but he was to discover later when he dug deeper into the subject that in fact it had its feet in the air neither in science or in humanities and in a way he's devoted much of his career if not his whole career to rectifying that Problem herman went on to vanderbilt university in 1961 he stayed there quite a few years to earn his phd his first tenure

track teaching appointment was 1964 in the economics department at louisiana state university and he stayed at that university until 1988. now 1973 comes along and herman publishes this book of edited papers he writes a long introduction about the Steady-state economy i'm sorry i missed a slide i must go back um i want to go back to the 1968 paper uh economics as a life science this was the first paper of real significance in my view that herbert published the title is telling economics as a life science in other words he was saying economics can learn

a lot from biology to improve our understanding of how an Economy relates to the broader environment so on the left you see this is a diagram taken from from that paper you see that the biological processes of anabolism and catabolism where useful matter and useful energy are drawn into an ecosystem used and then degraded matter and energy are released back and he said well you know it's really the same in an economy except we talk about production and consumption production requires useful matter useful energy and Ultimately the economy produces degraded matter and degraded energy and

that parallel uh is really important for understanding herman's approach to economics so in 1973 he um went significantly further in explaining how the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere this square here represents the planet the only thing entering significance is the Sun and waste heat leaves uh down over here this is the economy within the biosphere extracting primary matter primary energy recycling some matter but ultimately disposing of waste matter and waste energy back into the biosphere another key idea that came in comes in in the 1973 book is herman's view that the economy needs

to be understood in three related dimensions it's scale how how large it is in a physical sense Relation to the biosphere the distribution of income and wealth among different people and then allocating the products that are produced in the economy uh to different people now his one of his major criticisms of mainstream or neoclassical economics is that it relies far too heavily on the market which is plays a useful role in allocation to also determine distribution and scale uh neither of which he thinks it's capable Of doing uh properly if at all a third element

in this 1973 book was this ends mean spectrum that herman introduced and this goes back to his idea that economics ought to be grounded in both physics looking at the ultimate means and ethics and religion looking at what it's all for but he says instead economics or using the older main political economy Is about converting intermediate means to intermediate ends and neglects the ethical and ultimate end version or aspect and neglect where all of this material comes from in the first place here's herman now in 1988 i believe uh teaching on a fulbright scholarship in

brazil urban spent a lot of time in brazil in different parts of his career this is fluent in portuguese and how the love of the country is Um it was at that time that he started to talk about the shift from an empty world to a full world and these graphics below illustrate what he means here you have an empty world a little fishing boat up here and a small net and abundant fish life but what has happened over time is there's been an incredible accumulation Of fishing gear much larger nets and of course the

depletion of fisheries so this is a nice image of what he and what he means by the world becoming full um the other thing that's important to capture in these diagrams in this graphics is that um his view and i think it's correct is that what nature provides and what humans make are complements not substitutes if you're going to catch Fish you need fish and equipment one does not substitute for the other in 1989 an international society of ecological economics was formed very much to promote hermann's ideas you can see him over here in the

photograph many many very important contributors to ecological economics are shown in this now rather classic uh image from the conference that took place in 1991 From 1988 to 1994 hermann worked at the world bank i have unfortunately he felt he ought to leave academia in the late 80s he was feeling less and less welcome in his economics department because of the kind of ideas he was finding important he worked in the world bank and when he left the world bank he gave a speech which you can read on the internet he gave advice to the

bank he said the bank should stop counting the consumption of Natural capital as england as income natural capital being if you like another word for nature he saw that the tax system should shift from away from labor and income uh to taxing resource throughput taxing the materials and energy that we use and dispose of that we should max all the banks should maximize we of course should do it too the productivity of natural capital in the short run and invest in increasing Its supply in the long run and fourthly possibly the most controversial is from

the point of view of the bank is that it should move away from the ideology of global economic integration by free trade free capital mobility and export-led growth and develop domestic production for internal markets as the first option having recourse to international trade only when clearly much more efficient obviously this is an attack on Globalization running rampant two versions of this book or two editions of this book for the common good were published in 1989 and then 1994. herman wrote this in close collaboration with his co-author theologian john cobb i'm just going to mention one

part or one little piece of this 500 plus page book and it's the description of the index of sustainable economic welfare Where herman and others have been criticizing gmp now gdp as a measure of well-being and they said look it includes expenditures on things that are bad and it doesn't include the value of things that are good and and should be adjusted and then we'll have a better index of economic welfare and we can draw conclusions from that when he did that with his colleagues for the us if you look at the decade 51 tonight

to 60 gnp per capita increased much more than this index modified index of economic welfare the same is true in 1960 to 70 70 to 80 where there was hardly any increase in this more meaningful index of economic welfare and in 80 to 90 it actually went negative now with economic growth measured by uh gmp still being positive but things getting worse according to the index of economic welfare we have what herman now likes to Call and done for some time uneconomic growth day hermann um enjoys debates and he's been in a number of really

important debates that are in the literature and which are analyzed in detail in the book i'll just run through them very fast he debated the steady-state economy with his professor and mentor georges eurogan uh he debated the relevance of dynamics Thermodynamics and economics that was in 91. he debate debated with uh professor baguatio international trade specialist of the merits and demands of free trade he debated the question of if you have scale distribution and um allocation you need you need you've got at least three policy objectives you need instruments or institutions for each of them

He debated with uh philosopher uh professor sago about ethics and about whether knowledge could replace resources in capital he debated with um sorry uh noble memorial prize laureate solo and sticklets about economic growth in 1997 and again with uh with another noble memorial prize winner kenneth arrow uh about are we consuming too much in 2007 So he loves to debate um and the book goes into those debates in some detail as i said then in 2014 herman has received many many awards uh this particular one from japan the blue planet prize very prestigious i i

will read the citation professor herman daly redefined steady-state economics through the concept of sustainability by incorporating such factors as the Environment local communities quality of life and ethics into economic theory which led to building a foundation of ecological economics he has been questioning whether economic growth brings happiness to humans and has been issuing warnings to society which tends to overemphasize economic growth as a consequence he has had a significant intellectual influence so just to bring this to a close here's A photo of myself and herman taken in 2018 when i spent the best part of

a week with him uh interviewing him um about uh his life and his ideas i thought that was very valuable for writing the book now i don't know what was on his mind as we had that photo taken but here's the sort of thing that i was thinking of herman is a gentleman he's well liked and and widely admired He's an original thinker an excellent writer and he'll debate anybody and i'm my conclusion having done all the research and writing the book is that his ideas for a full world are more relevant than ever that's

the trailer if you want to know more please buy the book thank you very much thank you peter thank you very much Indeed um perhaps to open the conversation um i could turn first to you herman i'm i'm not going to ask you though i'm tempted to how it feels to be looking at photographs of your much much younger self or even you know how it feels to read read about yourself in in that in the way that peter has so graciously done in The book um perhaps i could perhaps i could start with a

a sort of more fundamental question what if you were to identify something in your life that was a first cause original cause so to speak something that sparked the journey that your intellectual life and professional life took you on what would that something be Well my goodness i guess the the first thing i want to say is that tomorrow is thanksgiving day here in the u.s i know you have a different day in canada but uh you and peter and many have given me so much to be thankful for today i i'm amazed regarding your

question you know what uh sparked started it's it's very hard to say you know looking back It is quite an experience to read someone's interpretation of your life and ideas and i think peter's is pretty accurate i i learned some things about myself uh i did i learned that growing up in texas probably had more of an influence on me than i had really Realized in later years i suppose observing as he pointed out that texas at that time was totally segregated and uh let's say pretty racist place uh and so you know one group

it doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to realize That something is wrong with that kind of system and i guess where i learned that something was wrong was really uh in church although the churches have not always been at the leadership of opposing segregation even as a child i sing sunday school songs about jesus Loves the little children red and yellow black and white that impressed upon me that things aren't always correct that the way the world is could be terribly wrong and i suppose that carried over into other elements when i got into

economics you know you just sort of accept the way things are i started out of course as a growth economist i was totally Interested in in economic growth as a cure to poverty both in texas and latin america and it took me a while to grow out of that and to see that there was something wrong there but maybe one of the things that that about an early experience with uh what's wrong with the world uh yeah I guess i might also add one further point you know one of the things they used to do

with school children at the time was they would give you a picture and then the the caption was what's wrong with this picture and the picture is very clever it looked just right but if you studied it carefully you Would find something that was very anomalous couldn't possibly be the case and so i guess that way of looking at the world you know what's wrong with this picture what's wrong with what what you're being presented that that came through later on in uh in the circular flow diagram of the uh standard economic textbooks and this

of course i learned directly From george sk rogan he was he was really the first to point out the way that was and i i had looked at that diagram for years and years and never seen anything wrong with it and then he opened my eyes and i said well this can't possibly be right so i guess those are some of the things that pushed me in that direction let's talk a little bit about that that um question of grace i mean at that Point at which you tipped from sort of understanding grace as a

cure for poverty to understanding a growth-based economics as a part of the problem i mean is i i can't really imagine because it was some years before we any of us on the call were were trying to follow in your footsteps but at that point in time that must have set you at odds First with the economics profession and then later of course with the world bank um and yet somehow you stuck to your guns in relation to that what what was it that kept you sticking to your guns in the face of of that

kind of of antagonism opposition yeah um well i suppose it was just the uh pure logic as i said i really started out as an Economist tonight i i thought it made a lot of sense and microeconomics has a uh a win to stop rule in other words you you have something grows it's a firm or a household consumption as it grows that increases costs and it increases benefits and you have the law of diminishing marginal Utility diminishing benefit a law of increasing marginal cost at some point they become equal that then you should stop

growing at that point well that's very logical that's just math and i said well why doesn't that apply to the global economy i mean the macro economy well because we think of the macro economy as If it were the whole well the hole grows into the void there's not no opportunity cost it doesn't work but in fact the macro economy grows into the ecosystem which is a larger hole so it does it too is a part so the economics of the part really applies to the macro economy as well as the micro economy and that

i couldn't escape that logic you know i said well why not why Do we why why do we have a when to stop rule and microeconomics and no such thing in macro economics and so that um and i you know it was a gradual sort of thing i i was it did occur to me that i was very much in the minority and therefore i might be wrong and so That was uh i guess one of the reasons why i did i did seek debate because uh not only i am sort of cantankerous i suppose

by nature but also you know i might be wrong and so convince me and and stop me from making a bigger fool of myself than i already have and so that was part of uh part of it But i i absolutely understand i mean huge respect really for that because that's a not only you know a way of prosecuting science and proper science to be continually questioning but it's also in some sense a very challenging personal past to take i mean as people develop they can become very comfortable in their views and look for support

from those around them from their peer group and receive accolades From that peer group and be promoted to fast lung places and and high positions um in in terms of status and yet to choose a different path is actually something quite rare and i suppose you know that pursuit of logic is obviously one of the things that's very very important to you what's what what would you regard as the things that have sustained you as you Fought those sometimes very lonely battles well um actually they are they were lonely battles i should say that in

ecological economics uh i did have some support in fact i had some really good teachers and uh really excellent colleagues and uh partners and so it was not entirely Uh me against the world there were there were good people who helped me and who i tried to help and that extended all the way i mean i could give a few you know from uh robert costanza john cobb uh robert goodland at the world bank uh brian checked with cassidy peter brown at the university of maryland joshua farley at the University of vermont bill reese and

my mathis joachim lego clovis cabo county in brazil juan martin de saliere i mean there a lot there were other people that were on the same path and so um that would that was a big encouragement to me to find these people and i found some of them they some of them found me and and we began to cohere And i think that was what uh we got together uh with costanza me ann marie johnson juan martin sallier and we started the international society for ecological economics and as i pointed it had to be an

international society because there were too few people in any one nation to do otherwise and so i so i did get some help and very Much and it wasn't entirely lonesome so there was that um well i g and uh although i have not received a whole lot of uh support within standard economics indeed mainly criticism Outside of economics it just as you pray as you discovered i'm sure the there's a whole lot of criticism of the profession of the economics profession and so many people outside of economics are very eager to see some uh

criticism and constructive reform Of economics because it's just so important uh so that that was a that was an encouragement as well yeah thank you and i mean obviously i guess the question that comes from to my mind from that is the extent to which actually progress itself depends on um setting oneself at odds with consensus And and you know that seems to in some sense be what you achieved with the kind of remarkable legacy of positioning this critique of growth at first at the margins of economics and then or at least hopefully then that

critique itself becoming moving more and more towards the center do you see it do you see more openness to to your ideas Um in the last few years than there were in the early days um yes and no uh i i guess to continue with your previous question i mean one of the things that that also influenced me in the in uh being an outsider or um Being on the marg was i read uh thomas coons book the structure of scientific revolution and that that i began to see well gosh these these kinds of things

happen in all fields i mean even physics ideas don't just triumph people have to generations have to die and new Generations have to come along before some ideas make it into the uh to the canon and you see that in religion you see that in in physics you see that everywhere well why not economics i mean maybe maybe we've just really made a fetish an idol out of economic growth and we neglected uh The the legitimate criticisms of growth so that that gave me a little confidence as well to uh to see that now i've

babbled on and i've forgotten the point you well it was a question of whether you saw progress so so yes you know there's some some acceptance of those ideas greater acceptance of those ideas you prefaced it with yes and no no well yes and no uh the well you look at the uh Ecological economy i think we've made a lot of progress in ecological economics but uh so that's that's the positive side uh there are people good people working in the area and i've been fortunate to be associated with with many of them uh but

at the same time we're also a minor counter current in the mainstream which is sort of hell-bent towards Growth and the mainstream has not uh really recanted in any significant way and in fact uh it seems to be getting worse when you read what's happening in the world so in that sense um i think we've we've got a long way to go and uh and i'm hopeful that future ecological economists will Will uh do a better job than we older ones have done to convince the mainstream thanks herman um there's quite a few questions coming

in and i would encourage you i saw a couple of raised hands but i just wanted to encourage you if you would to put your questions in the q a box which you should see under [Music] at the bottom of your zoom screen and and i will try to get to some of those some of those are actually asking you know sim questions about where do we go how do we get more to the mainstream and and where the challenges lie so i want to come back to that a little bit but before before doing

that let me turn um first to you perhaps ellie um And ask you for some reflections i mean i mentioned right at the beginning that a part of your interest is in in feminist economics and i guess there's some sort of interesting points about the relationship between the ecological economics that hermann sketched and and the interests of of the feminist economics i wonder if you could speak a little to that and also to your um reactions to to peter and herman's Presentations thanks tim i would like to just point out a couple of connections between

herman's work as uh summarized and described so well by peter uh and the envy field of feminist ecological economics which of course has many variants and many you know there are many people who see themselves as feminists and as working on economic questions and who might not Call themselves feminist ecological economic economists but in general um herman's writings do mention equity and the importance of more equitable distribution of wealth not just income and herman has also raised the focus on community-based economic economies and on provision for the distant future as a common good as a

public good and also the recognition that caring for everyone is in the interest of all These are all points that peter makes very well in the book and i think that feminist ecological economists of many persuasions do see these as crucial pillars of sustainable societies a priority shift to putting equity first in particular intersectional and gender equity intersectional equity including gender equity this opens equity ethical ways To address some of the stumbling blocks which are also noted in the book whether they're ideological whether they have to do with inertia whether they have to do with

lack of information or a lack of education and understanding gender equity in data gathering in particular also health care and senior care and reproductive health also gender equity in Education intersectional equity and economic opportunities and political access all of those things accelerate the demographic transition ethically all you have to do is look at kerala and other places where equity is prioritized so not just population growth but also questions of excessive throughput and over consumption Can melt away if equity comes first not necessarily i mean it's com it's complicated but equity is such an important foundation

for addressing all of these things so i think that uh demographic transitions to well-being focused societies i'm sure catherine's going to talk about this much in much more detail but that kind of a democratic transition and also the energy transition a democratic democratic energy transition Depend it seems to me on undoing capitalism's reliance on an extra exacerbation of social inequities and economic inequities so i'm wondering i would like to hear what peter and also herman would say about this question would an economic system that doesn't rely on inequities Still be capitalism well that's a great

question i'm going to i'm going to ask i'm going to ask peter first to comment on that thank you ellie for the question um well i you know i um it's not something that's discussed why very much in the book so i'm really having to draw on other parts of my brain uh look one of the things about capitalism is that it defines equity in Its own terms so what aversion might be that uh if you work hard you'll do well that's fair and obviously any so the the conclusion that seems to follow from that

it's not my conclusion it's someone who's not doing well if somebody's not working hard uh and that's blatantly wrong so when you say if you had a more equitable society could it be capitalist well it would have to uh A significantly redefined idea of equity would not be compatible with capitalism uh this kind of the the the massive increase in inequality and the distribution of of wealth and income that we're seeing in capital society uh strikes most of us is highly inequitable uh so if you're going to tackle that in a big way first of

all you're going to you're going to run into opposition from powers That be within the capitalist system uh but i think that in the end uh if we were to succeed in limiting the spread of incomes and wealth very much by the way as hermann has been recommending for a long time that there should be a maximum income to complement a minimum income you don't hear discussion of that very much uh then i don't think that that would be very compatible with capitalism would be my Answer thanks peter um herman we didn't test you on

specifically on capitalism yet but where do you stand on it and where would you stand on ellie's question is a is an equitable capitalism an oxymoron yeah i uh i guess my gen the way i've approached that is just to say capitalism is where we are and so we don't really get to choose a Blank slate as a starting point we have historically given initial conditions and those are of the capitalist system and there are many things wrong with the capitalist system and i think there are many contradictions between the steady-state economy and capitalism as

it exists so i've been more interested in trying to Remove those parts of capitalism specifically the it's in different it's uh increased ever-increasing scale of the economy and it's ever-increasing uh male distribution of wealth and income to tackle those things directly and then say well what kind of what do you want to call a system then which which results uh I really don't care if you call it cap modified capitalism or ecosocialism or something i really i'd like to call it steady state economy of course but that's uh so i haven't gotten too much in

into that uh debate uh and it quickly gets you into into marxist economics and i agree with marx in terms of his uh emphasis on class exploitation that was i think completely left out of standard economic Not well largely left out but um i i get when you get into that i you get dragged into marx's historical determinism and these things which i i really don't agree with at all where would you answer that question ellie i think that um what herman just said in terms of the emphasis being on the scale Like peter's slide

had those three um issues of scale distribution and uh what was the other allocate allocation all right from an ecological perspective and then i can understand how a student of georgetown again would would think about this right um the the material throughput the ecological implications of the economy Are certainly very important but what i was trying to point out in bringing a more feminist lens to all of this is that the equity piece the distribution piece might well be the key to the other two and to doing those to making them happen ethically and democratically

and so the i i i i don't really i mean I we're moving into a time now because of the climate crisis where it seems to me the question of what we call what economic system we call it is becoming less and less relevant and what its impacts are for people for people's lives for well-being you know and and to refer to another one of peter's slides the ultimate goal here is well-being for for all Right and so that has to do with distribution but it also has to do with a a longer vision or

a more comprehensive vision including the scale of the economy within the within the earth's ecosystems but also who is benefiting from that economy and i think i i just wanted to kind of see what you would say herman about A shift towards an equity focus towards prioritizing equity maybe as a first step yeah well i think that's very important first step and i think that's totally um consonant with the ultimate end you know is that that's what brings ethics into we we order our intermediate ends with Reference to some concept of an ultimate end to

give to know what to put in first place and i think that equity equality and particularly in in the feminist case i mean equality and equity for women who have not been blessed with that over the years uh compared to males who have had a dominance in most Systems so that kind of equity is important as as well as the distribution of wealth and income so i would i would say that's that's very high uh on the list and then i don't know you know i i i'm not i've not had the uh i i

don't have the capacity to include specifically uh Feminist uh economics uh you know black economics every other kind of of special economics because i just don't know enough about it but i know in the case of the we got into it a little bit with the index of sustainable economic welfare the problem of including what has traditionally been considered Women's work unpaid work in the household you know giving that more value so there are many ways in which i think this is a i would consider this an opportunity for future development i don't think it's

been adequately dealt with yet in ecological economics and i think it's it's a field that i look forward to seeing more people work In thanks herman um there was a point there where you'd seed up uh beautifully uh a question to catherine um because you talked about the ultimate end and the ultimate ends as being uh to some extent well-being for all um and of course that is almost the strap line of of the leadership that catherine has shown in this in this space catherine maybe first of all tell us a little bit About that

framing of the ultimate ends in terms of well-being but also um perhaps reflect on the influence that hermann has had on the development of that idea thanks thanks tim and i wanted to say thanks also of course of course to him for this incredible body of work that has has really rolled out the carpet for so many of us to dance or walk or Journey and and i mean it i don't think we can underestimate that contribution you have made to a wide and diverse movement um when it as as you've already spoken about peter

and as many of the people you spoke to in the the journey of writing the book have also identified but peter i think what you've done is is this most beautiful synthesis of that incredible body of of work but doing so into as you we saw with your slides they're just Interweaving with the social and the personal and the socioeconomic and political context as well and i think your your term that the great debates of the sort of intellectual tussles i i think really speaks to that this beautiful phrase i think oscar wilde said that

that all great ideas are dangerous and of course you know they have to because they're they're upending orthodoxy but they they Also can be dangerous to the holder of those ideas or the propagator of those ideas because and and we saw that you know the story of the jobs not being god or rewards not being given and so on just by virtue of challenging that orthodoxy that i think is still so profound and tightly gripping so many of our political debates and so you're herman you said you know in answer to Tim's question around the

the influence or how how are we going with this this journey this intellectual journey of being able to question growth you answered well yes or no my reflection would be it's i think the influence is certainly noticeable but still nascent and and i think that really i think that the onus is on us this wide diverse multifaceted Rich creative movement of people activists thinkers uh writers doers around the world who all share that sense that surely we can disentangle that question of means and ends surely with all the wisdom this world has and all the

compassion this world has we can figure out that the economy In and of itself let alone growth of the economy should never be an objective up there as the ultimate objective surely we can put it back in its box and think about designing the economy so that it serves our ultimate goals and that's why we sort of put the the almost the adjective of well-being in front of the economy saying we need this economy to be designed in a way that delivers concertedly and proactively human and Ecological well-being but but i do really feel i

think there are hopeful signs that that conversation is is starting to break through it certainly pockets rather than some coherent movement within within politics but but i think we are seeing reckoning you know the circular economy agenda i think inherently recognizes the need to understand the economy as a subset of the biosphere and and you know To add to ellie's points around really understand how the economy is a subset of society in the care economy as well as feminist economists have been telling us equally for decades i think we're starting to see you know pledges

around climate emergencies where from governments we're seeing efforts to start to protect and talk about nature-based solutions To me one of the i think most astounding moments was last year when you had the dusk up to review and this particularly not because so much of what it said because it did recognize the embedded nature of the economy within the ecosystem but because of who commissioned that report now the dusk sculpture review was Commissioned by the uk treasury and as a commission into the economics of biodiversity and i think that to me is extraordinarily hopeful they've

seen quite incredible world resource report look you know things we could debate about it absolutely but coming from the uk treasury starting to really remind us about the flaws of gdp and be Really put square and center the embedded nature of economy and i think that does show that some of these ideas and in no no small part because of tim's work and in his engagement and pushing with inside government i also just want to reflect on just how that that duality that yes and no that two step forward one step back as someone once

said that's a cha cha cha so we should enjoy it but but Peter you you quote the 2008 commission on growth and development um and you quote it as saying growing gdp is evidence of a society getting its collective act together and herman i think the response you said was well a growing gdp could be a sign of depleting natural resources and and so on and and i was really struck that it was of course just a few months after that commission that you quoted The commission on growth and development that saw growing gdp as

evidence of a society getting sacked together just a few months in september 2009 we had the report this so-called stiglitz commission you know with this um commissioned by president sarkozy the commission on measurement of economic performance and social product progress that of course took your many decades of work On the index of social and economic welfare and then really put some rocket fuel behind that's an inappropriate metaphor so forgive me but really put some rocket fuel into the beyond gdp debate and we've since seen i think a lot of progress in terms of recognition of

the flaws of of gdp i at least in my my tiny humble little window into this i don't think i need to explain to civil servants anymore the flaws and the perverse incentives that are bound up in Gdp does that mean that we've pushed it off it's it'll deserve pedestal absolutely not but i think the debate has certainly moved on and i and i think to me that's just one example of the noticeable but nascent influence but i will say that's on us that's on all of us in this movement to make it go beyond

nascent and really make it matter to the extent it needs to matter thank you catherine um but we have we have a an astonishing Number of people with with questions some of them which we're kind of slowly covering off um but a few and and as as many or more that we're we're not we haven't yet touched on um some of them relates to that sort of question of of how we persuade um a mainstream that may not already be where we are and i i'm gonna try and get some people To talk to that

issue um so let me first ask um joanna who is going under the jack santa barbara um if you could maybe ask the question that you wanted to ask joanna um if i promote you to panelists i might even we might even be able to get you to join the conversation worked very well um warm warm greetings to everyone Uh and especially to hermann hermann i've i've long been curious about your religious orientation and wonder if you might if you might say a few words about um that strand in the development of your thinking it

it's my impression that those who those uh who are thinkers in the realm of ecological economics are strongly driven by ethics but that few Are noticeably driven by by religious thinking um i'd i'd like to hear what you might say on that okay well hello joanna what what a pleasure to see you again is that jack sitting next to you uh before i try to answer your question i have to say that they go back to previous question about people who help you Certainly you and jack helped josh farley and me with our ecological textbook

not only with financial support while writing it but also with ideas so i'm grateful for that as for i think your question is is to my mind very important um and i'm frequently asked something like that i mean because Um well religion let's go back for just a minute to uh saint paul who said when i was a child i thought as a child i spoke as a child i reasoned as a child and when i became a man i put away childish things i think that people very often have put away childish things which

we all Need to do because what you learn as a child is very often childish but not everything you understand or learn as a child is childish some of it really does stand up to rational criticism and some of the things that are being that are used to replace A religious perspective on the world and i make i i think do not stand up to rational criticism and so one of the things i've of course as peter emphasized my upbringing and was religious i did try to put away childish things but i tried to keep

those things which were not childish and so what i thought was not childish Was a resistance to the um what i encountered in in the in the intelligentsia and particularly in a basic materialist view i don't mean materialistic sense of consumerism but materialist in the philosophical sense of the world is reducible to matter and energy and everything including your Thoughts and ideas are uh determined in that way so this kind of deterministic materialism which is uh now flies under the flag of so-called scientific materialism appropriated i i just find that unconvincing i am not a

robot i do have free will is directly experienced and i find Intelligent people such as alfred north whitehead who with his radical empiricism says you don't just write off your own most direct experience as unscientific and accept some hypothesis of materialism as giving a material explanation of something that you experience directly which is contradictory to what you Experience directly so for those reasons i think that there's a spirit dimension in in our lives we are physical beings but we're not only physical beings and i uh so the i've always felt that this uh correction for

an ultimate end was a way of bringing uh religion now i mean not everything that flies under the flag of religion Is worthwhile there's a whole lot of garbage i agree with that but that's back to the issue of putting away childish things and figuring out what's what's not childish so um i guess one other thing is uh one thing i learned from george ski rogan and that in well that ends mean spectrum that peter pointed to if we go down to the bottom if we want to really be materialist and Explain the world in

terms of physics and low entry matter energy and so forth well what is the economic system in purely physical terms well it takes in useful organized structured matter energy low entry matter energy it grinds it up and it throws out disorganized scattered dissipated waste matter and energy So it converts useful stuff into waste which is a kind of idiotic process you know why do you want to grind up the useful parts of the world into waste well you do that because that's necessary to maintain life the maintenance of life and enjoyment of life and so

the maintenance and enjoyment of life are Require require that generation of waste and why what is it that's good about life uh john ruskin says there is no wealth but life so i think that that leads you that pushes you in the upper direction of reasoning about an ultimate end a hierarchy of intermediate ends some Things are better than others how do you know uh so now the fact that i think all that's extremely important doesn't mean that i haven't you know a totally convincing answer to it i just struggle with it like everyone else

does thanks simon um do you feel that that in a Slightly more secular world there's a kind of secular route to that same question i mean it is something that religions to some extent have have um been curators guardians of that idea of of ultimate ends but but it is surely to some extent a fundamentally human question is there a is there a sense in which modern institutions could embody some of what we perhaps have lost from Religious institutions guarding that question well i think that there's a logical push within the secular reasoning world that

if you have uh you know many different objectives and ends that you and you have scarcity then you need to have some sort of ordering of ethical ordering of what goes in First place what goes in second place and so forth and so once you say priority then that sort of means something has to go in first place and that then is a pro approximation i suppose to an ultimate end so in that sense purely logical thinking would would force one in that direction uh but um i think we have a whole lot to learn

From philosophy and religion and theology and reasoning about that ultimate end thanks simon and thanks joanna for that question um i've wanted to promote uh helena for the question that you asked um in the in the q a helena um perhaps you could ask herman uh you're still muted okay thank you very much Uh my question is a very simple one is why is it that so few economists are seeing what for you and me is so self-evident uh when i go back for a moment to my own development as my doctorate is in chemistry

of dna and what i was taught in graduate school is half of it is not true anymore and and and those were dogmas they were considered real dogmas yeah And um and we didn't the field did not create some subfield like economy and ecological economic just moved forward because it was so self-evident uh these new discoveries and yet it seems like we're talking about tim you're talking about how do we convince why do we need to convince it yes so why is it There's a the question so the question there is um are we seeing

something that that most economists don't see why why is it so hard why is macroeconomics in particular not seeing things in the same way i mean i guess it goes back herman to your question you know have we got something wrong and that continual questioning and Probing of the ideas but is there is there a sense in which that is not happening where it should be happening well that i think that's a very good question and i uh it's interesting to make the comparison with other fields i know um talked about biochemistry and they evidently

made a discovered that some things were wrong and made a change Fairly rapidly but in other scientific fields change has been very slow it's just you know physics and others people generations have had to die before the new paradigms come in and this is why i was impressed by the the philosophy of thomas kuhn and the structure of scientific revolutions uh i think in a way What happens i'm in here i'm just parroting kuhn's view that uh in order to practice science you have to believe certain things you have to be a member of the

community you have to accept certain axioms or else you're a kook and and so you try to solve problems within those axioms And sometimes you get to anomalies that are so great that you can't do it and then you have to go back and change the axioms and that's the revolution now i really don't know why that's not happened in uh in biofit i'd like to understand better biophysics why why they were able to negotiate a change Which economists don't seem to be able to do i suppose in economics there's a whole lot of vested

interest in the way the system is because it has put people at the top so the system must be good because it put me at the top therefore i'm the proof and that That may be one reason but uh i can't i can't answer the basic question that she raised which i think is a very good one is uh well you know why if it's so obvious why don't other people see it well maybe there is they will but i mean i think yeah to some extent maybe we could see that they're beginning to we

could see some of what's happening is in in the way that kuhn perhaps would have Described as auxiliary hypotheses hypotheses that prop up the original theory as it begins to reach the point of transition and to that so that's end of that's the way economics does it adds epicycles yeah it says uh well we have externalities right okay well let's just multiply the number of externalities and and uh and you know Instead of uh putting what's important internally let's just keep multiplying externalities sure and that as that happens though one of the things that happens

in you know in that classical paradigm shift cuny and paradigm shift is the emergence of these new ideas new languages new fields new attempts to create something beyond an auxiliary hypothesis and um it's a good point to bring in hunter lovins as your question i think hunter And indeed many of the people uh asking questions relate to that idea of some of these new fields of inquiry new approaches to economics that are coming in hunter perhaps you'd like to pose that question tim thank you and warmest greetings to all of you herman it is so

wonderful to see you again good to see you and and to see all of you and to have this amazing conversation A quick answer if i may to that last question i think one of the reasons this has not gone more mainstream is we've done a lousy job of storytelling about it the neoliberals had on rand atlas shrugged the fountainhead quoted by the then president alan greenspan any number of powerful people as most formative in their thinking Who do we have telling these kinds of stories in ways that are truly captivating note for projects in

the future my question was what do you think of john fullerton's regenerative economics and tim i wouldn't say that this is a whole new approach because he builds in name on hermann's work on your work on peter's work on peter brown On vodka stands on on the whole the whole heart of ecological economics but at the same time he is i think putting forth something that is new and that i've found extraordinarily useful particularly the distinction between economics that is at its heart extractive and economics that is regenerative as nature is in a sense referencing

Your reference to nature that it in everything it does it's creating conditions conducive to life over well i like that and i think that john fullerton is uh is a really wonderful guy guys he's come out of the belly of the beast Really in terms of the wall street and and all of the uh financial economics and has seen something wrong with that and it's trying to to uh to reform it another person of that similar way that i've been impressed by over the years is peter barnes who has come out of you know the

business world and creating Companies and been successful at it and and yet has said well wait a minute something's wrong here we've got to re-figure uh things i think both of them have um have really made contributions as for a regenerative society if we understand by that a society which relies mainly on renewable resources and not so much on non-renewables i think By all means that's important but it's not going to work at the present scale i think it it's going to require a reduction in the scale of the human presence in the biosphere for

us to live at a decent standard of living Uh that way without the use of non-renewable resources so that would that would be one question which i would have about the regenerative society i'm all in favor of it but how big can the economy be and still be supported by sustainable yield uh regenerative resources yeah i mean to some extent that is a kind of central question and we come back in a In a way um to to that question of growth and in particular the underlying system the belly of the beast i think as

you described it hunter there and i just wanted to bring john barry in to ask your question john since it sort of relates to that that's great tim good evening everybody and greetings from ireland where the concept of economic growth is first tried out by Colonialists couple hundred years ago that's a different story um but but my question herman that's wonderful to to listen to you and so on like many of us on the call you've been a great influence on on uh much of the work that many of us do i suppose it's around

this reticence about capitalism and in particular my own view and again i i don't know whether others would agree that we now have the scientific uh data that we can See that it's only some version of a coordinated perhaps not fully planned economy in the old sense that's going to get us out of this crisis i certainly think when it comes to ipads or children's toys that the free market fill its boots absolutely fine well and what used to be called the old commanding heights of the economy energy transportation healthcare surely there is a a

compelling rationale from a well-being and sustainability Point of view that they should move out of being commodities and be seen as human rights and and based on the fulfillment of human needs which to me is incompatible with a an orthodox capitalist understanding of the economy so you want us you want us to come right back to that big challenge again and talk i mean in the same way that we earlier were looking at the potential conflict between an equitable distribution and the Mechanisms of capitalism you're arguing essentially john that there's a once you extend those

rights in an equitable fashion to the basic necessities of life that in itself becomes a conflict with capitalism well we're essentially talking about decommodifying you know the meeting of human needs and to me that seems to be then we're already up and against any conceptual defense of a recognizably capitalist economy now we'd have to call It socialist but it seems to me that once we start decommodifying that then moves us out of you know a capitalist frame of reference without coming coming back to the your original um antipathy herman to to to be talking about

languages um and to be captured by languages which are often opposed to each other in non-productive ways where do you think the mechanisms are for challenging our cultural ethos and And in particular the the way in which a market capitalism has commodified our lives yeah um well this is a difficult question and my own confused way of thinking about it is that i'm a little suspicious of decommodification of things i mean i don't look at Commodities being in and of themselves a problem you buy and sell nature is based on exchanges which don't have prices

human beings have exchanges with prices we've had some experience with societies which have tried to decommodify and to go through social provisioning in some other ways central planning Uh well i don't think that those those have been very successful so i would slow down on that and i would back up and start maybe with a different perspective and say um you know there are some things some goods which are um rival and excludable and some which are non-rival and Non-excludable and for those goods which are rival and excludable uh you know the market seems to

work okay as far as i can tell for goods which are non-rival well you know then you don't need a market you don't need They're non-rival they should be free they should be maybe uh things like knowledge it's non-rival well it does have a cost of production so we should socially finance knowledge but the knowledge should not be a commodity it should be free afterwards so i think going back to the rivalness and excludability distinction Which we do not respect very much we we take we take non-rival goods and make them rival in order to

get a price from them that's bad and we uh take uh rival goods and treat them as if they were nonrivable and end up with the tragedy of the commons so i think uh that to that extent i i can see the Problems with commodification and modification of capitalism i don't know uh maybe you know that's probably an area which i need to think more about central planning of the commanding heights of the economy well okay the commanding heights i take to be fundamentally some limit on scale of the total economy relative to the biosphere

and And some limits to the inequality of distribution of wealth and income so those to me are the commanding heights and and there i would really say by all means we need social action and planning uh to uh to take care of those issues as for uh other than that i i need to think some more about it Thanks simon i mean i find i don't know about anyone else but i find something distinctly comforting in the idea that herman daly is still thinking about economics and will go on thinking about economics for us and

for our benefit for some time to come and we are reaching close to the end and i want to give the panelists all of them a chance to uh to talk i know i've covered a bare handful of the ideas And the questions that have come through the q a and i really apologize for that i wanted to bring in um one last question before we move to roundups um ben uh gallant i'm not sure if you can turn your video on or if not but maybe you should be able to now at least to

ask the question ben had a question actually one for herman i'd like you to ask both of these um one for herman which perhaps we could start with ben Uh hi can you hear me yeah we can hear you okay um so yeah this is the first question was um say ecological economics has become a important and vibrant field in its own right very much drying on your own work um but it's relative policy influence uh compared to what we call traditional economics has remained relatively small so i wonder what you think about How given

that context you think about your legacy and the legacy of your work and also um what your thoughts are on the future of economics uh where you think it's going to go next and where you think it should go next um did you want me to ask the other question as well hold on to the other one for now ben i'll i'll come back to i'll come back to Your second question later because i just want to finish on that one but that's that seems to be you know it's a nice general question it does

reflect quite a lot of the things that have been asked in the chat and perhaps i can ask each of the panelists to um to reflect on it but i'll start with you herman um yes things have been slow And i have [Music] i was reflecting earlier in the discussion on [Music] i know tim you have had experience in working with government agencies and you have had to you know deal with the constant dilemma half a love is better than none you know you want to get something through so you're going to have to during

my time At the world bank it was uh i had the very much the same experience uh we had a little saying at the world bank some of us that bringing about any change in the world bank was like moving a brick with a thin thread tied to it you know if you don't if you don't put any tension on the thread you'll never move the brick you Put too much tension you you break the thread and have to go back and tie it again my characteristic error was to break the thread and spend most

of my time re-tying it you know so i don't know how how people manage to do that you have to be a diplomat you have to have some skills which i i think some people have god bless them So that's um so back to the question raised earlier underlying that as well it's so obvious why can't other people see it you know so why do i have to drag this brick with the thread don't you see that the brick has to move when we have to move well people don't see it and so i guess

change is just slower than than than we we would like and that's a real problem because we're being pressed by Environmental consequences of our actions which put us on a shorter time frame than our usual ability to change so i anyway i'd say let's maybe we can get a rope instead of a thread you know and pull it or a crowd each of whom is holding a thread yeah mini threads like in lilliput somewhere i'd go over here yeah um that's that's lovely herman i mean This is something of course catherine which you are engaged

in in well-being economy alliance um particularly through the well-being economy government's initiative um how do you find that process i mean it is something in a sense that is at least movable there seems to be something to play for now in a way that there wasn't previously perhaps i think it's a mixed picture i think There are individuals within government entrepreneurs we might call them who do absolutely get this who've probably been reading herman daley for many of their their years of professional life but who we exist within the system of government with all its

path dependencies with all colleagues who have got other microchips inserted and other mindsets and i think that's why it's really heartening that this discussion isn't so much debating the Evidence anymore because i think amongst this audience there seems to be a sense of what's the next wave of this we need to focus on on mindsets and because i think that is the that is the moment of this this journey and there's a lovely phrase feminine that you use around warning of turning to hair of the dog and that metaphor i think speaks to what our

mutual friend robert costanza talks About the extent to which we have a system that is addicted to economic growth and we need to use some of the techniques of addiction therapy um to help the patient break that that addiction i just want to also just finally say uh i think you model some of the sort of attributes of the sort of politics that will get us there that sometimes feels all too rare in politics that we we see on our Televisions and listen to on our radios in the fact that it's you know gentle respectful

debate able to challenge and be challenged without retreating into the sort of camps that we so much see our politics characterized by and so i think if we can also learn that from you and take that into our politics we might just have a chance of achieving that mindset shift that we so necessarily need and i think everyone's really identified that today Thanks catherine um ellie let me turn to you for some final reflections and i also wanted to ask you partly because you placed that question of equity so firmly in the debates if there's

if there's a moment at which you coming across herman's work was influential in the way that you you thought about that or again what was what was it that stimulated you to be working In these debates you know sorry i wanted to say something about that when i was a graduate student when i was a phd student in the mid-80s and i was struggling with it mike micro and econometrics and these graphs that show this limitless you know out there from which things could be drawn that that book for the common good landed in a

very important place for me It was it was so um validating to have the idea that the world is in fact limited as as you know so even if even when i raised it with my professors and they would just poo poo it still it was it was quite important for me to realize that what you said logic it carries a day right when you When you look at these things and see that there are limits and that it's a very inequitable world and that the transformations that we need are tied up in those two

things um it's it's made a big difference in my professional choices and and in my career so thank you very much for that um and i this relates to what i want to say about policy too I believe that much of the work that ecological economists have been doing and publishing in the journal and talking about at their conferences is coming home to roost now in this decade as we try to get to net zero as we try to facilitate this energy transition that we're already in the middle of that research and the ideas that

have been planted That have flowered that are you know the results are there in the libraries of the world um i believe that that they're going to be built on they are already being built on and i i think that uh this this talk about the transition of whatever ism we're under as has been talked about in the chat uh i think Human creativity and innovation is coming forward in a way that we'll deal with and you know the supply chain and interruptions the the problems that we're facing politically in the united states and elsewhere

also in china those things are all related to these key questions that that you've posited for us herman and peter too around equity allocation and also scale So thank you i think i hope you will see it in the next few years thank you thank you ellie um before i come to you peter i just wanted to ask um ben to pose his second question which is a question to you ben uh yeah sure um so i was just wondering Through the process of writing this book um has it changed the way that you look

back on your own career and your research well i i suppose i did take the opportunity to reflect on my own career uh which uh in many ways parallels herman's um but i was i started out based in britain although i did my graduate work in canada And i went from being an academic to a civil servant to a private consultant back to a civil servant and then finally back into academia um so i had a lot much longer period outside of the academy than herman did so it's given me a sort of a different

um perspective on some things for example when you when asked about policy making uh well i was involved in policymaking as a senior civil servant for a number of years so my experiences there i think proved very Very valuable to me and i hope to my students when we would talk about those things um my career however would have been different had i stayed in academia and still had some of the same ideas um and it's all part of what i suppose we've been talking about a little bit here the isolation of of relative isolation

of hermann and others that's how i felt when i was working on in this way i was sort of a lone figure Um uh and that's one of the reasons i enjoyed writing the biography because i could see the parallels between my own intellectual development and herman's um so i don't know that i would have done anything differently but i might i but i do think i probably missed out on opportunities for intellectual engagement that would otherwise have been there thanks peter and And is that reflecting on the conversation this evening is there anything that

you'd like to pick up on particularly as we draw to a close okay so many things but i'll just mention too first of all this incredibly stimulating uh exchange of views is exactly what comes from herman's work this is how stimulating his contribution to ben over the years there are a number of papers that i'd Never heard of i knew nothing about that herman had written um which i spent a fair bit of time in in the book writing about uh his combination for example of um uh marxist uh theory and malthusian theory instead of

seeing them as antagonistic he found a way of combining them with a into a very interesting analysis of of population and class and that's just one example um so that's been very valuable the other thing i Would just like to comment on just because it was where the conversation sort of ended up before on the policy making and whether things are spreading out um i dedicated this book to a group that i don't think anybody has heard of maybe apart from herman called the gothic group now the gothic group is a group of my ex-students

and sometimes some current students if they're invited That meet periodically at my house and we discuss all sorts of things some of the issues today and others but the point i want to make is that they're all working outside academia now they're all in government positions or the private sector and so they are the champions that we need for the daily inspired ideas to propagate through the system and i don't think we should overlook that and it's been a great um joy of my life to work with ellie and Others at the faculty of what

was called the faculty of environmental studies it's changed its name recently because these are the kind of students we would attract uh students who would want to learn some economics interested in ecological economics but in a very broad way and then would take those ideas out into practice put them into practice in the wider world it's not enough yet and of course cusp is doing the same thing in its own way uh and there are other Organizations now around the world doing that so i remain surprisingly optimistic that change is in the air and will

come and we'll all owe a tremendous debt to hermann for that coming to pass thank you very much peter i suspect that um and you may have to consult maria your wife on this that the gossip group may find itself besieged by would-be subscribers from our 250 or so Followers on this course i just uh the room there doesn't look quite big enough you might have to um go out into the garden um but but that idea of an informal group and and a space for conversation and and the example that herman has uh given

us through his work um in creating that space for conversation i absolutely applaud um many many thanks To to all of you to ellie perkins to catherine trebek to all of those who asked questions um and and apologies that we didn't manage to have time for everybody to answer them the book as we mentioned is is now published and um and is available from all reputable booksellers and some disreputable ones and um and will hopefully be the basis For a further conversation um for herman's remarkable work there was a point that catherine made which maybe

i could just end on in a sense that that in looking at and and understanding the work of of someone like herman who has changed his field changed the way that economics thinks changed all of our thinking on this call and and way beyond that and to some extent give us the foundations For a different kind of economics that work is a part of what we celebrate but we also do as catherine said celebrate qualities of of the man of the person um and in in this case those qualities herman you have shared with us

very generously tonight that openness to conversation that kindness and gentleness of spirit that re restless relentless sense of inquiry and even that work ethic which I believe you said you were going to write us another book um sometime between thinking about these things that you haven't thought enough about yet um that will undoubtedly provide the answers and maybe if i could just finish herman with a very personal private question to you in between that thinking about these things that you haven't quite figured out yet How do you like to spend your time these days well

i uh i suppose my time is uh i like to watch the world go by see what's happening uh although that's frequently rather frustrating and [Music] i suppose that my age and with my Caregiving responsibilities and uh sort of uh fading physical strength i i devote more and more time just to the ordinary things of life you know getting up and paying attention to things that need to be done and maybe i'll have a few hours each day to do some reading and thinking about all of these things and i'm So extremely grateful for uh

the feedback and the questions that people have raised and it gives me a considerable amount of uh of hope that that the the work of ecological economics is going to fall into capable and good hands and so i'll be there to applaud it Thank you herman i think that brings us more or less to the end i should say a particular thanks at this point also of course to peter uh for writing the book for providing a window really into the work and the life of an extraordinary man and and for contributing that to us

this evening and presenting some of the ideas in the book it's been a pleasure to have everybody Here i hope that you have enjoyed it we will make sure that the video is is available for those of you who like to look at it again or to share with your friends and we look forward to that next space for what i i personally feel is an extraordinary and extremely important discussion that goes to the heart of what it means to be human of what it means to live on a finite planet and what it means

in particular of Course to be an ecological economist but in general to be someone who thinks and engages with their social world and and that's an example that herman has held up for us with remarkable clarity many thanks to everyone you