I was honestly shocked by the low quality of the interview. If this was presented as an exchange between teenagers on Reddit, I would have believed it.
I was honestly shocked by the low quality of the interview. If this was presented as an exchange between teenagers on Reddit, I would have believed it.
The interview was pretty bad, I agree. It's not clear what a "steady state economy" would look like, or what measures are held steady.
Economic activity is an indication for benefit for people. I see no need to make a distinction between economic activity and a benefit obtained from that activity.
A rise in cancer treatments is probably not a good thing, all else equal.
That being said, the interviewer then asking “what’s the meaning of life” was really pointless and unnecessarily edgy. I also agree that not trying to come up with any policy proposal is kind of intellectually lazy and has some strong “I’m just the idea guy” vibes.
The issues I have with Daly's approach, though, is in placing the blame on growth and acting as if a steady-state economy is the answer. Even if we froze the economy today, we'd still be emitting too much CO2 and we'd still be wasting tons of time and resources on things that have a net negative value on society. Being simply opposed to growth doesn't solve the real issues. It just unnecessarily alienates people who would otherwise be willing to address the actual problems, and also places you in opposition to good forms of growth that don't cause these problems (and may help solve them).
And while I think it's important to think about the big questions, I don't think it should the focus of economists. The role of economists isn't to decide what our values and goals are, it's to give us an insight into how we can best pursue them after we decide those values and goals ourselves.
I would be curious how population and demographic changes play into his model of a steady state economy.