ABSTRACT
Since the early 1970s economists have been laying the groundwork for an ecological economics which utterly changes the way students and scholars think about markets, supply and demand, production and consumption. In effect, mainstream economics sees nature as a subsystem of the economy and for Herman Daly that means it’s more like a religion than a science. As Daly says, it’s a ‘necessary change in vision’, a big bang in economics, as it were, so expect to see transformations at each stage of the circular economy. Bringing production and consumption into a sustainable cycle will probably cause initial difficulties in the countries used to over-consumption, although most people tend to underestimate just how resilient they are. Food production will also probably contract, at least until the sustainable farming revolution is completed, but this may also bring the unexpected health gains.
