ABSTRACT
During his travels in Latin America as a teenager and later as a young scholar, Daly saw first-hand the combination of poverty and large families and wondered how the vicious cycle could be broken. Among his keen insights into population is that ‘more people are better than fewer – as long as they are not all alive at the same time.’ He argues that large numbers of people living today with high levels of consumption reduce the number of people and artifacts that will be possible tomorrow. Humans and their artifacts: cars, houses, planes, phones etc. are all ‘dissipative structures’. They cannot and should not grow indefinitely.
In a paper on population Daly showed how Marx’s insights on class and Malthus’s concerns about population outpacing food production could be combined in a single analytical model. His advocacy of tradeable birth allowances first suggested by Boulding was not well-received and his views on migration have also been challenged. Daly recognizes that the maldistribution of income and wealth and increasing environmental degradation provide a strong impetus for migration and argues for legal migration but is against open borders. He insists on the importance of population stabilization as a component of a steady-state economy.
