This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Herman Daly's 1977 book Steady-State Economics made an argument most economists of the time treated as self-evidently wrong: that continuous growth in the physical scale of the economy, not merely in the efficiency with which it uses resources, cannot continue indefinitely on a finite planet. Daly drew the argument from Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's earlier application of the second law of thermodynamics to economic processes, which showed that every act of production converts low-entropy resources into high-entropy waste in a way that cannot be reversed or fully recycled.
Where mainstream growth theory treated natural resources as one input among many, substitutable for capital or labor when they grew scarce, Daly argued that produced capital, machines, buildings, software, cannot substitute for the natural capital, a stable climate, functioning ecosystems, depletable stocks of minerals and fuel, that make production possible in the first place. A 'steady-state economy,' in his formulation, held the physical throughput of matter and energy constant while still allowing qualitative improvement, better technology, more knowledge, richer culture, without growth in physical scale.
Daly practiced this argument from an unusual vantage point: as senior economist in the World Bank's own Environment Department from 1988 to 1994, where he pushed, with limited success, for the institution's project appraisals to price natural-capital depletion rather than treat it as a free input. He left the Bank still arguing that a lending institution built around growth as the measure of development success could not fully absorb a critique aimed at growth itself.