One debate I'd like to see

[depakid]

Milton Friedman vs. Herman Daly.

Talk about diametrically opposed worldviews. :popcorn:

On Friedman see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman

Interview with right wing news: http://www.rightwingnews.com/interviews/friedman.php

On Daly see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly (there are some innacuracies in this entry).

Steady State Economics: http://dieoff.org/page88.htm

Comments on who would win that one

[tritsofme]

1. It would be a great debate.

I'm not all that familiar with Herman Daly.

I have however, read most of Milton Friedman's work.

It is very well thought out, and Mr. Friedman is a very intelligent man.

What can I say? I've always had a penchant for fantasy fiction.

[depakid]

2. I don't think Friedman gets it on a higher level

Like many economists, he doesn't under that the world's economy is a subset of the world's ecological system(s). He (and others like him) ignore the laws of thermodynamics (among other things) and believe that GDP can continue grow infinately, without constraints. He also believes in this wierd proposition of unlimited substitution- according to Neoclassicists, so long as you have enough labor and man made capital- you can actually do without (or in the Cobb-Douglas production funtions- actually increase natural capital!

Natures laws don't work that way- as Daly (formerly of the World Bank) would be the first to point out. His view is that the economy (as represented by the general equilibrium) is a subset of the world's ecoloogy. It might be able to create some limited wealth- but it cannot it create energy. It relies (like all open systems do) on inputs of energy and material from a source (fossil fuels, solar energy and extractive minerals) and outputs into limited sinks (Oceans, landfills, etc). Ecological economists call this throughput- and like all systems, throughput involves entropy.

I'd love to see these two go at it, because they have such different pre-analytic visions- I'd love to hear Friedman's responses to externality questions- and his ideas on where energy and material inputs are going to come from this next century. I imagine we'll see such a debate in the not to distant future- but being of the 20th Century "instant gratification" crowd, I want to see it now! LOL.