A zero sum economy where my family does ten percent better and your family does ten percent worse has my family 60% better off in just three generations.

The interview, as almost all MSM pieces tend to be, was very light on detail. Daly says that his vision of steady state doesn't rest on the same assumptions that a growth economy does, but the obvious next question of "What are those assumptions?" is apparently left to the reader to figure out elsewhere. This is problematic, because your sentence that I quoted about would seem to destroy the notion of steady state very quickly.

Resources are finite. That's pretty much the study of economics in a nutshell, right? Not every person in an 8 Billion strong world can have a half acre of land and two SUVs, but unless we start to regulate which lucky few get those benefits, I'm not sure I can see how that's a tractable problem.

Discomfort is the potential gradient that keeps us striving for more, and so long as there is discomfort in the world (always), capitalism is going to be a force. However, that certainly doesn't mean that we can't adopt policies that aim to allocate resources in a less environmentally destructive way. But I get the sense that's not what Daly is getting at, so while I respect his ethic and the food-for-thought, I don't know what, exactly, I was supposed to take away from this piece.