Herman Daly defines a steady-state economy as having a constant stock of physical wealth and a constant stock of people maintained by natural resource flows. He argues that nature provides two sources of wealth: terrestrial mineral resources and solar energy flow.
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, establishing the foundation for classical economics. He observed that any national economy would eventually settle into a final state of stationarity with constant population and capital.
Ecological economics was formally founded in 1988 as the culmination of conferences through the 1980s involving Herman Daly, Robert Costanza, AnnMari Jansson, and Juan Martínez-Alier. These scholars integrated thermodynamic entropy with economic analysis to address natural resources and the environment.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen argued that all matter and energy is transformed from states available for human purposes into valueless waste and pollution. This view has been termed 'entropy pessimism' within ecological economics and suggests Earth's mineral resources will eventually be exhausted.
Tim Jackson released Prosperity Without Growth noting that carbon dioxide emissions increased by 80 percent between 1970 and 2009 despite relative decoupling efforts. He concluded that simplistic assumptions about capitalism's propensity for efficiency are almost literally bankrupt when facing growing GDP.