Daniel Bromley


Daniel W. Bromley is an economist, the former Anderson-Bascom Professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and since 2009, Emeritus Professor. His research in institutional economics explains the foundations of property rights, natural resources and the environment; and economic development. He has been editor of the journal Land Economics since 1974.

Career

Bromley graduated from Utah State University in 1963 with a degree in Ecology. He then received an M.S. and PhD in natural resource economics from Oregon State University, where his major professor was Emery Castle.
Bromley began working as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969 and retired after 40 years. He served two terms as chair of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. In 2014 he published Wisconsin Becoming: The Careful Creation of Prosperity, which covers the history of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics and its relation to economic development in the state of Wisconsin.
Since 2009, Bromley has been a visiting professor at the Faculty of Agriculture and Horticulture of the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. In 2011 he was honored with the Reinhard-Lust-Preis for International Transfer of Science and Culture awarded jointly by the German Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and the Fritz Thyssen-Stiftung.
For three years, Bromley served Chair of the U. S. Federal Advisory Committee on Marine Protected Areas. Bromley also served on a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences on climate change in the United States. Bromley is a consultant, advising the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Asian Development Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Ministry for the Environment in New Zealand, and the Aga Khan Foundation. His has consulted with the Government of National Unity in Sudan on economic recovery in the south and in Darfur and the government of Jordan on institutional reform in the water sector.
In 2016, Juha Hiedanpää and Bromley published Environmental Heresies: The Quest for Reasonable, which reframes environmental conflicts and which advances a pragmatic, deliberative approach.

Contributions to economics

Bromley has been the editor of the journal Land Economics for more than 41 years. His scholarship has been concerned with more effective fisheries, economic development, and environmental policy. In an influential article, "The ideology of efficiency: Searching for a Theory of Policy Analysis", Bromley challenged conventional notions that economic efficiency analysis is "objective", finding an absence of consistency and coherence in the logical positivism of economic welfare analysis.
In the 2006 book, Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions, Bromley challenged the prevailing economic microeconomic models of rational choice; he offered a competing evolutionary model of pragmatic human action where individuals "work out" their desired choices and actions as they learn what choices are available. Bromley's perspective on volitional pragmatism builds on the philosophical and institutional economics work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, John R. Commons, Thorstein Veblen, and Richard Rorty.

Awards

Books