This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.
I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let’s get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don’t want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water.
I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.
The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.
I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.
As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.
We have the most crude accounting tools. It’s tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn’t tell us the things that we need to know.
If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.
We’re trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.
Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it’s much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.
Whats immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.
Markets cant think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.
Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.
The question is not only what is grown but what it’s used for. There’s not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.
Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.
Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn’t collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.
The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.
It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.
The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too.
If you cut down a forest, it doesn’t matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.
I’m a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there’s a great deal of work, and I won’t see the end of this.