Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

The environmentalist Alan Durning found that in 1991 the average American family owned twice as many cars, drove two and a half times as far, used twenty-one times as much plastic, and traveled twenty-five times farther by air than did the average family in 1951.

To once more quote from Benjamin Friedman’s long and otherwise glowing defense of economic growth, carbon dioxide “is the one major environmental contaminant for which no study has ever found any indication of improvement as living standards rise.”

we do need to start building an economy that works for our current needs, rather than constantly readjusting our lives to serve the growth of the economy.

In a changed world, comfort will come less from ownership than from membership.

Under the current system, as many have pointed out, all we do is add together expenditures, so that the most “economically productive” citizen is a cancer patient who totals his car on his way to meet with his divorce lawyer.

You get more food per acre with small farms; more food per dollar with big ones.

The deepest problem that local-food efforts face, however, is that we’ve gotten used to paying so little for food. It may be expensive in terms of how much oil it requires, and how much greenhouse gas it pours into the atmosphere, and how much tax subsidy it receives, and how much damage it does to local communities, and how many migrant workers it

American industry uses less energy per dollar’s worth of stuff it produces, but it produces so much more stuff each year that our carbon emission totals keep rising.

Recent statistics show that, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates notwithstanding, Americans making $50,000 to $100,000 give away two to six times as much of their money (in percentage terms) as people who make more than $10 million.59