Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

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.

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.”

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

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.

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

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.

In 1973 the CEOs of large corporations earned thirty-five times as much as the average worker; now they earn two hundred times as much.

What is needed is some signal “that would tell us whether economic activity was making us better off or worse off,”

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