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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.”

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