Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

As Marx and Engels put it in their classic summary: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.”

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.