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.”

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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.