The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

way: Everyone is a producer of his or her own happiness. We obtain our own utility, to use his language, “through the productive activity of combining purchased market goods and services with some of the house hold’s own time.”

The prime exponent of Buddhist economics, E. F. Schumacher, was a colleague of John Maynard Keynes who, after long reflection on the theories that he once practiced, wrote a popular exposition of a more sustainable economics in Small Is Beautiful.

happiness within the economy is dictated by the difference between people’s expectations of relative income and their actual capacity to achieve it.

experiments show that people cooperate best in situations where they themselves can adapt and change the rules of the game.

animal.

of its central focus on the plucking out of desire from our hearts, is Buddhism.

Keynes turned conventional economics on its head by looking not at the behavior of individual firms, but at entrepreneurs’ feelings about risk and uncertainty, and how they would ride the flows of capital.

all too often, the abundant will of government representatives is shaped by a corporate agenda, rather than a popular one.

fundamental building block of fairness, and a way that society is regulated