Sublime

Where to put the price tag or, to put it in a more academic way, where value is stored is one of the central quandaries in the City Authentic, a term I use not only to title this book but to describe a set of policies, practices, and ideas that leverage our modern desires for meaning and belonging to drive economic development.

To accomplish the former, we could simply take money away from the employed and give it to the unemployed, subsidize firms in keeping superfluous employees, or pay everyone a social wage regardless of whether they work or not. These redistributive policies diminish the relative wealth and power of the holders of money. The other solution, in the

It puts ecological and social functioning at its core, but it is not a paradigm of sacrifice. To the contrary, it involves a way of life that will yield

13 From Debt to Provision

Center for a New American Dream, a nonprofit devoted to making American lifestyles socially and ecologically sustainable.

we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life—they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth. A steady-state economy can allow us to choose goals

So if humans are needed neither as producers nor as consumers, what will safeguard their physical survival and their psychological well-being?