We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.
— Susan George
Markets can't think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.
We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.
What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.
The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?
Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.
Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.
The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too.
There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.
Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.
Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.
Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.
The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.
What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.
The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.
Subsidize... or lend.
I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this.
I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let's get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don't want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water.
There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.
If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.
This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.
The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.
I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.
What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.
There are a lot of people who don't contribute anything to consumption and production.
I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.
If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.
If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.
What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we're rooted somewhere, they've got our address, right?
Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.
It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.
How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.
Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.
The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.
Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We've seen only the tiniest beginnings of that.
What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like.
As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.
