Quotes About Economy

By agnostic, I do not mean simply not caring whether GDP growth is coming or not, nor do I mean refusing to measure whether it is happening or not. I mean agnostic in the sense of designing an economy that promotes human prosperity whether GDP is going up, down, or holding steady.

Out of all of these power relationships, when it comes to the workings of the economy, one in particular demands attention: the power of the wealthy to reshape the economy's rules in their favour.

Given that 80 percent of the world's population live in such countries, and the vast majority of their inhabitants are under 25 years old, significant GDP growth is very much needed, and it is very likely coming.

It's important to note, however, that the decoupling required would not be a one-off phase: if GDP were to keep on growing, then the rate of decoupling would have to more than keep pace with it, year on year on year.

People's sense of reciprocity appears to co-evolve with their economy's structure: a fascinating finding with important implications for those aiming to rebalance the roles of the household, market, commons and state in any society.

the last decades of the twentieth century, the focus shifted from measuring GNP to today's more familiar GDP, the income generated within a nation's borders.

maintain such high levels of redistribution year on year. Far more secure is for every person to have a stake in owning the robot technology itself. What might that look like? Some advocate a 'robot dividend', an idea inspired by the Alaska Permanent Fund,

Don't wait for economic growth to reduce inequality—because it won't. Instead, create an economy that is distributive by design.

Such an economy must help to bring everyone above the Doughnut's social foundation. To do so, however, it must alter the distribution not only of income but also of wealth, time and power.

We have an economy that needs to grow, whether or not it makes us thrive. We need an economy that makes us thrive, whether or not it grows.

Preparing for landing, then, calls for taking the economy out of that growth autopilot and redesigning the financial, political and social structures that have turned growth into what Rostow called 'the normal condition'.

Doughnut Economics sets out an optimistic vision of humanity's common future: a global economy that creates a thriving balance thanks to its distributive and regenerative design. Such an aspiration may seem foolish, even naive, given the intertwined crises of climate change, violent conflict, forced migration, widening inequalities, rising xenophobia and endemic financial instability that we face.

economy, the priority of the Depression era.55 Imagine, then, if a demurrage-bearing currency could be designed so that, instead of boosting consumption today, it boosted regenerative investments in tomorrow. It would transform the landscape of financial expectations: in essence, the search for gain would be replaced by the search to maintain value.

By largely ignoring the core economy, mainstream economics has also overlooked just how much the paid economy depends upon it. Without all that cooking, washing, nursing and sweeping, there would be no workers—today or in the future—who were healthy, well-fed and ready for work each morning.

Likewise, rather than focusing by default on how to increase economic activity, ask how the content and structure of that activity might be shaping society, politics and power.

Today's economy is divisive and degenerative by default. Tomorrow's economy must be distributive and regenerative by design.

Likewise, rather than focusing by default on how to increase economic activity, ask how the content and structure of that activity might be shaping society, politics and power. And just how big can the economy become, given Earth's ecological capacity?

Say farewell to economy-as-machine and embrace economy-as-organism.

Open Source Circular Economy (OSCE) movement. Its worldwide network of innovators, designers and activists aims to follow in the footsteps of open-source software by creating the knowledge commons needed to unleash the full potential of circular manufacturing.

tax employees, and you'll head for a jobless economy, as many countries are discovering today. It is happening in part thanks to the twentieth century's legacy of perverse tax policies, which charge firms for hiring humans (through payroll taxes), subsidise them for buying robots (through tax-deductible capital investments), and levy next to nothing on the use of land and non-renewable resources.

the founding fathers of political economy were unabashed to talk of what they thought mattered and to articulate their views on the economy's purpose. But when political economy was split up into political philosophy and economic science in the late nineteenth century, it opened up what the philosopher Michael Sandel has called a 'moral vacancy' at the heart of public policymaking.

The last two centuries of extraordinary economic growth in high-income countries are largely due to the availability of cheap fossil fuels.

cleaning up a nation's air and water by shifting from manufacturing to service industries doesn't eliminate those pollutants: it sends them overseas, letting someone else, somewhere else, feel the burn while those back home can import the neatly packaged finished product.

Just as the Cleanliness Institute closed its doors in 1932, a casualty of the stalled economy, Aldous Huxley published his satire of a sanitized utopia, Brave New World. It's doubtful that Huxley, living in England, had heard of the Institute, although naturally enough there are parallels between its emphasis on indoctrination and social pressure and the vastly more extreme measures taken in the novel's odour- and germ-phobic future civilization.