Quotes About Resources

Other resources located within the family also weigh on children's development. In figure 7.1, they are represented by parents' psychological support for their children's schooling, which preliminary analyses identified to be the key component of functional social capital as measured here.

Angola's vast reserves of oil and diamonds should make it one of Africa's richest countries, but the politicians—Deofina calls them the donos, or owners—spend everything either on the war or themselves.

The essence of that industrial system is the cradle-to-grave manufacturing supply chain of take, make, use, lose: extract Earth's minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who—probably sooner rather than later—will throw them 'away'.

We live now, says Daly, in 'Full World', with an economy that exceeds Earth's regenerative and absorptive capacity by over-harvesting sources such as fish and forests, and over-filling sinks such as the atmosphere and oceans.

It is an economic era that has come to be known as the Great Acceleration, thanks to its extraordinary surge in human activity. Between 1950 and 2010, the global population almost trebled in size, and real World GDP increased sevenfold. Worldwide, freshwater use more than trebled, energy use increased fourfold, and fertiliser use rose over tenfold.

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.

For the twenty-first century, a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

Gregory Mankiw's widely used contemporary textbook, Principles of Economics, the definition has become even more concise. 'Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources,' it declares—erasing the question of ends or goals from the page altogether.

Population matters, and in an obvious way: the more of us there are, the more resources it takes to meet the needs and rights of all, and that is why it is essential for the size of the human population to stabilise. But here's the good news: although the global population is still growing, since 1971 its growth rate has been falling sharply.

meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

The Wealth of Nations.

When Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Onondaga Nation was invited to address students at the University of Berkeley's College of Natural Resources, he highlighted this risk. 'What you call resources we call our relatives,' he explained. 'If you can think in terms of relationships, you are going to treat them better, aren't you? . . . Get back to the relationship because that is your foundation for survival.

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.

There are clearly many ways to more equitably share the wealth that lies beneath our feet. Ostrom was quick to point out, however, that there is no panacea for managing land and its resources well: neither the market, the commons nor the state alone can provide an infallible blueprint. Approaches to distributive land design must fit the people and the place, and may well work best when they combine all three of these approaches to provisioning.44

This state of affairs is not inevitable. Humans were able to employ science and law to transform common holdings into a commodity and then into capital; we also have the ability to reverse this path, transforming some of our now overabundant capital into renewed commons.

Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and thus are essentially waste. The pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by the waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes. Indeed, as we discuss in Chapter 17, the

In markets, you gain leverage by your power to walk away. Inside organizations, you gain leverage by having control over key items such as resources, decisions, budgets, information, and the like.

To come through this authenticity crisis, we must reexamine our purposes and reevaluate how to spend our resources from now on. "Why am I doing all this?" "What do I really believe in?" No matter what we have been doing, there will be parts of ourselves that have been suppressed and now need to find expression. "Bad" feelings will demand acknowledgment along with the good.

In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.

The fault lies not with any particular manager, but with a management regime that empowers the few at the expense of the many, that prizes conformance over originality, that wedges human beings into narrow roles, robs them of agency, and treats them as mere resources.

The typical medium- or large-scale organization infantilizes employees, enforces dull conformity, and discourages entrepreneurship; it wedges people into narrow roles, stymies personal growth, and treats human beings as mere resources.

bureaucracy partitions activities into formally defined operating units, each with its own goals, team members, and budget. Where the aim of stratification is consistency, the goal of formalization is clarity. By precisely delineating roles and responsibilities, individuals know what they're accountable for, what decisions they can make, and what resources they control. It's hard to imagine how an institution could function without a formal organization, but perhaps we should try.