The End of Growth Quotes

“The end of economic growth does not necessarily mean we’ve reached the end of qualitative improvements in human life.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“All of the solutions to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint. That’s why most of those solutions remain just good ideas. That’s also why we will probably hit the wall, and why the outcomes described in the previous chapters of this book are likely. The sustainability revolution will occur. The depletion of nonrenewable resources ensures that humankind will eventually base its economy on renewable resources harvested at rates of natural replenishment. But that revolution will be driven by crisis.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“Automation has reached the point where most businesses need dramatically fewer employees. “Presumably, this should make companies more profitable and increase their willingness to invest in new products and services,” writes Larsson. “It does not. Instead, there is competition between more and more equal competitors, and all are forced to reduce prices to get their goods sold. The advantages of leading companies are getting smaller and smaller and it is becoming ever more difficult to find areas where unique advantages can be developed.”36 Regardless of the industry, “Most companies tend to use the same standard systems and more and more companies arrive at a situation where time and cost have been reduced to a minimum.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to our new economic reality

“Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“Nationalization of the economy will not constitute a solution to society’s difficulties; it will merely be a reflexive means of averting immediate meltdown.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“the economic pain gripping the United States will not actually be the fault of immigrants — or China, Muslims, environmentalists, or even terrorists. Nor is the essential problem Big Government: As we have seen, the desperate effort to inflate government spending and power is more of an effect than a cause of the nation’s predicament.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“Urbanization, the industrialization of food systems, and the building of highways may have contributed to GDP over the short term, but they have created societal vulnerability over the longer term. In a world of Peak Oil, scarce fresh water, unstable currencies, changing climate, and declining trade, true “development” may require implementation of policies at odds with — sometimes the very reverse of — those of recent decades.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“Despite their economic advantages, specialization and globalization in some ways reduce resilience — a quality that is essential to our adapting to the end of growth.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen,”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

“the existing market economy has no “stable” or “neutral” setting: there is only growth or contraction.”
― Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality