The Price of Civilization Quotes

“Similarly, though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price of Civilization

“Sustainability, or fairness to the future, therefore involves the concept of stewardship, the idea that the living generation must be stewards of the earth’s resources for the generations that will come later. That’s a tough role to play. There is nothing natural or innate about it. We need to defend the interests of those whom we’ve never met and never will. Yet those are our descendants and our fellow humanity. Alas, it’s a role that we’ve mostly ignored till now, to the increasing peril of all who will follow. The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The Millennials, as a result, are less likely to be divided or even torn asunder by the culture wars of the boomer generation. They will live naturally with diversity. They will accept a more activist government. They will be more attuned to environmental needs. All this points in the direction of the mindful economy, if the healing strengths of the Millennial generation’s tolerance and optimism are mobilized for collective political action. What,”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“We need more government, but also a much more competent and honest government. Economic reform and political reform must go hand in hand. Without the one there cannot be the other. The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“Basic survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.3 For”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“A considerable amount of American consumption spending is not for the enjoyment of consumption per se, but to show off wealth, status, or sexual allure. In the famous phrase of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, this is “conspicuous consumption,” that is, consumption whose main purpose is to impress others rather than to be enjoyed by oneself.2”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“Our greatest national illusion is that a healthy society can be organized around the single-minded pursuit of wealth.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“our common humanity made it possible to find common cause in the midst of competition and that peace depended on our own virtue and ethical behavior.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?10 Kennedy”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology. That, in a nutshell, is how we have lurched into the early twenty-first century.”9”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“humans have a profound ability both to cooperate and nurture and to shun others and fight.8 In our advanced technological age, with the capacity of our weapons to end human life, our ability to master our baser emotions and channel them toward constructive and cooperative outcomes will provide the basis for our survival.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“When the political and economic situation is as dangerous as it is today, cynicism and loss of time are far more dangerous than they look. History plays cruel tricks on the unserious. American political leaders have been in an unserious mood for years, unwilling to level with the American people. The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The Tea Party is a concoction of the anger of middle-aged, middle-class white Americans who sense that their cohort is slipping from economic security and social dominance. They are furious, of course, and are easily manipulated by the status quo interests. That’s an old story. Time is against them. The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The most powerful tool for breaking extreme poverty is a holistic community-based development strategy that combines vocational training and job placement, early childhood development, educational upgrading, and local infrastructure. Each part of the antipoverty effort supports all of the others. This kind of ground-up development effort must in practice be led by the communities themselves but backed with financing from the federal and state governments. Options”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“We need not presume to shape the distant future; we need only respect the prospects of those newly born today. End”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The problems facing America have become much more complex over time, and the political class lacks the capacity to deal with them. The problems are global, interconnected across many areas of politics and policy, and often highly technical. The climate change challenge, for example, involves agriculture (both as a source of greenhouse gas emissions and as a highly vulnerable sector), electricity generation and distribution, federal and private land use, transportation, urban design, nuclear power, disaster risk management, climate modeling, international financing, public health, and global negotiations. Could one imagine a problem less easily handled by a layman Congress operating on a two-year election cycle? The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“A new governing majority will depend on two breakthroughs. The first is that voters, not big money, once again determine election outcomes. We need to break out of the money-politics-media trap. The second is that government be able to translate increased revenues into effective public services and infrastructure. We need, in short, a return to civic virtue, in which Americans recommit to contributing to the common benefit and to cooperating for mutual gain.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“We need the rich today to do their modest part to enable all of society to share in prosperity. By passing that hurdle, we would reduce the need for long-term transfers from rich to poor in the future. The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“My point here is to insist that the rich should pay their way, and that they can easily afford to do so. All of the angst of canceling vital government programs to close the deficit is a charade put on by the rich for the rich. With a fair tax structure and a just contribution of the rich to the rest of society, we can afford a truly civilized America. Let”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The upshot is the following: Perhaps 4 percent of extra GDP could be collected as of 2015 mainly by taxing the rich (2 percent), tightening corporate taxation (1 percent), strengthening tax enforcement (0.5 to 1 percent), taxing financial transactions, and taxing carbon emissions (0.5 percent). Introducing a VAT would raise even more revenues and could be phased in over several years. The point is that there are lots of options, and most of them could be concentrated near the top of the income distribution, where they belong. How”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The combination of higher income taxation and wealth taxation would thereby raise at least 2 percentage points of GDP from the very top earners. But even if they had to pay another 2 percent of GDP, there would certainly be no need to shed tears for the rich. Their net-of-tax income would remain around 10 percent of GDP, a share of national income two-thirds higher than the 6 percent of GDP in 1980. There”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“According to the latest wealth data of the Federal Reserve Board in the Flow of Funds, the total net worth of households is around $56.8 trillion.27 The wealth of the top 1 percent is therefore around $20.6 trillion. With roughly 113 million households, the average wealth of the richest 1 percent is roughly $18.2 million per household.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“the United States will need substantially more revenues to close the budget deficit, especially recognizing the need to increase federal spending in certain critical areas. I”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“The supposition that there is massive waste to be cut in the civilian budget is simply a myth. To recapitulate: ending all earmarks and foreign aid and achieving all of the specific cuts on civilian programs proposed by the deficit commission, even if such choices were meritorious, would amount to less than 1 percent of GDP. True”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“America cut back on “welfare” from the 1970s onward. Family income support fell from 0.4 percent of GDP in 1970 to under 0.2 percent in 2010.16 Welfare still looms large in the public’s imagination, but it plays little role in the budget and the deficit. It’s been a long time since America was generous to its poor families with children! The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.”5”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“It is easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of economic policy: the life satisfaction of the population. That ultimate goal should be unassailable for a country founded precisely to defend the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“it is the provision of public services, notably the universal access to affordable day care, even more than income support to families, that is key to the elimination of poverty among families with children. Sweden’s public services, of uniformly high quality, ensure a decent start for all children. Sweden”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“we need an honest approach to poverty, not one that blames the poor and leaves them to their fate. We know that the single most important key to ending the cycle of poverty is to enable today’s children growing up in poverty to reach their full human potential. That in turn requires that America as a society invest in the human capital—meaning the health, nutrition, cognitive skill, and education—of every child in the nation, whether born to wealth or poverty.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity