Survive-The Economic Collapse Quotes

“Karl Marx already saw this in his time, writing in the Communist Manifesto: Wherever the bourgeoisie has come to dominate, it has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic conditions. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley bands that attached man to his natural superior, leaving no other bond between man than naked self-interest, inexorable “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentality in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“A number of European countries are going to be put in trusteeship, with severe austerity programs. Some will go bankrupt and be forced to return to their old national currency. Sooner or later, the United States will no longer be capable of continuing its policies, and will be forced to admit that its debt can never be paid off. The consequence may be a unilateral default, with the nationalization of banks and strategic industries, and the creation of a new dollar backed by some sort of benchmark (such as a precious metal); or it may be hyperinflation, with the euro and the dollar meeting their ends by no longer being accepted in payment.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“An all-too-affluent society, not used to hardships and physical and intellectual effort, is often quickly corrupted, and its reflexes, dulled. It no longer knows how to value what it obtains too easily. It tends to create a narcissistic, materialistic, and lazy culture, which generates a less competitive young generation preoccupied solely with immediate enjoyment.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“The maintenance costs of an expanding society quickly get too high. This is the case with every empire studied by Paul Kennedy in his celebrated The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies. Empires extend their power over territories in order to control resources, but the costs of empire also rise.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“the ecology of a prairie is not efficient. Numerous varieties of flowers and grasses keep the soil fertile and healthy. A single species cultivated in monoculture is certainly “efficient” . . . but will exhaust the soil’s nutritive elements, facilitate erosion, and rapidly destroy the soil for good. All of nature is an “inefficient” system!”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“If such a virus were let loose in nature by an enemy state or a terrorist organization, the effects would be devastating. A totalitarian state or its elites, afraid of losing their status or simply wanting to reduce a population that consumes too many resources, could use a virus against its own people. It’s a scenario that cannot be ruled out. After all, if dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot could give the order to kill a part of their own population, what assures us that it would be different today? The commanders could choose to have vaccinated in advance those they designate for survival.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“In June 2001, the U.S. government conducted a simulated epidemic as an exercise: Operation Dark Winter. It tested the resilience of the American health and hospital system in the case of a national epidemic. Results showed that the whole system will quickly collapse.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“the growth and supremacy of the West over a period of centuries is impressive. Improvements in our quality of life are evidence of the well-founded nature of the values conveyed by these myths. But is this due to our value system, or merely to our access to cheap and abundant fossil fuel? It always comes back to this same question. And now that a country like China, not very democratic or capitalistic (in the liberal sense of the term), is getting along extremely well without these Western values, one may wonder whether a strong causal connection ever existed between liberal democracy and economic success.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“What can you say about an economy that borrows 50 trillion dollars, paying four trillion a year interest on it, in order to produce 14 trillion dollars of GNP? If the U.S. were a corporation, it would immediately be liquidated.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“Swiss journalist Myret Zaki expounds the thesis of the collapse of the American economic model in her book The End of the Dollar. First of all, she shows that the American figures are a vast deception: GNP is disconnected from reality by methodological changes and constant redefinition, which go almost unnoticed by the general public. Real GNP is far lower than what is published—a thesis maintained as far back as 2002 by French historian Emmanuel Todd in his book After the Empire.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“At the beginning of the 1910s, the American banker J. P. Morgan estimated that the capitalist system could not function if the difference between the salaries of the directors and the workers went beyond a factor of 30 or 40. It is presently above 1,000! The 20 percent best-off Americans contribute half of consumer spending. The remaining 80 percent are quickly becoming impoverished, falling into spiraling debt that has entirely removed them from the cycle of investment and savings”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“business leaders begin by killing off employment in their own neighborhoods in order to transfer it to countries whose low salaries and lack of social rights they like. Then, faced with the growing demands of the host country (whose role is getting stronger on the world stage), they agree to kill off innovation by letting it be seized. This is what the French journalist Eric Laurent describes in his book The Scandal of Off-Shoring: “The Rise of China and India is Built Upon the Future Cadaver of the West.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“The number of fish has declined by 90 percent in one century. In 1950, 19 million tons of seafood were harvested from the sea; in 1997, this became 93 tons. Since then, it has been going down continuously. There are parts of the ocean where not a single fish can be found—genuine dead zones. By 2010, over 75 percent of marine ecosystems were considered exhausted.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“Desertification is another process that has accelerated because of human activity. Often it is a matter of overgrazing on land with few plants. When the wind blows over these stripped lands, the thin layer of productive soil is carried off, and only arid soil remains, unable to hold rainfall, which makes the situation ever worse. Desert extends over these lands very quickly, making them sterile. Desertification is a problem for China, where the Gobi desert is now no more than 150 miles from Beijing. The problem is enormous on the African continent. In Nigeria, more than 1,350 square miles of land are lost in this way every year.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“In this industry, we need 16 calories to produce a calorie’s worth of cereals, 70 calories to produce a calorie’s worth of meat. Roughly two pounds of cereal are needed to produce a pound of fish or poultry; four pounds of cereal, for a pound of pork; seven, for a pound of beef. This costs a lot in terms of agricultural surface area. Not to speak of the horrible conditions, in most cases, of production and slaughter in what must be called meat factories—factories in which one can observe behavior which would have been inconceivable in the time of our grandparents. Animals are treated with unheard-of cruelty—and done so on a massive scale: in the United States alone, more than 9 billion animals are killed every year.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“We must consume! It has become a kind of duty. We consume and throw away. Products quickly become obsolescent, out of fashion, broken, intended to be replaced rather then repaired. Into the trash with them! Packaging everywhere and for everything: into the trash! In Europe, the amount of trash produced by each person on average in 2009 amounted to 1150 pounds. In the U.S., the amount is double. Municipalities dealing with waste management expect to have to double their capacity between now and 2020.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“The barrels-of-oil-equivalent energy required to pump a barrel of oil has gone from 1 for 28 in 1916 to 1 for 3 in 2004 and continues to worsen. This is the most worrisome fact, because it means that soon it will no longer be economical to extract oil.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“as urban theorist Mike Davis shows in his book Planet of Slums, more than half the world’s population today lives in shantytowns and favelas, amid filth and squalor, crime, violence, and corruption. Is this because of unfair sharing of wealth, exodus from the countryside, economic exploitation, geographical or political factors, even plain bad luck”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“the human race’s greatest fault is that it cannot understand exponential equations.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“Two historical periods especially left their mark on me. First, the Roman era, whose principal tales were recounted to me by my father. Especially intriguing to me was Rome’s fall. Following a convergence of several factors—debt, inflation, loss of confidence in institutions and elites, ever-greater migratory pressure and, finally, destructive invasions—it collapsed, carrying with it a civilization that benefited from advanced technologies and a comfort comparable to what we enjoyed in the 19th century.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“first gas became rare and expensive, and now there is no more. the automobile age has ended. electricity, too. no computer is working. the big corporations no longer exist. paper money is no longer worth anything. cities have been destroyed. epidemics have decimated the population. there is no more government. there still seems to be a president . . . but that may only be a rumor.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“tasks for civilized people can be stated succinctly: we have to grow our food differently as industrial farming goes obsolete; we have to inhabit the landscape in ways other than suburbia and colossal metroplex cities; we have to move people and things in ways other than airplanes and automobiles; and we have to rebuild the fine-grained, local networks of economic interdependence that will constitute commerce as we leave the economic dinosaurs of Walmart (and things like it) behind.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“Barack Obama disappeared from the political scene even more rapidly than he had appeared a dozen years before. He was replaced by a populist, right-leaning administration. Many wondered if they had been properly voted into office; no one could deny that they possessed vocal supporters.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

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― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

“Now let us agree on a simple and down-to-earth definition of “debt”: a debt is a claim on future wealth. Now, all wealth is the fruit of human labor. A debt, therefore, is a claim on future human labor.”
― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse

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― Piero San Giorgio, Survive -- The Economic Collapse