bill mckibben deep economy summary chapter 1
Intro 1. . 97) b)Goverment subsidies are grossly mis-allocated. will go bust and join streams of desperate migrants to America and to the urban slums of their own countries." By shopping locally and supporting independently owned farms, you help the income of the middle class, use up less fossil fuel, and usually eat healthier. One effect of those changes, of course, can be predicted by everyone who's ever sat through Introductory Economics. . Author Bill McKibben believes, as do a growing number of economists, that we indeed have to choose between one and the other. Basically, almost all the growing wealth accumulates in a very few (silk-lined) pockets. It is not until consumers develop a … In Deep Economy, he presents a convincing argument that local economies are much more sustainable than global ones, not only because it uses less resources, but also because it makes us happier. (1) See chapter 1 of An End to Poverty? He is the author of more than a dozen books, including the bestsellers The End of Nature, Eaarth, and Deep Economy. (besides class…sorry). ( Log Out / Suddenly, one-hundred-percent growth in the standard of living could be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia. First coal, then oil, then natural gas allowed for everything we consider normal and obvious about the modern world, from making fertilizer to making steel to making electricity. The real miracle, though, is that you could contrive a way to have a food crisis. . . Priority bus systems have been built in China and Brazil, which rapidly decrease the amount of cars being driven and strengthened their communities. It's compact, it's easily transportable, and it packs an immense amount of energy into a small volume. on p. 117, McKibben says “once everyone has a big efficent piece of equipment all their own…” there was no reason to visit neighbors becuase. Bigger no longer equals better. In 1972, a trio of MIT researchers published a series of computer forecasts they called Limits to Growth, and a year later the German-British economist E. F. Schumacher wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful, with its commitment to what he called "Buddhist economics" and its exhortation to people to "work to put our own inner house in order." So, that morning, we hitched up our two dogs and walked about a mile to the farmer’s market held in the parking lot of our college town’s more or less abandoned -- though centrally located -- mall. His engine replaced a team of five hundred horses walking in a circle. After Growth 2. b. We have those in the US but they are used for paying for the roads we use. What level of community do you think would help provide the most functioning and fulfilling life for you and others around you? ( Log Out / From Moscow Nikita Khrushchev thundered, "Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system. One is political: growth, at least as we now create it, is producing more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress. Take, for example, the juxtaposition of two stories on a recent front page of the New York Times. Cars that kept dropping in price. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. This progression in growth is using up the Earth’s resources, which come at a limited supply. The roof of my home is covered with photovoltaic panels, and on a sunny day it's a great pleasure to watch the electric meter spin backward, but the very point of solar power is that it's widely diffused, not compacted and concentrated by millennia like coal and gas and oil. The decline of unions had something to do with it, and so did the advent of computerization. of adapting economic organizations to the service of the people." To make sure it didn’t thrive, the residents invested together in opening a bargain-clothing store that competed with the chains low prices. b. With the larger companies, it is difficult to quality check their entire facilities, which are mainly operated by a large amount of machinery instead of actual people. b-new technologies only served to provide a more competitive edge that further isolated the working class, and made them insecure in their positions. Wars are fought over oil, not over milk, not over semiconductors, not over timber. Hoover had been right—there were all kinds of technological advances to come. It was left to former president Herbert Hoover to protest that "we are yet but on the frontiers of development," that there were "a thousand inventions in the lockers of science . At the utmost, Keynes calculated, the standard of living had increased 100 percent over those four thousand years. So far that seems to be spot-on—highly variable prices, trading higher over time. The main issue of this modern form of agriculture is that it puts many middle class Americans in the poor house at the expense of a vast amount of fossil fuels and natural resources. By contrast, the second argument draws on physics and chemistry as much as on economics; it is the basic objection that we do not have the energy needed to keep the magic going, and can we deal with the pollution it creates? How much more efficiently? All basic needs are covered, and the rest is up to the tenants. In Deep Economy, McKibben argues against the current neoliberal social order while creating a very approachable prescription for a sustainable society. The theorists didn't control affairs, though; and the dynamic entrepreneurial actors unleashed by the new economic revolution soon showed that businesses could keep improving their operations, apparently indefinitely. c-much new expendutires are geared towards the services that enable our newly-found era of ultra-productivity. this is what our system professes. 3) The question I want to provoke for the other readers is: What would be the disadvantages to America going back to small independently owned farms and not relying on big corporations for food? In the Netherlands, bicycle riding is becoming ever more popular as opposed to driving cars. He argues that our current system is unsustainable and that we must fix the damaging parts of it. Growth simply isn't enriching most of us. Three fundamental challenges to the fixation on growth have emerged. "The essence of the first Industrial Revolution was not the coal; it was how to use the coal," insists Jeffrey Sachs. Deep Economy. A British inventor named Thomas Newcomen developed the first practical steam engine. In any event, we seem to be on track to find out. What I like best about it is the way Bill McKibben puts together a comprehensive way of looking at contemporary problems. It quoted a real estate broker who said clients were suddenly shopping for apartments in "the $6 million range" instead of contenting themselves with $4 million digs. Sickness dictates taking care of myself. Maybe he's right, but it seems more likely that fossil fuel was an exception to the rule, a onetime gift that underwrote a onetime binge of growth. Our over consumption and depletion of fossil fuels are the main culprits. To understand how valuable, and how irreplaceable, that lake of fuel was, consider a few figures. 3. Knight’s life is the bizarre yet fascinating subject of Michael Finkel’s latest book, “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit” (Knopf, 2017). George Gilder, the fervent apostle of tech-driven high-growth economics, went further: entrepreneurs, he said, "embody and fulfill the sweet and mysterious consolations of the Sermon on the Mount." The birth of the Industrial Revolution was all about fossil fuel, and so, in many ways, was everything that followed. 1) It mentions on page166 that artists are starting to rely more on concert sales than record sales. WEEK 3: Political & emotional responses to climate change. By the end of the 1970s, their message resonated: the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that 30 percent of Americans were "pro-growth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain. . Do you think such a movement could gather enough support on campus? 75-78. Meanwhile, solar power and the other renewables, wondrous as they are, don't exactly replace coal and oil and gas. (In fact, there's persuasive evidence that if all you cared about was growth, the best way to speed it up would be to redistribute income more fairly.) No need to choose. Having found what has been truly a magic wand, the strong temptation is to keep waving it. He writes, “…growth is no longer making most people … Deep Economy is a very well written and important book. It would help if we took the premise of Thinking in Systems and applied it to our current economy and social philosophy. An economic historian named Robert Collins recently described the rise of what he called "growthmanship" in the United States. In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. 2. People turned down their thermostats a touch, and sales of solar panels started to boom. yes, it is bs, but it seems so deeply internalized that often times it is validated by experiences. The question I bring up for discussion is What can politicians, celebrities, and everyday citizens due to make environmental activities cool? i took a class last spring that dealt with semiotics, or the analysis of symbols, specifically in pop-culture. We should, theory insists, use less oil, both by changing our habits and by changing to new energy sources. . The statistics are such that even an arch-conservative commentator like Dinesh D'Souza calls them "staggering." Reagan convinced us it was "Morning in America" again, and under various banners—supply-side economics, globalization—it has stayed morning ever since. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Of the three, oil may be the most miraculous. Cheap air-conditioning that opened whole regions of the country to masses of people. William Ernest McKibben (born December 8, 1960) is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming.He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org.He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change. For everyone. Instead of facing the issue of how sustainable the current environment and climate are, McKibben questions how sustainable the United States economy is. . We had banks and governments and mathematics and religion. This was a subtle point made in the book but I feel it is one of the most important. Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. With smaller systems of production, there is more focus on quality. Economists can't explain all the underlying reasons for this spreading gap. Before history began we'd learned about fire, language, cattle, the wheel, the plow, the sail, the pot. Even so, policy makers and economists didn't really become fixated on growing the total size of the economy until after World War II. Macmillan, Mar 6, 2007 - Business & Economics - 261 pages. He focuses mainly on economy. Economists calculate a "Gini coefficient" to measure income inequality across a society; the U.S. coefficient has risen steadily since the late 1960s, to the point where many economists believe wealth is more stratified today than any time since the Gilded Age. It's different: if fossil fuel is a slave at our beck and call, renewable power is more like a partner. First meeting (Around the Table) F. Stuart Chapin III, “The Planet is Shouting but Nobody Listens,” in Moral Ground, pp. Another investment banker seemed flummoxed by his windfall: "'I have a sailboat, a motor boat, an apartment, an SUV. If you stick something in the ground here, it grows.”. 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