#economic

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management. ↗

— George Monbiot

#economics #environment #government #shopping #design

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world? ↗

— Derrick Jensen

#ecology #economics #environment #sustainability #dreams

Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the, uh... real engineer? A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams. And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it. ↗

— Andrew Sheng

#economics #dreams

You were probably educated in the conventional economic theories of your period which were magnificent and most ingenious, but--if you will pardon my saying so--all wrong. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#theories #education

The working class had imposed upon them a sterile and authoritarian educational system which mirrored the ethos of the corporate workplace. ↗

— Anthony M. Platt

#education #politics #education

Standard economics assumes that we are rational... But, as the results presented in this book (and others) show, we are far less rational in our decision making... Our irrational behaviors arevneither random nor senseless- they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of he basic wiring of our brains.-pg. 239 ↗

— Dan Ariely

#educational #inspriational #education

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#politics #equality

The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun: a certain amount of difficulty plus a certain amount of your friends plus a certain amount of interesting strangers plus a certain amount of reward plus a certain amount of opportunity equaled fun ↗

— Cory Doctorow

#gaming-theory #equality

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers? ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#capitalism #corporations #dam #economics #environmental-degradation

We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human. ↗

— Charles Eisenstein

#new-normal #normality #paradigm-shift #paradigms #sacred-economics