Gdp Quotes

“I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.”
― Warren Buffet

“The problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.”
― George Monbiot

“Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.”
― Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“Creativity is key to productivity and prosperity.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“It’s not growth itself that matters – what matters is how income is distributed, and the extent to which it is invested in public services. And past a certain point, more GDP isn’t necessary for improving human welfare at all.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Gross compassion quotient (GCQ) of a country is the measure of the level of compassion of the country as whole.”
― Amit Ray, Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth

“Consider this thought experiment: if Portugal has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38,000 less GDP per capita, then we can conclude that $38,000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13 trillion per year for the US economy as a whole. That’s $13 trillion worth of extraction and production and consumption each year, and $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds nothing, in and of itself, to the fundamentals of human welfare. It is damage without gain. This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% from its present size while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused single-mindedly on GDP growth. This is no longer a matter of choice. In a globalised world where capital can move freely across borders at the click of a mouse, nations are forced to compete with one another to attract foreign investment. Governments find themselves under pressure to cut workers’ rights, slash environmental protections, open up public land to developers, privatise public services – whatever it takes to please the barons of international capital in what has become a global rush towards self-imposed structural adjustment. All of this is done in the name of growth.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Humanity has been taking off like a rocket since the 1700s, but we have not achieved a stable orbit in the heavens. And even if we did, no orbit is stable in the long run. Eventually gravity claims what is hers.”
― Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy

“Due to Nepal's dependence on foreign assistance as the principal source of funding for its expanding development spending, its indebtedness has increased on a large scale.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Why Nepal Fails

“Recognition of the value of time, the change in our attitude to time, time management and time consciousness translate into economic growth or increase in GDP.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Entrepreneurship is, to most entrepreneurs, the art of using things such as the need for job creation as veils to hide the desire to make way more money than is needed.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“GDP the measure that was invented in the manufacturing age is no longer valid. Gross compassion quotient (GCQ) will be the new measure for the new age. It will show the new light to the humanity.”
― Amit Ray, Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth

“The country now has the second highest GDP per capita in the world after Luxembourg, and Luxembourg is hardly a proper country.”
― Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

“Growth is good, at least for those doing the growing.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Our standard of progress was conceived for a different era with different problems. Our statistics no longer capture the shape of our economy. And this has consequences. Every era needs its own figures. In the eighteenth century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the nineteenth century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the twentieth century, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state.
But today it's no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros. From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we're all still fixated on 'efficiency' and 'gains,' as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it's precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail... It's time for a new set of figures.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

“We have a tendency to describe capitalism with familiar, well-worn words like ‘markets’ and ‘trade’. But this isn’t quite accurate. Markets and traders were around for thousands of years before capitalism, and they are innocent enough on their own. What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it’s organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we measure as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“From the perspective of human welfare, the high levels of GDP that characterise the United States, Britain and other higher-income countries turn out to be vastly in excess of what they actually need.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Upper-middle income and high-income nations – countries over the threshold of $10,000 per capita – could in theory deliver flourishing lives for all, achieving real progress in human development, without needing any additional growth in order to do so. We know exactly what works: reduce inequality, invest in universal public goods, and distribute income and opportunity more fairly.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“[For the past forty years], guided by the dogmas of neoliberalism, governments have privatised public services, slashed social spending, cut wages and labour protections, handed tax cuts to the richest and sent inequality soaring. In an age of climate breakdown, we need to be doing exactly the opposite.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Once we grasp the scale of national and global inequalities, then the narrative that seeks to cast GDP growth as a proxy for human progress begins to seem a bit tendentious – perhaps even a bit ideological. And by ideology I mean in the technical sense: a set of ideas promoted by the dominant class, which serves their material interests, and which everybody else has internalised to such an extent that they are willing to go along with a system they might otherwise reject as unjust. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci has called this ‘cultural hegemony’: when an ideology becomes so normalised that it is difficult or even impossible to reflect on it.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“It is politically easier to rev up GDP and hope some of it trickles down to the poor than it is to distribute existing income more fairly.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“We must be highly skeptical of the view that long-term changes in the rate of growth of welfare can be gauged even roughly from changes in the rate of growth of output.”
― Moses Abramovitz

“GDP is a very important measurement of everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”
― Robert F Kennedy

“Country with a GDP the size of a planet competing with an island nation for economic supremacy!”
― Economic Supremacy