Economic Unsustainability Quotes

A world in which government is burdened by historic debt, philanthropy has limited resources, and the private sector is only interested in its own personal gain is simply unsustainable.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies.

The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along.

It's an old-fashioned, very outdated, non-functioning idea that we can drain all the resources from directly around us and skyrocket to the top of a skyscraper, and that's success. We have to understand that when one has to leech from others to that degree, then that's something we need to watch and stop.

Our hubris needs to be downsized, thinking that profiteering on Earth, on whatever level - environmentally, economically, culturally - is unlimited and everybody should get as much as he wants or she wants. Humans need to be shrunk again to their actual size.

When a democracy reaches a point where the politicians cannot say no to the people, and both parties are competing for votes by promising even more spending or even lower taxes, or both, the experiment is about over.