End Notes

Summary of the Book’s Main Argument

Our current market economy can only provide such employment as it does and counteract the loss of jobs to automation, by producing an ever-growing volume of ‘stuff’ and persuading the better-off to want it. This continual growth in consumption combined with overpopulation is destroying the environment we depend on.

Even at this unsustainable level of consumption growth, the economy still fails to provide much of humanity with a secure livelihood, leaving them in want of life’s basics; there is no ‘natural full-employment equilibrium’ to which the economy tends.

Furthermore, since money can be made more easily out of addiction and dependence than out of restraint and self-sufficiency, much of the consumption growth consists of products with limited benefits or that are actively harmful to health, well-being and community life.

Our challenge is to end catastrophic consumption growth, while simultaneously enabling all of us everywhere to have the opportunity of a good life.

The solution has to lie in government regulation from the local level to the international, with the environment and fairness as the major goals, and preferably with the best democratic and pluralist checks and balances that we can elaborate, and citizen participation in setting society’s direction. Only by taking control of the market can we ensure that instead of it dictating to us, it serves us.

Further Reading

Our shared ancestry with the rest of life on Earth

• The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life.[256]

Growth, Limits to Growth and Economics

• Limits to Growth The 30-Year Update.[3]
• Prosperity Without Growth.[257]
• Small is Beautiful.[1]
• Guns, Germs and Steel.[11]
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.[149]
• The Economics of Feasible Socialism.[65]
• For mainstream macroeconomics, there are numerous undergraduate university text books.

Advertising

• The Hidden Persuaders.[39]
• Badvertising website.[236]

Energy and De-carbonising

• Zero Carbon Britain.[183]
• Nuclear Power.[84]
• Voodoo Economics and the Doomed Nuclear Renaissance.[71]
• Reports from: The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).[258]

Climate Crisis

• Reports from: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.[259]
• The Climate Book, created by Greta Thunberg.[260]
• NASA: Global Climate Change - Vital Signs of the Planet.[261]

Inequality, alternative economic goals

• The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone.[238]
• Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World.[105]

Well-being, Happiness

• Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile.[230]

Reaching Agreement and Shared Values

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.[255]