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GDP was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it is so single-minded – almost even violent. It tallies up all money-based activity, but it doesn't care whether that activity is useful or destructive.

— Jason Hickel The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (2018)

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More quotes by Jason Hickel

The colonial high-water mark was an effect of capitalist policy and should never have existed.

If the whole population were to consume and emit like Ireland and Switzerland, we would be living on a dead planet right now.

More than 40 years of experimentation with neoliberalism shows that it erodes the power of voters to decide the rules that govern the economic systems they inhabit.

The Handbook of Neoliberalism (2016)

To get a sense of how extreme overconsumption is: if we all were to live like the average citizen of the average high-income country, we would require the ecological capacity equivalent of 3.4 earths.

The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (2018)

In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population.

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jason Hickel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.