Quote of the day

“The demand for alternatives to GDP resides predominantly in certain quarters of the environmental movement. It’s easy to see why. Many environmentalists demand policies that, if implemented, would show up as unmitigated damage in economic measures like GDP per capita. I think it’s difficult to overstate how huge an impediment this is to much of the environmental movement — especially since these measures do track the elements of well-being pretty well.

Some enviromentalists, like Thomas L. Friedman and Van Jones, go the congruence route and jump into the business of retailing fantasies about pro-growth green central planning. But this kind of “and a pony!” no tradeoffs stuff is a pretty hard sell. Anybody really serious about saving the world from the peril of a more livable Canada is going to have to argue for policies that will indeed gut-punch world income growth. That argument is a lot easier to make if you can first persuade governments and journalists to shelve standard economic measures and replace them with new figures that make a virtue of green-tinted impoverishment. It’s hard to fail when you’ve redefined success.”

…

Will Wilkinson.

(Because of Ulla’s previous request, I have decided for the time being to not italize long quotes – the above method, with citationmarks and a “…” in the end, will be applied instead. To avoid unnecessary confusion however, my decision rule for now is that I will only use the method applied above in posts where I use the word quote in the title of the blog post, and only in posts with only one long quote. In posts containing multiple quotes of varying length, I’ll consistently italize all the quotes in the post in question)

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