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Deep Economy Paperback – March 4, 2008
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The bestselling author of The End of Nature issues an impassioned call to arms for an economy that creates community and ennobles our lives
In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. For the first time in human history, he observes, "more" is no longer synonymous with "better"―indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites. McKibben puts forward a new way to think about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all. Our purchases, he says, need not be at odds with the things we truly value.
McKibben's animating idea is that we need to move beyond "growth" as the paramount economic ideal and pursue prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. He shows this concept blossoming around the world with striking results, from the burgeoning economies of India and China to the more mature societies of Europe and New England. For those who worry about environmental threats, he offers a route out of the worst of those problems; for those who wonder if there isn't something more to life than buying, he provides the insight to think about one's life as an individual and as a member of a larger community.
McKibben offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a hopeful future. Deep Economy makes the compelling case that the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMarch 4, 2008
- Dimensions5.34 x 0.61 x 8.01 inches
- ISBN-100805087222
- ISBN-13978-0805087222
- Lexile measure1270L
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“I'd like to see Deep Economy read in every Econ 101 class. Bill McKibben asks the central human question: What is the economy for? The stakes here are terrifyingly high, but with his genial style and fascinating examples of alternative approaches, McKibben convinces me that economics is anything but dismal--if only we can learn to do it right!” ―Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
“The cult of growth and globalization has seldom been so effectively challenged as by Bill McKibben in Deep Economy. But this bracing tonic of a book also throws the bright light of McKibben's matchless journalism on the vibrant local economies now springing up like mushrooms in the shadow of globalization. Deep Economy fills you with a hope and a sense of fresh possibility.” ―Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma
“How is our nation going to cope with global warming, peak oil, inequality, and a growing sense of isolation? Bill McKibben provides the simple but brilliant answer the economists have missed--we need to create 'depth' through local interdependence and sustainable use of resources. I will be requiring this inspiring book for my students, and passionately recommending it to everyone else I know.” ―Juliet Schor, professor of sociology, Boston College, and author of The Overspent American
“Bill McKibben works on the frontiers of new understandings and returns with his startling and lucid revelations of the possible future. A saner human-scale world does exist--just over the horizon--and McKibben introduces us to the people and ideas leading us there.” ―William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
“Masterfully crafted, deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding. . . . An incisive critique of the unintended consequences of our…growth-oriented economy.” ―Los Angeles Times
“A hopeful manifesto.” ―Boston Globe
“What makes McKibben's book stand out is the completeness of his arguments and his real-world approach to solutions.” ―USA Today
“McKibben is a fitting prophet… [His] dexterity as a keen observer and stellar wordsmith makes Deep Economy well worth reading.” ―The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“Wise and…optimistic.” ―The Courier-Journal of Louisville
“McKibben's proposals for new, less growth-centered ways of thinking about economics are intriguing, and offer hope that change is possible.” ―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“[McKibben] ably argues [that] growth has increased inequality and decreased human happiness.” ―Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including the best sellers Falter, Deep Economy, and The End of Nature, which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis.
He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the winner of the Gandhi Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called “the alternate Nobel.” He lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org; his new project, organizing people over sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Deep Economy
The Wealth of Communities and the Durable FutureBy McKibben, BillHolt Paperbacks
Copyright © 2008 McKibben, BillAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780805087222
Introduction
For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. The idea that individuals, pursuing their own individual interests in a market society, make one another richer and the idea that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth has indisputably produced More. It has built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading this book. It is no wonder and no accident that they dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.
But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Now, if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand, you have to choose between them. It’s More or Better.
Some of the argument I’ll make in these pages will seem familiar: growth is no longer making most people wealthier, but instead generating inequality and insecurity. And growth is bumping against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that continuing to expand the economy may be impossible; the very attempt may be dangerous. But there’s something else too, a wild card we’re just now beginning to understand: new research from many quarters has started to show that even when growth does make us wealthier, the greater wealth no longer makes us happier.
Taken together, these facts show that we need to make a basic shift. Given all that we now know about topics ranging from the molecular structure of carbon dioxide to the psychology of human satisfaction, we need to move decisively to rebuild our local economies. These may well yield less stuff, but they produce richer relationships; they may grow less quickly, if at all, but they make up for it in durability.
Shifting our focus to local economies will not mean abandoning Adam Smith or doing away with markets. Markets, obviously, work. Building a local economy will mean, however, ceasing to worship markets as infallible and consciously setting limits on their scope. We will need to downplay efficiency and pay attention to other goals. We will have to make the biggest changes to our daily habits in generations—and the biggest change, as well, to our worldview, our sense of what constitutes progress.
Such a shift is neither “liberal” nor “conservative.” It borrows some elements from our reigning political philosophies, and is in some ways repugnant to each. Mostly, it’s different. The key questions will change from whether the economy produces an ever larger pile of stuff to whether it builds or undermines community—for community, it turns out, is the key to physical survival in our environmental predicament and also to human satisfaction. Our exaltation of the individual, which was the key to More, has passed the point of diminishing returns. It now masks a deeper economy that we should no longer ignore.
In choosing the phrase “deep economy,” I have sought to echo the insistence, a generation ago, of some environmentalists that instead of simply one more set of smokestack filters or one more set of smokestack laws, we needed a “deep ecology” that asked more profound questions about the choices people make in their daily lives. Their point seems more valid by the month in our overheating world. We need a similar shift in our thinking about economics—we need it to take human satisfaction and societal durability more seriously; we need economics to mature as a discipline.
This shift will not come easily, of course. Focusing on economic growth, and assuming it would produce a better world, was extremely convenient; it let us stop thinking about ends and concentrate on means. It made economics as we know it now—a science of means—extraordinarily powerful. We could always choose our path by fixing our compass on More; we could rely on economists, skilled at removing the obstacles to growth, to act as guides through the wilderness. Alan Greenspan was the wisest of wise men.
But even as that idea of the world reigns supreme, with the rubble of the Iron Curtain at its feet as deserved proof of its power, change is bubbling up from underneath. You have to look, but it’s definitely there. A single farmers’ market, for instance, may not seem very important compared to a Wal-Mart, but farmers’ markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy. They’ve doubled in number and in sales and then doubled again in the last decade, suggesting new possibilities for everything from land use patterns to community identity. Similar experiments are cropping up in many other parts of the economy and in many other places around the world, driven not by government fiat but by local desire and necessity. That desire and necessity form the scaffolding on which this new, deeper economy will be built, in pieces and from below. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives. Eventually it will take form as legislation, but for now its most important work is simply to crack the consensus that what we need is More.
A word of caution, however. It’s easy for those of us who already have a lot to get carried away with this kind of thinking. Recently I was on a reporting trip to China, where I met a twelve-year-old girl named Zhao Lin Tao, who was the same age as my daughter and who lived in a poor rural village in Sichuan province—that is, she’s about the most statistically average person on earth. Zhao was the one person in her crowded village I could talk to without an interpreter: she was proudly speaking the pretty good English she’d learned in the overcrowded village school. When I asked her about her life, though, she was soon in tears: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory and never returned, abandoning her and her sister to their father, who beat them regularly because they were not boys. Because Zhao’s mother was away, the authorities were taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no money to pay. Her sister had already given up and dropped out. In Zhao’s world, in other words, it’s perfectly plausible that More and Better still share a nest. Any solution we consider has to contain some answer for her tears. Her story hovers over this whole enterprise. She’s a potent reality check.
And in the end it’s reality I want to deal with—the reality of what our world can provide, the reality of what we actually want. The old realism—an endless More—is morphing into a dangerous fantasy. (Consider: if the Chinese owned cars in the same numbers as Americans, the world would have more than twice as many vehicles as it now does.) In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time. Copyright © 2007 by Bill McKibben. All rights reserved.
Continues...
Excerpted from Deep Economy by McKibben, Bill Copyright © 2008 by McKibben, Bill. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin (March 4, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0805087222
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805087222
- Lexile measure : 1270L
- Item Weight : 8.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.34 x 0.61 x 8.01 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #829,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #476 in Development & Growth Economics (Books)
- #1,107 in Environmental Economics (Books)
- #3,172 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy, and numerous other books. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, and was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.
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Almost 50 years ago, the General Motors' exhibit at the World Fair was based on the idea, "Technology can point the way to a future of limitless promise." If McKibben or anyone else wants to understand the future, they need only look at today's GM, or Ford. The world is heading for a similar wreck; the survivors will be those who get out of the way.
This book is an example of the problem it laments; it is a dazzling example of the benign greed that is producing disaster, it offers cheery solutions well suited for miniscule groups of the conscientious, but it's not an answer. It merely uses more paper to explain the danger of using too much paper and other materials.
Let's be realistic: GM's vision of the future produced gray smog, stop-and-go rush hour traffic, road rage, OPEC prices, the rust-belt, inner-city blight, White flight, auto thefts and car bombings, plus global warming, used car sales people and SUVs. It's all a product of free decisions in a free marketplace. Now, GM is collapsing but Toyota thrives with its little cars and hybrids. It's how we got today's mess. What's the solution? More free decisions in a free marketplace?
McKibben is perfect when he points out small hunter/gatherer cooperative groups were normal for 99 percent of our history; but, he fails to come to grips with the monetization of relations among people during the past 5,000 years, and especially the last 300 years. Everything is now impartially subject to decisions based on free market pricing, which means the lack of hunter/gatherer cooperation is replaced by individualized competition.
Our economy is a wolf-pack that has turned on itself.
He cites the creation of the Industrial Age as beginning with Thomas Newcomen's invention of a practical steam engine in 1712; but he ignores the agonizing social upheaval people endured in fleeing old local sustainable farms and moving into cities. Any major change in our future will likely involve a similar human and material price. Someone needs to explain the "cost" of change and how it can come about.
One solution I'm involved with on a daily basis is Amazon.com -- which by making it easy to "recycle" used and donated library books has spared whole forests. Until such recycling occurs for much more than books, we must be content with dire forecasts about the oncoming wreck of the economy.
For most societies, the solution has always been collapse before radical change. McKibben offers little hope that America is different.
Doable? Other reviewers are optimistic. But, I look at the sorrow of ruins and fear people are too attached to past and present mistakes to see or accept alternatives. Perhaps McKibben is right; he is certainly an antidote to my pessimism. His analysis is interesting -- if doable; and if doabvle, it is vital.
This is a rough guide to a better future.
McKibben's premise is that our current economy is based upon year after year growth and expansion and our environment and well-being can't take it too much longer. He argues that our unofficial national motto of "more is better" is killing us as we tear through our global resources and destroy our bodies. Technology, vocational efficiency and economic growth are turning us into the hyper-individualized individual that is easily manipulated and controlled by big business corporations. We are obsessed with consumerism and excess but studies are showing us that "more stuff" does not actually make us any happier thus it is pointless. Meanwhile we are destroying the Earth through the burning of fossil fuel and the little gains we are slowly making will be more then wiped out by the growth of China and India's economies which are trying to become like the USA. His solution is logical as he argues we must become more communal in every facet of our life. Our economies, our energy usage/distribution and our food system will all benefit the Earth as a whole if we can address these problems at the community level.
This is all pretty heady stuff that most of think about at some levels, but might not be ready to accept as a way of life like McKibben suggests. Nonetheless this is a great intro book while others out there go into these subjects with more detail.
Bottom Line: Because of its short length and uncomplicated prose, this is a great book to give to that special someone that hasn't read any social issue books yet but might benefit from it.
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but covering all the reasons why it was inevitable.
The ideas in it are much more widespread now but still well worth spreading further.









