Two Memorable Quotes

In front of my desk I have several memorable quotes to guide my way. Perhaps you do too. Let me tell you about two of them.


1) Each year in Canada, the country’s national newspaper (The Globe and Mail) includes an insert from The Corporate Knights. In this insert the companies active in Canada, both local and international, are rated in terms of their  sustainability leadership. This includes environmental, labour and fair trade practices. 

This year the number one company was Siemens, a company based in Germany. Siemens is a giant of a company, with a long track record of producing building technologies, rail and transport equipment, health services, renewable energy technologies and home appliances. Werner von Siemens, the founder of modern day Siemens said over a hundred years ago,

“I won’t sell the future for short term profit”

Unfortunately, many of today’s captains of industry have gotten this backwards.

2) An analysis of the present day international capitalistic system, reveals that the system can only keep going with continual increase in the growth of production. Thus to make this system work, gross domestic product (GDP) must continue to rise and consumerism must continue to absorb all the increased products. Since we live on a finite planet with increasing population, it soon becomes clear that this system cannot be sustainable. 

To counteract this trend a movement has taken root that is called the Degrowth Movement (descroissance, en francais). The idea behind this movement is that in the future we will need a better sharing of work and its benefits, less consumption and a healthier lifestyle. This will not be an easy transition. Perhaps better shared work may be possible using new electronic techniques. However, robotization and increasing artificial intelligence and electronic control has the possibility of throwing many out of work. Inevitably we will need to look at the concept of work sharing.

I attended a Degrowth conference in Montreal in 2012. Among the hundreds of attenders there were economists, sociologists, scientists, engineers and lifestyle people of all sorts. One of the sessions that I remember well was a session on the Netherlands and the 2008 economic crash. Whilst elsewhere in some European countries, unemployment reached 20%, in Holland the level was held to about 4-5%. How did they do it? The Dutch government had previously decreed that all new government employees were to work only four days a week instead of five, and at 80% of the regular salary. This system was slowly creeping into the private sector as well. What this meant was that if the size of the economic pie was not going to increase, then each person was to get a smaller slice. During my recent visit to Holland I saw that many Dutch transported themselves by bicycle instead of cars and they seemed to have a more relaxed lifestyle, with their shorter workweek.

Now for the quote. In Ontario, our TV Ontario station did a documentary on the Degrowth movement. The closing quote of the documentary was:

Degrowth will happen – either by design, or by disaster.