Quotes from Andrew Sayer

Debt has become the means of subjecting everyone – from sovereign nations to homeowners and victims of payday loan sharks – to a mixture of ersatz morality and threats. Pay your debts or else you're a bad person or bad country, and so bad things will happen to you.35

The super-rich have so much that there is no way they can spend all of it on things they can use, so they recycle the rest into further rounds of speculation, buying up property, companies and financial assets that generate little or no productive investment, and merely siphon off more wealth that others have produced.

Much of our normative orientation to the world is at the level of dispositions and emotions, indeed not only aesthetic but ethical dispositions can be part of the habitus, acquired through practice as intelligent dispositions which enable us often to react appropriately to situations instantly, without reflection.

The market/non-market boundary does not define the edge of the economy: unpaid work in preparing a meal for someone is as much an economic act as preparing pizzas for sale – or selling computers or insurance.

The solution to the economic crisis is widely thought to be growth. But that will only accelerate global warming. The rich countries need to switch to steady-state or 'degrowth' economies to save the planet, but capitalism needs growth to survive; it's in its DNA. Soviet state socialism proved no better environmentally. We need a different model.

There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning. (Warren Buffett, estimated 'worth' $44 billion, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, quoted in the New York Times, 26 November 2006)1