last highlighted date: 2023-09-18

Highlights

  • You could paraphrase that as; marketing is only 7% efficient at meeting people’s needs and 83% efficient at creating artificial demand just to convert sales. This is not to say that the bought products were all useless, rather, buyers could have done comfortably well without them — but the marketing system created ‘artificial need’ just to make a sale. Think fast fashion, travel, fast foods, electronics, automobile, FMCG, etc.
  • Research in industrial ecology indicates that high standards of well-being can be achieved with about 6–8 tons per person.
  • That’s about 13 tons per person on average, but it is highly unequal
  • The world economy presently uses 400 EJ of energy per year, or 53 GJ per person on average (again, highly unequal between North and South).
  • Is it too much to ask of them to uphold similar ethical standards as doctors, or is it too much to ask of them to not make our souls unjust — by manipulating our emotions to maximise profit while increasing global warming and other injustices?