Sublime

However, Smith offered some fascinating hopes for the future. He pointed out that consumption didn’t invariably have to involve the trading of frivolous things. He had seen the expansion of the Edinburgh book trade and knew how large a market higher education might become. He understood how much wealth was being accumulated through the construction

Increasingly, people accept the once controversial notion that the future calls for a society with no economic growth. A planet with limited resources cannot host unlimited growth (Kenneth Boulding, the economist, mystic, and peace activist, once quipped, “Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madma

As economist Tim Jackson deftly put it, we are ‘persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about’.45