Living like New Yorkers

October 2007

The previous post promised an update, which is obviously sorely overdue….

The assertion in the article that most strikes me is this: that “the best strategy…is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York.”

Is this not a physical impossibility? Every day in the dining hall at school we were reminded that if the rest of the world lived like Americans it would take five earths to support us.

The only way that this can happen is for people to subscribe to a new definition of what it means to be ‘rich.’ The definition must place a higher value on things that don’t a) consume as many resources, and b) produce as many carbon emissions.