# Quote — James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency

> In America, globalism meant the accelerated dismantling of the nation's manufacturing base and its reassignment to other countries where labor was dirt cheap and environmental regulations did not apply. It also meant the ramping up of a “service economy” or, more properly, the myth of a service economy to replace the old manufacturing economy. […] It was… absurd. It was like the old joke about the village that prospered because the inhabitants were all employed taking in each other’s laundry. In fact, far fewer actual things of value were being created in the service economy. […] It was assumed, for instance, that computers… boosted productivity. Much of that gain was either illusory or fraught with collateral social and economic losses of other kinds. Companies that reported higher productivity were shedding employees like mad and the entire ethos of work in America was being transformed from one of [the] people having secure careers and permanent positions with reliable companies to one of institutionalized insecurity for… everyone below top management in a new general atmosphere of Darwinian corporate ruthlessness—under the rubric of "free-market competition."

- Author: [James Howard Kunstler](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-howard-kunstler.md)
- Book: [The Long Emergency](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-howard-kunstler/the-long-emergency.md)
- Page: 220
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-howard-kunstler/the-long-emergency/in-america-globalism

## More from this book

> At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by President Reagan and his advisors) that would be called “globalism.” It was not so much a new idea as the logical and inevitable result of mature self-organizing systems elaborating themselves under the influence of renewed, immense energy inputs—the ultimate cheap-oil way of doing business in the closed system [in respect to matter] that is the planet Earth. It entailed the maximization of short-term profit and the minimization of care for future generations. It was the ultimate generator of entropy.

p. 219 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-howard-kunstler/the-long-emergency/at-the-start.md)

> Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By “oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By “corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a “person,” with “rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, “a corporation… is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance… It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

p. 186 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-howard-kunstler/the-long-emergency/globalism-was-operated.md)

> It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the “affordable” range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy can’t be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite its… technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws.

p. 194 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-howard-kunstler/the-long-emergency/it-is-assumed.md)