THIRTEEN

SETTING THE RIGHT GDP GROWTH RATE

Life is like riding a bicycle—in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

Paul Polman, the brilliant CEO of Unilever, made the following statement: “Our ambitions are to double our business, but to do that while reducing our environmental impact and footprint. . . . It has to be done via more responsible consumption. . . .”1

If all companies set the goal of doubling their business, and then they succeed, sustainability will be impossible to achieve. If the less developed countries would, by some miracle, achieve middle-class living standards, then pollution, road and air traffic, and energy power outages would smother our quality of life and our planet.

Medium and large businesses, ...

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