Ken Webster Quotes

“An effective system is one that is able to maintain itself.”

“Apple is quite keen on getting the valuable materials back, but they don’t want anybody else benefitting. They don’t want third parties benefitting from fixing, repairing, and refurbishing, unless Apple gets a taste of that action. There’s a logic to that of course. Apple is saying ‘we don’t want leakages’ because leakages mean that value is going to somebody else, while they want to keep it for themselves as long as possible.”

“Efficiency is essentially trying to get the most from the least.”

“History suggests that, through its course, we have always messed up our own supporting environment or been unable to cope with climate shifts.”

“If I got a nice house in Amsterdam, it’s valuable not because of anything I have done particularly; it’s because of the quality of Amsterdam itself, the community, the things that people have put into it over decades and hundreds of years. That has given the land some value. So, in a way, I am getting an unearned income or unearned benefit in terms of the value of that land and the way it changes while I haven’t done anything for it. Therefore, some of that value belongs to the community and that’s the age-old idea of land value taxing, which speaks about the obvious point: wealth comes from the commons and if you want to take the benefit of that because you have got control over part of it now, you have to pay a fee in order to do that.”

“Sure there are big trees in the forest but they are way outnumbered by the amount of smaller creatures, plants and animals, which are absolutely crucial to the functioning of that system. You have to feed the forest to feed the trees.”

“The sweet spot is that place where a system is effective and uses efficiency where appropriate, but not to the detriment of making the system brittle.”

“There is no point in having a system if it isn’t effective.”

“Using the analogy from the living systems approach, a system should be able to adapt to changing circumstances, it has got a degree of what is called homeostasis.”

“We need to understand that the link between work and wages will be broken, so it’s not going to be a fully employed wage economy and I don’t think that a job guarantee scheme will mean anything neither.”