Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan George

Markets, in Susan George's telling, have the attention span of a mayfly and the power of a monarch. The jab lands because it reframes a familiar defense of capitalism: that markets are “forward-looking.” George flips that into a critique of structurally enforced myopia. Quarterly earnings, investor calls, revolving credit, political cycles synced to market jitters - none of this is a glitch. It is the operating system. When she says three months is “very long-term,” she’s not being cute; she’s pointing to how finance turns time itself into a commodity, priced and traded until the future becomes a rounding error.

The second sentence is the real provocation: “the important things in life” must be taken “outside of the marketplace.” That phrase isn’t anti-commerce so much as anti-surrender. The subtext is that leaving essentials to market logic guarantees they’ll be treated as optional or extractable. Climate stability, public health, housing, water, dignified work - these aren’t just goods; they’re conditions for any workable society. Markets can allocate within rules, but they cannot supply the rules, because the rules often require limiting profit, delaying payoff, or prioritizing people who can’t “signal demand” with money.

Context matters: George comes out of the late-20th-century globalization fights - structural adjustment, debt regimes, IMF discipline, corporate power sold as inevitability. Her line is a call to redraw the boundary between what can be bought and what must be governed. It’s less a plea for purity than a reminder that democracy is supposed to be longer-term than a quarterly report.