Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan George

Susan George’s line lands like a deliberately ugly mirror held up to an even uglier ideology: the habit of measuring human worth by economic throughput. The phrasing is clinical, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. “Contribute” is the loaded verb, smuggling in a moral verdict while pretending to be a neutral accounting term. By pairing “consumption and production,” she traps the listener inside capitalism’s two approved modes of existence: you either make things or buy them. Everything else-caring for someone, recovering from illness, studying, aging, resisting-is treated as a kind of social idleness.

The most interesting subtext is how easily the sentence could be read as either critique or complicity. In the mouths of austerity politicians, similar language becomes a justification for cutting benefits, policing disability, or stigmatizing unemployment: if you’re not a unit of output, you’re a cost. George, as an activist, is typically targeting the mindset itself, exposing how economic rhetoric dehumanizes by turning structural exclusion into personal failure. “A lot of people” hints at scale and normality: this isn’t a fringe exception, it’s a built-in feature of the system.

Contextually, it echoes late-20th-century debates about globalization, welfare states under pressure, and the rise of “workfare” moralism. The line works because it’s blunt enough to make you flinch, then notice what made you flinch: the quiet violence of reducing life to a ledger.