What Greider leaves unexamined is the role of the state as an investor in the educational skills, research and development, and infrastructure necessary for growth in today's man-made brainpower industries and for the invention of the industries of tomorrow. Greider ends his book with a dark environmental paradox. Yet, if industrialization is not allowed to proceed, a majority of the world's citizens are consigned to a permanent second-class status, deprived of industrial artifacts that enhance life's comforts, the tools that multiply human choices. The latter proposition, however troubling to environmentalists, is undoubtedly true. That is why it is important to say that Greider's clash between environmentalism and economic growth is not the simple one he outlines.
Market economies deal quite nicely with limitations on natural resources.
As resources become scarcer and rise in price, consumption falls, replacements are found, and resource deposits that were too expensive to recover become recoverable. Most measures of local pollution have shown sharp improvements over the past twenty-five years in America. As incomes rise in the developing world, voters there will have an equal interest in a livable environment. Where both the market and the political process fail is in dealing with global environmental issues, such as global warming and the thinning ozone layer over the North and South Poles, in which the effects occur over long periods of time and their severity is highly uncertain. The decline in quality of life is so slow that we don't notice it and therefore don't do anything about it.