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Today, human-made stuff equal to each person's body weight is produced every single week for everyone alive globally. This 'anthropogenic mass', which at the beginning of the twentieth century accounted for only about 3 per cent of all biomass (all the trees, shrubs, other plants, animal bodies, and so on) on Earth, surpassed the overall biomass around the year 2020. The mass of produced plastics alone is double the mass of all the terrestrial and marine animals, including the bodies of humans.

— The Future is Degrowth by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan

The growth paradigm has played a key role in transforming the social discourse on how to distribute wealth: from a zero-sum game in which a fixed amount is distributed (so what some win, others lose), to a seemingly positive-sum game in which everyone benefits from the growing economic product and therefore has a common interest in economic growth. Growth promised to turn difficult political conflicts over distribution into technical, non-political management questions of how to collectively increase GDP -- an ideology that only partially reflected reality within the capitalist core during the 'golden age', and much less so from a global socio-metabolic perspective.

— The Future is Degrowth by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan