## Metadata - Author: [[Wendell Berry]] - Full Title: What Matters? - Category: #books ## Highlights - We have allowed, and even justified as “progress,” a fundamental disconnection between money and food. And so we are led to the assumption, by ignorant leaders who apparently believe it, that if we have money we will have food, an assumption that is destructive of agriculture and food. ([Location 295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003SE6V9Y&location=295)) - To speak of the need for affection and loyalty and social stability is not at all to slight the need for life-supporting work. Of course people need to work. Everybody does. And in a money-using economy, people need to earn money by their work. Even so, to speak of “a job” as if it were the only economic need a person has, as if it doesn’t matter what the job is or where a person must go in order to have it, is brutally reductive. To speak so is to leave out virtually everything that is humanly important: family and community ties, connection to a home place, the questions of vocation and good work. If you have “a job,” presumably, you won’t mind being a stranger among strangers in a strange place, doing work that is demeaning or unethical or work for which you are unsuited by talent or calling. ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003SE6V9Y&location=394))