Short and to the point. ••

When Will The Recovery Begin? Never.

Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can’t be built on replacements. Don’t expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff. And don’t rely on exports. The global economy is contracting.

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can’t get back on track because the track we were on for years — featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere — simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track — a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can’t “recover” because it can’t go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin.

Economies, I think. As much as the moment demands unity of act and finance, and as much as buying-greening-selling could be the new “flip,” the retrofit experience could also be hyperlocal mining for negawatts. Too much so and it’s too labor costly, too little and you don’t get down to the roots of the waste.

Zip. Yes, even Reich says this is a teaser. He also likes to use that “70% is consumer spending” too much. If it were lower, or we were greener, more like the other industrial powers, there’d still be a giant pile of cleanup ahead.

Related to this — and connecting how money moves around to conspicuous consumption and the credit bubble inspiring people to live like kings begging to be overthrown — “L’Economie, c’est moi” — well well, we’re finally talking about getting on the case of conspicusumers, inviting (to my “thinking”) the world debate to change from “Mexican Standoff” to “Showdown at the Supply-Side Corral” — where it should have been and pretty much was, on one side of the multi-fence. Pretty much.

But not nearly enough. The researchers who painted this picture of our decapitated future threw diesel generators at the poor like diesel was something you could grow in your basement, and set targets for the rich world like there was a lot of time. Really for this to be a new economic paradigm, you need some people to be OK, right? There has to be a reason to change, something good about us that needs preserving.

We aren’t unified by our heartless smarts. That will be our downfall here. We have a need now to be very cruel to our assumptions and dreams.

(•) While I’m assembling more of an answer to commenter #1—

Outside a bad case of ultra-conservative moral and metaphysical horrors, I can see little wrong with an economy that’s 70, 80 or even 90% consumer spending. There’s a lot of job shit done that shouldn’t be. 70% is bad only because so much of the spending is attributable to malevolent social engineering, necessitated by same or dedicated to servicing the externalities of same. The harmful economic impact could be reduced dramatically by single payer healthcare and anti-usury laws. The environmental impact of consumerism could be reduced by a citizen’s basic income and eliminating entire categories of employment. There are too many people going to work, at jobs that shouldn’t exist, performing services that make bad problems worse. They spend a fortune, and we spend one too, on improving their ability to get to workplaces best described Negative Externalities, Inc. We’re killing the planet and its people to keep banksters gloating and telemarketers busy interrupting dinner. How much does it cost the economy and the environment to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan?

I don’t know if The Now can be cruel enough to get that questioned. I suspect it would have to be very cruel indeed, and that would make questions irrelevant.

—why not enjoy an hour’s slide-talk on these very issues?

You can go the original post for comments and conversation from speaker and the PDF of the slides.

Rembrandt asked me to give a ‘grand finale’ presentation of a weekend conference on depletion, offering up a framework for how to view the supply/demand intersection. Many in audience were my friends/colleagues so there were quite a few inside jokes. I was also trying to squeeze a heck of alot into 60 minutes. There are several errata after a first listen:

1. Earth is 4.5 billion years old (sounded like I said trillion)
2. Brains began with simple organisms, I said ’single cell’.
3. 50% of obese children will grow up to be obese, (not 50% are obese)
4. Avg height difference between men and women in human cultures is range of 4-7 inches, not 7 inches.
5. Wages rose for 15 decades (not centuries…though that too is possible but data is only for certain countries)

The general thrust of lateral thinking…generalist vs specialist is what I was aiming at – i.e. it is a mistake to a)focus on one limiting resource and b)ignore who we are as evolved organisms and all that entails. Out of all topics I discussed, I would only consider myself an ‘expert’ on finance (which means I’m an expert on none…;-)

If you watched it, I hope you enjoyed/learned something. I was happy, given my severe lack of sleep, that I fit it all into 1 hour. There are no easy answers to these issues, and maybe no hard ones either – it is my hope that others at higher levels in business/government/academia can bring these concepts closer together…

I don’t know why video shares of slides end up so much worse than the resolution of ordinary video but they seem to, always. Also, ugh, I have some work to do on the body text margins of this layout, ugh.

(•) Lately reading shows that the world’s geniuses are tied up with specialist business. They’re waiting for God to tell them to change, how blinkered carriage horses are waiting for NY traffic to subside so they can run free. Is that too Formal?

(•) So much
so much time to
convih, ih, ihnce you
no
know
way to
know what else
to
do.