...which are indicated by the persistent high cost of energy, which drives the high cost of those commodities that aren't already high because of scarcity and increased production costs. Oil is the obvious one, the larger part of which is now produced with a baseline break-even point around $90 a barrel - a huge paradigm shift over 10 years ago. Copper and most metals are another, and then there's phosphorous and NG, both critical for agriculture.

Two main points - the higher cost of energy and commodities reduces their utility as drivers of economic growth, and slows growth. The other point is that growth itself is primarily "real", being founded on real resources and materials; this being a finite planet, there is a limit to growth.

The modeling methods economists use tend to dismiss or ignore this, assuming that growth is somehow the birthright of any human economy if only it follows the correct ideology. Perhaps not so anymore!

Wish I had your insight. Pretty much mine compares to Vonnegut in "Harrison Bergeron"'s normal intelligence. Can see the pieces but not put them together in a coherent manner.


Was it in Ayn Rand's "For the New Intellectual" she uses the term "human ballast"? Assuredly that is the perception of the "1%" to the 99%. WE have the numbers, but that doesn't produce sanity or change. The ONE thing my Democratic party has always driven me nuts with has to do with the layers and multi-focus, we get so busy consumed with our personal focus, we are the perfect target for being "divided" not by our differences but by our difference's impact to a platform, plan, intent.

Perhaps the best we can do: I really am one who rescues turtles. Can't recall it ever being some goal that was set. But they are the "least among us". Still every time I stop my vehicle to carry a turtle across the road in the direction his head is facing, there is this moment of wondering if somehow in the gust from a passing vehicle he got turned around.
Not long ago in the same week, it was the same very Large Red Eared Turtle, returning from the direction I had carried him across the road from. Loaded the Big guy in my car, and drove to a neighbor's , they have a small creek flowing in front of their house. Learned yesterday they have seen the big guy several times, and he seems to be doing well. The creek empties into a cove of the lake. Perhaps, she concludes, the BEST we can do is to care about the least among us.

...is definitely something to keep in the forefront. I think one big problem we have has little to do with what percent we are or what party or even in the presence or lack of compassion, but the lack of a simple physical sense of how much is enough. Enough food, enough money, enough clothes, enough that we can relax about needing more, enough that we can afford to be generous. Every generation we get bigger and richer and have more stuff, and the rest of the natural world gets squeezed a little harder into a shrinking corner. If our share of the planet's resources stop growing, so be it.

I tell my kids that we live in the wealthiest nation on earth (more or less) in the most prosperous time in all of recorded human history - so if I won't buy them that Kinect or the Disneyland vacation (or whatever the necessary thing of the moment is), we're still pretty much ok in the grand scheme of things. We live right around poverty level but we are ok, and I'm employed; its not that someone is keeping stuff from us, its that we don't need much else.

be easily represented numerically, but that doesn't negate the facts presented in this article. If anything, they make a stronger case.

BTW, I disagree with several of the conclusions they draw.