| binary solo said: Unemplyment figures are notoriously fudgable, because there are all sorts of ways you can exclude people from official figures. It's much easier to determine the number of people who are employed (especially in countries that have a PAYE income tax system). If you want to enjoy the benefits of the current economic system you have to accept the costs: intermittent recession, a minimum 4% unemployment rate to keep wage growth in check, periods of increased unemployment to flatten out wage growth for a while, economic growth largely fueled through debt that eventually tips an ecopnomy into negative growth when some of the worst debt is written off. |
This is something that I have a major issue with. Debt is the assumption that the future will be richer than now (else wise, you wouldn't be able to pay it off), and the rate that debt is growing suggests that people expect the future to be exponentially larger.
The problem I have with that is that a larger future, and a more complex society, requires more and easier energy. In fact, the correlation between human prosperity and oil production is almost perfect. How can we make the assumption of an ever-larger future based on things that require finite resources?
And it's not about the day when we run out of oil, it's about the day when we reach peak oil - that is the amount we can produce in a given time period for a certain cost starts to decrease. At the point of peak oil, 50% of total oil is still around.
I personally believe that we need to get off oil. Fast. Or, rethink our economic model. Either way, major difficulties are coming to our ways of life in the mid term (if we don't get off oil, and our economies can't keep growing at the rates that our ever-growing debts require us to grow at, we will see collapses of the financial sectors, and our currencies)
