Haha, that's not what I meant. What I'm trying to say is that, yes, although I do come from a wealthy family, you most probably do as well. The difference between the standard of living that you and I enjoy is minute compared to us and someone from the non-developed/developing world. The average Cameroonian is almost 50* poorer than the average American/Western European, for example.

Hang on, I thought you were against capitalism and the like because it exploited the world's poorest? You want to stop/curb immigration, to help save same jobs - at the detriment to the world's poorest people (also the people who are willing to move fucking country to get a job - versus the majority of the "they took our jobs crowd" who sometimes refuse to work because the job's across town), but also at the detriment to society as a whole?

*Psst!*

I think he just wants to stir up discussion with his incendiary comments

*/Psst!*

The governments will use whatever means it takes to make their numbers look the most favourable to International Financiers. Changing definition of unemployment from 15 hours of paid worked in a week to 1 hour of paid worked in a week, fortnight or month reduces the figures dramatically. 

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.

You know what else is undertracked? Child mortality rates. 100% of newborn babies will die at some point.

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)

I don't think the benefits of the current economic system require that lending be so wild as to result in things like subprime lending.

That seems more like a failure of too much deregulation combined with the greed of the banking sector (and their customers' greed of course).

Rather interestingly the banking sector is giving out more bonuses today than before the crisis, thanks to the largesse of the government bailouts.

And you don't think those things you identify are fundamentally part of the economic system? Sure as hell they are. The current economic system basically rewards / encourages short term greed at the expense of long term sustainability / economic stability.

And because the current political system is a captive of the current economic systems there not only needs to be a fundamental economic change but the political systems in ALL countries needs to be transformed; not just tinkery reforms like campaign finance reform, but establishing an entirely new democratic model. When you have campaigning in a system which necessarily costs money, you're going to have monied interests calling the shots, and playing both sides. So it's not campaign finance reform that's needed, you basically need to eliminate campaigning. Trouble is people lack the intellectual capacity to envisage a democratic structure without campaigning (people have totally swallowed the fallacy that democracy requires campaigning (and political parties) to work well, when the exact opposite is in fact the case). And they are blind to democratic systems that are working without campaigning or partisanship. And of course there is no incentive on the part of the politcal and economic establishment to change things, because it's working for them.

So if the people who hold all the cards are happy with the economic and political status quo, and the most recent GFC has done nothing to really briung about change, what is it that will, in the end, acheive real political and economic transformation?

And you don't think those things you identify are fundamentally part of the economic system? Sure as hell they are. The current economic system basically rewards / encourages short term greed at the expense of long term sustainability / economic stability.

And because the current political system is a captive of the current economic systems there not only needs to be a fundamental economic change but the political systems in ALL countries needs to be transformed; not just tinkery reforms like campaign finance reform, but establishing an entirely new democratic model. When yo