thelongnews.com

Tom Friedman has an excellent editorial, as he often does, in today’s New York Times.  He suggests that the economic crisis that we are facing may be a great disruption point, where the business-driven growth model that drives our economic philosophy and approach hits up against the fundamental limits of both our funding model and the overall ecological system of our planet.  That is, there ain’t enough money and resources available to keep growing forever in the same unsustainable way we are today. The more I read, the more I am coming to believe that the fundamental idea we have to face is waste vs. sustainability. How do we have economic, political, sociological and business systems that are designed to minimize waste and maximize stability?

Now I am not sure that there is direct link between the banking crisis and the challenge of waste vs. sustainability, but then again, maybe there is.  One major proximate cause of the banking crisis was that people were driven to take out more loans against larger houses than they could afford.  People were encouraged to take out second mortgages to buy more stuff that they couldn’t yet afford.  When it all started to unravel, the banks were unable to manage through it and here we are.  Maybe if we all had kept our cars and TV sets a little longer, we might not have pressed the growth of the economic system as hard as we did, and we might have escaped the system failures that we are now experiencing.

As a sidenote, Friedman also points to a blog, climateprogress.org, that takes a good look at climate issues and environmental stability.  A brief look at it suggests that that blog is thinking along the lines of the longnews point of view.  Worth a longer look.

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