"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Monday, March 9, 2009

Inflections

Thomas Friedman has a nice article entitled "The Inflection". I don't know that I've seen anything comparably forthright about our long term predicament in the major press.

It's a bid odd in that the word "inflection" doesn't appear anywhere in the article. 

It happens that I had an article with essentially the same title a few months ago. It goes a bit further toward the implications of the idea of an inflection point in the growth curve. It probably was aimed at a narrower audience, but if you already know what "inflection" means you might find it interesting. 

Tim O'Reilly also said something of the sort last December.

3 comments:

tidal said...

I suppose it was inevitable that we wouldn't start to "get" sustainability until it hit us in the face with a two-by-four. But we are in truly awful shape if this is ALREADY coming true. Even if you personally are all in cash or short the market... one is nonetheless deeply committed to the growth paradigm, just by being a citizen. Insurance companies, pension plans, government borrowing, mortgage lending... they are all premised on implicit assumptions of economic and/or capital market growth.

There's part of me that says, whew!, thank god we may be getting somewhere in terms of recognizing physical limits! But I am deeply, deeply afraid of what that means for capital markets and capital market institutions (as if we don't have enough to worry about there already!).

Dano said...

I can't send this Friedman to the GF.

Why?

She'll roll her eyes and not read the whole thing. She's heard it a million times from the ululating idiot she shares her life with and has tuned it out.

Yes, the GF is not geared to receive the message and change the lifestyle. Sigh. But that is a fact of life for 80% of the population.

[/grumpy-*ss fatalist]

(Word validation disagrees with me, as it says "tries")

Best,

D

Nosmo said...

Bill Maher brings this up on last Friday's show. Just a few sentences on why the economy has to grow. His guests didn't buy it--kind of lame arguments from them. It is a good sign that it is brought up in the media more and more.

Any way the whole show is available here: www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/3/7/84836/10620

Worth listening to. Even though he is a comedian, he and his guests have real conversations, which seems rather unusual on TV these days.