Political leaders have known since the late 1960s that humanity was facing an existential crisis. They did nothing. Now, with extreme geophysical events occurring more frequently, a growing segment of the public is belatedly demanding remedy. All they may hope to see is “too little too late.”
Category: Economics
Though the cause of human self-extinction may be singularly attributed to unsustainable lifestyles, it involves so much more than just “climate change.”
Insensible governmental response to the covid pandemic had scant benefit but many negative repercussions, ranging from public health to culture to economic malaise. The economic anarchy called capitalism is struggling back to its feet, crippled by its own inadequacies.
When trying to solve a problem involving patterns, people think of adding but not subtracting – a bias with wide-ranging implications.
2020 will mostly be remembered as the year of the covid-19 pandemic, but so much more served as a harbinger of the doom which lies ahead.
Presented with bad news, most people tend to play it down if they can. Professional forecasters are no exception. Alas, their untoward optimism often hurts those they smile upon.
Since antiquity man has sought to conquer Nature rather than peaceful coexistence. Covid-19 is simply a reminder by Nature that it cannot be overcome. How humanity has responded to covid-19 has hastened its demise later this century.
Covid-19 punched global capitalism a knock-down blow. At taxpayer expense, the US government decided that people are expendable but big business is too big to fail.
Worldwide, eggs are a favorite food item. Over 77 million metric tons of eggs were produced in 2019. There’s a heavy hidden toll behind that production.
Covid-19 has infected the world’s peoples, showing most poignantly humanity’s interconnectedness. To demonstrate their ineptness, most governments chose self-defeating shutdown as a response.
Covid-19 has become a pandemic. The world economy is getting sick.
Men have long admired grandeur of their own making. Industrialization magnified the scale which could be attempted. As the hoary proverb goes: the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
The incomes and wealth of the richest Americans have grown astoundingly this century. Meantime, the poorest Americans have remained so.
Whereas our desires propel us through life, unintended consequences more profoundly shape the world in which we live.
Farming has long had outsized political pull, owing to the disproportionate electoral power of rural areas over cities in ostensible democracies. Farm subsidies and tariffs on agricultural imports are common throughout the world; highlighting the hypocrisy of capitalists, who proclaim free trade as a cardinal virtue.
Official US employment and unemployment figures are fictitious. Unemployment is at least 4 times worse than official figures state. The figures paint a rosy picture while a sizable chunk of the American population lives in economic misery.
The last recession spelt a titled recovery: the rich rapidly recouped and got richer while the working class struggled to keep their economic footing. Now, over a decade later, the world economy is inexorably heading toward another downturn. It may be the last depression.
Rats are naturally furtive creatures. But rats on California city streets are an increasingly common sight.
America has grown grotesquely dysfunctional; a trend long in the tooth.
The world economy is grinding down. The protracted trade war started by President Trump is sapping economic vitality. A recent demonstration of inter-bank mistrust forced federal intervention. American employment and consumer spending are slipping. The economy of Germany, the stronghold of Europe, is sputtering. Growth in China is slowing. Climate change is taking an increasing toll as a harbinger of self-extinction. Yet stock markets, especially America’s, generally remain buoyant. How?
In 2017 Boeing opened a museum for its employees dedicated to aviation safety. The artifacts intend to show how tragic accidents in the company’s history advanced airplane safety. Instead, they illustrate a pattern of cover-up.
Capitalism can impoverish the soul. This curmudgeonly system treats life as cheap and makes those psychologically under its sway mean. Homelessness in America illustrates.
Humanity is sleepwalking to its own demise. Worldwide, there is no decent political leadership; instead, daily doses of petty politics and slimy sloganeering as usual. On the economic front, English economist Mervyn King reminds that the sleepwalking is likely to catch up with us soon.
Oligopoly is the natural state of a mature capitalist market. That state was attained by American home builders after the Great Recession of 2008, in the wake of the crunch caused by a housing financial free-for-all that went into free-fall.
Capitalism is a system for unbridled evil: responsible for the rape of Earth and the financial enslavement of most of the members of societies which embrace the economic regime, which is practically the entire world. The gross inequity which is the invariable result of a mature capitalist state inspires the simpletons in the underclass to wish for a strongman in whom they can vest hope of some salvation.