<Monday Open Thread... The Oil Drum And things quietly appear to be getting incrementally worse>

49 comments on What does "Addicted to Oil" mean?

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Marotti32 on February 7, 2006 - 9:13am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Your comment reminds me about Wouter Van Dieren's report to the club of rome "Taking nature into account". It describes the idea of "economic growth" pretty well. There is actually no necessity to do this. I think there were some pages about Thomas Hobbes "Leviathan" (Long time ago I read this excellent book. Oil is just the first important commodity which is in use in the industrial world. A kind of addiction which simply cannot be served in the long run. So it is with fertile soil, stable climate, clean water...
matthias, berlin
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Don Sailorman on February 7, 2006 - 12:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If we want people to be employed, a rate of growth in real Gross Domestic Product of about 3.5% per year is required to prevent the rate of unemployment from increasing. You may not like to acknowledge this fact, but I challenge you to find a single economist to disagree with it.

The problem as I see it is to sever income from work. The only people to tackle this problem seriously are the utopians (who have come up with nothing useful, to the best of my knowledge) and certain science fiction writers.

John Maynard Keynes gave some interesting hints as to how this problem might be resolved in his famous 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."

My own ideas for income distribution are so radical that advocating them, for example in a graduate student economics lounge room, would cause somebody to dial 9-1-1 and have me involuntarily committed to a mental institution. Why? Because everybody knows that the way it is must be the way it has to be.

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49 comments on What does "Addicted to Oil" mean?

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