Nice concepts. Maybe it makes sense to take a harder look at other countries say Japan ? Europe's a bit warped in a good way because of the high fuel taxes. I think Japan/Korea might have similar dynamics to the US but both places in general have better public transport and thus substitution.

I think maybe one of the big issues that your saying in a round about way is the US may be sensitive to oil prices since it has a small cushion for substitution. Substitution includes conservation and alternatives. So the real issue is as oil prices rise how well can a given economy substitute and keep its economic vigor if you will. Off the top of my head the US and Australia are probably the least flexible economies vs oil.

Europe can at some point start scaling back taxes or better aggressively pour gasoline taxes into mass transit and localization.

I think that increasing oil prices are going to uncover structural problems in various economies over time. Even though the OECD economies are similar the ability to substitute for oil seems to vary fairly dramatically across countries and even regions.

Take Arkansas my home state a lot of the poor people live in rural areas with inefficient large trucks as transportation. These people will be hard hit by rising fuel costs. The inner cities and even close in suburbs are in poor shape and this is in general where a lot of the black population lives. Something called white flight played a large role in the shifting demographics of the cities and its still a force.

What I find interesting is that fuel prices will force the poor whites to move back into and integrate with the poor black population. Also the wealthy will reverse their migration back towards the close in suburbs.

You can see that attempts to move to lesson dependency on oil can have some real social implications esp in areas that have large rifts.

Knowing the south what will probably happen is the government will mark a neighborhood as being revitalized and will emminent domain most of the homes and take them at low prices then the builders will refurbish and sell them to the wealthy. I can't imagine that the poor blacks will be allowed to profit by this change of fortune.