Hi Nate--I agree we need a Culture Shift. But to accomplish that, we must reform the corporate media which sent the "wrong" message in the first place. Not that anyone comments on what I write, but I've written about the need for a paradigm change since I joined theoildrum.com almost at its inception. Such a change requires behavioral change by the body politic, as you've pointed out in your essays. Since the late 1990s, I've wrestled with what ought to be the goal of the new, Post-Modern, economy--one not based on money. Knowledge and Wisdom ought to be the goals of a cooperative culture/society that relegates (discredited, old-culture) wealth formation to the commonweal and its promotion. Such a culture does go against some attributes of the human animal, but it also stimulates other attributes buried far too long, IMO. We've seen what the power of media can accomplish in generating the current dilemma; it can also be used to help us solve the dilemma, but radical change is required.

Nate,

I made the transition from business (chem plant manager) to the boondocks (among other jobs, the elementary school custodian) over 30 years ago. My experience indicates that it requires developing a new reality to succeed and be satisfied. This is almost impossible for most people.

A good example of this is when our city friends (MD, architect, college professor and similar occupations) visit us in the boondocks: They enjoy the serenity, the beauty, etc. but they always ask what we "did" meaning activities. It doesn't do much good to say "we live" and that life and work are mostly one.

Eventually, people may realize they have been screwed. See Charles Smith's essay When Belief in the System Fails http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar08/belief-fades.html
But, they won't have spent the time considering alternative realities to prepare themselves mentally for the change - whatever it may be.

I think one thing that would help to transition is a security blanket. Perhaps, similar to the one posited in Ecotopia.

Who knows.

Todd

Agreed, we need to Bhutanize our system, and begin striving for a higher GNH (gross national happiness) instead of a greater GNP.

If ‘we’, instead of focusing our competitive drive on producing something more efficient than the other guy, had spent all our competitive energy playing football and chess, we would likely have starved to death by now:).

On a more serious note, competition only makes us worse off when some amongst us can improve their relative ranking by banning and prohibiting others from competing as vigorously as they otherwise would.

The causes of the current credit meltdown are too much regulation, not too little. Were it not for various levels of governments’ ability to, through zoning laws and the like, make the simple act of providing a roof over ones head, almost prohibitively expensive, we would not have had a debt run-up to begin with. Guaranteed. Strip away all regulation involving building and construction, and there would be an immense supply of dwellings, likely several per head.

In every unregulated industry, overproduction is the norm. The simple fact that not all providers judge future demand with equal accuracy, with some inevitably over estimating it, ensures that. Only in regulated industries like housing, health care and education, can those better off and politically connected prevent this from happening, in order to maintain their own power and status as gatekeepers to a scarce resource.

Simply get government at every level out of people’s lives, decisions and wallets, and a society at our current technological sophistication would provide an absolute overabundance of virtually everything to virtually everyone. There is simply no reason, other than the vanity of the political classes, for government to play a larger role in people’s lives today that they did when America was first formed.

As I’ve written before, a Californian real estate market devoid of regulation, would likely have the vast majority of the population living in huge condos in one of a wall of 40-60 story high-rises stretching from Cape Mendocino to Cabo San Lucas. With high speed rail running the length close behind. While the ‘rich’ would likely still live ‘better’, by occupying larger, nicer equipped units on higher floors, even the so called ‘poor’ would at least have a spacious beachfront condo. Not too shabby compared with the kind of rat infested projects our ‘progressive’ overlords currently see fit to provide them with.