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27 comments on More thoughts from Pedro Prieto on NINJA Financial Issues and Energy

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Sterling925 on May 30, 2009 - 8:43am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Again having invested in tertiary education I have a collection of skill sets which are considerably more valuable than before. ie I produce more in a smaller amount of time than previously

Like what? 98% of us (in the "developed" world) are urban dwellers in support roles, mostly superfluous in my experience, living on the fat and behaving as primary consumers while putting little back into the system unless you count project plans and meeting agendas as "more production."

These are examples where technology change and capital investment mean I in turn can produce more goods and services. All the examples above require some some sort of loan of resources.

True - as far as it goes. Loans on hallucinated capital (60 trillion debt) that will never be repaid and "loans" from natural resources that are ultimately finite (fossil fuels) or "loans" on renewable resources exploited faster than they can, if ever, renew (forests, soils, fish, water, etc.). The author's entire premise if I may paraphrase seems to be that we are in financial overshoot much the same as we are in ecological overshoot.

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TheTransition on May 31, 2009 - 11:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Like what? 98% of us (in the "developed" world) are urban dwellers

Yes. That is me. I like to think that I do my bit for society. Posting here is part of it. If the economic landscape changes dramatically I will retrain to be useful in it.

People are fallible. It is far easier to think things will continue as they used to because 99% of the time that is a correct assumption. Earlier on in this thread someone accused me of not understand exponential functions. That's pretty funny, considering I just spent several months teaching a course on thermodynamics :-)

One of the interesting things we studied were phase changes. You make a plot of temperature rise vs heat input and everything tracks along in a pretty smooth curve until you hit the phase change. After the phase change, things are different but then they settle down and track along a new path. Banks generally lend money based on how things used to be in the past. This isn't a good assumption during a phase change but it doesn't mean it's not a good idea to lend money with interest.

In any case, as I pointed out, it will continue to happen into the future. It is one of those great ideas that has given us all wealth.

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27 comments on More thoughts from Pedro Prieto on NINJA Financial Issues and Energy

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