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The irony of course, is that globalization slowed/stopped wage growth for the average american worker thru global wage arbitrage. Did the elites ever bother to think that wage stagnation is catastrophic to a debt based monetary system that relies on ever growing credit expansion to handle...

That would be a foolish thing to do for a country that has the world reserve curreny. It makes more sense to print paper and export inflation, then to export something tangible, of value, like irreplaceable oil.

What Buffet and Gates realize, that many in their class don't, is that we have an economic system that is mostly supportive of the extremely wealthy. Many don't understand this and attack their fellow Americans that are on the dole. What they don't realize, is that these Americans are merely...

SouthAmerica - I agree with a lot of your macro historic points and on the Kondratieff cycle in general. We are at an historic watershed. But as for Krugman, here is what he wrote in 2002: "To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to...

Let's forget about the greater economy and technological advances, and focus on a household. And why not? The word "economics" comes from the ancient greek word "oikos" meaning household. Households, in the past 100 years experienced a technological revolution. From microwave ovens, to...

Very true. That's why I mentioned earlier in this thread that we should closely examine the need for a 40 hour workweek, with 2 weeks vacation. Maybe in order to get full sustainable employment, we only need to work the equivalent of 6 months a year, or some other number?

That's why I explicitly mentioned energy resource extraction in that post. The argument I was addressing was that one day we can extract energy from other sources in the universe. I say that will never happen. Either we solve the energy dilemma here on earth, or we don't. If we don't...

Kass and Achilles: I believe you both refer to space exploration as a technological and resource breakthrough someday in the future. Here's the dilemma: Space exploration is not commercially viable because of energy constraints. Those rocks from the moon we have collected are damn...

You missed the point I was making. You ignore the child from 1920 - that is an important baseline. Each generation in my example is 40 years apart. Compare the changes from 1920 to 1960, with the changes of 1960 to 2000. I submit there is a diminishing rate of return. Here's another...

The age of discovery peaked with the Industrial Revolution - and it took some time for that technology to come to the masses. Let's think of it this way. Imagine 3 children, all ages 10. For their time, they are called "middle class," i.e. the median lifestyle. One child lives in the year...

Krugman's a Keynesian ass whose economic theories created this mess. Didn't he recently say we need another bubble? He's stating the obvious, and suggesting a policy that won't be implemented so he looks good when the unavoidable Depression accelerates. We have two choices: Spend like...

We've already been doing that for decades. I know many people that make well into the six figures. They are engineers, and they all work for defense contractors. We spend more on defense than the next ten largest countries do combined. Yet we focus on the "evils of socialism" abroad...

I agree.

That conclusion is far from being proven. The UK, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, etc... have varying degrees of socialism yet are suffering. The US is much more capitalistic than any country in Europe, and is still suffering. More so, I would submit, if it were not for having a world reserve...

Technology is a double edged sword. In the past, it has both created and destroyed jobs. The trend I see today is technology creating productivity efiiciencies, thus, on a net basis, jobs are actually lost. Imagine if the casino economy that flourished after leaving the gold standard never...

My use of the words "pure fantasy" have to do with the commercial viability of extracting intergalactic hydrocarbons. Not the existence of gases on Titan. You know what it costs to bring back a couple rocks from our own moon? Titan is a wee bit farther away.

Fannie Mae.... a political slush/hedge fund driven type company that was leveraged 80:1. Gets bailed out by the Federal Government to the tune of billions, executives keep their fat salaries, there is even a tax credit created to keep them busy, and they still need more money... And now...

Pure fantasy and a sign of desperation.

$75 during a global recession is expensive as hell when you look back at the late 1990s and see it was $20 a barrel during the boom times. Big oil, what used to be called the "Seven Sisters," are nothing compared to what they used to be. Today, they only account for 10-15% of the global oil...

I was discussing conventional oil scarcity. It's a fact. People that look at raw numbers without doing the complete math don't get it. Yes we have abundant coal. But coal liquefaction, what you describe, has a very low EROEI. That means energy returned on energy invested. You need to...