Unsustainable Economy

In all of this market turmoil I have not heard anyone talking about the real issue with our market system. This issue is with the very assumption on which our whole economy is built upon. The assumption is that of unlimited growth. Everything is built on growing the economy. If we don't grow fast enough it is called a recession, if we stop growing it is called a depression. But can we sustain unlimited growth over the long run?

We live on a tiny blue-green planet with finite resources. To grow we must use resources, (pump oil out of the ground, rip down mountians, cut down forests etc) resources that are finite. But the idea of growth is built on the idea that resources are infinite, or worker efficiency can be increased infinitely. But we have to realize that people and the planet have limits. We can't keep growing beyond the ability for the planet to support us. And increased worker efficiency is usually at the expense of quality of life. These "bubbles" that we have in the economy are because of the short term gains in the present that are paid for in the future.

Our growth has been subsidized in the past hundred years by oil. We use oil to create and move things, grow food, etc. It is the basis of our growth. But oil is a finite resource. It is at its heart the energy of the sun hitting the earth for millions of years the stored in a liquid form. Which gets us to what our economy should be built on.

The amount of sun hitting the earth in a day. That should create our food, heat our homes, and sustain our economy. We need to start living within those means and build an economy that provides a good quality of life for all but knows that everything must be sustainable over the long term. Maybe this meltdown will be the start of the change that is needed to fundamentally shift how we think about our economy of the world we live in. Until we move to a sustainable model we will never have real long term prosperity.