Perpetual Growth

The content in this space has been changing lately because I've been having trouble coming to grips with anarchy.

Anarchy is what you get when authority disappears. Countries, economies, and bank accounts might still exist, but only as rudderless vessels, tossed about on the waves and currents like so many corks.

We still have leaders, and the legally constituted authorities are still in their places, looking serious in black suits and frowns. But the current crisis seems to have short-circuited their central processing units, and the practical effect is that the civilized world is now led almost exclusively by leaders attempting to manipulate their own hallucinations, mirages born out of fantasies. And a delusional leadership is no leadership at all.

Case in point (from Bloomberg): Gloom is deepening among business leaders and economists, casting a pall over this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“We cannot underestimate the challenges the global economy faces,” Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley Asia’s chairman, said today, predicting the world economy may contract in 2009 for the first time since World War II.

Concerns over the economic outlook are virulent as executives from JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon to Stephen Green of HSBC Holdings Plc join more than 2,500 counterparts, academics and policy makers in the ski resort for five days of soul-searching and deal-making.

Just one in five of 1,124 chief executives in 50 nations said they were very confident about prospects for revenue growth in 2009, down from half last year, and more than a quarter said they were pessimistic, a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP showed. The sentiment was the worst since the accounting and consulting firm began tracking the CEO outlook in 2003.

The world economy is hurtling deeper into recession as banks add to more than a $1 trillion in writedowns and governments tighten their grip over the financial system.

I have a just a few questions for the "business leaders and economists" now gathered at that cushy Swiss resort to commiserate with each other and cry perplexed tears into their Chateau Margaux '95.

1. Do you really think perpetual growth is possible? Hint: in order for that to be possible, two other things would also have to be possible: a) perpetual growth of productivity, which would depend in turn on b) perpetual growth of population. And if it was possible, do you think perpetual growth would be a good thing?

2. Do you believe that real growth is possible without a corresponding increase in production?

3. Do you know who Thomas Malthus was? Do you know when he lived and what he wrote, and what his argument was? What do you think of his argument?

4. Did you know that because the supply of the one critical resource we depend on for life is diminishing and will never grow again, that the situation in which we now find ourselves is much worse than even the pessimist Malthus ever imagined?

5. Have you ever read Ecclesiastes 3?

6. Why do you meet in this plutocratic bubble, behind these walls patrolled by security guards with dogs, instead of, say, the Holiday Inn in Stockton, California, where you could find out how real people live, and breathe the same foul air as they do? Have you been in a convenience store lately?

7. What the fuck's the matter with you? Are you on LSD?

As Bubba Gump said, that's about it.