What we are calling "economic productivity" these days is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and the human spirit.
That's just the wretched numbers. I can do the math.
Fortunately I don't have to believe in anything to get through the day. Nature will always do what nature does. Exponential growth always ends. As they say on the triage deck, the bleeding always stops. (My sister is a paramedic, my wife's career is similar, with even more high power, highly scientific, highly technical university training.)
This planet has seen many innovative species flame out. We humans are not the first, and we won't be the last.
In ten million years nothing is left of us but a peculiar layer of trash in the geologic record and a few bits of metal floating around in outer space.
Personally I think we should be paying people not to work, and that taxes ought to approach 100% at some multiple of this minimum income, probably a multiple less than twenty. Pump the oxygenated water into the bottom of the pond, skim the scum off the top.
The world would actually be a better place if some people stayed home all day having protected sex, smoking pot, and playing video games. Hard working gangsters and steroid pumping gun loving cops do not make a community a better place.
Even better, further education and art. Free. Celebrated.
The devil finds work for idle hands. It's called Wal-Mart. It's some fucking church stuffed full of affluent "Prosperity Theology" Christians, madly seeking something, anything, to fill up the empty places in their souls.
Realistic, sustainable, economics is basic pond maintenance. If the circulation stops the scum on the top gets so thick the environment beneath becomes dark and anaerobic.
Our high energy, fossil fueled economy, in which the rich get richer, and everyone else gets kicked around by sadistic goons wearing steel toed boots, needs to be killed dead, with extreme prejudice.
I doubt the wealthy political classes of this world will ever support fair, sustainable economic systems, but nature will stomp'm extinct one of these days.
Whatever happens, the meek shall inherit the earth, but only because there are so many of them.
It's not a hypothetical thing either. There are places on this planet today where civilization is already collapsing.
Seeing the world through the eyes of an evolutionary biologist doesn't mean I exist in a dark hopeless place. This world is endlessly fascinating, I can honestly say I've never been bored. My family, crazy artists the whole lot of them, bring me great joy. My pets, all of them from the shelter, make me happy, even when they are bad. I have a garden, especially a tomato vine that thinks it's a perennial. I like computers. I don't buy hardware or software. People throw away easily repairable computers that run Open Source software just fine. (Debian is awesome! Your mileage may vary. I've been on the internet since 1979 and was present when the early BSD editions were released into the wild. After a brief and sometimes lucrative affair with Microsoft Windows, Debian was like coming home again.)
I've been homeless and off-my-meds too. Dumpster diving feral man. There's no promise I won't visit that place again.
But wow, it's all been a wild ride, even in an economy largely controlled by disgusting sociopaths.
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