in the seventies. Built in the 60s, it was a prime example of wasting energy -- leaky windows, drafty doors, and a crawl space so open the cold wind whistled through. The heating ducts went the length of the crawl space before the heat got to the house. The crawl space chilled the living floor; the cold came through my slippers.
We had the crawl space dug out, providing a full basement with insulated walls; added storm windows; replaced the sliding glass door with a tight expensive one. We never paid as much for heat as the previous owners, in a time of rising fuel costs.
And how did this lose jobs? We spent the money saved on electricity! on travel with the kids, private school, computers, clothes, eating out. All of these things created jobs -- and were more fun than buying more fuel! Duh!

This article was typical. Given the theological premise, as expressed in the first section (I wrote down, "manifesto of insanity" and "theology of cancer", alot of the rest of it was relatively reasonable.

Of course, Peak Oil rules out much of this. Time is running out on their "stumulative" ideas from section 4, mass industrial education (section 6) also relies on a fossil fuel platform. But not a word about a sustainable relocalization of it (not to mention how the curriculum itself will have to be revolutionized).

As for health care (section 5) - forget it. This is going to be relocalized, deindustrialized and thus "reformed" whatever the big government/ big capitalist dreamers think.

As for some characteristic dogmas from section 1:

That last question may sound abstract, even technical, compared with the current crisis. Yet the consequences of a country's growth rate are not abstract at all. Slow growth makes almost all problems worse. Fast growth helps solve them. As Paul Romer, an economist at Stanford University, has said, the choices that determine a country's growth rate "dwarf all other economic-policy concerns."

This is funny. "Problems" are defined simply as anything that slows down, and "solutions" as anything that speeds up, with growth.

Speed and growth, worshipped for their own sakes - the theology of cancer.

Growth is the only way for a government to pay off its debts in a relatively quick and painless fashion

Yes, it is. That doesn't mean it's possible.

Yet there are real concerns that the United States' economy won't grow enough to pay off its debts easily and ensure rising living standards, as happened in the postwar decades. The fraternity of growth experts in the economics profession predicts that the economy, on its current path, will grow more slowly in the next couple of decades than over the past couple. They are concerned in part because two of the economy's most powerful recent engines have been exposed as a mirage: the explosion in consumer debt and spending, which lifted short-term growth at the expense of future growth, and the great Wall Street boom, which depended partly on activities that had very little real value.

"Two of" the engines? And what would be the other "powerful engines"? According to GDP: war. But is this really "growth"?  

Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that our bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's growth was artificially raised by massive industrial output that ended up having little use. Ours was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme.

Ours is a ponzi scheme, Harvard.

Where will new, real sources of growth come from? Wall Street is not likely to cure the nation's economic problems. Neither, obviously, is Detroit. Nor is Silicon Valley, at least not by itself. Well before the housing bubble burst, the big productivity gains brought about by the 1990s technology boom seemed to be petering out, which suggests that the Internet may not be able to fuel decades of economic growth in the way that the industrial inventions of the early 20th century did. Annual economic growth in the current decade, even excluding the dismal contributions that 2008 and 2009 will make to the average, has been the slowest of any decade since the 1930s.

Finance, nope...manufacturing, nope...infotech, nope...

So for the first time in more than 70 years, the epicenter of the American economy can be placed outside of California or New York or the industrial Midwest. It can be placed in Washington. Washington won't merely be given the task of pulling the economy out of the immediate crisis. It will also have to figure out how to put the American economy on a more sustainable path -- to help it achieve fast, broadly shared growth and do so without the benefit of a bubble. Obama said as much in his inauguration speech when he pledged to overhaul Washington's approach to education, health care, science and infrastructure, all in an effort to "lay a new foundation for growth."

This is ridiculous, and does not answer the question. If the question is, What will be the substantive basis for future growth, "Washington makework" is not even an answer, the alone a good answer. It's not even wrong.

Here's the crazy finale:

For centuries, people have worried that economic growth had limits -- that the only way for one group to prosper was at the expense of another. The pessimists, from Malthus and the Luddites and on, have been proved wrong again and again. Growth is not finite. But it is also not inevitable. It requires a strategy.

Where were so-called pessimists ever proven wrong, except on timetables? The "growth" pirates have only managed to extend their plunder grounds.

But now they reach the limits of the earth, and no spaceship delusion is going to take them further.

saving energy. My point is, that money saved on energy gets spent on discretional stuff is fun or necessities.
We did save a significant amount on heating and were physically more comfortable without the drafts.
We didn't put the money saved into a piggy bank to collect dust. It did go to jobs, and probably most of the jobs were healthier and more fun than mining coal.

for laying that out.  This is what passes for "real" economic analysis.  The phrase "fraternity of economic growth experts", or whatever, is sort of funny because it was my conclusion after looking into neoclassical economic growth theory that there isn't a neoclassical growth theory.  But no matter.  As you can see, there is no conception of where wealth comes from, since if something has a money value, it must be as valuable as the price that it holds.

This is why I keep pushing manufacturing (one of the reasons), at least put the discussion of economics into the real world.

manufacturing is the source of the growth, ecosystems are the constraints on that growth.  None of these concepts make it into economics -- manufacturing, source of growth, ecosystems, or resource/ecosystem constraints.

PurpleOzone, economists also tend to be very leary of a "free lunch", that is, they like to operate under the assumption that there is a scarcity -- that you just are stuck with dividing up a never-expanding pie.  So Keynes had to invent the concept of the "multiplier", which is what your example shows.  Technological change is also a "free lunch", but that's another story.

So when ground source heating/cooling for instance, takes off commercial;ly, it reduces electricty demand while increasing economic growth.  The jobs instaling and manufacruting, selling an financing this conservation technology provide growth.

Many green technologies do this, reduce consumption while increasing growth..  and investment.  High consumption, credit card/home equity loan growth reduces investment.

So do we want green, smart growth or consumption to grow and eat the biosphere and weird the climate?   Jobs, prosperity, financial security without ever expanding destruction of the natural world?  Yep.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Manufacturing is the source of the growth, ecosystems are the constraints on that growth.  None of these concepts make it into economics -- manufacturing, source of growth, ecosystems, or resource/ecosystem constraints.

Yes, and so far as I can see, there's no element in the Washington scheme which either acknowledges resource and ecosystem constraints or which has a serious long-term plan to develop a new, reality-based manufacturing economy.

It's just zombie cant about all the same old delusions of "growth", so-called free trade, figurative and literal highways to nowhere.

I know it's not supposed to come around for another four years, (every five years, right?), but is there any real reason, if they somehow got serious about things, that they couldn't write and pass a new food/farm bill before then?

More and more I think the that's the most important legislation we need - if we don't very soon get rid of the monoculture subsidies, agrofuel mandates, redirect resources to localized agriculture,and carry out real land reform, none of the rest of it is going to matter.

Of course there are other groups of arrogant and greedy leaders who qualify as Masters of the Universe. What is important is that they know who they are. As anyone can imagine, they do not care to be called out or held to account for the unearned wealth they have accumulated and stashed in tens of thousands of Swiss bank accounts.

It would probably take two volumes to lay out what is happening. The first book would present the ways Masters of the Universe distinguish themselves from others and a second book would contain a list of people who meet the minimum standards to be one of the MOTU.

What the family of humanity needs to understand more clearly and quickly is this: Masters of the Universe among us serve nothing higher than themselves and no one other than themselves, co-conspirators and their minions in their pernicious efforts to recklessly and conspicuously overconsume Earth’s perishable fruits and to relentlessly hoard Earth’s non-perishable resources.