Ludwig

its fair enough that the stuff on Diamond is just a distraction from the main thrust of the article. I was astonished by the fact that anyone could defend him. For the record Daiamond's mistakes are not minor, they are howlers.

The article itself indicates that Geoff should keep his day job. For example, he talks of unsustainable household debt levels and a house price bubble. Say, what? House prices have been largely depressed in Australia for years, although there have been exceptions. In Perth they shot up a couple of years back and may still be rising, but in Melbourne and Sydney they've done nothing for years.

In fact, one of the reasons Australia escaped the worst of the GFC is because our property market was not booming in the lead up to it. For that and other reasons, with a fewe exceptions, the bad loan write-offs remained relatively small. So much for a major part of his thesis.

Squeers -

You are right in that we need a better system - political, economic and in our values. I have written a fair bit on this. You'll find a few indicators on my website, for example
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/cut-emissions-and-boost-economy/
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/gdp-shrinks-hooray/

Or you can download my 2004 book Economia, which has a long section on how to reform the economy and reduce our destructive footprint on Earth.
http://betternature.wordpress.com/booksanddownloads/economia/

Well I don't know what universe Curmudgeon inhabits, if he thinks house prices have been depressed. They have only doubled, or close to tripled, over the past decade or two, way beyond inflation (which excludes housing costs, by the way - another trick of mainstream economics).

But beyond anecdotes, Steve Keen has been documenting Australia's private debt level (160% of GDP), mostly mortgage debt, and the risks to our supposedly brilliant economy.
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/

Note: U.S. debt to GDP ration has again attained over 100 percent - at over 15 trillion.
Combined private and public debt in the U.S. is over 54 trillion.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Thanks for links Geoff, I'll have a look asap.

I believe in the fundamental proposition (I only wish I had time to research it) that it is impossible (at least at this, or any foreseeable, stage in our technological development) to sustain economic growth in tandem with cuts in Co2 emissions; the latter are the inevitable by-product of the former. Economic growth is not abstract, it's "material" growth and costly in terms of fuel in and emissions out (there's also the considerable question of entropy. I've posted this link elsewhere but perhaps you've missed it: http://tinyurl.com/7uv25c9)
IMO, the only way we can cut emissions is by cutting economic growth, i.e. material growth. This is non sequitur, however, in a capitalist system; profits collapse and societies degenerate without economic growth. It's not simply that the big end of town won't permit it or that governments are enthral to their corporate masters, the whole shebang is in denial, or wilfully misleading the electorate, of the fact that economy and the human presence must grow or collapse. The fact that it must collapse if it continues to grow seems to be the preferred option.
What I was getting at above is that well-intentioned as we may be with our ideological solutions, they're hatched in the equanimity of our studies, and not in the real world where our leaders are obliged to operate rather than pontificate.

Interesting thoughts Squeers, but I think there's a way through.

Living systems have long since solved this problem. They grow, they stabilise and they continue. Unlimited growth is pathological - a plague or a cancer.

Humans are part of the living network of the planet, and for a long time we followed this pattern.

There are many ways already known for us to dramatically reduce our material throughputs, so we have a much lighter footprint.

We are not limited to past kinds of "capitalism". If we make quality of life the objective of our economies, instead of GDP, and increasing GDP, then we can reduce material throughput and improve our quality of life - simultaneously.

We have to overcome the inertia of the presently powerful, who don't want anything to change of course. That is likely to happen, as the present system can't even maintain itself, let alone us and the planet. The present system results from an unholy alliance of the self-interested rich and the deluded economics mainstream, whose core theory is pseudoscience.