“the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status”. The ghost of Marx walks again!

The author has made a valuable contribution here in stating our problem.
The solution offered however is nonsensical but it is the best current economic thinking offers. In other words, nothing.

The pre GFC,period was not sustainable either.
The economy has been on borrowed time since the 1980s
And now that the credit is maxed out, it is back to the future.

The question economist need to answer requires them to flip their economic understanding from a system which assumes scarcity to a system which produces excess.

That is now beyond our ken, this is what happens when you turn university education into and indoctrination program.

Yes the author has highlighted the problem quite correctly, but fails to see the true reason. The problem is creeping socialism & green stupidity.

As long as they have a radical ratbag greenie socialist in the white house, & a ratbag EPA, [Environmental Protection Agency] they are headed for the scrap heap.

You can't have government forcing up the cost of energy, without ripping that cost out of the economy many times over. You can't have such cronyism & corruption of the countries wealth generation, without trampling all over the living standards of the people.

When you have such a huge percentage of the population who vote, rather than work for a living, you are heading for the bottom of the pile. The age of entitlement, & ratbags in charge is killing any country where it has taken hold, & only collapse is likely to correct it.

Squeers thinks that we are at the limits of growth.With new technology pollution and energy problems can be over come.Squeers is part of the can't do generation which keeps the masses poor.

Firstly we have to reform the banking system.Private banks both commercial and central should not be allowed to create money as debt they do not have.This debt money creation system is the cause of all the poverty and wars on the planet.

If 87 of our richest billionaires have more wealth than the planet's 3500 billion,something is seriously wrong.The power of the few on this planet is a dangerous recipe for self destruction.They control our Govts,most of energy and resources on the planet.

Russia,China,Iran Syria, Venezuela and North Korea and the last few countries that ave not been fully conquered by their debt money creation system.

In 1955 GMH paid their workers and average of $37 per hr in today's money.Walmart today pays it's workers an average of $8.80 US per hr .Technology and robotics have made these companies far more efficient but still the profits are not high enough.

If you don't pay people enough to consume the products they produce, then your economy spirals downwards.

Bill Still in this Doco http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswI suggested that a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire was Caesar removing all the cheap bronze money form the economy and replacing it with his gold coins.It concentrated all wealth in a few hands and their economy could not function.Sound familiar ?

Aryay:
"Squeers thinks that we are at the limits of growth.With new technology pollution and energy problems can be over come.Squeers is part of the can't do generation which keeps the masses poor".

I've said nothing of the kind.

I don't think we're anywhere near the limits of growth, with half the world still to undergo transformation, as well as economic growth increasingly stemming from virtual commodities and other insubstantial innovations. Despite the technological decline, or plateauing in concomitant material growth, however, it remains the case that economic growth requires growth in demand, which has finally to be multiplied and cultivated.
There is a serious entropic effect apropos accessible energy, but that aside I dare say the planet will indulge the human juggernaut for some time to come. What I would say is we've passed the tipping point whereby our situation is retrievable in acceptably humanist terms; short of a devastating famine and overall collapse.
In my view new technology cannot help us since it is dependent on the same growth mechanism for its innovation, and despite new efficiencies contributes to the problem, rather than alleviating it.
In practice, new technology does not reduce the footprint, but facilitates greater consumption. In a world addicted to economic growth the net effect of cleaner/more efficient technology is not equilibrium, but further expansion unto physical limits--which we can of course never actually reach. Unsustainable human proliferation is not a natural phenomenon, it's economic.
As for "keeping the masses poor": the masses are not a stable quantity, waiting to be rescued, but a dynamic and emergent phenomenon symbiotically dependent on growth, just as economic growth nurtures its dependency on the accumulating masses.

Chris

Unlike you, I understand that the socialists are talking about killing large numbers of real human beings. The fact they don’t understand the economic consequences of their own policies is no excuse, because as we have seen in here many times, they knowingly and deliberately choose illogic and circularity, even after it’s pointed out to them. Every time I join issue with them, they are calling for my freedom to be violated by actual physical force and threats – that’s why I’m joining issue! Then when I call them out for being totalitarians and fascists, all of a sudden human feelings matter after all – their own! Squeers is fresh from his argument comprising nothing but personal insult and name-calling: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16063&page=0
Unlike Squeers, my substantive argument is stand-alone; it never *relies on* personal insult, but *disproves* arguments calling for the State to attack or threaten me to obey their intolerance. Insults are the least of what they deserve - and calling them totalitarian fascists is mere description anyway!

Unlike you, I don’t pretend to know what values peaceable people should live by; to have a Gods-eye view or a Grand Plan by which everyone is to be moulded into shape to serve my ends. I recognise that it’s morally evil, and that your claims to know how to achieve it, even in your own terms, are completely fake.

Unlike you, I actually care whether what I’m saying is true or not. I don’t just circularly persist in a scheme for violating other people, even after it’s been pointed out that it doesn’t make sense. For example you own Utopia is to claim an elusive “balance” between coercive and consensual measures. But when you are asked how anyone, whose freedom would be adversely affected, could know by what principle that balance is to be determined, you are completely at a loss to say what it is. In other words, you’re talking bullsh!t as a pretext for violating the liberty and property of others, and then when you’re called out on it, the conversation turns to hurt feelings – the fascists’!