“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.“
Upton Sinclair

This is a deliberately short piece to make a simple point. The oncoming recession is not a temporary blip in the economy. Unlike past recessions, there can be no more growth to get us back to business as usual.

As Tim Morgan says:

“The economy is in big trouble, not ‘maybe’, not ‘perhaps’, not ‘in the future’, but NOW. We can’t explain this away in terms of covid, or the war in Ukraine. The unravelling of the energy dynamic is what’s really behind economic deterioration, worsening living standards and market woes.  There’s no technological fix for this, and no monetary policy fix either.“

Tim Watkins adds::
“Once again, the economists and policy-makers will be asked why nobody saw it coming. Once again they will shuffle their feet, bow their heads and mumble something about black swans. And only later will we come to learn that everyone on the inside from the guy who reads your electricity meter right the way up to the Grid’s technical director knew all too well that it is impossible to run a complex modern economy on renewable energy… only by then it will be too late.“

The economy is shrinking and will do so for the foreseeable future.The problems implicit in the shrinking economy will be quite different from those presently anticipated by the government and those of left, right and green inclination.

We must now begin to imagine a world with no economic growth…

This post first appeared at Orcop.com