by Vernon Crumrine

Created on: November 30, 2010

“Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”  Or so said the fictional character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie “Wall Street”.  In his time, Gekko may have actually been onto something.  If nothing else, he might have at least made a distressingly honest observation.  Even so, when pressed, today’s businessmen, economists and politicians are more apt to say only that they’re “working on some of the things” that have left our money just a "little under the weather" lately.  

Of course, should you be in the habit of using the stock market as a barometer of all things economic, things may even actually seem to be turning around.  In our current holiday season, economists are busily tabulating Black Friday and Cyber-Monday sales figures, looking for signs that say the economy is actually improving.  “Happy days are here again”, etc., etc....But even if we get that old song stuck in our often oblivious-to-reality heads, we should surely know better.

The real problem could be that we still long to be able to view things in the old way. In fact, we seem to insist upon it.  Our tendency to see things as they were rather than as they are can do little more than bring us a sense of false comfort, however. The old way, for instance, tells us that our money is built upon the concept of a never-ending, continually expanding monetary system. In the very early days, perhaps, that perception might have appeared to be a good way to think about things.  I choose not to think in that particular manner personally, yet perhaps for awhile it was arguably a somewhat valid argument; that is, as arguments go.

The problem with the concept of exponential growth, though, assumes that our resources are always and forever going to continue to be virtually limitless. We will never run dry; we will never consume everything; we will never run out of what we need; there will always be more.  But then simple arithmetic also makes it clear that exponential growth will eventually exceed and ultimately outpace what the earth is actually capable of returning to us.  And if we think about it, we will probably realize every brand-new inhabitant is going to somewhere down the line also depend upon being able to consume more than his share of what amounts to the planet’s finite resources. 

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