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the white rabbit
26th June 2010, 12:03 PM
G20 to take separate routes to secure recovery TORONTO (Reuters) – World leaders hoping to shore up a fragile economic recovery will leave it to individual countries to decide how best to repair battered budgets without stunting growth. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/canada_us_g20

keehah
27th June 2010, 11:16 PM
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/destined-fail-magical-thinking-g20/41097

In the lead-up to the G20, the US was lobbying heavily for a very different outcome. The US wanted continued stimulus and thin-air money printing and made its plea for this policy stance very publicly in the days and weeks leading up to the G20 meeting.

The reasons for this stance are numerous and complex, but one stands out prominently: Elections are coming up. If you are an incumbent, now is not the time to cut off the stimulus efforts.

The story here is that the US wants to stay on the path of printing, borrowing, and government stimulus, but a significant portion of the rest of the developed world has decided this is not a direction that makes sense. Such fundamental splits in philosophy are what great historical turning points are made of.

The second thing we learned is that, despite these differences in how to fund future growth, there is nothing yet to indicate that any the world leaders are aware that the very concept of perpetual growth is an unworkable fallacy. It’s obvious, hopefully to even the most casual of thinkers, that someday, sooner or later, whatever growth one is engaged in will have to stop. Nothing grows forever; everything has a limit.

But apparently the concept of limits is not part of the magical framework of modern economic thinking (emphasis mine):

It’s funny how these things are always expressed as a “need.” We “need” economic growth and job creation. Have you ever wondered why this is? Why is it that we “need” either? Needs are not negotiable; wants are. How sure are we that job creation and economic growth are actually needs?

Well, we need job growth, because there are more and more people entering the work force each year due to population growth. If there were no population growth and everybody already had a job, then there would be no “need” to create jobs. Zero percent job growth is the right amount for a stable population. No growth = no need for new jobs.

So we can therefore reduce the politicians' statements about the need for jobs to its more basic level and discover that they are really saying we “need” population growth. It's certainly been a very real and dominant factor for a very long time, but it is not a need. There are many who would even say it shouldn't even be considered a “want.” We can trace an enormous number of the problems or predicaments we face to over-population or to the strain that results from accommodating the needs of a growing population.

It seems to me that if job creation is a ‘need’ then we’d do well to ask ourselves if we’d prefer to spend our time trying to figure out how to create an ever larger number of jobs in perpetuity or if we’d like to spend our time figuring out how to create a stable population. While this may be an uncomfortable topic for some, it also happens to be reality.

Apparition
27th June 2010, 11:50 PM
Different paths?

Hmm, I wonder which countries will be less financially chaotic afterward...