"Subdued Economy" and/or "Waiting for Godot"

For some time now, I have been thinking that the columnists and economic pundits who keep writing hopefully about the end of the recession and the pending economic turnaround may well be wrong.

There is no particular news in the idea that people are poor at predicting the future.  But for a long time, it has seemed to me that such prognosticators believe if they wish/forecast loudly and persistently enough, they will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  For them, this is best exemplified by a return to the hyperbolic economic opportunities that have characterized our recent economic past.

At the moment, there is a kind of earnest intensity within the popular economic wisdom, in trying to blow the embers of the current "subdued economy" into the kind of hydrocarbon-based, economic flaring that western capitalism has experienced since World War II.

But what if that past fifty years was an economic aberration?  What if the past fifty years was not just another cycle in the longer-term historic economic conditions of human kind?

Thomas Malthus notwithstanding, and current deniers aside, we do appear to be fast approaching the limits of human population growth.  Not in terms of geography, but in terms of resources, environment, and perhaps of potential for pandemics of one sort or another.  Even the potential for global social discord seems too loom.  The pervasive nature of social media have really changed the rules of the game of articulating interests.

The techno-fix(es) has thus far created as many (if not more) problems than it has solved.  Stephen Hawking, in celebrating his 70th birthday, is reported to have stated:   "We must also continue to go into space for the future of humanity, I don't think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet."

This is a fine techno-fix sentiment; but the limits of our planet and the speed with which we are sullying our current base in the universe, probably gives humanity considerably less than 1000 years in order to achieve escape velocity, let alone to find some other resource horizon.  We might be better served in the near term by looking at how to effectively manage what we have, rather than for resolution through inter-galactic means.

Perhaps there is a not-so-hidden message in the state of our current "subdued economy".  Perhaps the message to all of us is that we ought not to be trying to return to the overheated economic nature of the past fifty years.  Perhaps we need to experience and hone our human capacities within a subdued economic understanding.

I wonder what subdued economy(ies) might look like?

Clearly there are those who panic at the thought of such a notion.  Canada's federal minister of natural resources seems to be of this ilk.  The viewpoint of Canada's federal government, as conveyed through this minister's open letter about pipeline development to the west coast has a hysterical tone.  The notion that Canadians and others in the global community might mindfully consider how we will go forward economically, apparently strikes this minister as 'radical'. 

I feel as if I am watching two men on a bench.  The minister's views have overtones of role of Lucky.