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What's happening to the country and the planet's economies is complex, so old models like recessions and depressions may not work to describe what we are about to experience.
And there are many forces at work - digitalization, communications, population, resource depletion and changes in resource exploitation, climate and biosphere changes affecting agriculture and resource patterns, and most importantly changes in the extraction of fossil carbon.
It's hard to imagine, here in this country, what economic development could genuinely put millions of lower and middle class workers back to work in jobs that pay anything like a living wage.
I expect a pattern not so much like a depression, but instead a very long decline, what we would think of as a endless recession that slowly gets worse and worse for certain classes of society, and spreads as those classes inexorably lose their buying power.
It's possible that some innovation we can't predict now could reverse this trend - and we can propose a few possibilities - but so far there doesn't seem to be any sign of such an innovation taking root anywhere.
Nothing seems to be hitting the US economy right now, anyway.
Anybody see any signs of such an innovation happening?
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