A Comment on 'The Age of Greed' by Jeff Madrick and Ecological Economics

This book of review of the decline of the American economy 1970-2011 by Jeff Madrick covers the usual stories of the free market/deregulation overkill that allowed American real productivity to be subverted by wise guy money and finance trading schemes.

Having just read a book 'Where the Wild Things Went' on the decay of the world's biosphere through the elimination of large predators that let the proliferation of small critters occur that in turn over-use the available green resources, I could not help comparing the role of a runaway financial sector unregulated by the conservative belief that all trimming of honest souls is good and the decline of corporate industrial productivity when LBO's (leveraged buy outs) with junk bonds helped pile up U.S. debt. In a way the U.S. public debt is a kind of leveraged buyout of rational economic and political thought.

When successful corporations producing some particular goods with a special genius were undervalued it became even easier to borrow money to buy them up through junk bonds and then sell the parts; subsidiaries, firing employees and so forth after taking over the prey. Over-extended deregulation became a kind of equivalent of allowing the extermination of American wolves, coyotes and so forth that let the deer populations rise an order of magnitude, eat all the flowering plants and others, crash bee populations, deny birds nesting habitat and ruin the health of the forests with even saplings being eaten and only older stands remaining.

Because the Obama generation has been trained to be simultaneously irrational, compliant and greedy I am not optimistic that either the environment or economy will be corrected in a good direction. President Obama has turned his back upon the kinds of innovation that a Roosevelt by have brought to bear to large economic challenges and claims to pre-empt republican leadership on their own goals of creating an irrationally greed driven political and economic system.

It is easy to anticipate that the conservative bulls would be seeking new things to leverage abroad in China, India and elsewhere while concentrating wealth and degrading the quality of life for ordinary people that might formerly have had a reasonably good prospect for a good standard of living.

The conventional U.S. economic posture is light years away from meaningful reforms toward an ecologically rational and balanced physical infrastructure of course. Artificial mountain range housing with wildlife outside wandering upon the slopes, the return of large scale predators controlled by human intelligence and made to live in non-fragmented restored ecosystems. Business models voted upon by democratic processes for actualization through selection for low-entropy effects and improvement of quality of life. Limiting the size of corporations to 5000 employees and the number of corporations any one may invest in to 3. These sorts of things probably will not occur before the end of human life cycle challenges are upon the planet. Oh well.