The New Normal/An Era of Nothingness

NPR has described the high state of unemployment and lackluster economic growth as 'the new normal'. I believe that technically it might better be called the new b.s.

Lucretius for one amongst middle aged investigators considered the formation of a vacuum. Aristotle before had inferred attributes of a theoretical vacuum space and of pure nothingness-he rejected its existence. I shall regard it a little more even so.

A zero-growth ecologically sustainable economy cold still have full employment. The present problem is that economic growth and national productivity is unrelated to the employment rate directly. Instead the increased profits just go to concentrated wealth management and the upper class while the government apologists for 'the new normal' of ordinary citizens being screwed by the corporate world fail to consider the infinite subtlety and beauty of constructivist economic systems and rules for free enterprise democracy that allow a myriad of formations of prosperous cultural versions of a democratic society to potentially exist.

Ideas about nothing are as challenging as ideas about things potential yet not actual. We tend to regard the concept of an empty universe and a vacuum as one with three dimensions if it did exist before any Universe ever did. It is more difficult to imagine a vacuum or empty universe without any dimensions at all.

In fact the idea of a primordial vacuum could be wrong. A vacuum has negative pressure in comparison to something else with positive pressure or mass. So before any universe ever existed, before the first virtual particle ever oozed out of nothingness, the vacuum with its unbounded infinite existence must have had neutral pressure (no pressure). The emergence of even one single dimensional virtual particle would have exerted a pejorative negative pressure upon the entire neutral vacuum universe forever increasing collaterally with the appearance of more virtual string-particles. That concatenated pejorative positive pressure on the neutral vacuum might account for the acelleration of the Universe into the extra-cosmic vacuum noticed since about 1999.

A steady-state economy can be regarded as a full employment economy with sustainable energy input that does no harm to the ecospheric viability of a continent or world. Negative internal pressure of an economy creates high unemployment, poverty and pathos. Positive external pressure degrades and destroys the viability of an an ecosphere and non-sustainable accelerates thermodynamic conversion of natural resources from a low to high entropy condition.

It is possible to have an economy that sucks with high unemployment and simultaneously concentrates wealth while devastating the ecosphere. A health steady state economy has neither of those features. It perennially increases the quality of life for all its citizens with improvements in culture and in optimizing use of renewable resources.