The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (52 page)

12. Ted C. Fishman, “As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations,” The New York Times, October 14, 2010.

13. For another overview of this subject, see Dalibor Rohac, “Shaky Foundations to China’s Growth,” Asia Times online, posted October 21, 2010.

14. Chandni Rathod and Gus Lubin, “And Now Presenting: Amazing Satellite Images of the Ghost Cities of China,” Business Insider, posted December 14, 2010.

15. Wieland Wagner, “China’s Real Estate Bubble Threatens to Burst,” Spiegel Online, posted August 3, 2010.

16. To read more, see Bill Powell, “Inside China’s Runaway Building Boom,”
Time.com
, posted April 5, 2010.

17. Warren Karlenzig, “China’s New National Plan: Green By Necessity,” Common Current. com, posted November 29, 2010.

18. The history of currencies is recounted in Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

19. See
Wikipedia.org
, “Genoa Conference (1922).”

20. See
Wikipedia.org
, “History of the United States Dollar” and “Nixon Shock.”

21. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

22. See Marvin Friend, “A Short History of US Monetary Policy,” The Powell Center,
powellcenter.org/econEssay/history.html
.

23. Bill Black, “The EU’s New Bailout Plan Will Exacerbate Political Crises,” Business Insider, posted December 13, 2010.

24. See
Wikipedia.org
, “Foreign Exchange Market.”

25. To read more, see Edward Harrison, “Currencies Pegged to the Dollar Under Pressure to Drop Peg,”
CreditWritedowns.com
, posted October 13, 2009; Michael Hudson, “Why the US Has Launched a New Financial World War — And How the Rest of the World Will Fight Back,”
alternet.org
, posted October 12, 2010.

26. Michael Sauga and Peter Müller, “The US Has Lived on Borrowed Money For Too Long,” an interview with German Finance Minister Schäuble, Spiegel online, posted November 8, 2010.

27. See for example, “Finance Has Become a New Form of Warfare,” an interview with Michael Hudson, Information Clearing House, posted November 5, 2010; David De-Graw, “The Road to World War III — The Global Banking Cartel Has One Card Left to Play,” Amped Status, posted September 23, 2010; Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “QE2 Risks Currency Wars and the End of Dollar Hegemony,” The Telegraph, November 1, 2010.

28. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “The Eurozone is in Bad Need of an Undertaker,” The Telegraph, December 12, 2010.

29. Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), chapter 6.

30. Vicken Cheterian, “The Arab Crisis: Food, Energy, Water, Justice,” Energy Bulletin, posted January 26, 2011.

31. Brice Pedroletti, “China Seeks to Mine Deep Sea Riches,” The Guardian, December 7, 2010.

32. For an excellent general overview of the population issue, see Bill Ryerson, “Population: The Multiplier of Everything Else,” in The Post Carbon Reader (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010); for an interactive Internet guide to population sizes and growth rates for all regions and countries, see “Explore the US Census Bureau’s International Data Base,”
mazamascience.com
,
mazamascience.com/Population/IDB/
.

33. “Pakistan: Population growth rate adds to problems,”
irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91656
(accessed March 16, 2011).

34. Spengler, “Longevity Gives Life to Tea Party,” Asia Times online, posted December 7, 2010.

35. Population Media Center,
populationmedia.org
.

36. Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2008); Sharon Astyk, “Peak Oil Is a Women’s Issue,”
Relocalize.net
, posted November 25, 2006.

37. “Mother: Caring Our Way Out of the Population Dilemma,” by Christophe Fauchere and Joyce Johnson, Tiroir A Films, 2011,
motherthefilm.com
.

38. See for example Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, August 2008); Edward Goldsmith et al., The Future of Progress: Reflections on Environment and Development (Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 1995).

39. Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991); John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (New York: Penguin Group, 2006).

40. United Nations Human Development Report 2010, The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, November, 2010).

41. See the report by Reset for the House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Committee on Peak Oil, The Impact of Peak Oil on Economic Development (Edinburgh: Reset, 2008).

42. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).

43. Amartya Sen, “Development as Capability Expansion,” in Readings in Human Development, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and A. K. Shiva Kumar, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 3–16.

44. See page 22, “Quantitative Relationships Among Energy Use, GDP, and Other Socio-nomic Indicators,” in James H. Brown et al., “Energetic Limits to Economic Growth,” Bioscience 61, no.1 (January 2011), pp. 19–26.

45. Wikipedia, “Overdevelopment,”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdevelopment
.

46. Manfred A. Max-Neef, Antonio Elizalde, and Martin Hopenhayn, “Development and Human Needs,” chapter in Human Scale Development: Conception, Application, and Further Reflections (New York: Apex, 1991), p. 18.

47. Manfred Max-Neef, Antonio Elizalde, and Martin Hopenhayn, (in Spanish) “Desar-rollo a Escala Humana — Una Opción Para el Futuro,” Development Dialogue, número especial (CEPAUR y Fundación Dag Hammarskjold, 1986), p. 12; Manfred Max-Neef et al., “Human Scale Development: An Option for the Future,” Development Dialogue 1 (1989), pp. 7–80.

48. Wikipedia, “International Inequality,”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_inequality
.

49. Jim, “Desdemona at 2: The Environmentalist’s Paradox,” Desdemona’s Despair, posted December 2, 2010.

50. James B. Davies et al., The World Distribution of Household Wealth, United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (New York: UNU-WIDER, February 2008).

51.N aomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

52. (January/February 2011); Robert B. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

Chapter 6

1. Michael Cooper and Mary Williams Walsh, “Mounting Debts by States Stoke Fears of Crisis,” The New York Times, December 4, 2010.

2. The connection between falling standards of living and political unrest has long been a subject of study. See J. C. Davies, “The J Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfactions As a Cause of Some Great Revolutions and a Contained Rebellion,” in The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, H. D. Graham and T. R. Gurr, eds. (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 690–730.

3. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “Monitoring America,” The Washington Post, December 20, 2010.

4. Rick Munroe, “Review: Putting the Bundeswehr Report in Context,” Energy Bulletin, posted September 28, 2010.

5. Ferguson is discussing government debt only, but I have reworded his points somewhat and extrapolated them to refer to a more general debt crisis. Niall Ferguson, “Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspectives on Current Predicaments,” presentation posted online, Business Insider, May 19, 2010,
businessinsider.com/niall-ferguson-sovereign-debt-2010-5#-26
.

6. Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon, eds., Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, forthcoming), p. 76.

7. Ellen Brown, “QE2: It’s the Federal Debt, Stupid!” Truthout, posted November 12, 2010.

8. Ellen Brown, “Austerity Fails in Euroland: Time for Some ‘Deficit Easing’,” Truthout, posted December 24, 2010.

9. A similar strategy is being pursued by JAK bank in Sweden, which issues no-interest loans to customers.

10. Ellen Brown, “Cash-Starved States Need to Play the Banking Game: North Dakota Shows How,” The Web of Debt, posted March 2, 2009.

11. The government could loan money into existence interest-free for projects deemed to be in the public interest that would generate enough revenue to repay the debt. It could buy municipal bonds at zero percent interest, for example, to help the current municipal fiscal crunch. Interest is the culprit more than the debt-based creation of money.

12. See, for example, Stephen Zarlenga’s The Lost Science of Money (New York: American Monetary Institute, 2002) and Margrit and Declan Kennedy’s Interest and Inflation Free Money (Lansing MI: Seva International, 1995).

13. Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics (Washington DC: Island Press, 2004), p. 258.

14. Unfortunately, however, banks loan when the economy is booming and collect payments when it is shrinking, the opposite of what is required.

15. Transaction Net, “LETS — Local Exchange Trading Systems,”
transaction.net/money/lets/
.

16. Dierdre Kent, Healthy Money, Healthy Planet (Nelson, NZ: Craig Potton, 2005); Richard Douthwaite, The Ecology of Money (Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 2000); Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World (London: Random House, 2001); and Thomas Greco, Jr., Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2001).

17. BerkShares, Inc., “Local Currency for the Berkshire Region,”
berkshares.org
.

18. Other monetary theorists, including Bernard Lietaer, Richard Douthwaite, and Ellen Brown have arrived at essentially the same conclusion. See Ellen Brown, “Vision: Time for New Theory of Money,” YES! Magazine, posted December 21, 2010; Lietaer, The Future of Money; Richard Douthwaite, “The Supply of Money in an Energy-Scarce World,” in Fleeing Vesuvius, pp. 58–83.

19. Bernard Lietaer, “Why This Crisis? And What to Do About It?” lecture, TEDx Berlin, November 15, 2010, online at
lietaer.com/
; Bernard Lietaer, Robert Ulanowicz, and Sally Goerner, “Managing the Banking Crisis,”
Lietaer.com
, posted February 4, 2010.

20. Greco, The End of Money, pp. 171–189.

21. Greco, The End of Money.

22. Upon reading this paragraph, ecological economist Josh Farley commented: “My personal view is that the state should be solely responsible for creating money. It would be a receipt/IOU for services rendered, repayable in the form of taxes. Taxes would be used to regulate the money supply rather than a means of financing government expenditure. This would allow money creation by federal, state and local governments. To get around the Constitution, state and local governments would issue interest free bonds accepted for taxes rather than legal tender. I’ve participated in enough complementary currencies and credit clearing systems to recognize that their reality often falls short of their theoretical beauty.”

23. “Bartering, an age-old mode of commerce, has taken hold with a vengeance this year as the recession draws a broader spectrum of people trading everything from designer clothes to guitar lessons. The phenomenon is rooted partly in environmental concerns about crowded landfills and the energy consumed in manufacturing as well as a mainstream embrace of recycling. Social media like Facebook lend momentum to the swaps as people join forces to trade, share or negotiate better deals from retailers.” Mireya Navarro, “In a Tight Holiday Season, Some Turn to Barter,” The New York Times, December 22 2010.

24. Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government,” Global Research.ca, posted April 6, 2009.