The Downfall of the Western World...

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There is not enough evidence for your claims. The green industry being the main contribution is not valid. You gave mainly Los Angeles as an example. Regional areas in Oregon and Washington state, environmental sustainability has let them survive the worst of the recession.

We can have a sustainable, stable economy while striving for environmental sustainability. And wait, don't people need to be hired to build, maintain, and drive these trains? Doesn't green technology need to be manufactured? So how does it not produce jobs?

...and the rise of...?


I don't think it would be that soon.

Great, great picture of what appears to be Germanic barbarians attempting to hold the line against even more savage Huns.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The Oglala Aquifer. It is a huge aquifer that supplies america's bread belt in Kansas, Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma.

If it were to go drie it would be like the Persian Gulf Oll going dry- not just a regional situation.

I am aware it is a dramatic title. It was thread bait.

I think another reason why the Western World is having so many issues is that we are too dependent on the government intervention. Whether that is mainly due to the governments becoming more like nanny states, the growth of government & administration, or due to the government intervening in an economy based on laissez faire principles (which has a core message of leaving the economy alone to correct itself) is debatable.

Oregon is not a good example of weathering the economic storm, we had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country entering the recession and for most of the last 2 years, and now we're moving towards the middle but we're no shining gem at number 36 in the country for highest employment rate. Washington isn't either at 33.

I gave LA as an example of what so many of these stupid cities do. LA is host to uber-large metro, one of the largest economic cities in the world and one of the two largest ports to the pacific. The article outlined the focus of the mayor as being on highspeed rail, downtown redevelopment and high-density apartment living following a "smart-growth" driven agenda. He's also bringing a football team to town, enlargening LA Live, and making downtown livable again. He is building the liberal utopia under the guise of Jobs. Every policy liberals advocate for, they find a way to tie "It'll create 1 Million New Jobs" to it. How about focusing that 100 billion dollar investment soley on manufacturing and infrastructure? (no... high-speed rail or public transportation is not infrastructure spending, it is leeching public funds for the benefit of those it employes.)

Those trains are advertised as costing 40 billion in LA and many times that for the line that will run from LA to Sacramento, though the ridership they use to justify it and it's daily running costs are imaginary, and the costs are off by a few 100 million dollars. They are eager to build it anyways so they have already begin building the LA-Sacramento line bit by bit through the interior of california so that it becomes a project that politicians in the future will have to finish to justify the billions of dollars wasted on such a stupid project. Those trains need maintenance and service-people but that train will cost hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, will not have the ridership that these policy makers imagine, so it will run at much lower speeds to save on electricity, and every passenger mile traveled on it by a customer will cost the taxpayer $200.00+ in taxpayer dollars to subsidize this stupid idea.

The whole idea behind the green economy was that policy makers would get tough on society and industry with policies to lessen our carbon footprint and increase sustainability and the green economy would be born out of the need of both society(consumers) and industry to fall in line with regulations or pay a fine. It is not market driven, which is fine, but let's at least be honest... there is no market for green tech without government policy and subsidies. So no... it does not need to be produced or manufactured, economically speaking. When one argues for it being manufactured, one needs to be honest it is on moral grounds, because economically, to green America is also to make us a thirdworld and bankrupt country.

Do you know what happened to ancient civilizations when they were hit with any sort of devastating catastrophe? They very likely would just disappear. If you want to include international aid with the "nanny state," then if the volcanic eruption of Santarini had overwhelmed the Minoan civilization of Crete and Thera would have been given aid and comfort from nations around the world, and then hopefully would have gotten them back on their feet. But in reality, three thousand years ago, the Minoans were so devastated that the remnants of their nation sought refuge in Egypt, and disappeared from the historic record. Most people lived short, poverty stricken lives before there was any sort of government safety net, even very late in the western world. Still pretty common in the third world where there is not government aid for citizens.
Considering that so many people in the past had suffered and died horribly without government intervention, I'd say that the so called nanny state is looking pretty good.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

America is in debt up to it's eyeballs, both the government and the people. It's a house of cards waiting to fall. Corporations buy other corporations to make it look like they are making more money. It's the same amount of goods being produced overall, just under a different company name. Smoke and mirrors. And that's not even considering peak oil. Greed and mismanagement.

Corporate Greed (bad as it is) is nothing compared to Government Greed and Mismanagement.

The government has planes and tanks. Corporations do not.

ruveyn

I'm not sure about your premise, that "quality of life" is in decline, at present. I kind of suspect that it is, but first I'm uncertain even how to define the phrase, and second I don't know what indicators you'd point to as being the main drivers of it. Infant mortality? Concentration of wealth? Average levels of education? Some sort of self-report via polling on, well, just about anything from levels of satisfaction with life to sense of the future? Some mixture of the above?

Oh, and do you think it is possible to even measure objectively? I mean, my definition of a high "quality of life" might consist of nothing more than living in a studio apartment with a high-speed internet connection, and living off of pizza, black coffee, Hostess cup cakes and sour cream and onion potato chips. (It doesn't, but I can certainly imagine worse fates.) Somebody else, say a monk or nun following the Rule of St. Benedict surrenders all personal possessions and virtually all personal freedom and submits to a lifeftime of strict observance of a code of behavior that a lot of folks would find close to hell on earth. Third, the spoiled brat daughter of some overpaid executive might insist that if she couldn't spend winters in Palm Beach (or Vail), summers on Martha's Vineyard, and use daddy's charge card whenever and wherever she felt like it, why there'd just be no point in continuing.

Third -- at least in the United States -- it is quite reasonable to express skepticism regarding how raw economic data is collected, about how this data is used to calculate everything from inflation, to unemployment to GDP and just how wide of the mark these figures are. To pick an easy example, social security recipients are entitled to an increase in benefits (Cost of Living Allowance, or COLA) based in large part upon whatever the government says the current rate of inflation is. The higher the inflation rate, the larger the COLA increase for each beneficiary. For a government running a huge deficit, might this not give the government that cuts the checks AND calculates the inflation rate an incentive lurking in there somewhere to show one figure rather than another? Nah, course not. And that's just one eyebrow raiser. An expert on this kind of stuff is the guy behind the http://www.shadowstats.com/ site. Unfortunately, most of it is behind a pay wall, but if you poke around you can find a fair amount that is free. And even if you disagree with his analysis overall, I don't see how what he has to say won't make you a bit more skeptical.

So, I guess before I plunge headfirst yet again into a post that nobody'll read (hell, it keeps me occupied anyways ), I'd need to know:

• What is "quality of life?"
• Is it capable of objective measure, or is it subjective depending upon one's perspective?
• Assuming objectivity is possible, what factors matter, and what don't?
• Assuming we can point to this or that as an objective standard, what can we consider accurate and what do we take with a grain of salt?
• A decline or rise in quality of life presupposes some sort of baseline that we're measuring against (again, assuming objectivity, and all the preceding blah,blah, blah). What to use for this? And, how comparable is the Year X baseline to Year Y (2000, 2011, 2020, whatever?)

Maybe my questions are an attempt to "nail jello to the wall" (as I think some congressman once said about trying to get a straight-forward answer from an economist) but if I'm thinking C-A-T and someone else is thinking the same concept is spelled D-O-G
all anyone is gonna do is talk past each other. Oh, wait. This is the internet. Nevermind.

Nonsense. Who do you think makes those planes and tanks? Who supplies the fuel? Over half of our military is now privatized.

So how might you explain this then?

Regardless of who manufactures the hardware, it is the government that deploys and commands it.

Manufacturing Firms do not have private armies. It is against the law.

ruveyn

there is as many mercenaries in afghanistan as there is actual troops, to say militray is only that of government is a bit naive.

Here's a reasonable standard for measuring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s ... y_of_needs
I think Quality of Life is totally subjective depending on circumstances and expectations. Circumstances are changing in the western world that will make old expectations unreasonable. Many people used to work for the same company for 30 years, then retire. Now many people may never retire. Housing used to be a good investment, now it's bankrupting many. I've never missed a meal, but if there is a change in government I could see it happening.

Hired by whom? The government, of course.

ruveyn