A Systems Perspective 2: Oil, Energy, and Recessions

A recession is defined as “a significant decline in [the] economic activity spread across the country, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP growth, real personal income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” (New Bureau of Economic Research) It’s a little vague, and I remember Bush not wanting to announce an official “recession” back in 2008. Well, it was (is) one, and here’s the related chart:

For some of my background on recession writing, view:

• https://eddiemill.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/economic-recessions/
• https://eddiemill.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/food-and-climate-change/

This will be a post about oil and energy: what I used to write about optimistically (MaPSblog) but now see the extent of our fucked-ness. Read on, dear reader. As promised, a new economics post will be up Friday. This is post 2/3 of “A Systems Perspective”: Environmental Implications of America today.

What’s different?

A Systems Perspective 1: Resources in Country growth

What we make & have and how we get it.

This is one of my academic posts based mainly on class theory of International Economics, History, Geography, and IR, along with my development economics post Agricultural Trade Doesn’t Work for Poor People , and a sociology posting The Next Globalization is Local . Today I explore the hypothesis that we ascended to economic empire by resource-use (and debt- other post & Other Post Nicole Foss ..) reliance in Economic growth, and use that to extrapolate outwards in my blog about a response to a pending resource recession.

The US ascention to greatness

I hope to prove with this post, like all my other posts, that Economy is not separate from the environment, and history has a large impact on the future of the USA. Information about online
masters degrees is available for people who want to further explore global growth and economics issues. Advanced study is often beneficial for moving toward a full understanding of the complexities of our modern economy.

Economic history growth of the Economy:

World Economic Finance and how we ascended 1879-1945: the United States grew absolutely and relatively in relation to other countries at this time, due to capital intensive production (steel), resource intensity (factories for export and trade), and internal composition of our business sectors during this time. Conditions for growth were ripe, and there was a ton of land for taking. We expanded our transportation infrastructure, cultivated a secondary (internal) demand for goods and services, and invested heavily in our non-renewable resource extraction (table 1). In California, as an example, “earthy goods” of timber, gold, coal, oil, fish, agricultural products, natural gas and energy are a big source of productivity, combined account for around 40%-70% of where people were employed in productive California (table 2). There was a 64% resource intensity gain of GDP during this time period that we grew 1879-1941.. Just look at these tables:

Walker, Richard A. 2001

Often, this value depletes the source it’s built on. It’s sort-of a “resource bonanza” capitalism that made private property, surplus, money and investment; in a word <b>growth</b>. Where did this welfare come from? Since the industrial revolution, production systems did change a lot during this time, and regional transportation networks took off like the modern-day internet. But if we’re looking to replicate real growth in other countries (or our own) in the present day and avoid recession, it necessarily involves real. production. on this sort of scale by human means. And it better be sustainable, too.. It’s hard to imagine a future society with no environment left. FYI, there are plenty of precedents for recovery for the US but most often it’s going to war that eventually gives us the boost.

for a recession: see other post