What price would you fix an ounce of gold at under your gold standard?Quote:
Originally Posted by Clipper Nation
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What price would you fix an ounce of gold at under your gold standard?Quote:
Originally Posted by Clipper Nation
So you want to spend how much funding this research on some completely unknown technology, that would, if found, still require strip-mining vast tracts of land?Quote:
Originally Posted by mavs>spurs
Why is this better than spending the same dollars on renewable energy that is a lot closer to being competitive with this form of energy already?
You also didn't answer my other question.
You do understand, that even if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this wish list, that we would still be subject to oil supply disruptions from the middle east that would effect our pump prices, yes?
Even if we made all the oil we consumed, that does not go away.
maybe this trend will turn it around:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...nning#r=hpt-fsQuote:
Despite all the attention the trade deficit receives each month, little heed has been paid to the rapid expansion of U.S. exports, which have been growing nearly three times faster than gross domestic product since 2005. As a share of the U.S. economy, exports are at their highest point in 50 years.
Rather than slow down any time soon, our research indicates this export boom is likely to continue. Combined with manufacturing “reshored” from China, the increased exports could create 2.5 million to 5 million U.S. jobs by 2020.
We’re optimistic because the U.S. is steadily becoming one of the lowest-cost countries for manufacturing in the developed world. By around 2015, total U.S. manufacturing costs will be 8 percent lower than in the U.K., 15 percent lower than in Germany and France, and 21 percent lower than Japan’s. At the same time, rapidly rising wages and other costs are eroding China’s once-formidable advantage.
Our new research, part of BCG’s ongoing study of the changing global economics of manufacturing, focuses on U.S. cost-competiveness trends vs. those in Western Europe and Japan. Together, the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan account for around 60 percent of global manufactured exports.
otoh, consider the "peak growth" meme:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/201...growth-theory/Quote:
One of the more persistent economic ideas rattling through the intelligentsia is that the last 250 years of amazing innovation, productivity and growth —from the steam-engine birth of the first industrial revolution in the 1700s to last month’s launch of the iPhone 5 — have come to an end. The nations of the developed world, especially the United States, have seen their best centuries. Growth has peaked. The future is flatlined.
Serious economists are throwing their good names behind this speculative idea, the latest being Robert J. Gordon, at Northwestern University. In a U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Prof. Gordon raises the possibility that the last 250 years “could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history.” The opening words of the paper’s title are designed to provoke: “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?”
http://financialpostopinion.files.wo...pg?w=329&h=386
While Prof. Gordon is talking about the United States, his thesis would apply to the United Kingdom and other developed nations. Prior to 1750, growth rates were non-existent on a per capita basis over hundreds of years. Then, fed by three main waves of innovation — from the steam engine era to the dawn of electricity to the computer revolution — growth in Britain and the U.S. soared. But those spectacular rates of growth — averaging more than 3.5% over much of the last century — actually “peaked” in the middle of the last century, says Prof. Gordon, and have been in decline ever since, with worse to come.
Prof. Gordon’s analysis, about which more later, received world-wide publicity in the Financial Times on Wednesday when economics columnist Martin Wolf endorsed the idea that the era of unlimited growth is over. “Get used to this,” he wrote a little too enthusiastically as he turned the slow growth theory into an Occupy theme. “For almost two centuries, today’s high-income countries enjoyed waves of innovation that made them both far more prosperous than before and farm more powerful than everybody else. This was the world of the America dream and American exceptionalism. Now innovation is slow…. The elites of the high-income countries quite like this new world. The rest of their population like it vastly less.”
Preposterous though that last bit about the elites being slow-growthers, Prof. Gordon may have prompted Mr. Wolfe’s little aside with his experimental calculations that future U.S. growth might average 0.2% in future. This suggests, wrote Prof. Gordon, “that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99% of the income distribution could fall below 0.5% per year for an extended period of time.”
Another economist who has been trumpeting a long-term decline in U.S. growth is John Ross, Visiting Professor at Antai College of Economics and Management, Jiao Tong University, Shanghai. He sees a “long-term deceleration” in U.S. economic performance, a trend he pins in part on the failure of “Reaganite/neo-Liberal policies.”
In Prof. Ross’s view, this entrenched decline in growth rates should be the dominant focus of current economic analysis and forecasting. It is folly, in this context, to constantly view quarterly U.S. growth data as “disappointing” when in fact the much-lamented slow growth of GDP they may be the new normal. “Analysts are surprised by the new data only when they have no internalized or built into their models this long term deceleration of the U.S. economy.”
the Martin Wolf bit in FT cited above: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/78e88...#axzz28XXqYcVS