The good news and the bad news
Time series showing the decline of growth in advanced (or "fully grown"?) economies since the 1960s suggesting an end to growth within one generation. Growth in developing economies increased enormously between 1990 and 2005 but is now showing the same trend towards zero as advanced economies suggesting the entire world is hitting the same resource limits. This graph took me 10 minutes to plot using publicly available data, but the obvious conclusions for the feasibility of long term growth are beyond the imaginations of almost all political leaders today. Are we in the midst of a societal-scale shared delusion? Which do you want first...? Let's start with the bad news. The bad news is that growth in industrialized, high income economies has been falling for the last six decades and looks like it will reach zero sometime within a generation. (That's assuming it hasn't already reached zero with the positive growth figures that countries report...