Читать книгу Why Things Are Going to Get Worse - And Why We Should Be Glad - Michael Roscoe - Страница 6

Preface

This book came about because I wanted to explain to my children why things were getting tougher, why it was that I’d been made redundant for the third time and was having trouble finding work; why a lot of the things we’d taken for granted in our lives would no longer be affordable.

I’d been thinking for some time about the tendency for technology to kill jobs (including mine, after 30 years in journalism) and where this trend might lead, as populations continue to grow. I’d also been thinking about the conflicting needs of the economy and the environment – how our economic system depends on growth, but that same growth is bad for the earth.

It seemed obvious that, sooner or later, we would have to confront these dilemmas and change the way we lived. But it was equally obvious that we weren’t going to give up our easy lifestyles, not voluntarily anyway. We are only human, after all.

And then one day I was reading a United Nations report about this very subject – an attempt to resolve the growth-versus-environment issue – when I saw a chart that, according to the authors, showed how world growth had begun to ‘decouple’ from natural-resource depletion. The authors thought this a hopeful sign, though they couldn’t explain why it was happening.

The real reason for this apparent decoupling seemed clear to me however, because it indicated something I’d been expecting, and unfortunately it wasn’t the hopeful sign the report’s authors had been looking for. What it was showing, I reckoned, was the failure of the economic system that had made the West wealthy.

In this book I investigate the reasons for this failure and try to explain what’s really gone wrong with the global economy, why we haven’t seen the worst yet, and why, despite all the hardship and tough years to come, we should be glad that the boom times are over and we are forced to confront the real issues – issues that were bound to blow up anyway, one way or another.