Peverse??

These are strange times. In fifteen months we have gone from a world where we were "living in a new paradigm" where "Boom and Bust have been abolished" to a world where the wheels are falling off.

This, supposedly, is all down to confidence. Commentators who warned that there would be a price to pay when people realised what was happening were called "naysayers" and derided as being old fashioned and out of touch. All of these people, especially Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph and Jeff Randall, also of the Telegraph.

I don't think these commentators are laughing, they realise that times are much too serious for that, but they would be right to say "I told you so".

From my perspective, we live in an age where the amount of information and the amount of knowledge available to the average person is huge compared with previous generations. How many of the people that became so poor that they ended up in Hooverville knew of what was happening around the world. There was radio, television is was in it's infancy, and many were too poor to even own a radio.

That Depression was, perhaps, the first indication that there were too many people to easily support on the planet. However, since that we have increased the global population from just over two billion to over six billion, with the forecasters taking the population over nine billion by 2050. IF the population gets that high, we will either have to live life in a totally different way, as if we don't, we will end up living in a world where all the natural resources will either have been used or are difficult to obtain.

In the meantime we have scientists telling us a pandemic of influenza or some other disease is about 20 years overdue, a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu would kill, if the spread and lethality was similar, in excess of ninety million. Of course, if H5N1 mutated, at current lethality rates, that would be more like one to two billion and finally, if the rumoured smallpox samples escaped, then with the lack of immunity now, it could hit fify percent of the worlds population, so a round three billion.

That would wreck the capitalist paradigm that the world currently operates on. Growth would be unheard of for decades, if not centuries. But perhaps it would move us back to being more responsible with our environment.

So here I am, sitting in my centrally heated house, typing on a computer, connected by ADSL broadband to the wonderful invention the "Web", where I can read information on UK Politics from Guido or Ian Dale, get alternative views on the news from Drudge or Al-Jeezera, or look at what Kondretieff waves are in economics and their consequences

Enjoy it while you can afford it, it may get much more expensive as we move forward