I had a conversation yesterday with a friend about economic growth. The situation we're in today reminds me of a car engine that is running without oil for quite a while now, faster and faster every year. Experience and physics have shown that at some point it simply stops dead. The illusion of never ending growth is explained quite simple by a smaller model of our world, for example a village on an island with no connection to the surrounding world (same as our world with no connection to the surrounding universe). On the little island might live a hundred people with different abilities that all produce useful things and work to keep the society alive. But there will never be a need of things or services for a 1000 people because it‘s only a tiny island, so there's naturally a limit of useful goods in this society. In our world today we have well exceeded the natural demand of everything. There's much too much of everything, one third of our food is kicked in the bin for example, ironically there're still millions of people starving. But to stick to the growth, we do have one problem in my mind that keeps this motor running without oil till it breaks, although common sense tells us it's dangerous and lets our society develop into a wrong direction for years. It's the doctrine of shareholder value. The influence and size of capital markets in our world today way surpasses markets of "real" values, for example food or car production. The capital markets do not create any great new products, they are just moving billions of dollars around the globe helping only themselves to grow even larger every year. And tragically even when there comes the point when those gamblers have gone too far, like every couple of years, it's the normal people that bail them out so they can go on with this idiotic and harmful game for the rest of us. There are good books and I'm also a proponent of atonement. I think we all shouldn't have bailed out the banks six years ago, we should have let them go bankrupt, that's what they were anyway, it would have done nothing bad to the world at all other then setting the limit our society is willing to except but not go beyond. Iceland did this successfully, banks got state-owned and had to start from scratch. It lets a society retain its dignity and penalises people who failed to give them a chance to change their behaviour in the future. By bailing out the terrible banks in 2008 and afterwards we did the exact opposite. We trusted the bankers and made sure that we and they still believe in the fairytale of endless growth. It's going to be painful next time ...

KIKI