Interesting look at bubbles and capitalism. The article is ostensibly about the views of Jeremy Grantham (a manager of a global investment firm) and notes his hypothesis that there are 10 bubbles slowly destroying capitalism.
Flash forward: in Grantham’s early 2012 newsletter he saw a bigger train accelerating: When he focused on the “common good, it became quickly apparent that capitalism in general has no sense of ethics or conscience. And probably its greatest weakness is its absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources and the mathematical impossibility of maintaining rapid growth in physical output.”
This we call the Myth of Perpetual Growth, the pseudo-scientific justification for modern capitalism.
Grantham concludes that capitalism’s flaws are so deadly that while it does “a thousand things better than other systems,” it fails in those three crucial areas. And “unfortunately for us all, even a single one of these failings may bring capitalism down and us with it.
Number one on the bubbles list: is “the Health-care Bubble: Forget court, elections — health care will implode.” It’s unsustainable.
Read the article for the others.
Medicynical Note: We’ve long postulated that we have no system of health care in the U.S. (Here and Here) The facts seems to bear this out: 50 million without insurance; New drugs that cost more the average and median income; Hospital bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; Our (the U.S.) Cost/capita for health care twice that of many other industrialized nations.
It’s not rocket science. Our non-system is broke.
Medicynic 