From the London Financial Times. This is one of those profound perspectives

The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy
By Martin Wolf
Published: December 19 2007 02:00 Last updated: December 19 2007 02:00

excerpts

We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely.

According to Angus Maddison, the economic historian, humanity’s average real income per head has risen 10-fold since 1820.* Increases have also occurred almost everywhere, albeit to hugely divergent extents: US incomes per head have risen 23-fold and those of Africa merely four-fold. Moreover, huge improvements have happened, despite a more than six-fold increase in the world’s population.

A zero-sum economy leads, inevitably, to repression at home and plunder abroad. In traditional agrarian societies the surpluses extracted from the vast majority of peasants supported the relatively luxurious lifestyles of military, bureaucratic and noble elites. The only way to increase the prosperity of an entire people was to steal from another one. Some peoples made almost a business out of such plunder: the Roman republic was one example; the nomads of the Eurasian steppes, who reached their apogee of success under Genghis Khan

This, then, was a world of savage repression and brutal predation.

The age of the plunderer is past. Or is it? The biggest point about debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back the question of limits.

For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart.

for the rest of the article (highly recommended) go to : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6b28b57a-add3-11dc-9386-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

tips to Douglass Ott and to Rich Karlgaard at Forbes.com who refrred to the FT article

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