27 abr 2009
too little too late
The article "You've Bought Your Last Car" gave me a stomachache... to say the least. Especially the line, "A recession has followed every significant oil price increase," gave me a heart attack, so i decided to try to independently verify this:
1865-Present GDP & Oil Prices VS. Time
(Data from Measuring Worth, Oil/Barrel Prices, Oil Prices)
Now, i am not an economist, so i'm not exactly sure how precise Angelantoni's numbers are. This First graph is from 1865-present, and before 1950 his correlation is not true. However;
1950-Present GDP & Oil Prices VS. Time
in this graph we can see that a recession has followed every significant oil price increase quite clearly. Red highlights are increases in oil prices, blue highlights are recessions (or at least when the economy was not growing... need to look up more on this!) (forgive my poor highlighting job, first time doing that in excel). Now, if economists knew that (and they should have, given that i spent an hour with the data and proved it, at least to myself), why wasn't anyone talking about it last year? Especially since easy production of oil is starting to end, and even if it weren't we should be reducing our use of it anyway.
This just makes me wonder about a lot of other things. Did the economy track to any one commodity pre-WW2? And if so, what commodity? Also, i gotta say that i've seen the GDP graph a billionty times, and never thought about it so much. The Great Depression is barely a ripple, right after it was back on the 1.8% growth track; and wow was the war was good for the economy. Also, i need to learn more about using excel, i think to really get good numbers out of this i need to do more than just eyeball where the slopes are 'high' or 'low.'
Yeah, if i wasn't already all about building a post-capitalist utopia, this would put me over the edge. As i said to mom yesterday, economics has had the wrong paradigm for too long: economics is a subset of the environment, not vice versa. i think this graph, showing how strongly easy energy input into the system influences earnings, really shows that.
And back to the original post that started this day-long rant out... what happens if we really are too poor to replace the oil-based infrastructure? (i'm getting worried that we can't mitigate fast enough... please, please, please let things like Better Place and Transition Cities take off).
We've always known we live in a unique era. I bet/hope for/try for the Great Turning, but today i'm afraid it won't happen fast enough.
i'm seriously going to faint. (and why can't i just read novels or watch TV like any normal person with too much time on their hands?)
"I just don't need none of that Mad Max Bullshit"--modest mouse-- ¶ 13:56
The article "You've Bought Your Last Car" gave me a stomachache... to say the least. Especially the line, "A recession has followed every significant oil price increase," gave me a heart attack, so i decided to try to independently verify this:
1865-Present GDP & Oil Prices VS. Time
(Data from Measuring Worth, Oil/Barrel Prices, Oil Prices)
Now, i am not an economist, so i'm not exactly sure how precise Angelantoni's numbers are. This First graph is from 1865-present, and before 1950 his correlation is not true. However;
1950-Present GDP & Oil Prices VS. Time
in this graph we can see that a recession has followed every significant oil price increase quite clearly. Red highlights are increases in oil prices, blue highlights are recessions (or at least when the economy was not growing... need to look up more on this!) (forgive my poor highlighting job, first time doing that in excel). Now, if economists knew that (and they should have, given that i spent an hour with the data and proved it, at least to myself), why wasn't anyone talking about it last year? Especially since easy production of oil is starting to end, and even if it weren't we should be reducing our use of it anyway.
This just makes me wonder about a lot of other things. Did the economy track to any one commodity pre-WW2? And if so, what commodity? Also, i gotta say that i've seen the GDP graph a billionty times, and never thought about it so much. The Great Depression is barely a ripple, right after it was back on the 1.8% growth track; and wow was the war was good for the economy. Also, i need to learn more about using excel, i think to really get good numbers out of this i need to do more than just eyeball where the slopes are 'high' or 'low.'
Yeah, if i wasn't already all about building a post-capitalist utopia, this would put me over the edge. As i said to mom yesterday, economics has had the wrong paradigm for too long: economics is a subset of the environment, not vice versa. i think this graph, showing how strongly easy energy input into the system influences earnings, really shows that.
And back to the original post that started this day-long rant out... what happens if we really are too poor to replace the oil-based infrastructure? (i'm getting worried that we can't mitigate fast enough... please, please, please let things like Better Place and Transition Cities take off).
We've always known we live in a unique era. I bet/hope for/try for the Great Turning, but today i'm afraid it won't happen fast enough.
i'm seriously going to faint. (and why can't i just read novels or watch TV like any normal person with too much time on their hands?)
"I just don't need none of that Mad Max Bullshit"--modest mouse-- ¶ 13:56
