Thanks for the kind words. You are obviously a “thinker” and your words sound straight from the heart. I would offer my differing “take” on some of your suggestions for consideration, no offense intended.  Whether slaves, serfs, peasents, or today’s “minimum wage” workers, the economic value of “bodies and brains” is determined by supply and demand. The brain of an author just beginning their first work may have “tremendous potential” for the future, but few, if any, know or even suspect it. That, and five bucks buys me coffee at Starbucks.  Like a geological survey, mere “potential” is worth only a fraction of the value of a proven, pumping well. The brain of prolific authors of “best sellers” can be referred to as a “tremendous asset” because there is tangible evidence of genuine economic value.  I am old enough to remember women whose lives were infinitely improved as “progress” and “relative economic affluence” made available the early washing machines, electric irons, gas stoves, indoor plumbing, electric light, refrigerators and air conditioning. Where would you draw “the line” between needs and wants?  No longer did their hands shrivel from constant immersion in caustic water, get scarred from handling poorly balanced stove-heated cast irons, chopping or splitting wood for the stove. Backs did not ache or become bent carrying water from an outside source.  With indoor plumbing, summertime was no longer a time of disease; people didn’t live half their lives with the pain of rotting teeth, fewer women and infants died in birth and appendicitis is no longer a death sentence in most of America. The family “lived better” before the sun came up and after it went down because one could see better with electric lights that were safer and brighter than candles, kerosene lanterns or gas light.  I don’t think you could sell many women of today to go back to the “good old days” I have described. The Industrial revolution was all about replacing human sweat with animal sweat, steam “energy”, electric “energy”, or “petroleum energy”; the latter three largely being produced by burning wood, coal or oil (or refining same).  Would you people on bicycles or treadmills to generate electricity? People aren’t hamsters, but if that was the sole energy source for TVs, we might have less obesity.  You are 100% right that the ratios of fuel consumed for fuel gained are rapidly dropping and no one can argue with a straight face that man is not eagerly destroying the earth’s rain forests and overfishing it’s oceans. Why? The reason is simple.  There are too many people on this earth for it to support with an “American” quality of life. This has been a truth ignored by those who should know better for far too long. @MaggieMP,  Thanks for the kind words. You are obviously a “thinker” and your words sound straight from the heart. I would offer my differing “take” on some of your suggestions for consideration, no offense intended.  Whether slaves, serfs, peasents, or today’s “minimum wage” workers, the economic value of “bodies and brains” is determined by supply and demand. The brain of an author just beginning their first work may have “tremendous potential” for the future, but few, if any, know or even suspect it. That, and five bucks buys me coffee at Starbucks.  Like a geological survey, mere “potential” is worth only a fraction of the value of a proven, pumping well. The brain of prolific authors of “best sellers” can be referred to as a “tremendous asset” because there is tangible evidence of genuine economic value.  I am old enough to remember women whose lives were infinitely improved as “progress” and “relative economic affluence” made available the early washing machines, electric irons, gas stoves, indoor plumbing, electric light, refrigerators and air conditioning. Where would you draw “the line” between needs and wants?  No longer did their hands shrivel from constant immersion in caustic water, get scarred from handling poorly balanced stove-heated cast irons, chopping or splitting wood for the stove. Backs did not ache or become bent carrying water from an outside source.  With indoor plumbing, summertime was no longer a time of disease; people didn’t live half their lives with the pain of rotting teeth, fewer women and infants died in birth and appendicitis is no longer a death sentence in most of America. The family “lived better” before the sun came up and after it went down because one could see better with electric lights that were safer and brighter than candles, kerosene lanterns or gas light.  I don’t think you could sell many women of today to go back to the “good old days” I have described. The Industrial revolution was all about replacing human sweat with animal sweat, steam “energy”, electric “energy”, or “petroleum energy”; the latter three largely being produced by burning wood, coal or oil (or refining same).  Would you people on bicycles or treadmills to generate electricity? People aren’t hamsters, but if that was the sole energy source for TVs, we might have less obesity.  You are 100% right that the ratios of fuel consumed for fuel gained are rapidly dropping and no one can argue with a straight face that man is not eagerly destroying the earth’s rain forests and overfishing it’s oceans. Why? The reason is simple.  There are too many people on this earth for it to support with an “American” quality of life. This has been a truth ignored by those who should know better for far too long. The “Population Bomb” that concerned ordinary U.S. citizens in the sixties left the public conscience and has since quietly exploded worldwide. Is the ostrich in danger any safer in denial with head in sand?  There are billions in Africa, China, India, South and Central America that aspire to own the cell phones, TVs, homes, cars and food they see on television the world over. Will they accept your suggestion that these things will remain forever beyond their grasp, and that of their children and their children’s children? Good luck with that.  If a majority of human’s “purpose” is to provide “sweat labor” their whole life, how is their existence better or of more significance than that of a horse or an ox? Respect is like a “good reputation. It is something earned again and again, and not something given once and forever. On what possible basis would such “sweat labor” earn the respect you suggest?  Indeed, I would argue that if mankind does not very soon devise and implement efficient and environmentally sustainable sources of economic energy and food production, humanity is destined to turn this big blue marble into a big brown marble. We live in a time that most do not realize is one of the most peaceful in history; and yet there are more than enough crazies “out there” that would happily reduce this planet to radioactive slag within moments of gaining access to the necessary tools of destruction.  The only credible alternative is that the world will prioritize the resources necessary to establish colonies on the moon, Mars, and outward that can ultimately be self-sufficient. So long as humanity’s “eggs” are all in one basket, i.e. on this Earth. all the hopes, dreams, sweat, and sacrifice represented by all of man’s recorded history is in grave peril.  You can create any kind of society you want just by how your tax system penalizes and rewards people. When the U.S. taxes individuals who achieve increasing economic success at a “proportional rate”, at some point the incentive to “produce” disappears. “Success” is thus discouraged.  When illegal immigrants who jump our borders and America’s own” poor, unmotivated, unskilled, and unemployable are rewarded with tax incentives, literally “by the head” to produce ever more of themselves, these become an ever-increasing proportion of our population. History will look back and ask “What were they thinking?”  I believe a choice must be made between quality of life and quantity of life. Only by embracing the promise of technology can man discover the best and brightest path forward. The necessary economic “seeds” must be planted and carefully nurtured to maturity if our existence on this Earth is to become more sustainably productive and the lives of ordinary citizens more “meaningful”.
The cumulative output loss from this British downturn in its first five years exceeds even that experienced during the Depression of the 1930s.