The five horsemen of our apocalypse

It seems like people are relaxing a bit after our most recent “crises.”

We’ve adjusted to losing a third of our savings. Summer is here.

Trillion-dollar Wall Street bailouts are not in the headlines anymore, nor the continuing foreclosures on innocent homeowners. If we have a job, we’re thankful. The media tells us we’re dealing with health care, global warming, etc. The government hopeful-pump-priming dollars are arriving. Whew!

Ummm … sorry, the clock is still ticking, and ticking faster. The cliff-edge between megarecession and total collapse is looming closer. We’re carefully looking the other way.

We’re trained in school and business in linear-rational engineering thinking. Focus on one problem at a time. Find a solution to it. Don’t look at externalized costs or the connectedness between things, because that’s hard to put numbers on and doesn’t help who is paying for the answer.

That isn’t how things really work. Every real problem has multiple, intertwined causes, and needs multiple, intertwined solutions. Every real solution also solves multiple problems. Real economics has no bottom line. That’s linear thinking, and puts out of our sight all the secondary costs and problems and linkages that always occur.

There are at least five major players in the transition we’re in. They all interact – wildly – and all need to be tracked at the same time:

Daily Astorian