Now, look at the overshoot graphic. Do you see a trend?

For the rest of 2016, we’ll be “ living on resources borrowed from future generations ,” as the World Wildlife Fund pointed out when we failed last year.

The day marks the juncture when humanity’s demand for ecological resources exceeds what the planet can replenish annually. In 2016, it falls on Monday, which means people have already consumed an entire year’s worth of the world’s resources ― and we still have four months to go until the year’s end.

It’s less than eight months into 2016 and the ominous day is already nearly upon us: Earth Overshoot Day , previously known as Ecological Debt Day, is a reminder of the enormous toll we take on the Earth.

Between 1996 and 2006, overshoot day moved from October 4 to August 24 — 42 days.

Between 2006 and 2016, overshoot day moved from August 24 to August 8 — 16 days.

What does that mean? Long story short, it means we are living in a low-growth world (New York Times, August 8, 2016).

One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth...

Which explains lots of things.

This trend helps explain why incomes have risen so slowly since the turn of the century, especially for those who are not top earners. It is behind the cheap gasoline you put in the car and the ultra-low interest rates you earn on your savings. It is crucial to understanding the rise of Donald J. Trump, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and the rise of populist movements across Europe. This slow growth is not some new phenomenon, but rather the way it has been for 15 years and counting. In the United States, per-person gross domestic product rose by an average of 2.2 percent a year from 1947 through 2000 — but starting in 2001 has averaged only 0.9 percent. The economies of Western Europe and Japan have done worse than that. Over long periods, that shift implies a radically slower improvement in living standards. In the year 2000, per-person G.D.P. — which generally tracks with the average American’s income — was about $45,000. But if growth in the second half of the 20th century had been as weak as it has been since then, that number would have been only about $20,000.



The Congressional Budget Office in 2005 predicted the economy would grow much faster than it actually did, even excluding the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. "No financial crisis scenario" assumes that 2008–2009 G.D.P. growth matched that of the rest of the decade rather than being sharply contractionary.

To make matters worse, fewer and fewer people are seeing the spoils of what growth there is. According to a new analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, 81 percent of the United States population is in an income bracket with flat or declining income over the last decade. That number was 97 percent in Italy, 70 percent in Britain, and 63 percent in France. Like most things in economics, the slowdown boils down to supply and demand: the ability of the global economy to produce goods and services, and the desire of consumers and businesses to buy them. What’s worrisome is that weakness in global supply and demand seems to be pushing each other in a vicious circle. It increasingly looks as if something fundamental is broken in the global growth machine — and that the usual menu of policies, like interest rate cuts and modest fiscal stimulus, aren’t up to the task of fixing it (though some well-devised policies could help).

Neil Irwin of the Times then explores various theories of why global growth has slowed so dramatically in the last few decades. For example, there is Robert Gordon's view that the most transformative technologies are all behind us.

In 2000, Robert J. Gordon, a Northwestern University economist, published a paper titled “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” It argued that the internet would not have the same transformative impact on how much economic output would emerge from an hour of human labor as 20th-century innovations like electricity, air transport and indoor plumbing did. It was a distinctly minority view in that apex of technological optimism. “People said: ‘Productivity growth is exploding, Gordon. You’re wrong; we’re in a new age,’ ” Mr. Gordon said. But as productivity growth slowed several years later, “people started to take my point of view more and more seriously.”

That's a good theory, and I think there's much to support it. What would you rather have, indoor plumbing or a smart phone?

And then there's Larry Summers' secular stagnation view.

Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and a former top official in the Obama and Clinton administrations, watched as growth stayed low and inflation invisible after the 2008 crisis, despite extraordinary stimulus from central banks. Even before the crisis, economic growth had been relatively tepid despite a housing bubble, war spending and low interest rates. In November 2013, he combined those observations into a much-discussed speech at an I.M.F. conference arguing that the global economy had, just maybe, settled into a state of “secular stagnation” in which there was insufficient demand, and resulting slow growth, low inflation and low interest rates. While the theory is anything but settled, the case has become stronger in the last three years. But it may not be as simple as supply versus demand. Perhaps people have dropped out of the labor force because their skills and connections have atrophied. Perhaps the productivity slump is caused in part by businesses not making capital investments because they don’t think there will be demand for their products. Mr. Summers, in an interview, frames it as an inversion of “Say’s Law,” the notion that supply creates its own demand: that economy-wide, people doing the work to create goods and services results in their having the income to then buy those goods and services. In this case, rather, as he has often put it: “Lack of demand creates lack of supply.”

Again, there is a lot of merit in this "insufficient demand" view. Common sense tells us that economies grow from the bottom up, not from the top down. That may sound strange to say because for decades now, during the "trickle-down" era, we've been told that giving rich people more money is good for all of us. This spectacular, self-serving bullshit has benefited moneyed elites all over the world while most everyone else got diddly-squat.

Globalization did cause living standards to rise in the "emerging" economies, but now even that growth spurt has slowed dramatically. In my view, astonishing wealth and income inequality, not just in the U.S., but all over the world, has caused global growth to grind to a virtual halt.

And since we are talking about a global economy here, not a self-governing national economy, we are living in the economic wild, wild west. There can not be any effective political governance of a globalized economy to make sure that income gains are more equally distributed.

In fact, we have seen the opposite—corrupt economic and political elites continue to push self-serving trade deals which create a grossly unfair situation we might call "capitalism without borders". Only so-called "multinational corporations" truly benefit from these deals.

So it looks to me like the growth trend we've seen is the trend we're going to have in the future. This will affect everything, including the pace of environmental degradation (see Earth Overshoot Day above).

Here's how Irwin finishes up.

Economic history is full of unpredictable fits and starts. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, the internet, a defining feature of his presidency, was rarely mentioned, and Japan seemed to be emerging as the pre-eminent economic rival of the United States. In other words, there’s a lot we don’t know about the economic future. What we do know is that if something doesn’t change from the recent trend, the 21st century will be a gloomy one.

So our choices are "unpredictable fits and starts"—this is akin to waiting for a miracle—and a gloomy outlook if nothing changes.

I'm betting on the gloom.