Five Reasons The Economic Recovery Will Not Recover Anytime Soon

Economists are mumbling cautiously about recovery, housing starts a little better, jobless claims falling, humina humina, blah blah...

Here's are the big five reasons:

1. Aggregation. Like love, aggregation is in the air, all around us. Data and product lines are being tightened, combined, shaved down to meet the huge pressures to reach maximum efficiency. Aggregation is an irreversible force, simplifying all economic and production processes. It consolidates data more rapidly and powerfully than we can develop opposing, expansive (creative) processes. If this seems overly abstract, it is. We can best comprehend broad shifts in culture and society by metaphor and abstraction. The data is too vast to provide understanding through charts and graphs, through simple means. Which is why TV pundits and columnists, the chattering class, cannot provide real solutions. Only speculations.
   
2. Reverse Engineering. Simply put, to 'reverse-engineer' is to analyze a system or process to identify its component interrelationships and then recreate it so that the newer version can be marketed quickly to complete with the original product. Like aggregation, reverse engineering legislates against creative expansion in economic terms. What we now need is conceptual innovation to try to get ahead of these two forces.
3. Smart Computers. Both 1. and 2, above, are deeply embedded in the complex algorithms on which the global economy runs. Economies of scale and scope are the gods we bureaucrats worship (we are all bureaucrats at heart, slaves to process and procedure). All three have a consolidating effect on every economic trajectory on the planet where global trade and commerce prevail. To go metaphysical on you again: We Are All One. 
4. Earth's Polar Magnetism (Metaphysics Alert). The earth's energies are reorganizing themselves as we gradually realize the centralizing effects of our broad interconnectedness. It may or may not be too late. As George Carlin once said (I'm paraphrasing), "Save the earth? The earth is doing just fine. When it gets too annoyed with us, it will shake us off like so many annoying insects. It may be that the sole purpose of humankind's existence is....to provide plastic. The earth needed plastic Our work here is done!" 
5. The Writer Is A Wingnut. As though we need more wingnuts (hello, Palin, Beck, Bachman, et al). Truth is, everyone sounds like a wingnut when they put themselves forward as understanding the forces that move us and what we might do to counter the economic collapse. We are merely spitting into the wind.
   

The chattering classes struggle to be smarter than the earth's gravitation and its spiritual pull. It is to laugh, or to cry.