Hungry Gustav - Life Nonpareil

Green shoots all over the place...or are they?

It's hilarious when you read that Bovis Homes report 71% rise in trading yet in the same breath talk about "sales reservations". A quick look at their own website reveals what "sales reservation" really is:

This is where you indicate you are interested in purchasing a property and confirm your intent with the payment of a reservation fee, typically £500. This forms part of the purchase price as long as the sale proceeds.

This is where you see how indubitably desperate homebuilders are! What on earth is going on here? I sincerely hope they don't believe this... Oh wait, it's about psychology stupid! We should all believe we're doing just fine and all these problems will just go away. It's all in your head Gustav, it's all in your head!

Counterintuitive behaviour that isn't so counterintuitive

I've read this J W Forrester's seminal 1970's paper several times now. It was in 1998 when I found it for the first time but it sounded all too vitiating at the time. The economy was just recovering from the wrath of the 1990's recession and I was just about to embark on the biggest mental journey of my life thus far. So I didn't pay much attention, after all the paper was written almost 30 years ago at the time and global warming wasn't making the headlines yet. I've read it several times since and every time the picture becomes bleaker yet more lucid in the wrap of the current circumstances.
What Forrester managed to reveal with the use of a computer simulation is just how perniciously wrong the world order we live in is. Ramifications are hardly comprehensible let alone describable yet his Figures 1-7 show very neatly what follows if the world as a unified entity does not react in one voice. The whole story Forrester is telling wouldn't really make much sense would this paper not be almost 40 years old by now. It is only a computer simulation many would smirk but it is a simulation that predicts pretty accurately what has been happening ever since Forrester decided to show the results to the US government in the 1970. Industrialization, quality of life, depletion of resources, pollution and most importantly the population growth are all there and the predictions are all pretty spot on. What follows in the next few decades is really scary to say the least. It might not be such a good idea to live in an industrialized nation after all. Where has all the knowledge gone, I wonder? Do policymakers know all that and are playing it stupid or are they really just losing the touch with reality? Or as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman would say "We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics".