Sublime

Markets are driven by the actions of countless individuals, each reacting to his or her whims, the weather, and the news of the day. Remarkably, just as with army ants, out of all our individual actions emerges a higher order, a set of prices that allows us to buy and sell whatever we may desire.

“toy” models of economies—simple models that are so abstract they bear little resemblance to reality.

“Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

These are all highly contestable statements.

We can ballpark it by taking the per capita energy footprint of Canadians4 and multiplying it by the eight billion people in the world, which gives us about 2.4 × 1021 joules per year, roughly ten times the current global energy consumption. That’s the total amount of energy that would be needed each year for every person on the planet to have