Conceptually Grasping an Inflection Point

Now that everyone knows there is a Recession on, of course the next step will be for the masses to gradually acknowledge that there is actually a Depression going on. It will probably take only a few more false dawns and startling crashes to get to that point. A greater conceptual challenge will come when people struggle to realise the economic landscape has changed permanently - that the era of ever-increasing prosperity is over for good.

The economic boom of the last fifty years is an abberation in human history - though everyone now living sees it as normal. How long will it take to acknowledge that growth isn't coming back? And that any economic climate that doesn't involve serious decline is the new prosperity?

Truth is always the first casuality, and it should be expected that governments and financial institutions (or is that redundant now?) will lie with statistics. The mass media who are always so eager to sell things will be happy to go along with the lie. The people will just have to rely on their own power of perception to see what is really happening.

We suspect that society will divide roughly into two camps: those who 'get it' and adopt dramatically more frugal lifestyles; and those who persist in an increasingly delusionary attitude of affluence. Given that the latter attitude will become an ever shorter and quicker road to ruin, it won't be too long before the first group becomes ascendant.