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The modern economy experiences two types of cyclical debt cycles: the short-term business cycle that produces the familiar oscillation between expansion and recession, bull and bear; and the long-term debt cycle that we are experiencing now. During the 75-year period of these cycles, the debt-to-income profile of the entire economy gradually builds up a stock of household, corporate, and government debt that income is insufficient to service. The credit reset from indebtedness to balance is called a deleveraging.
The present American deleveraging started in 2007–2008, as rolling mortgage defaults undermined a system of extraordinary household and financial-sector leverage, triggering a shift in debt from the financial sector to a debt-burdened federal sector, through fiscal and...
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For most of the two hundred thousand years or so of human existence, we used but a small fraction of the earth’s freshwater resources. It has been only a few thousand years since humans first learned to exert any control over water by channeling it for irrigation and supply for cities. In a geological heartbeat, however, we have reached the point where we now use half of the world’s freshwater for our own consumption, leaving minimal amounts for ecosystem functioning. Agriculture uses the most water—about 70 percent globally—with population growth, shifts to higher meat consumption, and the use of grain in biofuels driving increased demand.1 It is fairly common in some areas to use 70 percent of annual flows and, in a few cases, to use as much as 120 percent or more by...
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Meet the Feature Authors
Professor of biological oceanography and vice dean of the science faculty at the University of Copenhagen; chair of the Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy.
UN special rapporteur on the right to food; professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium
Research associate at the Earth and Life Institute of the University of Louvain in Belgium; Adviser to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food
Author of The Future of Money; Coauthor of Creating Wealth and New Currencies for a New World
Director of planning and community development for the City of Montpelier, Vermont; Founder and board cochair of Global Community Initiatives
Professor of architectural history at the École Spéciale de l’Architecture in Paris; Program Director of BaSiC Initiative
Deputy director of the National Security Studies Program and director of the Smart Strategy Initiative at New America Foundation
Associate professor of environmental policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University
More Features
Policymakers and resource managers often frame ecosystem services management challenges as a matter of protecting natural areas outside of cities. Assuring good stewardship of nature’s services in...
The temperate rainforests that hug the coasts of Oregon and Washington are some of the most productive forests in the world.1 Temperate rainforests sequester more carbon per hectare than any other...
Ecosystem services are conventionally defined as the human benefits provided by natural ecosystems and include the capacity of those systems to reproduce or replenish themselves. It is useful,...
In Focus
The pathway for conversion to a renewable energy future has been pioneered by Denmark and a few other visionary nations. But...
If the United States intends to meet the Department of Energy’s goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s electricity...
I fully agree with the idea that world population growth can—and should—be reversed through fertility rates that fall below...
The Guttmacher Institute provides estimates, covering various years in the last decade, of the proportions of all...
Madawi al-Hassoun meets me in a hair salon she owns in one of Jeddah’s trendiest malls in the fancy al-Hamra District. It is...
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