“We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.”
― Wendell Berry
“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
― Wendell Berry
The stock market, apparently unbeknownst to economics experts and reporters, isn’t the actual use-based economy. It’s the collective betting on the collective amoral allegiances of people to money, based on promises to extract resources from future people and places (debts).
It isn’t the debt that is the problem getting kicked down the road. Before the debt could grow, there was Consumerism/Consumptionism/Colonialism: the concept that the purpose of a (privileged) life is to buy things that are neither necessary nor useful to the place one lives, and to be useless to one’s place in favor of being perpetually and competitively entertained by wasting natural resources.
There are better ways for humans to behave. One is to stop letting credentialed intellectuals make excuses for global stupidity.