Reading your business section makes me realise how a Copernican must have felt during the latter half of the 16th Century, when the Ptolemaic world system (with Earth stationary at the centre of the universe) still held sway (Japan's Bank Acts to Spur Spending to Revive Economy, 20 March 2001).

Almost 30 years after "The Limits of Growth" by Meadows et al. was published people are still unable to conceive of an economy in which profits, wages, demand, production, efficiency etc. are not continually growing, and which requires the already-rich to become ever wealthier.

The American economic model (taken over from my fellow countrymen - the British) is non-sustainable, as are the pecuniary and materialist values on which it is based.

A new world (economic) system must be based on sustainability, with us in the rich nations learning to appreciate more what we already have and to be satisfied with a fair share of what our finite planet has to offer, instead of recklessly striving for ever more material wealth, which can only lead to disaster.