COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:

Everyone claims to have a fix for our deteriorating economy. My favorite this week was a letter to the editor published in a Florida newspaper.

The writer claimed to have solved the problem with just $40 million. His “brilliant� idea was to give $1 million to 40 million workers older than 50 with the stipulation they quit their jobs, buy a home, pay off their mortgage and buy a new car.

How many people failed to do the math on that one (hint: 40,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 40,000,000,000,000).

Our aversion to mathematical consequences is at the heart of what ails us. The economic meltdown has exposed our lack of comprehension of the exponential properties of finance, banking, trading and economics. Our ignorance manifests in the anger expressed by the public, financial experts, and government officials.

We have been willing to believe the chosen experts, to have faith in our chosen leaders, and to allow hope to blind us to reality checks. We have surrendered critical thinking because of the perception that our lifestyles were getting better.

Policies to re-inflate the economy may improve Gross Domestic Product and stock values, but they will not fix an economic model that requires continuous growth in debt and consumption. The fact that we see rising gross domestic product as a good thing is a case on point. GDP is a measure of consumption, not a measure of health. Hurricanes, disease, earthquakes, car accidents, cancer and even global warming increase GDP. The faster we consume natural resources, the better GDP looks.

We live on a finite planet, one that operates by physical laws like thermodynamics. The planet and its resources sustain us � money is a fiat for real assets. Scientists and resource managers rightly question the limits of essential rare-earth metals, ores, phosphorus, uranium, platinum and fossil fuels to name a few.

We seem to obsess with how much remains in the ground as opposed to the more important issue, the flow or extraction rate of a particular resource. Extraction rates are affected by things like accessibility, resource quality, energy inputs and water availability. Like the campers building a campfire, we gathered the easy dry wood first, venturing further and further into the woods as the easy stuff was consumed. Flow rates are now peaking at the same time that population is exploding.

But Americans don’t accept limits â€� and the people they elect reflect that penchant. UCLA professor Jared Diamond aptly pointed out in “Collapse :How Societies Choose to Fail,â€� that history is replete with societies that collapsed when they reached their ecological limits. So the true fix is to transition to an economic model that recognizes there are limits to everything.

DEBBIE COOK is the former mayor of Huntington Beach.