Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Meditations on #sustainability

"A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it."

That's the first sentence of the description of this blog, but that's a long way to say what I'm really writing about. The short way is "a blog about sustainability in metro Detroit." Boiled down to its essentials, collapse of a civilization, whether human or Motie, is just the result of failure to achieve sustainability. Consequently, sustainability on the societal scale would be how to stave off collapse and on the family or neighborhood scale would be how to survive collapse.

So, what is sustainability? One could ask Wikipedia, but like all things at the Internet's free encyclopedia, the answer there has become a lot more complex over the past few years. ( On the other hand, a picture is worth a thousand words. )

While the above diagrams work in terms of describing sustainability, they don't really show the nested relationships of the three spheres. Instead, this does:

That last diagram shows that economy is dependent on society, which is in turn dependent on the environment.  Without an environment, there is no society.  Without a society, there is no economy.  Those relationships put sustainability into perspective.  They also show that the emphasis on economy above all is exactly backwards.  No wonder we're in trouble.

More on this later, maybe. :-)



Above originally posted at Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

Oakland County, MI, forecast: private sector recovery, public sector recession, plus #recall

Just as I started last month on Crazy Eddie's Motie News with a good news post based on a press release that assumed Business as Usual (BAU) will return, so I ended last month with a post based on another optimistic BAU press release, this time from one of my alma maters.

University of Michigan: Oakland economy is in the early stages of sustained recovery

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—After posting modest job losses last calendar year following an abysmal 2009, the Oakland County economy should add nearly 29,000 jobs over the next three years—the best years since 2000, say University of Michigan economists.

That looks really good, doesn't it?

In their annual forecast of the Oakland County economy, George Fulton and Don Grimes of the U-M Institute for Research on Labor, Employment, and the Economy say that Oakland will add nearly 11,000 jobs this year, another 8,000 next year and more than 9,700 in 2013.

This year looks like the best of the three and next year the worst of the three. If you're a politician up for re-election in 2012, that may not be the best news, but at least the projection isn't for job losses that year, either.

Last calendar year, Oakland County lost less than 1,200 jobs after losing nearly 60,000 jobs in 2009, and is currently adding jobs—the majority in sectors most tied to the New Economy.

Now does adding 29,000 jobs in three years look that good? Not when you realize that more than twice as many were lost in one year.

( Even so, the good news continues. )

Update on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly about Metro #Detroit #RealEstate for March 2011

Update to this entry, in which I posted the following from the Detroit Free Press.

Median home sale prices were down 13.3% in metro Detroit to $58,000 last month, compared with $66,900 in March 2010. Prices were down in all counties, but sales prices in the city of Detroit rose by 10%, to a median of $8,505 from $7,725.

Prices are also down, but note the price rise in Detroit proper. That's an early sign of a possible recovery, even if it's starting at a very low level. In a BAU environment, I'd say that the local market is very close to a bottom. The BAU people agree.

Kathy Coon, broker/owner of Real Living Great Lakes in Rochester Hills, said that prices are coming up despite the March readings.

"Once the appraisers see what is going on in the market, the prices will start coming back up," she said. "The good houses right now are selling really quickly, those that are priced right and in good condition. We are seeing the good foreclosures selling really quickly with multiple offers."

Looks like Ms. Coon was right. A few days after I posted that news, the Free Press followed up.

February metro home sales up 1% from January

The metro area gained 1% in February compared with January, but was down 3.7% from February 2010, according to S&P/Case-Shiller home price data released Tuesday. Home prices for the top 20 cities in America were down by 3.3% from a year ago and down by 1.1% compared with January.

Detroit was the only major metropolitan area in the U.S. to show an increase in prices month-over-month according to the Case-Schiller index. Even so, home prices here are only 68% of what they were in 2000. Business as usual? Not quite.

Above originally posted to Crazy Eddie's Motie News.