A few words on Jeff Rubin's "Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller", and where it fits in the grand scheme of things

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been reading through Toronto economist Jeff Rubin's book, "Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller".

Of course, he is preaching to the choir because I've been on a similar wavelength for at least the past few years. The difference is that Jeff Rubin is a noteworthy economist and I'm just someone who writes on a blog that gets about 60 hits a day. It's especially important that he's an economist because the economists that we hear from in the press are normally far too optimistic about keeping the status quo going and growing.

The book, essentially, shines a torch into many different corners of the economy to anticipate the effect of higher oil prices on our way of life. Since oil's most wasteful uses are related to transportation, he expects a relocalization of economies. Along with that comes a smaller material quality of life and a different way of life, but ultimately one that is still satisfying but in different ways.

This is an outlook that I am starting to agree with. It's similar to the type of outlook put forward by James Howard Kunstler -- that energy depletion will force us to relocalize our economies, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Even though we will pay more for the things we need and will have fewer things in general, we will probably value them more, they will be more durable, and we'll feel a deeper connection to those things and the people that produce them.

I didn't find much new here, but I spend a lot of time reading about this topic. With that in mind, it is a very good summary of the issues confronting us and he comes to some very reasonable conclusions.

One of the best characteristics of the book is that it's not particularly alarmist, despite the alarming implications of what he writes. It is laid down quite matter-of-factly. This suggests to me that the idea is entering the mainstream and has left the realm of the conspiracy theory and "doomer". Of course, this may be because I've been tempered by having read far more extreme things before it. Perhaps, to someone uninitiated and invested in the status quo, it will be a stressful read. When I first read James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" a few years ago, for example, I had to put it down frequently because it was giving me chest pains.

Actually, even though it preceded Rubin's book, "The Long Emergency" is a detailed, imaginative exploration of how the world might change and proceed under the scenarios outlined by Rubin. It's a worthwhile follow-up read as the books are closely related. I would recommend Rubin's book as the one to read first -- because it sets the stage more methodically -- but Kunstler's book is equally as important because it paints rich and viable pictures about what it might mean to our existence, and this is an area where Rubin's book only scratches the surface.