Now that Thomas Friedman is saying:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.” [...]
We can’t do this anymore.

...maybe the country will wake up.  The global economy is on a collision course with the reality that we live on a finite planet.

Economist Herman Daly has long been one of my heroes, as he has been talking about the need for a steady-state economy (neither growing nor shrinking) for decades.  Here is what Daly said recently, in April, 2008:

The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state—a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of better stuff (or at least different stuff). The remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much less a growing one.

Daly's article is long and thought-provoking, well worth reading. Having described a steady-state economy (SSE) as being like a helicopter, hovering, rather than an airplane, moving forward, he was prescient:

....[I]t is one thing to imagine the possibility of a SSE, but something else to chart a transition thereto from a failed growth economy. Can one transform an airplane into a helicopter without first landing, or perhaps crashing? In order even to take such a task seriously one has to realize that the growth economy is heading for a big crash. [Emphasis added]

After describing various changes in the global economic system which might be enacted to achieve a SSE, he says:

While these transitional policies will appear radical to many, it is worth remembering that, in addition to being amenable to gradual application, they are based on the conservative institutions of private property and decentralized market allocation. They simply recognize that private property loses its legitimacy if too unequally distributed, and that markets lose their legitimacy if prices do not tell the whole truth about costs. In addition, the macro-economy becomes an absurdity if its scale is structurally required to grow beyond the biophysical limits of the Earth. And well before that radical physical limit we are encountering the conservative economic limit in which extra costs of growth become greater than the extra benefits.

I urge everyone to read Daly's article, including the advice he offers in his pithy Ten Point Policy Summary.  Thomas Friedman, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, Barack Obama, and all the rest of them should be reading Daly and taking his advice seriously. Friedman is at least hinting that he is aware of the dimensions of the problem and the critical nature of our times. Our past course has been unsustainable, the global economy is crashing, and it's time we get serious about how to transition to a sustainable future.