Addiction is hell

Thomas L. Friedman and I don’t always see eye to eye, but this recent editorial of his is right on:

When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.

He goes on to quote economist Paul Romer: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” which pretty much sums up the reason we did a “historical pre-enactment” of the 2008 oil crisis in World Without Oil. Through the artifice of a game, we got to have the learning opportunity a crisis presents, without the crisis itself.

President Bush understands our oil addiction – he used the term himself, in a State of the Nation speech. As Friedman elucidates, what Bush doesn’t understand is how to cure addiction. After 9/11, he told the nation to go shopping while he worked up a pretense to invade a country with huge oil reserves. This is some kind of twisted War On Drugs approach to oil addiction: you occupy your dealer. The only thing is, the War On Drugs isn’t working either.

So now we have: This is your economy. This is your economy without cheap oil. Any questions? Artwork by ~~zorro~~ via Flickr.