La Dolce Vita kicks us hard between the legs

In an essay in HBR that I can only assume will quickly get picked up by every single media outlet -- or shut down by The Man -- Umair Haque ponders the next bubble.

Which is everything.

 How's your house price doing? Where would your 401K be, if central banks withdrew life support for banks? How steep is a college education this year (hint: on average, 10-15% more than last year)? How are weekly grocery and gas prices doing? Where are commodity prices — not to mention gold — headed? Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble: these days, it seems, everywhere you look, there's a bubble inflating — or popping.

Examined closely, relative to GDP, living standards already did collapse: examined closely, measures of gross industrial output decoupled from still deeply flawed but perhaps slightly more meaningful measures of human welfare, like the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare andGenuine Progress Indicator, which have at best sharply lagged, or at worst flatlined, for decades.

The plain truth might be that we're living beyond our means because our way of life atrophied our means. And it may be that way we live, work, and play requires deep transformation — if we're to upgrade our means to live, work, and play better tomorrow.