So oil prices and gas prices are down, although they have not yet made it back to where they were a year ago. Our friends in the Republican Party would have us believe that an entire convention of devout, whatever it is they are, chanting: Drill! Drill! Drill! did the trick. Unfortunately, through some odd coincidence, we still don't have the money to enjoy long fall auto trips because an entirely unrelated recession is throwing many of us out of work.

Life is unfair. Especially to Republicans.

Or maybe something else is happening. Maybe the oil price increases were the start of an inflationary episode. Too much money -  courtesy of Mr. Greenspan - chasing too few goods. Maybe this was just a repeat of that 70's show without the funny hair or the growth in labor incomes.

And maybe a recession is still the only tool that we have to fight this inflation. Throw enough people out of work and eventually wages and prices go down. That is what we did at the end of the 1970's and through a good part of the 1980's. We are doing it again.

In modern economics its is generally unfashionable to talk about production. There seems to be a belief that all we need to worry about is creating sophisticated financial markets and production will take care of itself. In this situation Wonks Anonymous thinks that we may just have to start looking at production.

Every time we are poised to enjoy a run of economic growth that might actually lift the majority of people on this planet out of poverty, we run up against the same resource limitation. Given the way that we have set up our technology, there is simply not enough oil or other convenient fuels to sustain growth.

The major challenge for the near future will be either finding the oil - Wonks Anonymous is skeptical of this one - or fundamentally changing our economy so that we use much less fossil fuel. We did nothing about this in the 1980's. Maybe two warnings is all that we get.

More on this later.