The year 2009 will witness a tsunami of appeals to economists to fix, as disgraced Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it, the ‘flaw’ in their thinking. Most will get it wrong. The proposals for bailouts, regulations and government spending sprees all share one tragic flaw: they assume no physical or biological limits to human growth. Most economists cling to an 18th century mechanical universe that conjured an ‘invisible hand’ of God, that would allegedly convert private greed into public utopia. Indeed, a few got rich, but the meek inherit an earth featuring child slavery, sweatshops, a billion starving people, toxic garbage heaps, dead rivers, exhausted aquifers, disappearing forests, depleted energy stores, lopped-off mountain tops, acid seas, melting glaciers and an atmosphere heating up like a flambé. Meanwhile, a rigorous subculture of scientists and economists have been working to free economics from its 18th century quagmire by reconciling human enterprise with the laws of physics, biology and ecology. Their time has come. This year, 2009, will signal the birth of a genuinely innovative economics that will eventually displace the patchwork rationalizations for greed. The new ecological accounting is variously called ‘dynamic equilibrium,’ ‘steady-state’ or ‘biophysical’ economics. […]