Ill Omens

Ill omens for US companies: on the NBC evening news for the last two days - and perhaps the entire week - there has been a special rport each night on
people getting rid of excess possessions and living a much more frugal existence. You know that corporate America must hate to watch their consumers exposed to this heresy.
If the Consumer Era is over, where shall we find growth? India, China, and Indonesia - to name only three - are emerging into the world economy. There is at least a generation that will be devoted to their rapid growth phase. We shall be beleaguered with imports from them, and find it hard to sell anything to them in quantities sufficiently large.
So where's the growth going to come from?
This is where we dropped the ball. Space would have been the untrammeled frontier of possibilities where we did and still yet do have a great advantage. Even here, however, there is at least a generation of work and exploration in the near area between Earth-Moon-Mars before anything could be expected to jump.

China expects a man on the moon in 2020. We have our sights set on 2018. China sees this project as of tremendous importance, we see it, shrug our shoulders, and whet our budget trimming knives.