gain
we are painfully transitioning from a high energy gain society to a low energy gain society. let me explain what that means in terms of a video game: warcraft. your settlement starts right next to a gold mine. you assign one peasant to go mine gold. he produces all the gold you need to build other stuff. but eventually the mine collapses. the next mine is kinda far away. so your peasant has to spend time walking to the new mine. the rate at which he produces gold has gone way down. too low to support your growing civilization. so you assign three more peasants to fetch gold. you now have four peasants producing what it used to take one peasant. your gain has gone down by a factor of four. you now have fewer peasants available to build your empire. so it takes longer. your economy slows down. that's pretty much what's happening in the world today. yeah, there's plenty of oil out there. but it costs more and takes longer to get than our economy has traditionally paid. so just like our warcraft economy, our real world economy slows down. deflation will continue until we develop a new high gain source of energy. if there is one. solar cells are on an interesting curve. second generation nuclear looks pretty interesting too. if only we could get over our irrational fear of irradiation.