Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.

Roubini is one of the few trustworthy economists around, having predicted and long warned about the housing and financial collapses. The idiocy of the media in labeling him the doom side of probability (as if there were another side) belies the fact that all he does is look at the numbers with a clear eye.

Roubini’s Tale of Two American Economies details the state of play in our current depressed economy. We’re losing jobs, credit is unavailable, small businesses and householders are being forced to bankruptcy, and this will continue for some time yet.

Meanwhile, Roubini points out what we had already noticed, that the stock market is up and so are bonuses in the financial sector. As he states,

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Personally, I’m tired of this. I’ve been watching public policy and economics for over a year here, and I have the picture down now.

Reading my earlier posts there’s plenty of collateral for saying that politics is broken, because business largely owns it. The media are hacks and even if not are controlled by the same business that owns politics. The economic system fuels with exploited money the myth that its underlying dynamic (free market) both actually exists (wrong), and actually creates good (not demonstrable).

All of this can be improved, and Obama is a great force for good, loosening up this national gridlock. But Obama himself struggles still to get the financial industry to extend credit to the productive economy. And Roubini notes that one-fourth of our economy’s jobs can easily (and thus will) be outsourced in coming years. The jobs are never coming back, says Roubini.

I truly wonder how Americans will take this state of affairs as the near future rapidly unfolds. Anyone working in the old economy will become a kind of serf, in a master and servant relationship to holders of capital. And that capital itself has been created in a deeply flawed model of extraction that has never put a true price on its acquisition.

All of our economy is built on externalizing the destructive costs of resource extraction onto future inhabitants of the planet. Almost none of our current system is sustainable, with the exception of enterprises such as Ray Anderson’s.

So there’s an economy for the rich, and one for the poor. If you’re not in the first, you sure don’t want to be in the second, even in the U.S. As we begin to count the true cost of our economic system, provocative examples of the damage it creates start to arise:

Are we yet able to understand that an entire category of deaths not measured above—the category development economists now refer to as “preventable death, particularly from disease and malnutrition”—may indeed come to represent a greater challenge that the sum of likely wars and civil wars combined?
Wall Street’s excesses caused more deaths among children than the tsunami four years ago

On the basis that the old economy was wrongly constructed to begin with, what’s actually to preserve here? The old jobs are never coming back. Time for new jobs.

Here’s a new job: green chef. In a Fortune Magazine article just today, 6 green cooks are profiled, the first one Brittany Baldwin in Portland, who caters personal meals using ingredients straight from her own local half-acre farm. Locavore economy is the new gourmet. And actually local food for everyone may be one basis of the new economy. See my fuller exposition of this in my other site, the Local Food Grid.

Copenhagen is coming in a couple of weeks. I believe I’m about done with following this old economy. Expect to see more on sustainability from here on.

There’s not much I can personally do to reverse climate change, beyond the activities available to any citizen. But on the slim chance we can survive the global climate crisis that is already on the edge of the tipping point, I’m focusing on building the new economy that will replace the old one.

To me the one person who most symbolizes the new economy is Paul Hawken. If you thought Roubini was scary, try an overview of the world situation from Paul in this 50-minute speech given in Seattle in September. Just remember, he’s only using the same clear eyes that Roubini uses. But Hawken has answers.