As bad as the economy is, I feel one can tell the gravity of it by whether people's standard of living will remain the same.  Sitting at the dinner table with my mom and stepdad, we talked about the hospital, and how an uninsured person that can't pay is a secret blessing to the hospital, even while being publicly frowned upon.  And knowing the person is unable to pay, the hospital can then charge whatever they want and so collect a great deal more during their tax write-offs.  

This is an issue that seems very apparent to me:  efficiency.  To say it another way, to do more with what we already have.  Just like the hospital in the example above, it's not that health care is expensive that is the problem, but that the incentives are in the wrong place to make it affordable.  A person hears about how we need to revolutionize the energy system in the US, and it seems like such a giant chore until you discover that 50% of all energy created dissipates on the way to people's homes.  So knowing that, you discover there is such vast potential if we focus our fight in the right way:  why work so hard to convert 10% into renewable energy when you can make such greater gains by cutting the waste in half, quickly, while working in the long term to put in a cleaner energy source.  Similarly, our economy is based on growth, or creating more, which I have had a hard time understanding.  Why must it be this way?  Must we really sell more iPods next year just for the economy to be healthy?

But now I realize that much could be made for the better if, like changing the incentives in energy to focus on using more of the energy before it is wasted, we were to make efficiency of the economy the guiding principle.  In other words, you don't consume more resources, but you do more with them.  And the businesses that learn to do the most with the least is the victor for our money.

It seems like that is what is happening as it is, but it's still discouraging to read about Kinko's, and how they are internally telling their own people to forgo needless copying and printing, while they still desire to make the rest of the world do even more of it.  It seems a little bit schizophrenic.

How does that relate to Bolivia and Morocco?

It's everything to do with Bolivia and Morocco.  It's astonishing how adaptible people are, and that deserves our most optimistic attention.  One of my favorite quotes I've come across, this time in my book on the Arab-Israeli conflict is: "Is this the way the world is?  No, this is just how we've made it."