With the tenth anniversary of Lehman Brothers' collapse around the corner, economists are talking again about a "Goldilocks" economy - just right. Employment statistics appear strong, reported inflation remains in check, and the stock market is near all-time highs.

Yet America is in the grip of despair, with ever clear evidence of systematically widening inequality, entrenched racism, sexism and misogyny, unconscionable gun violence, a student debt crisis, accelerating health epidemics, and weather-induced disasters now the norm. A complex, war- and climate-triggered global refugee crisis has gripped Europe in fear, with no easy answers. In response to these cascading pressures, our politics have gone from uncivil to tribal, and collapse--social, economic, or political--must no longer be viewed as some remote possibility. Indeed, we may even be experiencing the unfolding of an early phase of collapse already.

America's past prosperity was derived from the dynamism of capitalism, but evidence of a dark underbelly reveals the truth about its expansionist and extractive core. Expansion has physical limits, and extraction has social limits. We have reached both and are now in desperate need of a new source of prosperity.