Right now, things seem pretty gloomy for both the American economy and the world economy. Paul Krugman recently published an article about “the third depression”. He believes that the American economic engine just isn’t turning over and that the world economy has flatlined, despite all the recent Keynesian stimulus by government borrowing and spending and printing of money. Over the past few weeks, the stock market seems to agree with him. Under this view, we’re in for at least a decade of high unemployment, growing poverty and real declines in living standards.

Well, that’s not impossible. Businesses are hoarding cash and avoiding additions to the payroll account. Real estate is still depreciating in value in many places. Banks are not increasing their lending. Consumers are still quite hesitant about spending, given all the continuing unemployment and uncertainty. Oil, food and other commodity prices (like gold) are about the only thing rising; these all put a damper on prospects for growth. Production, employment, financing and consumption all seemed locked in to a lower equilibrium than what we were used to up until recently. Technology and its corresponding effects (e.g. increased productivity, new business formation) should continue to inspire growth, but this is counterbalanced by the uncontrolled costs of health care, the costs of carbon reduction needed to avoid a future global warming calamity, and the high sensitivity of oil and food prices to even the slightest increases in demand.

But when viewing the state of the economy, most of us wear the darkest, grayest sunglasses out there. That’s because we get most of our information about the economy from the press. And the press makes its money by giving us mostly bad news. Good news just doesn’t attract attention. Just as cold weather always comes in with a flourish (thunderstorms, snowstorms, etc.), while warm weather usually sneaks in unnoticed, it is possible that some good things for the economy are now happening that will buy us time and help avoid the worst.

One of those things could be the growing supply and declining cost of natural gas. Even though oil production has stagnated as productive wells in good locations are being exhausted and the newly discovered fields that will replace them require costly and risky extraction methods (e.g., deepwater drilling), natural gas has benefited greatly from new technologies such as deep-shale “fracking”. There is now plenty of economically recoverable gas around the world; even better, a lot of it is in the USA. Natural gas is not carbon free, but it is cleaner-burning per BTU of energy than coal and oil; so it buys some time on the environmental issues (although it does not solve them, as the HBO movie Gasland vehemently asserts). Natural gas cannot immediately replace oil in most applications; initially it would reduce coal use in electric power plants (and oil for home heating). However, if gas stays cheap, technology will find ways for it to be used economically for transportation, i.e. by trucks, busses, trains, ships, and maybe even for the cars we drive.

All of that could help lower (or at least stabilize) energy costs, and thus give the economy some renewed incentive to grow in the next few years. With a few other successful technology ventures and other good breaks on the political and international front (no revolutions, no big wars, etc.), we might have a shot at avoiding the worst. Let’s hope.

Another positive development, this one on the non-technology front, is the rise of women. There is an article in the current Atlantic about “The End of Men”; despite the inflammatory title, it is actually a good and even hopeful review of how women’s talents are now being utilized more fully by the post-industrialized / digitalized societies such as Western Europe, the US and Australia (don’t hold your breath on Latin America, Africa and the Middle East other than Israel; although there are female political leaders now in power in Liberia, Argentina, Bangledesh, Kyrgyzstan and Costa Rica).

Even though I am a man and it is no longer “a man’s world” (remember that song by James Brown?), I am in favor of anything that might help the world economy. Men still seem more attuned to techie stuff (about 80% of engineering school graduates, 75% of computer science grads, and 60% of math grads on the undergrad level; even higher at the PhD level). But women are doing much better in most other areas, and businesses and governments now seem eager to hire and utilize them. Ironically, the business and government organizations currently making these hiring decisions are still mostly male-dominated. The pay-gap remains for now, but once more women are at the helm, you would expect that to fade away. Again, let’s hope.