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Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer's recent lectures on international standards of living was all to well remembered.

". . . so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts. Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross-country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody's share in this country. know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?

"You come up against a bleak fact, Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we're used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge - not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We've hogged it all. Technology won't come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with Muñequitas.

"It was okay, Travis, when the world couldn't see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communications by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like on a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, God help them. And what is the only thing we can say? 'Sorry. You're a little too late. We used it all up, all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry but that's the way it is.' What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don't dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and the shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well, materially, as we once did. And now, as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else."

John D. MacDonald, The Scarlet Ruse, 1973

These books are great. The stories are great. They are complemented with these little topical notes.