We have been concentrating on energy but there are other things equally problematical: water supply, sewerage, and medication for example. Our growing vulnerability to overuse of antibiotics is a case in point.

If I wanted a word to cover it all, I guess I would go for instability. In the engineering sense of the term, a neutral stability is a system that goes back to a similar but potentially different in detail state. A stable one goes to the same state. We are in neither of those positions, in my view: we live in such an unstable system that huge amounts of effort in needed just to keep things running. Lot at the impact of a tube strike in any major city in the world. Our systems are, in the main, designed to get as near 100% efficiency as possible, not for stability. Which is why a single crash on a motorway has such a disproportionate effect.

So I don't propose this as a solution, but as a step towards a solution. Pay less attention to productivity and efficiency and more on stability.