Fortune

“In any market, any disruptions, obviously, create some kind of a zero-sum game,” Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of maritime business administration at Texas A&M University at Galveston, told Fortune. “That is, some actors are losing and the others are gaining the equivalent loss.”

As a petroleum engineer, I am watching two ticking clocks that no amount of diplomatic pauses can reset. The first is a 25-day tank top threatening to freeze Middle Eastern production. The second is a 100-day sludge line that will poison the reserves oil-hungry nations are racing to drain. Beyond these thresholds, the global economy does not just slow down — it hits an engineering dead-end.

“That decline in the share of labor has got to be either falling earnings or falling numbers of people,” Raymond Robertson, a labor economist at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government, told Fortune. “The falling share of income is having to do with the shift towards capital.”