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America 2.0 By Jay Hanson
Posted by nate hagens on October 25, 2009 - 10:30am in The Oil Drum: Campfire
Though it may not be apparent to most, we are in the social crisis of our era. It is becoming increasingly clear we won't be able to service our large and growing debts in relation to the existing infrastructure and geopolitical landscape. How this and the myriad social, environmental and energy related issues get prioritized will require incredibly tough decisions, ones that will only get tougher the longer we delay.
AMERICA 2.0!
By Jay Hanson, 10/6/2009 (minor revisions on 10/14/2009)
This paper is hereby placed in the public domain and may be reprinted without further permission.
Original here
“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
—Benjamin Franklin, 1776
“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
—James Madison, FEDERALIST #57, 1787
The “bad news” is that “peak oil” marks the beginning of the end of capitalism and market politics because many decades of declining “net energy” [1] will result in many decades of declining economic activity. And since capitalism can’t run backwards, a new method of distributing goods and services must be found. The “good news” is that our “market system” is fantastically inefficient! Americans could be wasting something like two billion tonnes of oil equivalent per year!!
In order to avoid anarchy, rebellion, civil war and global nuclear conflict, Americans must force a fundamental change in our political process. We can keep the same political structures and people, but must totally eliminate special interests from our political environment. A careful review of the progressive assault on laissez faire constitutionalism and neoclassical economics, from the 1880s through the 1930s, explains how this can be done legally and without violence. These early progressives showed how we can save our country. All that is lacking now is the political will. I call this adjustment of our political environment “America 2.0.”
To achieve America 2.0, we must first separate and isolate our political system from our economic system so that government can begin to actually address and solve societal problems rather than merely catering to corporate interests. The second step is to retire most working American citizens with an annuity sufficient for health and happiness, as government begins to eliminate the current enormous waste of vital resources by delivering goods and services directly. This would allow most adults to stay at home with their families but still receive the goods and services they need to enjoy life.
PREFACE
“To
the free man, the country is a collection of individuals who compose it ... He
recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the
citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the
consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.”
—Milton Friedman, CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM
“We
may well call it ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ using the word ‘tragedy’ as the
philosopher Whitehead used it: ‘The essence of dramatic tragedy is not
unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of
things.’”
—Garrett Hardin, THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
The criterion of “profit” has shaped our political decisions since the founding of our country, but now that we are facing peak oil, new “scientific systems” criteria must replace “profit” or our civilization will “collapse” [2] like so many others have throughout history.
In order for America to survive this crisis, a moderate, “doable” modification to our political environment is required. This paper does not attempt to describe a complete system to replace state-sponsored capitalism and market politics. My modest goal here is to show a way forward which could avoid the worst.
THE BAD NEWS
(Figure adapted from The Net Hubbert Curve)
Our present “business-as-usual” model, which requires endless economic growth and endless job creation, is no longer physically possible. Here’s why:
1. Business-as-usual
depends upon jobs and markets to distribute goods and services.
2. Economic
growth and increasing job availability require increasing net energy.
3. Net
energy correlates with peak oil and both are expected to decrease for decades. See the “Net Hubbert Curve” in David Murphy’s graph above and read this footnote: [3]
4. Decades
of decreasing net energy will cause job opportunities to decrease for
decades because less and less energy will be available for economic
development.
5. Globally,
millions of new workers enter the job market each year, but job availability is
expected to decline by millions of positions each year. Eventually, the
projected high unemployment among young men will cause catastrophic
political failures similar to those that led to Hitler’s takeover of German
democracy. Therefore, business-as-usual is no longer a viable method of
distributing goods and services and a new method must be found—and soon!
Historians will say that “peak oil” marked the end of the second free trade episode. If we don’t abandon capitalism now, we will be forced into another global war over resources:
“By the fourth quarter of the
nineteenth century, world commodity prices were the central reality in the
lives of millions of Continental peasants; the repercussions of the London money market were daily noted by businessmen all over the world; and governments
discussed plans for the future in light of the situation on the world capital
markets. Only a madman would have doubted that the international economic
system was the axis of the material existence of the race. Because this system
needed peace in order to function, the balance of power was made to serve it.
Take this economic system away and the peace interest would disappear from
politics… By the end of the seventies the free trade episode (1846-79) was at
an end… The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic
liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.”
—Karl Polanyi
THE GOOD NEWS:
THE MARKET IS FANTASTICALLY INEFFICIENT
Yes, that is correct: The “market system” is fantastically inefficient! [4] Our present way of distributing goods and services wastes enormous amounts of natural resources, but gigantic resource savings are possible. As an illustration, let’s make a rough estimate of per capita food energy requirements and current waste:
If we wanted our government to distribute food directly instead of using the market, how much energy would be required to produce and deliver provisions to each and every American?
Adults need about 3,000 nutritional calories of food each day. Let’s allow 30,000 calories to produce and another 3,000 calories to deliver food to every American. That’s a total of 36,000 calories per day.
Just how much energy did the American “market system” actually consume? In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 231,008 calories per day, so 231,008 minus 36,000 equals 195,008 calories wasted each day. This simple calculation suggests that Americans could be wasting something like 2 billion tonnes of oil equivalent per year! [5]That’s FAR more oil wasted than all the oil produced in the Middle East!
If we change a few of our founding beliefs and assumptions—and reorganize politically—more than enough energy remains to mitigate the worst.
FOUNDED ON TRAGIC ASSUMPTIONS
The United States was founded on several assumptions. A key assumption, which led to several others, was that “the sum of individual interests” was equivalent to “the common interest.” In practical terms, this meant:
1. Individuals
know best how to solve their own problems.
2. Government
should promote economic growth to create jobs so that individuals can solve
their own problems.
3. The
best way for government to promote economic growth is to ask business leaders
what can be done to help them make more money. That’s why today, lobbyists are
absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our
unqualified elected officials and their appointed cronies would have absolutely
no idea what to do!
Today, we know that our founders were fundamentally wrong on this point. The lesson of “The Tragedy of the Commons”[6] is that “the sum of individual interests” is NOT “ the common interest.” In his 1968 classic, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Garrett Hardin illustrated why freedom in the commons brings ruin to all:
Visualize a pasture as a system that is open to everyone. The “carrying capacity” [7] of this pasture is ten animals. Ten herdsmen are each grazing one animal to fatten up for market. In other words, the ten animals are now consuming all the grass that the pasture can produce.
Harry (one of the herdsmen) will add one more animal to the pasture if he can make a profit. He subtracts the original cost of the new animal from the expected sales price of the fattened animal and then considers the cost of the food. Adding one more animal will mean less food for each of the present animals, but since Harry only has only 1/10 of the herd, he has to pay only 1/10 of the cost. Harry decides to exploit the commons and the other herdsmen, so he adds an animal and takes a profit.
Shrinking profit margins force the other herdsmen either to go out of business or continue the exploitation by adding more animals. This process of mutual exploitation continues until overgrazing and erosion destroy the pasture system, and all the herdsmen are driven out of business.
Most importantly, Hardin illustrates the critical flaw of freedom in the commons: all participants need to agree to conserve the commons, but any one can force the destruction of the commons. Although Hardin describes exploitation by humans in an unregulated public pasture, his commons and “grass” principle fit our entire society.
Private property is inextricably part of our commons because it is part of our life support and social systems. Owners alter the properties of our life support and social systems when they alter their land to “make a profit”—for example, when they cover land with corn or concrete.
Neighborhoods, cities and states are commons in the sense that no one is denied entry. Anyone may enter and lay claim to the common resources. One can compare profits to Hardin’s “grass” when any number of corporations—from anywhere in the world—drive down profits by competing with local businesses for customers.
One can see wages as Hardin’s “grass” when any number of workers—from anywhere in the world—can enter our community and drive down wages by competing with local workers for jobs. People themselves even become commons when they are exploited (are made the best use of) by other people and corporations. Everywhere one looks, one sees The Tragedy of the Commons. There is no technical solution to the problem of the commons, but governments can act to limit access to the commons, at which time they are no longer commons.
In the private-money based political system we have in America, everything (including people) becomes the commons because money is political power, and all political decisions are reduced to economic ones. In other words, we effectively have no political system, only an economic system—everything is for sale. Thus, America is presently one big commons that will be exploited until it is destroyed.
AMERICA 2.0
“I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations which dare already to challenge our government
in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1816
“Thomas
Jefferson, along with James Madison worked assiduously to have an 11th
Amendment included into our nation’s original Bill of Rights. This proposed
Amendment would have prohibited ‘monopolies in commerce.’ The amendment would
have made it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, or to give
money to politicians, or to otherwise try to influence elections. Corporations
would be chartered by the states for the primary purpose of ‘serving the public
good.’ Corporations would possess the legal status not of natural persons but
rather of ‘artificial persons.’ This means that they would have only those
legal attributes which the state saw fit to grant to them. They would NOT; and
indeed could NOT possess the same bundle of rights which actual flesh and blood
persons enjoy. Under this proposed amendment neither the 14th Amendment of the
US Constitution, nor any provision of that document would protect the
artificial entities known of as corporations.”
—Dr. Michael P. Byron [8]
In order to prevent collapse on the downside of the net energy curve, Americans must force corporate special interests completely out of our political environment. A careful review of the progressive assault on laissez faire constitutionalism and neoclassical economics, from the 1880s through the 1930s, explains how this can be done legally and without violence. [9] These early progressives showed how we can save our country. All that is lacking now is the political will. I call this adjustment of our political environment “America 2.0.”
The modification that I am proposing could reduce natural resource consumption by something like 90% and greatly reduce, or possibly eliminate, civil violence caused by the inevitable post-peak-oil-economic collapse.
Our present method of distributing goods and services works something like this:
• Our government loans money to banks, so bankers can operate
businesses (which require buildings, computers, furniture, lights, air
conditioning, employees, commuting, etc.)
• The bankers then lend money to other businesses, like
restaurants, real estate developers, etc. (which also require buildings,
computers, commuters, advertising, accountants, etc.)
• So the employees of these restaurants, real estate developers,
etc. can buy a car and drive to the store (with even more buildings, computers,
commuters, etc.)
• Just to buy a loaf of bread!
The “market system” has to be the most inefficient organization possible!
Why not simply have government pay someone to pick up that loaf of bread at the bakery and deliver it to the consumer? This is a form of distribution that would eliminate the banks, most of the other businesses, and all the stores. Most Americans would no longer need a car to commute to work or run to the store! However, some private businesses that provide critical services would still be operated but at our government’s direction.
We could use the same efficient method of distribution for everything that Americans really “need.” Shoppers would order provisions online, in the same way that Amazon or Netflix works now, and then their orders would be delivered the next day. And a medical care caravan could regularly drive through neighborhoods, filling teeth, giving checkups, and so on.
But first we must separate and isolate our political system from our economic system so that government can begin to actually address and solve societal problems rather than merely catering to corporate interests. The second step is to retire most working American citizens with an annuity sufficient for health and happiness, [10] as government begins to eliminate the current enormous waste of vital resources by delivering goods and services directly. This would allow most adults to stay at home with their families but still receive the goods and services they need to enjoy life.
Unless something is done now to prevent it, America will face anarchy, rebellion, and civil war on the downside of the net energy cliff. In order to maintain public order, the state must do one thing: take special interests totally out of politics. [11]
The urgency, necessity, and practicality of this proposal should be apparent to all sectors of society if they could be brought to understand how our social systems are depleting our physical systems. I am convinced that if Americans were given the honest science and engineering behind what needs to be done, the vast majority would willingly make a peaceful transition to a “sustainable retreat.”
Besides wanting to sell their ephemeral products and services to an unsuspecting public, special interests also want to prevent the state from solving social pathologies because they can profit from treating the symptoms. These special interests can do no better because they are machines programmed to create profits! [12]
ALL special interests—even universities, charities, and churches—depend on perpetual economic growth for their budgets, but the laws of thermodynamics tell us that perpetual economic growth is physically impossible. Therefore, ALL special interests must be removed from the political environment.
The first simple step is to remove the “personhood” Constitutional protections from corporations, which could probably be done by the President acting alone, via his “police powers.” Certainly it could be done by the Supreme Court or Congress if they had the political will to do so. Once corporations are firmly under democratic control, the federal government can begin correcting the abuses of capitalism as gracefully as possible. We want to preserve and include the great achievements of capitalism while removing its pathologies.
What follows are six political steps, listed in order of priority, that are designed to mitigate the societal disruptions of the net energy cliff:
1. Remove
the “personhood” Constitutional protections from corporations.
2. Make
it a federal crime for corporations to advocate anything (including, but
not limited to, advertising) in the mass media.
3. Make
it a federal crime for anyone employed by a corporation to lobby elected or
appointed officials directly or indirectly.
4. Mandate
public financing for elections.
5. Assemble
teams of the country’s best and brightest medical doctors, scientists,
engineers and other thinkers—but no representatives of religious groups, economists, or other special interests—to recommend public policy. (We do not
need a Manhattan Project for economics—on how to save the corporations and
their outrageous profits; we need a Manhattan Project on how the country can
survive the net energy cliff!)
6. Encourage
public debate on proposed changes.
(Number 5 above is the key difference that I am advocating. Public policy recommendations would come from medical doctors, engineers and scientists who are looking at the entire system instead of from a room full of fat salesman trying to sell worthless shit to an unsuspecting public. It’s based on the recognition that if one changes the environment in which political decisions are made, one changes the political decisions.)
NATIONAL GOAL
The “goal” of our society should be to make our citizens healthy and happy while using as few natural resources as possible (especially energy). The methods needed to attain this goal can be determined by teams of medical doctors, scientists and engineers. Capitalism should be dismantled as gracefully as possible and any natural resources that are not required health and happiness, should left to nature.
With modern technology, probably less than 5% of the population could produce all the goods we really “need.” A certain number of qualified “producers” could be selected by a peer group to produce for five years. The rest can stay home and sleep, sing, dance, paint, read, write, pray, play, do minor repairs, work in the garden, and practice birth control.
SELF-DETERMINATION
Any number of alternative cultural, ethnic or religious communities could be established by popular vote. Religious communities could have public prayer in their schools, prohibit booze, allow no television to corrupt their kids, wear uniforms, whatever. Hippies could establish communities where free sex was the norm. Writers or painters could establish communities where bad taste would be against the law. Ethnic communities could be established to preserve language and customs. If residents didn’t like the rules in a particular community, they could move to another religious, cultural, or ethnic community of their choosing.
In short, the one big freedom that individuals would have to give up would be the freedom to destroy the commons (in its broadest sense). Couples would be allowed only one child. And in return, they would be given a guaranteed income for life and the freedom to live almost any way they choose.
TACTICS
“Mob In The Square in Romania” Which Led To The End Of Communism
The changes I am proposing can be accomplished without rewriting our Constitution or violence. The two quotes at the end suggest tactics that worked for the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements. Sign-carrying activists should fill the streets of D.C., “like the mob in the square in Romania,” [13] until the city is gridlocked. Activists should just stay there until the powers-that-be concede.
I expect that organizing this movement will take a few years. It’s asking a lot. It can’t happen overnight. We know that with “cliffing” net energy, our society is just going to keep getting worse and worse until something big changes.
Let’s hope the “big change” is something “progressive” instead of a new “President For Life,” who has a “prayer breakfast” every morning where he makes up lists of “evildoers” that are to be rounded up and shot. (That’s still my most-likely scenario. We came close with “W.”)
No progress is possible until we can GET THE SPECIAL INTERESTS—ALL OF THEM—OUT OF OUR POLITICS AND OUT OF THE MASS MEDIA!
Jay—www.warsocialism.comwww.dieoff.com
“You don’t
communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue...
It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will
listen—in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a
precondition to communication... No one can negotiate without the power to
compel negotiation... To attempt to operate on a good-will basis rather than on
a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet
experienced.”
—Saul Alinsky, RULES FOR RADICALS
“The big
corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the environmental movement.
They sense that there’s a majority out there and that the emotions are all on
the other side—if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to
yield to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think
the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the
companies are too strong, they’re the establishment. The environmentalists are
going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail.”
—William Greider, WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE
“‘Capitalism’ is a money-based political
system which creates dissatisfaction, while converting natural resources into
garbage, in exchange for IOUs, which will be worthless when the oil peaks and
the country goes up in flames.”
—Jay Hanson
[1] Life on Earth conforms to universal thermodynamic laws. We mine our minerals and fossil fuels from the Earth's crust. The deeper we dig, the greater the minimum energy requirements. The most concentrated and most accessible fuels and minerals are mined first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to mine and refine poorer and poorer quality resources. New technologies can, on a short-term basis, decrease energy costs, but neither technology nor “prices” can repeal the laws of thermodynamics:
• The hematite ore of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota contained 60 percent iron. But now it is depleted and society must use lower-quality taconite ore that has an iron content of about 25 percent.
• The average energy content of a pound of coal dug in the US has dropped 14 percent since 1955.
• In the 1930s, a barrel of oil invested in finding, drilling and pumping could yield about one hundred barrels. By the 1970s, that number had dropped to about twenty-five barrels. Within a couple of years, that number will become one for one. At that point, even if the price of oil reaches $500 a barrel, it wouldn’t be logical to look for new oil in the US because it would consume more energy than it would recover. Decreasing net energy sets up a positive feedback loop: since oil is used directly or indirectly in everything, as the energy costs of oil increase, the energy costs of everything else increase too—including other forms of energy. For example, oil provides about 50% of the fuel used in coal extraction.
Every day, about 85 million barrels of oil are burnt.[ http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption ] Every day, less oil exists on planet Earth than the day before. The handwriting is on the wall: “capitalism” is running out of energy! Here is a small, silent animation which will illustrate the “net energy” principle: http://www.warsocialism.com/oil.html
Imagine having a motor scooter with a five-gallon tank, but the nearest gas station is six gallons away. You cannot fill your tank with trips to the gas station because you burn more than you can bring back—it’s impossible for you to cover your overhead (the size of your bankroll and the price of the gas are irrelevant). You might as well put your scooter up on blocks because you are “out of gas”—forever. It’s the same with the American economy: if we must spend more-than-one unit of energy to produce enough goods and services to buy one unit of energy, it will be impossible for us to cover our overhead. At that point, America’s economic machine is “out of gas”—forever. More on energy basics at http://dieoff.org/page175.htm
[3] David Murphy’s graph is an “educated guess” to illustrate the point that net energy falls faster than gross energy. Precision here is impossible because the data is not available. His Oil Drum piece can be found at: http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/5500
[4] Although economists claim the market is “efficient,” they actually mean “efficient allocation” of money—NOT the “efficient use” of materials. “Economic efficiency” is completely different than “materials efficiency.”
[5] Here is an oversimplified example to give us an idea of how incredibly inefficient the “market system” really is. Suppose that the only thing Americans had to do was to eat. How much energy would be required to feed them?
In 2006, Americans consumed about 334,600,000 Btu per capita, per year. [ http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee1c.xls ] This converts to about 84,317,785 nutritional calories equivalent per year [ http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm ] or 84,317,785 / 365 = 231,008 calories per day. But adults only require something like 3,000 calories of food energyper day to survive, so it seems we, very roughly, waste something like 231,008 - 3,000 = 228,008 calories per day, per capita.
Studies show that food grains produced with modern, high-yield methods (including packaging and delivery) now contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of solar energy. So we will allow ten calories of energy to grow and process each calorie of food delivered, so 3,000 * 10 = 30,000 calories per day is required to keep an adult alive. Thus, 228,008 - 30,000 = approximately 198,008 calories are still being wasted each and every day, by every American.
Let’s allow the equivalent of 3,000 nutritional calories (about 1/10 gallon of gas) per day, per capita to collect and deliver food and water to each and every household in the country, so 198,008 - 3,000 = 195,008 calorie equivalent wasted per day, per capita in the US.
The estimated population of America on Sept 22 2009 was 307,511,668, [ http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html ] so 195,008 *307,511,668 * 365 = 21,887,999,529,837,200 nutritional calories wasted every year in the US, or 2,188,799,953 tonnes—over two billion tonnes—of oil equivalent are wasted each year in the US feeding people! (In 2006, oil production in the Middle East was only 1,221,900,000 tonnes! [ http://tinyurl.com/mfwndm ])
Every year, the “market system” in the United States, wastes almost a billion tonnes more oil than is produced in the Middle East! Obviously, there is more to life than eating, but equally-obviously, the market system is the most inefficient organization in human history!!
[ Link to Excel spreadsheet. ] [ Link to high resolution image. ]
[7] An environment's “carrying capacity” is its maximum persistently supportable load (Catton 1986). If the load exceeds capacity, then the environment is damaged and carrying capacity is reduced. http://dieoff.org/page74.htm
GANGS OF AMERICA: The
Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of America,
Ted Nace, 2003,2005, http://www.amazon.com/Gangs-America-Corporate-Disabling-Democracy/dp/1576753190
Differences Between the Classic Corporation (Before 1860) and the Modern Corporation (After 1900) |
||
ATTRIBUTE |
CLASSIC CORPORATION |
MODERN CORPORATION |
| Birth | Difficult: requires a custom charter issued by a state legislature | Easy: general incorporation charter allows automatic chartering |
| Life span | Limited terms | No limits |
| “Shape-shifting” | Corporations not allowed to own stock in other companies; restricted to activities specified in charter | Corporations free to pursue acquisitions and spin-offs; |
| Mobility | Usually restricted to home state | No restrictions |
| Adaptability | Restricted to activities specified in charter | Allowed to pursue multiple specified lines of business and initiate or acquire new ones at company’s discretion |
| “Conscience” | Actions constrained by shareholder liability and by threat of charter revocation | Fewer constraints due to limited liability, disuse of charter revocation, and tort reforms |
| “Will” | Managerial action hampered by legal status of minority shareholders and of corporate agents | Legal revisions enable consolidation of management’s power |
| Size | Limited by charter restrictions | Asset limits removed; antitrust laws generally not effective |
| Constitutional rights | Functional only | Steady acquisition of constitutional rights |
http://www.warsocialism.com/gangsofAmerica.pdf
http://www.warsocialism.com/Gangs_2.pdf
[9] The “Progressives” are still making constitutional changes. THE SECOND BILL OF RIGHTS: FD’s Unfinished Revolution—And Why We Need It More Than Ever, Cass Sunstein, 2006;
http://www.amazon.com/Second-Bill-Rights-Unfinished-Revolution/dp/0465083331
· In 1960, the Constitution permitted sex discrimination. By 1990, it was clear that sex discrimination was almost always forbidden.
· In 1930, the Constitution allowed government to suppress political dissent if it had a bad or dangerous tendency. By 1970, it was clear that the government could almost never suppress political dissent.
· In 1910, the Constitution prohibited maximum hour and minimum wage laws. By 1940, it was clear that the Constitution permitted maximum hour and minimum wage laws.
· In 1960, it was clear that the Constitution allowed government to regulate commercial speech, which was not protected by the free speech principle. By 2000, it was clear that the Constitution generally did not allow government to regulate commercial speech unless it was false or misleading.
· In 1970, it would have been preposterous to argue that the Constitution protected the right to engage in homosexual sodomy. In 1987, it was well settled that the Constitution did not protect that right. By 2004, it was clear that the Constitution did protect the right to engage in homosexual sodomy. More in http://www.warsocialism.com/fortyAcresAndAMule.pdf
http://www.warsocialism.com/FDR2.pdf
http://www.warsocialism.com/theMythOfLaissezFaire.pdf
THE PROGRESSIVE ASSAULT ON LAISSEZ FAIRE: Robert Hale and the First Law
and Economics Movement, Barbra H. Fried, Harvard University Press, 1998;
http://www.amazon.com/Progressive-Assault-Laissez-Faire-Economics/dp/0674775279
THURMAN ARNOLD, SOCIAL CRITIC: The Satirical Challenge to Orthodoxy, by Edward N. Kearny; http://www.warsocialism.com/thurmanArnoldSocialCritic.pdf
THE FOLKLORE OF CAPITALISM, Thurman W. Arnold, Yale University Press 1937, CHAPTER VIII: The Personification of Corporation http://www.warsocialism.com/thePersonificationOfCorporation.pdf
REACHING FOR HEAVEN ON EARTH: The Theological
Meaning of Economics, Robert H. Nelson, 1991; http://www.amazon.com/Reaching-Heaven-Earth-Theological-Economics/dp/0847676641
http://www.warsocialism.com/gospelOfEfficiency.pdf
http://www.warsocialism.com/haleAll.pdf
[10] Human health and happiness are the products of our biology and environment.
[11] In order to understand why people act as they do, at a minimum, one must understand “politics” among social animals. See http://www.warsocialism.com/p1.html
[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_of_1989
This paper is hereby placed in the public domain and may be reprinted without further permission. This paper is the culmination of almost 20 years of study—working almost full time—to understand why our civilization is self-destructing. My brevity here is not due to my lack of understanding or scholarship. This file is archived at http://www.warsocialism.com/america.htm Jay Hanson, October, 6, 2009 |
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A core assumption in the above analysis is that we have peaked in net energy, which I believe we have, but with with a caveat. Peak oil does not on its own imply peak energy, as we could allocate 10% of a 10:1 source (oil) and put it into another 10:1 source (wind) and harness a higher aggregate total.
It's how we got there that is the problem. High energy gain natural resources allowed us to get so far and then as they declined, (to perhaps sub <20:1?) we had to increasingly issue more debt, which brought more resources forward in time and kept the economy going (i.e. more people thought they could afford more resources) until the time (now) when debt became too high to service. At that point, lower EROI manifests in what I've been calling the 'energy accordion' which is the narrowing gap between oil companies requiring higher and higher oil price to break even and a lower and lower price short-circuiting any economy recovery - those levels converge until oil, the lifeblood of modern economies, becomes unaffordable to both use and produce for economic growth. We can already see this starting to happen in microcosm with the refiners, who are reducing production in order to raise prices (profits), but in turn creating higher gas prices even in recession, etc. Just like the financial companies are bailed out by increasing our fiat debts, the refiners will undergo ownership change to hide this aspect of our borrowing from future (refiners will produce at a loss as a service to rest of economy to keep the chemical energy available in gasoline affordable to non-energy society).
But in the broader picture I don't think lower long term net energy necessarily spells end of economic growth, but it does spell end of our current structure of claims. If claims/ends/goals are readjusted, there could be quite a long period of using unconventional gas, oil etc. ahead at decent energy returns. But if we're using current metrics of societal success (i.e. GDP and consumption), I suspect Jay's general conclusion (of near-term limits) is accurate.
If the goal is long(er) term sustainability, then we have to treat energy outside the production function (as opposed to just a commodity), and high instant heat loss activities (driving, heat, etc.) become incredibly wasteful uses of the high power/energy density fuels left in our fossil bank account. In short, we're not broke by a long shot, but measured by current metrics we are insolvent - what sort of a social system would better integrate our human needs with our natural resource balance sheet, and how do we get there are the operative Campfire questions du jour.
" A core assumption in the above analysis is that we have peaked in net energy, which I believe we have. "
The key to reducing fossil emissions is to develop energy sources cheaper than fossil fuel. many approaches are being explored around the world, and the odds that all of them will fail in perpetuity are almost zero.
When that happens energy consumption will rise way above existing levels. Cheap clean abundant energy could be used to reduce our impact on the environment, but that requires an integrated approach involving all aspects of civilization.
"fail in perpetuity"
Please see 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
If you understand the second law you know that the sun will run out of fuel before the earth runs out of uranium and thorium. Is that a good reason to give up and drink the Cool Aid?
Consider that your original statement referred to alternatives that might sustain present levels of energy use, and that this one clearly alludes to that context in its query about "giving up." Consider that the presumed reason for the reference to uranium and thorium also has to do with potentials for humans to exploit them. Consider further that the sun, on the standard account, is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, and about half-way through its lifetime. It might seem, then, that the import of your statement is that humans might be happily running civilization on uranium and thorium reactors 4.5 billion years hence, when the death of the sun arbitrarily cuts short civilizations' promise just as it approaches midlife. Of course, this would be absurd, especially considering that the main energy resource that enabled the emergence of that global civilization in the first place was squandered in the short space of a couple of centuries, with something like 3/4 of the total being consumed within an astonishingly short interval of about 75 years - one human lifetime.
Of course, I realize that you do not mean this. Surely you mean merely to claim that 4.5 billion years from now, when the sun's hydrogen fuel has run out, the natural decay processes of uranium and thorium now present in the volume of the Earth will not yet have reached completion - and further assert that this "knowledge" derives from an "understanding" of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Here I merely wish to point out that the "knowledge" status of this application of the 2nd Law rests on the assumption that the sun and the Earth (and by extension, the universe) are closed systems - and the further assumption that hydrogen is the stellar fuel. These assumptions have been subject to criticism over the years - e.g. in Nicoali Kozyrev's 1948 doctoral thesis and by "electric sun" and "iron sun" advocates whose ideas are getting some play on the web today. The late engineer Dewey Larson (see e.g. Richard Heinberg's "The Smartest Person I've Met" for an intro) at least to my mind has offered some particularly devastating criticisms, though they have received astonishingly little attention. Particularly notable, in my opinion, is the mass of contrary astronomical evidence which Larson brought to bear on the issue. For example, the so-called "open" star clusters - thought to form in "star forming regions" in the galactic arms - are expanding at measurable rates. The ones currently regarded as "older" are on average more dense than those classified as "younger." This is one of the strong indications that the standard age-sequence is upside-down. See, e.g.:
"Just How Much Do We Really Know" (1961)
Larson's letter to Martin Harwit (1961)
The Neglected Facts of Science, Ch. 8 (1982)
The Universe of Motion (the first 150 pages, but esp. Ch 3) (1984)
Larson sums up the latter chapter as follows:
Of course all of this has little bearing at present on questions of energy and our future, but it does bear on the question of whether scientists are subject to the ordinary shortcomings of the human race, or especially qualified as leaders (I myself am of mixed mind on the matter).
And when one understands that man can't seem to manage fission power to date, you then understand the Cool Aid is toxic.
Just like Jonestown.
And when one understands that man can't seem to manage fission power to date, you then understand the Cool Aid is toxic.
Just like Jonestown.
Eric, why the same post 19 minutes apart, have you been drinking something stronger than Cool Aid?
Actually nuclear power is our safest source of new reliable dispatchable power that can be expanded on a large scale.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
Irrational fear and ignorance are the greatest threat to humans.
Actually nuclear power is our safest source of new reliable dispatchable power that can be expanded on a large scale.
Yes - solar power is the safest and can be expanded.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
And yet - in the Congressional Record (a far more authorative source than 'cloud wizards') the various people in the fission industry have admitted they are so unsafe that they can not afford insurance and need Government to act as the backdrop with Price-Anderson.
Irrational fear and ignorance are the greatest threat to humans.
I'd say that the greatest threat is when one human tries to exploit another.
Dumping plutonium at sea, sleeping on the job as a fission plant guard, using below spec materials - every one of these are examples of one human (or group of) not doing what was correct but doing what was "in their own interest". So until basic human nature changes - fission power will be littered with safety violations.
Once one becomes educated to the various failures exhibited by man one understands why fission power is a demonstrated looser to date.
Of course they have not admitted to being unsafe. (You must be this forum's most prolific liar, by far.)
What if all motor vehicle makers would be required to enter into a lottery: Every 30 years, one vehicle maker would be singled out to pay all costs related to all motor traffic related accidents and pollution damage world-wide. Now, what auto-maker could afford an insurance for this, and what insurance company could accept it? (We are talking 30 million dead, more injured, perhaps 100 million damaged autos, cancers from pollutions and so on - this is easily trillions of dollars.)
Now, the burden of car insurance can easily be spread among consumers and paid for in small chunks. If it couldn't, should we for that reason alone say "sorry, the industry can't pay for it's insurance - so no motor vehicle traffic"?
Should we REALLY stop the best mix of safety and cost in producing electricity (nuclear), just because accidents are few and big, rather than many and small? To me, that's just stupid.
What if all motor vehicle makers would be required to enter into a lottery:
What if you created a straw man?
REALLY stop the best mix of safety and cost in producing electricity (nuclear),
Solar power has the best safety record.
When someone makes a mistake with PV, what are the risks to others? How about with the other expressions of solar - wind and hydro? How can you manage that risk?
Fission power production has shown by their actions that they can't be trusted. And soon the world may get to see what happens when working fission processes are attacked. Should be as exciting as when fission plants have failed via human error.
me, stupid.
Small problem here, we do not have perpetuity to get alternate energy sources online. We need then coming online hard and fast now. Not only are they not coming online at any significant rate now but there is nothing in the pipeline that seems to be a potential realistic ff replacement at this point.
Right.
That is why we should be spending $100 billion per year to speed up the process.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4961#comment-459021
So we already wasted 7 years worth on the banksters?
Jay, this is one information dense paper. I think brevity is a worthy goal but I think you have over pushed the envelope a bit. Overall, I think you make many good points and the overall premise has at least some merit.
Would not have though it possible to over trash corporations but I think you do. Sure the US has a corporate style fascism government, with a modern democratic façade, that is causing huge wealth inequality and all kinds of other sub optional issues but they can play a positive role if they can be structure correctly.
Cutting back on everyone’s work week seems to be better that just paying people to sit at home. Maybe there would be an energy cost to this but I think most people would be better off working at least some. Also because of energy input limits, a huge increase in labor will be needed in the agricultural sector. Overall, I think that your most important point is that our primary challenge is not one of technology.
One question that I think needs to be addressed is whether humankind must change some of its reptilian thinking or perish. This is a separate question from can we, and needs to be answered first. I suspect that the answer is yes.
So, I perceive that we are back to mindset issues. The issue is to overcome the basic sociopathic nature inherent in all living things. As human beings, I feel that we have the potential to overcome this. How to change potential into reality is however a seemingly unimaginable quest.
To our advantage, we will be motivated since it is do this, or perish. We are way too intelligent, too fluent in the use of resources to survive otherwise. In addition, the switch that throws mindset issues is not energy limited and can happen rapidly.
Working to our disfavor is our tendencies to group think to everyone mutual disadvantage engaging it win/lose completive struggles. This is built on and intensified by thinking in language, which leaves us lost in word thinking traps.
The real issue then becomes how to and where to throw this switch and I think Jay’s paper provides some clues on these how’s and where’s.
Who can afford to hire people, who can afford to ‘work’ (live, dress, properly, commute), to make coffee with vanilla ice, Barbies in new costumes, organise Santa races that require all to be dressed in red dress, white froth and beards from China, or even computers with built in obsolescence (see Marx’s moral depreciation.) It is lunacy.
I was going to calculate this myself, but stumbled on it (see link) for the US:
quote:
Regarding employment numbers, I think there are only 5 numbers worth watching—2 of which are derived from the other numbers (from the BLS Household Survey):
1) "Civilian Noninstitutional Population"—now 236.322 mill
2) Employed—now 138.864 million
3) the Employment-to-Civilian Noninstit. Population Ratio—now 58.8%
4) Total 'Non-Employed' persons (subtract #2 from #1)—now 97.46 million
5) Non-Employment Rate (100% - 58.8%)—now 41.2%
Thus, 41% of our potential workforce (or 97.46 million) is not employed. We have a potential labor surplus of 97.46 million. This excess supply definitely reduces workers' bargaining power, including the suppression of their wages.
end quote.
http://unlawflcombatnt.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=disp...
Now of course non-employed includes happy stay-at-home moms, rich ppl who don’t need to work, drop-outs who manage OK under the radar, older children now living with parents, etc.
However a labor participation rate of 58% is historically low for the US, it corresponds to the 1948 official BLS rate (women at home.) In early 2000’s it was about 67. The official present numbers give close to 65, respectable.
http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/blsin/inu0018us0
The stats above are counted in persons (or jobs if one likes) but don’t take man-hours into account.
The last average work week (non-farm, non-manufacturing) that I looked at (last month) at the BLS was.....32 hours! Now it looks closer to 33:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf (PDF **)
Were one to add in under-employment, or need/wishes for more employment, how many extra % points would be added to non-employment and/or unemployment? If one considers that a regular working week is say 45 hours?
Shadowstats (serious) gives present unemployment of +/- 20% (dig in for the details.) Maybe? a bit too high per capita, but too low if converted to hours...
see U3, U6, and his estimate 94-09:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data
sidebar: How are ppl who work two jobs counted? What a mess. The US used to be a model for transparent statistics, proper accounting, they set world standards, procedures, really. No more.
Unemployment will rise and rise. This will be the mains sticking point, social horror, trigger for future events, not directly linked to rising oil prices or whatever. Can’t address Jay’s solutions now - post too long already - but change will forcibly come, socially, economically, and politically speaking because of that.
From an ecological viewpoint the current human systems, in all their myriad forms around the globe, self-organized in a hierarchical structure to maximize the use of available resources. All complex systems, both living and non-living, can be shown to operate on that same fundamental principle.
As we hit the downslope of resource availability our systems will by necessity become much less complex and will again self-organize to reflect that reality, as is their nature. Yes, a re-adaptation on the scale that we face will probably be painful, chaotic and messy, perhaps even brutal and bloody. Nothing at all unusual about that, it has happened many times before in human history.
I suspect that no amount of tinkering with quaint, dusty old notions of centrally planned state run societies will change that reality, despite Jay's best intentions.
Cheers,
Jerry
I suspect you're right. But will quaint notions of democratic societies change the reality you expect or are you saying the reality is unchangeable, so let's stop trying to mitigate? I don't believe it's unchangeable because we're not yet at point of resource exhaustion, just by our current metrics. And the re-adaptation at new scale you suggest could be both improved on or made worse by science and civic engagement. Lots of unknowns.
What do you recommend Jerry?
Good question, Nate.
My underlying (and unspoken) assumption is that political systems reflect the world views of their society. I'm sure this is not a new idea, and while I offer no specific references I have no doubt that people much smarter than I am have made similar observations.
Jay, OTOH, seems to be suggesting that a change in the political system will lead to a change in people's world view. Again, I'm not well read on the subject, but offhand I can't think of a single example where such a "solution" imposed from the top down has not ended badly.
Far from suggesting that reality is unchangeable, I am instead of the opinion that as resource shortages (or is it a longage of people?) become the new reality then so too will people's world views change, quite naturally. What those views will be, and what sort of politics will arise to reflect those views, is anyone's guess.
My second and explicitly stated assumption is that adaptation is painful, especially where it involves dramatically lowered standards of living. Can civic engagement mitigate that pain, at least somewhat? I would hope so, and by all means I do believe we should try. However, given the historical examples of collapse, and more recent examples of just how entrenched peoples world views can be, I do have my doubts.
What would I suggest? Education seems to be the obvious choice, there is an incredible, um, "diversity" in people's understanding of what seem to me to be the fundamentals of ecology, which I would describe as "the science of how everything works". I hold out the hope, perhaps idealistic, that if we could raise ecological literacy and encourage systems thinking it can't help but better inform people's world view.
Cheers,
Jerry
When the changes Jay suggests moved into 'Have the Government deliver our bread', I felt this Top-Down angle of his had taken a serious nosedive. We don't create a government just to babysit ourselves and 'provide for our needs'.. WE are our government, and we must provide.
If we need a reviewing of our approach to Government, I hope it is not to lay all the jobs on 'Them' and hope they hire 'Us' to do some of the work, but that the image of Government is an extension of ourselves and how we integrate to become a society, all of us with some responsibility for how it functions and grows.
That comment about decisions being up to 'Scientists, Engineers and Doctors', and not 'the Fat Salesmen', or the idea that a community of Artists might be built around the 'abolition of bad taste' left me feeling that Hanson has a very narrow view of what the broad range of people contribute to a society. Do we have special allowances for Skinny Salesmen, or Doctors who sell .. Artists who support themselves as Engineers? Can the big decisions be entrusted to Truck drivers and Sandwich makers?
For government..
"[To] make our citizens healthy and happy while using as few natural resources as possible (especially energy). The methods needed to attain this goal can be determined by teams of medical doctors, scientists and engineers." - How about Mothers? Teachers? Farmers?
- not to disparage the sciences, which are especially revered here, but we don't need to form a new Aristocracy to supplant the old one, do we?
Bob
In this and the previous poster's comment to the effect that he did not know a single instance of top-down orchestrated change that had not ended badly, I sense the workings of entrained intuitions - undoubtedly involving decent instincts and not-unreasonable readings of history. But I think there are some alternative viewpoints here, that need to be taken into account if we are to arrive an an objective assessment. To add some of my own intuitions into the mix, I find it very difficult to imagine, say, many inhabitants of any major city surviving the collapse of existing trade structures, a scenario I find all-too possible, without the existence or establishment of a strong central authority with broad allocative powers. I don't really see survival resulting from people organizing locally with their neighbors, in the absence of such an authority, though no doubt this would be good, perhaps even critical to their survival. The goal of the centralized authority would be to keep essential systems running - including some of the unsustainable ones, such as essential parts of the current food production and distribution system - while the basis for a new existence was being set up.
There are many points that could be considered regarding the proper lessons to draw from history - and I don't need to be lectured on the evils that centralized economic authority has often led - but for a measure of balance, consider that such systems are often in significant measure the result of grim social and economic conditions, so it is by no means surprising that the outcomes also leave much to be desired.
Regarding examples of central power that are often viewed more positively, we might consider the case of the U.S. in WWII. As Chomsky for one has noted, we had basically a totalitarian economy then - incidentally, administered, in that case, by corporate leaders who filled the various command-and-control slots.
We in this political culture often think about the evils of encouraging a culture of dependence on government largesse, but there are things to be said also for minimum basic income proposals. In present circumstances, many of us find our short term interests closely bound-up with the survival of institutions and economic activities that cannot be sustained. Minimum basic income would sever that Catch-22 situation, and allow many the freedom to choose to things that make more sense in terms of survival.
Steve;
I appreciate your call to keep balance. It's hard to tell where Hanson really stood with some of his phrasing.. it came out so stridently 'Anti Salesman', 'Anti-Corporate', then suggesting these panels of Scientists and such 'making our decisions' for us, that I was heavily chilled by the sense of Alpha-Dog can rescue us, instead of a healthy society that expects a degree of wisdom and leadership from all its members, and where the common job of society is to create such citizens, at which point we can find ourselves able to have a 'massively paralleled' social structure that has appropriate forms of leadership from the community up through the National and Global levels.
I think there are surely pieces that need to be handled on the large scale, like a road or rail system, but even WITHIN such a system, there needs to be a check on any State Monopoly which has individuals or companies that carry their own loads throughout that transport line (speaking somewhat metaphorically) .. The inverse also holds as well, as we see the Corporate Monopolies on certain Healthcare Options, the heavy-handed control on our food-supply, and in particular how that has affected the developing world, but also how corporate food has affected the health of our (American) population. Too much power in any one place is going to start fires.
And of course, even if 'Technology isn't Energy', we know that Knowledge is Power, and a balancing of that power source will clean up some of the other imbalances. It could be, however, that all of the excess power that's centralized in Governments and in Corporations at this point will simply be forced to leak out with the ravages of Peak Oil and related crises, and so these unnatural forces will then be less able to hyper-manage the information that keeps people MISinformed. Wishful thinking, but maybe not all that unrealistic, either.
There's a dose of reality coming, and reality is a great teacher, if it doesn't kill you.
Jokuhl,
Thanks for your further thoughts and sorry for my own sporadic participation. I'm very sympathetic to the ideal of citizenship and 'massively paralleled' social structures - particularly ones that in some way geared to the predicament we face, such as the goals and activities of The Post Carbon Institute, for example. We could take this discussion much further, I'm sure, but I don't have time now.
Jay makes multiple fatal assumptions, which is sad, considering who made them.
1. Homo sapiens do not willingly behave the way he recommends.
2. Homo sapiens is already way, way, WAY into overshoot.
3. Jay's recommendation for population reduction, having 1 child per couple, is way too slow to counter the impacts of overshoot. Even if adopted by the entire world right now, global population would continue to increase for decades due to current average lifespan.
4. The world cannot support this mess for decades more.
Given the above it appears as though he has succumbed to wishful thinking. Meanwhile back in the real world we get nonsense like "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all," says one Goldman Sachs adviser. And this clown utters this at the same time as the town of Samson, AL was occupied by US troops and the residents are forced to pay Wall Street for the privilege of crapping in their toilets. And Jay now thinks that these Wall Street parasites are going to lay down their financial weapons of mass destruction, hold hands, and sing Kumbayah?
Horse manure. The US, one of the few lights of representative democracy in the world once upon a time, is becoming more of a third world nation with each passing day. We've got 34+ million on food stamps. We've got 3+ years of housing inventory being held off the market by Wall Street firms to "prop up" housing prices while at the same time these same firms rely on mark-to-mythology accounting to avoid having to tell the truth about their own financial condition. And then, to add insult to injury, firms we rescued, like Citigroup, turn around and raise lending rates on 2+ million customers to over 29.99%.
The nation is being looted before our very eyes and Jay expects a 1960s hippy commune to spring up as solution to everything? Sorry, but I think he's been out in the sun too long.
I agree that humanity is in a classical ecosystem overshoot if we assume that the situation is static. We are doomed if we cant change.
Fortunately it has been demonstrated manny times that we can change. Politics, culture, the technology we use etc have changed manny times and dramatic changes can be done within a generation.
But there is alos no guarantee that it will change in a good direction. People who have resources can choose to use them to avoid changing untill it is to late to implement beingn solutions and reality forces a bad change upon people.
Your example of holding housing inventory off the market is a good exmaple of a bad solution since it stops healthy market mechanisms from working and while nothing is done old housing capital gets destroid while new investments run a higher risk for becomming malinvestments.
The only positive thing I can find in that is that you setting up yourselves for a very large demand destruction that will leave more mineral resources for other parts of the global economy. But it would have been much better if you instead had been investeing for the future.
Religion, another wildcard wrt change.
greyzone - I know Jay and we speak on occasion - I'm pretty sure he doesn't WANT the above scenario to unfold nor does he EXPECT it to be successful, and doesn't expect to be around to see it in any case. But if his objective is to mitigate suffering his 20 years of reading and thinking on this topic lead him to believe the above is the best shot. I don't agree, but do agree with Jay about the general scale and timing of the problem.
It is very instructive to see the comments in this thread - some think Jay is too optimistic and utopian (something he accuses many modern environmentalists and sociologists of being) and many react with fury that some of our liberties could be taken away by his suggestions. Freedom and liberty, I suspect, are correlated with energy surplus. This is one of those problems, whether it manifests in 1 year or 10, that in order to find the best 'solution', one has to agree on the goals. That is going to be a tall order, especially in a country with 300 million different political parties...;-)
What would you recommend our goals be by the way? And how would we best arrive at them?
We are in overshoot, therefore a dieoff is inevitable. Getting our species back into an ecological niche into which we can fit is going to hurt. So my own preference is to see political/social collapse as rapidly as possible, especially of centralized hierarchical controlling institutions. The outcome of such a collapse sets the stage for hundreds of thousands of smaller scale social experiments to attempt to adapt to the changing ecological and resource constraints around us. Most of these will, of course, fail. But given sufficient diversity of options there is a chance that some will succeed.
Rather than prescribe what to do based on my world view, which is contaminated with the flaws of the current failing social order, I'd leave the task to people to find as they try to adapt to a decentralized, much more local world. The cost will be high but the cost is going to be high anyway. The species may as well at least get a shot at survival out of it. Instead, centralized thinking looks like it is going to crush any experimentation that might occur.
1. Remove the “personhood” Constitutional protections from corporations.
2. Make it a federal crime for corporations to advocate anything (including, but not limited to, advertising) in the mass media.
3. Make it a federal crime for anyone employed by a corporation to lobby elected or appointed officials directly or indirectly.
4. Mandate public financing for elections.
5. Assemble teams of the country’s best and brightest medical doctors, scientists, engineers and other thinkers—but no representatives of religious groups, economists, or other special interests—to recommend public policy. (We do not need a Manhattan Project for economics—on how to save the corporations and their outrageous profits; we need a Manhattan Project on how the country can survive the net energy cliff!)
6. Encourage public debate on proposed changes. From Jay Hanson's guest post 10-24-09
*****************************
In his intro, Jay states "We can keep the same political structures and people, but must totally eliminate special interests from our political environment..." So it seems that Jay is saying that our present political institutions, as well as those individuals who currently inhabit them can do this. Maybe they theoretically can, but its clear, they won't. Items #2 and #3 above would require a Constitutional Amendment seriously re-defining the First Amendment, as every attempt so far to get a handle on campaign contributions has run afoul of the "Free Speech" argument. Maybe "Free Speech" could be defined more literally, namely when I engage in a conversation with others, whether its arguing politics at the local pub, or advocating from a soapbox, since this costs nothing, it is therefore "free" but as soon as I buy an ad in a paper or a 30-second spot on TV, well this isn't free speech, its paid-for speech, and thus allowed to be restricted. But this alone would take a decade or more to accomplish, and we will be facing severe society-wide problems well before this.
Again, "Who" is going to assemble the "best" scientists and thinkers? Who is going to define what is "best?" How is whomever ends up becoming this "who" going to get in the position to implement these suggestions? If we do get this far, how are we going to prevent these changes from being repealed several generations later, like with what happened to Glass-Steagall and other '30s era legislation enacted to prevent a repeat of the Depression?
It seems Jay is trying to sweeten the bitter pill by claiming that all these changes can be done within our current system. Unfortunately, elected government contains a fatal paradox. Since electoral democracy is by definition open to all, whatever the forces of greed are at any particular time will themselves be involved. Elections are not won on the quality of the ideas being debated, they are won on the basis, ultimately, of organizational capacity. Victory goes to those who can turn out the most get-out-the-vote door-knockers on Election Day, who can hire the savviest spin doctors and come up with the catchiest tag-line and 30-second spots. Jay is trying to construct a fire-wall between the electoral process and corporate wealth, but I feel that over any length of time this won't work, there's simply no fire-wall impervious to being end-run around or eventually undermined by those with the will and resources to do so.
Antoinetta III
Right on the money Antoinetta III If our founding fathers left us with a fatal flaw, in the constitution, it was not establishing congressional term limits, an item that seems to be missing from Jay's analysis, unless I missed it. The result is an ability to concentrate power and game the system, which people in power always seem to do, and will never willingly relinquish. It generally takes some time to establish the contacts and methods to start siphoning money from the public trough, a time afforded by years of "service" in congress.
We, as a nation, will not do what is necessary because humans will not give up their power. We as a world, will not do anything about climate change for similar reasons. When the ox that is being gored is asked about the decision of what to do, it will 99% of the time be a personally selfish decision. This is why we still produce so much electricity from coal and why China builds a new coal fired power plant or two a week.
We tend to grossly overlook basic human nature in this blog.
Term limits would be a very good thing.
If Gingrich and crew had succeeded in putting them in place-we probably won't have that opportunity again.
Unless we are very lucky-see my post addressed to Nate.
(I nearly always address my comments to the person whose comment has provoked my own as that makes it easier to follow the train of thoughts-when the thread gets long,sometimes it's hard to follow a few hours later.This way at least everybody should be able to see what I have responded to quickly-if they care.)
1. Remove the “personhood” Constitutional protections from corporations.
I don't think there is Constitutional protection - just legal president.
2 and 3 stem from 1.
Right Erick, and not even apparently a ruling by a judge in the first instance
http://www.johnmurphyforcongress.org/corporate.htm
"Corporate personhood in fact came about as a result of either deceit or accident on the part of a law clerk in 1886. More and more it looks like it was a deliberate act of deceit given the law clerk's connections with the railroads -- the most powerful corporations back in those days. Although the Supreme Court itself had nothing to say about the issue of corporate personhood in this particular case (Santa Clara) the clerk wrote in the “head notes” that corporations should be considered persons under the 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
Also of interest is this "personhood timeline"
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/personhood_timeline.pdf
Agree totally.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen tries some of the same thinking as Jay, but on a milder scale: "If we understand well the problem, the best use of our iron resources is to produce plows or harrows as they are needed, not Rolls Royces, not even agricultural tractors" (p. 21)
But Eric Scneider doesn`t concur: "Life is a complex thermodynamic system not a paragon of virtue".
We humans are always going to aim for Rolls Royces and hope our children will have them too, even if the effect is a total (and fast) collapse whereby no one can have them. But be honest, would you all like to live in a world without Rolls Royces? I don`t mean the car, but the things that are excellent and made with quality, even if they are expensive or luxury items; isn`t it just fun to look at them if not own them? Many paintings and artworks are such products, luxury items commissioned by wealthy nobles on the free market. I am by no means a free market person, but how many of these artworks would be around without hunger pangs, competition, pressure, vaingloriousness, in short, without us humans in all our folly and all our vanity and brilliance???
Perhaps after the system as it stands now really does collapse, then there will be some cooperation in a situation where people can`t aspire to much more than what is needed for basic survival.
You all might be interested to know that here in Japan the new Hatoyama government cancelled hundreds of infrastructure projects, such as dams, new highways, bridges, etc. The LDP (party thrown out) had made plans for these. Their basic MO was to fund these projects while making tons of construction companies very happy and employing thousands.
Well, that`s too expensive now with oil at 70-80 $/bbl---it became a strategy that wasn`t working. The new govt is going to give the money directly to the unemployed millions to spend on food and housing, in effect putting Jay`s plan into action in their own small way. Needless to say the amount of money each person gets is very small so supporting a family is pretty much out of the question---voila, instant birth control! (And thus another one of Jay`s proposals gets the green light, I suppose, but it`s probably unintentional.)
So the system needs to pretty much stop functioning before you see change, but then you might see some changes that you like. I am thrilled about the cancelled building plans because they would have destroyed more land, forest, wetlands etc.
Finally we see the amount of cement being prodcued and poured here going down. A relief for everyone, actually! I get the feeling that people here are joyous about this change in circumstances. No one liked covering everything with cement; it was just the only way to feed people. Suddenly that`s no longer true--in fact, the opposite is true! Vive la Peak Oil! It has liberated us from cement!
Then we might see the amount of plastic produced and thrown away also going down for the same reason--it`s just too expensive.
And also the number of cars sold continues to go down.
But still the system continues to function overall, and maybe that won`t change, while people slowly take up new jobs and work in different ways.
You might see these changes happening if you look.
The items referred to would make it a federal crime for corporations to advocate anything in the mass media or to lobby officials. But item #1, which advocates revoking corporate "personhood," would not require constitutional ammendment, as Antoinetta III may already be aware. The bestowal of "personhood" status on corporations derives originally from legal reinterpretations around the turn of the twentieth century, and presumably those "rights" could be revoked by the same route - especially such a change had solid popular support. But if corporations had no recognized "personhood" status, it would follow that they would lack first amendment protections, and so items #s 2 & 3 on Jay's agenda would not necessarily require constitutional amendment after all.
Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the concept of more or less continuous economic “growth” has been a given in the mindset of at least, the West. Now that we seem to be entering an era of Peak Everything (I think Peak Oil is only the first of who knows how many canaries in the coal-mine) it will only be a matter of time (5-10 years?) before a critical mass of the population will wise up to the fact that the “growth” era is over, essentially forever, and that we face an era of contraction, until at some future point (likely a century or two out), when we level off at some sustainable point.
If one steps back and takes the longer view going back to the development of agriculture, one thing rapidly become obvious. With the exception of the Roman Republic and some Greek and Medieval Italian city-states, virtually every society was governed by a hereditary monarchy. Not only was the government hereditary, but so was the society at large. Since charging interest was, almost universally a considerable taboo, there was no loan industry, no real estate industry; nobody sold their house, whether you were a Lord or a serf, when you died, your kids and extended family would go on living in your castle or peasant’s hut.
But along with the Industrial Revolution and long-term economic growth came all the political and economic isms and ideologies that we have seen in the last couple hundred years, everything from various kinds of republican democracy (usually “free” market oriented) to Fascism and Communism, both as theorized and as practiced in a number of places. All these latter systems, no matter how violently they oppose each other, have one thing in common. They all take continued economic growth as a given, often not even addressing the matter, it is simply an assumption subconsciously assumed.
So this sets up at least two discussion threads, consideration of both the short-term and long-tem outcomes that will come down when, as I mentioned above, a critical mass of the population will wise up to the fact that the “growth” era is over.
Short term: Since current economies are completely dependent on growth it seems that like it or not, circumstances will force us to change our economies, and circumstances will not likely give us 30-40 years to have our dysfunctional political systems try to placate everyone and come up with some sort of “democratic” solution. So in the short term, how does this play out, assuming, as I am that it is 5-10 years before the “green shoots” BS wears out and real, permanent decline issues (in the quality of life as well as in energy and the economy) become obvious to some critical mass of the general population.
Longer term: Is the return to a hereditary society and government inevitable. Personally, I think it is, but it could take a century or two before things stabilize at that point. So part of this question isn’t where we’ll end up, but how we will get there, as the century or two of overall contraction promises to be, shall we say “Interesting.” And, seeing how all the political and economic experiments on any scale done over the past 200-300 years have all taken growth for granted, it seems that those who have a problem with hereditary systems are going to have to envision something altogether new, something that all the political/economic philosophers and ideologues have never thought of. Is there any such thing?
I suspect that, like many other things, this era of political and economic experimentation was only made possible by the advent of massive amounts of cheap energy, and will end as we go further down the backside of Hubbert's Curve.
Antoinetta III
Antoinetta III
Interesting post...
Any guess projection on population levels when we get to your longer term hereditary society.
I have heard various schools of thought that place a sustainable population at anywhere from half a billion to two billion. Just as we have overshot ourselves, we will likely "undershoot" on the way down. As a WAG I would say a decline to 250 Million, followed by a gradual increase to whatever upper level is actually "sustainable." Considering the depleted state of the planet at this point, I suspect that the 2 billion figure is quite optimistic, a long term population fluctuation between, say 400 million and 600 million seems more likely.
Hi Antoinetta,
Thoughtful analysis but one aspect of this bothers me
Once agriculture started (11-13K years ago) and we started to have permanent settlements, the aggressive and hostile nature of our group interactions led pretty naturally to the hereditary social model you talk about. Strong natural leaders who could provide the leadership to defend their tribe and conquer other tribes evolved as chiefs and kings. Events really seemed to dictate this model for survival and I doubt there was a lot of “coffee house” discussion of alternative models – at least not for many centuries. I suspect that the great majority of people simply accepted the position they were born into without any concept of alternative models.
Now, of course, humans have experimented with many other social models and the genie is out of the bottle. Barring nuclear holocaust, massive meteor strike, or such that would eliminate all but a few humans – I suspect that the memory of these various models would live on and far fewer people would accept the hereditary model willingly.
I’m not at all sure what might be the dominant model in 300 years. But, it might be more of a warlord model with a variety of social organizations within that context. I wonder if the time from the fall of the Roman Empire – say around the 3rd century to about the 10th or 12th century when the barbarians were in full bloom would be instructive to look at. On one hand we had the more hereditary model you mention on the part of the settled Europeans and Russians and on the other hand the barbarian models (Mongols, Huns, Vikings, vandals, etc). In other parts of the world were American Indians who did not have the concept of land ownership. I’m not too sure about South America but it seems that rain forest people also have a variety social organizations. Ancient Africa would be interesting to study also.
However, I think it is fairly safe to say that the current social models in the US and most other western countries will have a hard time competing in the brave new world.
"I suspect that the memory of these various models would live on and far fewer people would accept the hereditary model willingly."
Posted by Bicycle Dave
Even if they are remembered fondly, all these models require continued "growth", and when this is no longer in the cards, they become untenable. However, also likely to be remembered is that all of these models eventually crashed disastrously, and, in historical terms, in a rather short time. This doesn't mean that there won't be opposition to whatever system starts to form, however, at the end of the day, some sustainable system will evolve, and I can't see anything else that comes close, other than a hereditary model. Electoral models additionally suffer from the fact that long-term, multi-generational thinking is at odds with being successful; converting political offices into prizes to be won every few years causes a short-term dynamic to be built into the very foundation and structure of the model.
Antoinetta III
Hi Antoinetta,
I totally agree with you that the "growth paradigm" will be over fairly soon. I should have been a bit more focused in my reply to your initial comment:
I was actually thinking more about the concept of land/property ownership by individuals/corporations as currently exists. I was wondering if future societies would challenge the whole "ownership" notion. Because of these memories, some groups might be more inclined to collective concepts, others to the idea that the king owns everything, and many shades inbetween and otherwise. I'm simply thinking that the "castle or peasant hut" model might not be as relevant in the future. Perhaps children will be "raised by the tribe/village" without regard to physical property rights.
As an aside, and somewhat in support of your thinking, one of my favorite authors is Dervla Murphy. She wrote a book "Full Tilt, Ireland to India with a Bicycle" http://www.amazon.com/Full-Tilt-Ireland-India-Bicycle/dp/B0000CMLE6/ref=...
At one point, she stays with a ruler of a small mountain enclave. Although a self-described "lefty" she was very impressed with the quality of life and general satisfaction of the people living under an absolute ruler. BTW, I highly recommend this book for anyone trying to gain an understanding of Afganistan and Pakistan where she spends much of her journey.
"I was actually thinking more about the concept of land/property ownership by individuals/corporations as currently exists. I was wondering if future societies would challenge the whole "ownership" notion. Because of these memories, some groups might be more inclined to collective concepts, others to the idea that the king owns everything, and many shades inbetween and otherwise. I'm simply thinking that the "castle or peasant hut" model might not be as relevant in the future. Perhaps children will be "raised by the tribe/village" without regard to physical property rights." Posted by Bicycle Dave
To the extent that the overall contraction ends up with society being re-localized to the village or tribal level, a large measure of what you state regarding collective concepts will likely come to pass. I also wouldn't be surprized to find that such places likely will have their equivalent of Dervla Murphy's "ruler of a small mountain enclave" somewhere on the scene. But I posit that any societal organization and its governing structures will grow in scope and complexity until they run into their limits. These being set by the overall size, phyical assets and debits, geographic location, diversity of resources, etc. that each specific society has. And I feel that after a hundred years or so, when we've finally finished with the overall contraction, that society will end up levelling off somewhat higher on the complexity ladder than the hunter/gatherer/tribal village. Certainly, as long as railroads exist, there will be a larger level of communication, some trade, etc, that some form of overarching governance will be needed.
Antoinetta III
My interest lies in the nature of the legal and financial structures which we take for granted. ie the classic elements of financial capital:
(a) Debt - in the form of credit created by credit intermediaries aka banks; and
(b) Equity - in the form of shares in the Joint Stock Limited Liability Corporation.
With partnership-based frameworks, using legal vehicles like the US LLC and the UK LLP it is possible to create complementary forms of financing, and in particular to 'unitise' energy and finance projects with direct Peer to Peer investment in future production.
In this model an "Open" Corporate links together the different stakeholders to (say) build and operate a wind turbine or install energy saving equipment. An open corporate doesn't own anything; do anything; employ anyone; or contract with anyone. it's not an organisation, but a framework for self-organisation.
The result could enable the funding of (say) an Energy Pool in the North Sea.
This recent article has had good feedback recently.
I believe that partnership frameworks will lead to existing financial intermediaries and rentiers being dis-intermediated ('Napsterised'). They will either become service providers, or go out of business. But it's not all bad, because the only capital they need as service providers is that necessary for operating costs.
Hello Chris, I had a feeling you would show up over here!
Very interesting subject, no? How to reorder society so it works better, so simple yet so ... unachievable. Those pesky humans never do the right thing! There is a balance of useful and not here, the best being the acknowledgment of how much waste is embedded in the petroleum production/use platform. With oil, the distance between worthless (in the ground) and worthless (in the atmosphere) is very short. Why not waste it?
... and ...
Mr. Hanson confuses financialism with capitalism. Capitalism is the ongoing refinement of trade and management of surpluses. Granted, when surpluses disappear, there is nothing for capitalism to manage but that won't keep it from loitering around and refining trade while it waits for something to turn up.
Financialism, however, is a dying man's grasp at substituting credit for energy and the outcome is a foregone conclusion. It is money making money and little else, there is no product, only claims, people take them seriously because they have claims of their own and on account of tradition. So what? Times change, the old financial claimants are as relevant to our onrushing future as are the Hapsburgs.
All the debt/indentures/leases/debentures/derivatives ... etc. are falling valueless, like Confederate dollars. This is the great struggle of the banks with their ruined balance sheets. Right now, finance - and this includes that overseas failure- in- the- making China - is rushing around the world making new claims ... waving their money, acting as if their claims made from a vast distance will have meaning for anytime longer than it takes for the ink to dry on the pages of the Wall Street Journal! This is the very same thing as the Americans have done, and what the British did before them, and the Spanish and the Portuguese and Dutch before them. The Romans arrived in Gaul and Britain and Asia Minor with legions, they left farmers, baths and theaters in their wake, the money crowd leaves behind bankruptcy and tax exiles.
As for exploiting waste, if one system could not enable this, another would. Waste is the purpose of energy! Energy is priced as something almost without worth even now; bits of cash- value are added at each level of use; lower prices leave more aggregate returns to the oil investment. Oil without the users/wasters all in a chain is valueless black goo. 'Users' translates into autos, ships, planes and tractors ... plus all the other stuff created out of the natural world as an habitat for these machines. Oil has to be cheap so that the accumlated residuals across all the different uses can pay for the entire habitat as well as for the energy required to run it.
This is an example of the decline in energy productivity. Productivity is a relationship; output/man- hours, for example. Here it is output/btu. Less btus means higher energy productivity, just like less man- hours means higher labor productivity.
Machines powered by petroleum energy have been substituted for human labor powered by food energy. There is a tug- of- war: substituting more machines for people increases labor productivity while shrinking energy productivity. This shrinking energy productivity is the heart of our current crisis. In other words, what Jon Hanson proposes as a solution, the dis- employment of the workforce, has already been taking place and is destroying the world's economies, both of them; physical and financial.
Finance exists as a hedge against falling energy productivity. Finance costs nothing to produce, unlike goods in the energy economy. Nevertheless, the accumulating debts must be serviced. We've been in trouble for a long while; no customers means no business. This in turn means, no debt service. I don't know how others interpret what has been happening over the past ten or fifteen years but it would appear that finance has been attempting to service itself - its own debts, that is. The result has been a colossal bubble in assets. The instability has led to a Minsky Moment. followed by a collapse of commerce.
Or has it? The long- term decline of low priced fuel has resulted in more of a Minsky Decade.
Labor working at good wages is necessary so that there are customers for business and capital for 'adjustments'. Here, business is at odds with itself! It fires its customers with one hand while booking the increased labor productivity as profit with the other! This cannot last; there must be some top- line earning growth or the business fails. The 'solution' has been for businesses to borrow ever more from finance to 'tide themeselves over' until something magical brings back the customers that have been laid off by the one hand!
Since the only way to provide for those without work is to extend some form of 'dole' or welfare, the next step is for the dole- provider to borrow the money from finance, since finance is the only entity that can magically create the required 'funds'. The government cannot 'make' its own dole funds out of thin air; it's trying to do that now and people who know better are laughing at it. Finance is a form of fraud, lending to itself is something that no respectable government could do and remain credible.
Since government is a debtor to finance, it can only act on its own when the claims against it dissolve. Since waste is the desired end product of our physical economy, eliminating waste would mean not the economy's reform but its annihilation. Government here can 'depower' itself, but that would concede to the indivituals - or more localized civic units - authority it is loathe to surrender. Authority that is accumulating by the unwinding of the economies, btw.
To recap: putting labor 'on the dole' is already taking place; an outcome is the destruction of commerce. The decline in commerce is centralizing authority. According to Mr. Hanson's model, we are already 'there'. Nevertheless, resource consumption is inexorably increasing, there is no sign of any meaningful reduction in it.
Try selling that to a farmer! He would never be able to leave the 5% category. A better idea is to turn away from mass- production and automation and return to a craft regime. More hands, more employment, increasing skill base, better and more diverse education, better health - no autos or factory farms - and more business. More human inputs substituted for energy in the workshop would leave energy and other inputs in the ground. More hands might give the populace something useful and pleasant for them to experience besides more highway interchanges. The idea is to increase energy productivity and decrease labor productivity. Eliminate income tax, increase gasoline tax.
Nate sez:
Finance brought more consumption forward, not nearly enough resources. This has been another aspect of the 'economic paradigm' of which the current crisis is a part. This is the paradox of cheap crude in the 1990's but not nearly cheap enough. It was certainly not as cheap in real terms within most of the developing world in 1998 as it was in the hey- day of American industrial growth thirty years earlier. Bringing demand forward accelerated the long increase in fuel prices beginning in 2000; and embedded that demand in previously undeveloped nations; a perfect example of unintended cirucmstances.
Chris Cook sez:
Already happening, the dis- intermediation of finance players; we are all the Fed, now ...
Why not require the consumer @ $10 per gallon to invest in that production as a pre- requisite? Then price to maintain availability over time rather than squander at once. This would not require government action, but a change in price schedule by a producer! Exxon could do this on their own. or a national producer such as Mexico. They could demand $50,000 investments from consumers with the promise of oil over fifty (or a hundred) years. (Fractional shares could be sold along with fractional consumption rights.) Production would be priced to guarantee that outcome. If one producer did this, the others would have to follow, otherwise they would deplete themselves out of business. Here, the 'commons tragedy' is turned upside down. Just like fishermen with bigger boats deplete a fishery, investors with 'bigger stakes' and the means to enforce them drive out those who have no incentive to conserve; the 'consumer- investors' in oil production priced in this manner would 'get rich' by conserving rather than by consuming.
More here ...
At this time, pricing energy for some other use but waste is risky for the producer, but what choice does he have? Energy only has value when it is destroyed... there is little other use for it but waste. This knowledge is what is driving the anxiety of Saudi sheikhs. Oil that is expensive enough to insure a level of production has a small/shrinking customer base because of the disconnect between investment (in production) and end use. Simply pricing oil to what the market would bear would indeed make crude gold- like ... and useless as gold is now as a currency. Like gold it would not cirulate and unlike gold, one could never take possession of enough of it to become 'rich' the cost of managing such a valuable surplus would be far more costly than what the 'black gold' would be worth. The sheikhs would be stuck with their valuable/worthless oil and the rest of the world would lament the loss of ... convenience.
Unbelievable, all the world sacrificed for convenience. Good grief!
Steve of Virginia opined:
They still letting you post here? Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, you buffoon.
The law of conservation of energy is an interesting one from the theoretical perspective. But to make a heat-driven engine work, you have to dissipate energy. You know: let it flow from a high temperature source to a low temperature sink. Heat energy does not flow uphill, only downhill.
I agree with what his intent was. From the point of view of energy consumers, once petroleum has been burned, and the concentrated energy has been dissipated, it has effectively been destroyed.
After their collapse, the twin towers were still there, but somehow they just weren't the same. Their usefulness was nearly destroyed although some of the steel was recycled. Same with energy, at one moment so concentrated and accessible and useful, and "poof", up in smoke the next moment. The "poof" goes on.
I agree. I think that a more likely scenario than Jay's is large numbers of people working in agriculture, local crafts & manufacturing, etc.
Cheap high quality energy has allowed something like 70% of Americans (circa 2005 anyway) to live off the discretionary income of other Americans. These people, on the discretionary side of the economy, need to become true producers and providers of essential goods and services.
From my April, 2007 ELP Plan essay:
I've described some conversations I've had in recent years with high school graduates and their parents. One of the recurring themes I have run into is that many people--who are aware that we live in a finite world--nevertheless believe that there will be white collar "policy making" positions available for their own children.
Four years ago this past May, I talked to a high school graduate about where I thought we were headed. She asked what she should major in. I suggested something related to agriculture, and she looked at me like I had grown a second head. She just graduated from a prestigious private university with a degree in ethnic studies, and she is currently scrounging around for any kind of job--and contemplating law school.
Another recent college grad, with a political science degree, is in his first year of law school. His parents said that they were aware of the weak job market for lawyers, but they had to do something to get their son some job skills (the implication being white collar job skills). I asked what happens if he still can't get a job after spending three years in law school, plus a six figure investment, probably mostly borrowed. No response to this question.
Westexas,
Our greatest writer had something to say about lawyers in a little story about one who settled in a little peaceful village without one and nearly starved until another lawyer landed there.Together they soon owned the town between them.
IIrc, we have more lawyers per capita than just about anybody-and about nenety percent of all they do is lawyerly make work-the profession is necessary but the practicioners of it as a group are parasites of the worst sort.
Another reasonably accomplished writer-Shakespeare-said that the first order of business , come the revolution , would be to kill them all.
Kurt Cobb had a great essay which showed the US economy as an inverse pyramid, resting on the food & energy producers, which account for about 5% of GDP. In other words, what is the value of the top 95% (especially the financial portion, legal, etc.) without the food & energy producers?
A question I have asked is what is the objective value of the world's 100 largest financial institutions without the world's 100 largest oil fields, and what is the objective value of the world's 100 largest oil fields without the world's 100 largest financial institutions?
Currently, we are maintaining our high levels of consumption, and our high levels of federal spending, courtesy of our creditors, especially in other countries. Another question I posed a few days ago is what happens when our foreign creditors decide that our high level of energy consumption is a bigger threat to the economies of the creditor countries than the benefit that they get from shipping goods to the US?
But, but, the Pied Piper from Prippyhead Law School promised he would take care of our children, that they would no longer be a problem.
_____________________
Personally, I am alarmed at how often this story is being repeated; about all the children being seduced into entering law school.
It's just not law school. We have millions and millions of young people (many of them with heavy student loan debt loads) graduating with degrees that are basically useless. The six figure sum of money down the law school drain just compounds the problem. You can see why I am usually about as welcome (at parties) as a skunk at a picnic.
Tex,
I'm with you all the way-within the system as it has worked in the past all these people somehow made a living.
But somehow I have a feeling that the day is returning when we will be more likely to buy a burger from a local guy who owns his burger shack outright than a so called burger fronm McDonalds-and at that time all the people who make thier living shuffling paper for Mickey D will be in trouble.
Many years ago when you could still buy old heavy solid oak factory made second hand bedroom furniture for a song I bought some-It will still be good for a few more centuries if its kept dry.Functionally it's as good as anything on the market-except if you hurt yourself trying to move it!
The guys who are making this sort of stuff locally in times to come aren't going to need advertising agencies.And they won't need cardboard boxes to ship it either-not of they sell in the community.
Incidentally my flea market furniture is now regarded as "excellent investment antiques/ collectibles" and I could get my money back and then some even allowing for inflation.
I'm an artist and ex-IT administrator currently finishing a philosophy degree started years ago. Next fall I will enter law school at age 36 and should take on little or no debt in the process.
I have seriously contemplated statements made on TOD and elsewhere about the coming uselessness of law degrees, and I have decided that there remains plenty of value for me in the field. Firstly, I am unconcerned whether or not I eventually hang my shingle as a practicing lawyer. I feel it is possible that much of the modern field of law practice may vanish.
However, society will always need governance. Hell, we may eventually see new constitutional congresses in North America. Regardless, governance requires law, and it is interesting to consider that the politicians must interface with civil society at some juncture. The populace will require private citizens capable of interfacing with the the law of government. Our systems require the public government and the private citzen expert to make a whole. You cannot get rid of the practice of citizen law without doing away with the other half, namely government.
Even if I end up a farmer or an artisan, I am convinced that a law degree will benefit me, my family, and my community. Many of these kids going into law may not have the careers they hope for waiting on them. I will agree with that. I do not agree with the sentiment that the profession is going to vanish or that the skills will be useless. Non-government citizen lawyers have their place in any society. They served a purpose in ancient societies, they served a purpose during the forming of the United States, and they will serve a function a decade or a century from now, assuming society exists.
I seriously doubt that any of the TOD regulars here, or people in society at large, feel that the knowledge gained by studying law and getting a degree in it is a useless enterprise. I personally know activist lawyers who genuinely try to help people and their knowledge and services can be very useful indeed.
I also find the idea that such knowledge might be required should we find the need to create a new social order, a new constitution and a completely new civil society to be highly likely. I don't think we should necessarily toss the
babylawyers with the bath water.My gut feeling is that when most people say that they think lawyers are members of a useless profession they are thinking of those SOBs that have sold out to power and use their talents to enforce a corrupt power structure that is the antithesis of justice. Those lawyers will be useless because their basis of power will have ceased to exist. Think ambulance chasers, corporate lawyers, lawyers that work to acquit the guilty for large sums of money based on some obscure technicality, the guys that work for places like "Who can I sue today",etc...
There will always be a need for skillful negotiators with great people skills who know and understand the development of law throughout the history of human civilizations.
Now, as for philosophers, we could probably do with fewer of them ;-)
From my ELP Plan essay:
From my comment up the thread:
From your comment:
This will not be done by lawyers.
All civil societies have "disputes" and they resolve these by means of "civil discourse".
Call it what you want, but the people who engage in advocacy for the position of one party or the other are performing the function of being a lawyer.
It will be sad if the entire system of justice that has developed in civilized nations goes down in flames and we return to the era of duels to the death. But hey, it could happen.
It's a great leap from dispute resolution and governance.
Governance is in the straitjacket of lawyerism and lawyerly 'deal making'. Part of going forward is to get rid of the straitjacket itself, not change the character strapping it tighter.
At the same time, the skill of dispute resolution will also be needed, but not as much in the leadership sphere. We have a lawyer president and a lawyer congress ... the end of the long chain of lawyer presidents and lawyer congresses. What does the common citizen have to show for this state of affairs besides onrushing ruin?
I'll forgive you because you know not what you say.
Assume you were appointed benevolent king for life.
One day, a loyal subject rises and says, "Good King, what we need is to have our rules of behavior written out in black and white words so that all subjects know what they may or may not do."
"Good point," you mutter as you pull out a blank piece of paper.
Then you start scribbling ...
IF one of my subjects killeth another of my subjects, it shall be deemed "murder",
except, err, if it is in "self defense" and
except, err, if he is a soldier and doing my bidding and
except, err, if ...
Congratulations oh noble King, you just became a lawyer.
:-)
Those two professions have some very similar traits and requirements, and I suspect those roles will always be intertwined, and often reviled, as that is the role of Negotiator, Compromiser, Interlocutor.. sausage-maker.
Just cause you don't like them, doesn't mean they're going away..
pennsuedo,
You are running with the herd.
And it feels good for the *me* and for the *now*.
Think about it.
When computer tech and internet were considered to be "the growth" industry (say, circa 1996) you jumped right in there. You and hundreds of thousands of other aspiring young people (in year 1995-1996 you were about 23 years old, just out of college, yes?) Much to your dismay, around year 2001, the big internet boom that began in 1995 went bust. Too many players all chasing after the one golden ring.
Perhaps you slugged it out for a couple of years, hoping that the IT company you were with would be "special", would survive and prosper despite the dire fate that most other IT companies met.
Then it sank in. You finally had to admit to yourself that you weren't "special" and the IT gig was a downward spiral. As you got older, it got tougher and tougher to keep up with the new kids on the block.
So you desperately looked around for something else.
Somebody told you, Hey I hear lawyers always do very well for themselves. Hang up a shingle. Charge $300 per hour and, why in no time, you will be "rich".
It sounded like sound logic. (Don't pay attention to the sound of the many hooves all pounding the ground at the same time.) You took the LSATs. You did pretty OK and started sending in those applications to all the "prestigious" law schools in town. One of them graced you with an acceptance letter. Welcome to the inner circle. Membership has its privileges.
So this year you will be studying "contracts" and "legal writing" and learning how to "think like a lawyer". By the time you get out of school, your brain will be twisted into a whole new configuration. Res ipsa loquitor.
Yes, understanding how our society is put together under laws and rules will give you a whole set of new insights. But that doesn't mean that when you get out of school, there will be "clients" hanging around, all loaded with money and just dying to retain you for your special skills because there is nobody else around with those same or superior skills.
I'm not saying you should drop out. Just keep an ear out for how many hooves are stampeding with you towards that bright line you think is a golden horizon (it might be a cliff).
One of my daughter's friends is married to a man who is a nuclear qualified US Naval officer, in the Submarine Service. He was thinking about getting out of the Navy and going to law school, and my daughter's friend asked me for my advice.
I told them that if the choice were between going to law school and cutting my wrists, I would have to think about it.
I thought that, IMO, there were two good choices open to him--staying in the Navy, or going into the civilian nuclear power industry.
I think your assessment of the IT industry is faulty. There was a downturn in 2001, but it recovered a long time ago and is in a clear upwards spiral.
But you can choose any profession - just be real good at it and you'll be employed.
No. The above graph is not IT jobs. It's all jobs --in just one state.
(I was not able to quickly find a graph of the IT job picture.)
One only need to call the help desk of any computer company and receive a pleasant voice from New Delhi to know what has happened to to US IT jobs in the last few years.
Jeppen you are clearly living in another world.
_______________________________
click on image for larger picture
More like a parallel universe...there is no way to get there from here!
So, based on a completely irrelevant graph, I'm living in another world? Okay.
But if you look at the Occupational Employment Statistics from year 2000 and year 2008 and compare:
http://www.bls.gov/oes/2000/hajiha_article.pdf
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf
You'll see that the computer/software industry employment has grown from 2.9 million to 3.3 million, or an increase of some 13%. And this is since the height of the IT bubble! In the meantime, overall employment went from 130M to 135M, or an increase of 4%. Furthermore, employment in the IT industry is projected to keep increasing much faster than in the rest of the economy.
The population of the United States in 2000 was 281,421,906. The population of the United States today is 307,796,966. Those numbers are direct from the US Census bureau.
Assuming a near equal ratio of employed in 2000 as in 2009, job growth should have been roughly 9% to keep pace with 9.3% population growth. Instead you state that total employment only grew by 4%.
This is a recipe for violent revolution. This is a recipe for failure.
Your numbers, just like your GDP numbers, do not compute. By the way, your prior GDP numbers, particularly for the US and Europe, fail to account properly for inflation. Adjusted for inflation, even free market economists acknowledge the "lost decade" in the United States with the equivalent in much of the Eurozone.
The graph is not irrelevant. It's amazing to watch you declare anything you dislike as irrelevant and then smugly declare your own BS as "fact". You are so mired in your own personal religious experience (faith in "free" markets, which never ever existed in the United States in any form whatsoever in its entire history) that one can only conclude that further discussion with you is futile.
I pointed out that the IT industry grew much faster than the overall economy, employment-wise. You counter with the claim that overall employment growth is disastrous? Well, how is that relevant? (Btw, how much did the working age population grow?) If you feel that employment is too low, then you should ask for a freer economy.
Eh, don't compute how? Are you telling me it is impossible for the population to grow 9% and the employment by 4%?
What GDP numbers are you referring to? I routinely give GDP numbers adjusted for inflation. Talk about a "lost decade" is likely not about something that has happened, but a worry that we'll do as badly as Japan did during the 90-ies. You should pay attention when you read stuff, or read twice or something.
Looking at BLS statistics, GDP in Q2-1999 was $10,684 billion, while Q2-2009 is at $12,901 billion, all in 2005 dollars. This is down from a max of $13,415 billion in Q2-2008. No lost decade yet.
The graph may have been relevant to something, but not to what we were talking about. My "BS" is fact, because it is not based on shallow newspaper reading and a lack of reading comprehension - I actually look things up! Imagine that? You should too, so you don't make an ass of yourself all the time.
You should be glad, then, as you obviously like economic totalitarianism? But I don't see the world in black and white. The US is quite good at economic freedom, but it could and should improve.
Only if you are very fond of your prejudice and lack of understanding.
You assume that I like economic totalitarianism without one shred of evidence. Nice assertion. Try again. The fact is that you equate economic liberty with "capitalism" (which you cannot even seem to accurately define). Yet economic liberty may be possible with other systems, something that you cannot seem to get your mind around.
As for the lost decade (already lost, not the next one coming up):
A Lost Decade for Jobs - BusinessWeek
A lost decade of growth - Business - Macleans.ca
Even the Wall Street Journal recognizes that 1999-2009 was a lost decade for wages for the vast majority of American workers, excepting the criminals on Wall Street who've created the current mess.
Lost Decade for Income: Change for Households, by State - Real Time Economics - WSJ
You can literally find thousands more articles detailing the decline in average wages over the last decade. That you simply cannot conceive that this is true, despite this data being confirmed by the bastions of capitalism like the WSJ, simply raises the question of whether you are even listening when people provide alternative viewpoints or whether you are instead proselytizing to protect your faith.
First, I note that you seem to concede most points, but keep yapping about a few side issues while throwing insults around. It's ok, I'm enjoying that too.
When a guy is going bananas over my "religious experience" of free markets and so on, I kind of assert that he doesn't like them, yes. And if I'm wrong, I don't feel too bad, since you started being the asshole, not me.
At least, I can't get my head around how there could be economic liberty without capitalism being allowed. And if allowed, I think there will be capitalism.
Probably, but as often is the case with statistics, if you choose your start and end years carefully, you can paint whatever picture you like. In this case, in the graph you provided, the decade starts with the height of the bubble and ends with a burst bubble. If you shave off the bubble around 1999, you have a nice upward trend. Or why not look at the bottom years - 1983, 1993 and 2008?
Furthermore, it's in a country who decided to wage two costly unpopular wars and hamper lots of communication with security measures - all of which is big government stuff, not free market. Also, household income - I don't quite understand why you yanks keep using that measure - in Europe we use hourly pay or something. If there are more divorces or if family-creation sets in at an older age, I guess household pay drops, for instance.
But hey, this isn't that important to me, really. I'm not defending any particular US policy and if wages has stagnated in the US, then fine - in this subthread I was just telling someone (who claimed otherwise) that IT is a nice growth business. Then you went off on a tangent.
Whoop! deee! F'nn! doo!!!
This is why I say you live on a different planet than I do...
So the fact that IT employment has grown 13% from 2.9 million to 3.3 million would be great if it hadn't fallen from almost 4 million, that's a 25% drop from a little over a year ago.
BTW I actually worked in software and computer related fields for the last 25 years in the US and I can tell you that the reality on the ground is worse than those numbers indicate. They don't for example take into account the number of computer and IT professionals that who are recent graduates nor older professionals who have stopped looking for work because they can't find it in their fields, many of these folks are now over qualified and underemployed in other jobs.
That was the most intelligent I have heard you say. (Nonsense is way better than falsehoods.)
You are confusing numbers that probably isn't comparable - my BLS numbers were also from 2008 and didn't show any 4 million. I have provided you with comparable numbers and hard data. I can lead the horse to the water, but I can't make him drink it. Thanks for the discussion.
FMagyar,
I live in the Silicon Valley area of California, which used to be High Tech Mecca. While I am not privy to the statistics, anecdotally speaking, what you say seems to be true here. Lots of CS graduates, but no jobs. Moreover, a lot of outsourcing of IT jobs to India. That all helps to keep the pay scale way down.
Next thing we know, Jeppen will be proclaiming how wonderful the free markets are in the "food processing" industries because so many more people are getting jobs at McDee, how wonderful the free markets are in the "retail sales" industries because so many more people are getting jobs as "greeters" at WallyMart World.
Yeah, I think its time to ignore him, he's either too far gone or maybe he's still in his denial phase. I don't mind having an honest dialogue with someone who has views that are different or even diametrically opposed to mine. I just have a hard time dealing with people who are stuck on a one note samba. I view the world as being a very complex set of chaotically interacting fractal systems that are at various stages of tipping points that will most certainly have unanticipated feed back loops and can not be understood from a simplistic rigid or dogmatic point of view. Ironically I actually would like to see real economic freedom in the US. Right now we have anything but.
Cheers and best hopes!
Thus, you are spending your time on TOD, which isn't very "stuck", and very much mind having a dialogue with a dissenting voice? :-)
And what makes you believe I wouldn't agree to that view? Precisely because the world is complex, we need economic freedom. It is a framework that is moral and allows the swift and dynamic evolution of very complex, very heterogenous and very specific solutions.
Some of you keep saying that, and I hope that you mean it, but I very much doubt that you do. Typically, when people like you categorically dismiss the economic freedom of the US, this signals a few memes of conspiracy-like theories or at least a very whiny and black-and-white outlook with regard to how the economic and political elites behave (which is either misunderstood due to leftist propaganda, or none of your business, or the type of misconduct that is hard to avoid in any system but is less rampant under the economic freedom of the US than in most other countries).
Often, you don't agree to real economic freedom policies, but use some own definition like "democracy is freedom, so economic freedom should mean economic democracy, so we are economically freer with communism, where we don't have to work for others' profit." Hopefully, you don't belong to that category. But as I said, I very much doubt you want economic freedom for real.
Yes please, let's ignore the BLS statistics I gave you guys and go with your anecdotes. I hereby retract everything I have said and apologize for presenting official statistics instead of just asking you guys for anecdotes.
Which is beneficial to both US consumers and to India. This is GOOD - this is free-market policy, that's one reason why you guys are so rich. In a hundred professions you lose 10% pay to global competition. And for each, the American consumer gains 1% in buying power. All lose 10%, all gain 100%, net 90% gain. (These are just example figures, but you get it?)
Or do you feel you should get closed borders in your particular profession, so only YOU can extort your fellow countrymen with limited competition? So all gain 89% and you gain 99%, instead of 90% for everybody?
Yes, I might. These entry-level jobs are important in any economy, and Wal-Mart, for instance, does much more for the buying power of the poor American (and for poverty eradication in Asia) than socialist policies.
Pennsuedo,
There is plenty of useful work for about ten oe twenty percent of the lawyers we have already-but the knowledge and training will be useful in other fields to a greater of lesser extent.
Just so you don't expect to skim a hundred grand (or two )off the workings of the ecomony for doimg something useless like sueing pointless lawsuits or passing a dozen more laws against offenses that are already on the books to make your name as a politician..
So many errors - I honestly don't really know where to begin.
So let me just comment on the efficiency of modern capitalism and the communism that Jay preaches: Capitalism has always proved to be more efficient. It dynamically optimizes the economy all the time, and as energy and resources becomes increasingly expensive, capitalism will adjust its functioning accordingly. If it, as Jay suggests, becomes rational to have the loaf producer, the milk producer, the cereal producer and so on all send their guys to deliver their stuff to my home, that is what will happen under capitalism.
It has always been seductive to do as Jay wants - assemble scientists (economists excluded) to run the economy for us. (It's almost as clever as letting all scientists but geologists devise the Yucca mountain nuclear waste storage!) Anyway, that central planning will never be as efficient and as dynamic as the ever-changing aggregate demand of consumers.
Also, there are lots of other stuff I'd like to oppose, such as the idea that energy scarcity would destroy jobs. Why? Why not the other way around? If oil gets scarce and we need to produce more locally, that will be less efficient and more job intense, for instance. Also, the idea that "everything is the commons" seems totally unfounded. My labour and my property is not commons, thankyouverymuch.
To my mind, there is no doubt that the policies that Jay advocates would lead to untold suffering and a certain collapse, while more of free markets makes society more robust in the face of challenges such as peak oil.
To be clear I think communism was just as much of a failure as capitalism (the current version) will be -both are ways of increasing the velocity of resource extraction while simultaneously creating a widening social status hierarchy spread. I totally disagree with you that modern capitalism, which because it uses debt is inherently growth based, can run in reverse - it can't and won' (at least in aggregate). Regarding energy, I think a better way to look at it (a concept I was helped to see by Hannes Kunz of IIER), is that energy is a form of labor, and fossil fuels have been incredibly cheap substitutes for human labor - much of efficiency gains we have seen over last 50 years have in fact been cheap fossil fuels substituting for human labor - what that looks like in reverse is not conducive to our current socio-political structure. And if you think that we live in a world of 'free markets', you haven't been paying attention.
I don't think this is true, neither for communism nor capitalism. Cuba's and North Korea's resource extraction probably haven't been increasing in velocity much. And our social status spread is likely much smaller than pre-capitalist times. Capitalism isn't a way to increase resource extraction, it's only about respecting ownership rights and allowing people to agree on trades. While communism is the opposite.
First, debt and growth aren't linked the way you seem to think. When I lend to buy a house, I just relocate my life income a bit and pay a price for this - I don't presume continous growth. And when a company lend to invest, they don't presume overall growth, just that their particular investment will be profitable. Second, I didn't talk about anything running in reverse. But I do think capitalism is best suited to handle both positive and negative growth. I don't see any reason capitalism can't handle recessions. In fact, it does, regularly.
Not really - peak oil per capita was around 40 years ago now. So efficiency gains since then have come from innovations - not from adding more fossils. Also, why a fossil squeeze would not be "conducive" is not clear. Many socialists argue that globalization is a problem - why then would more localised and labour-intensive production be a problem?
Many of you yanks have a quite strange outlook here. You think you are in the hands of the military-industrial complex, lobbyists, plutocrats or some such. But I maintain that most of the economic activity that goes on in the western world is directed by grass-root consumers' demand, and most goods flow quite freely around the globe. Sure, there are lots of government interventions that we'd be better off without, but overall, it's not like we live under communism. Also, it's clear that non-free markets is not a good reason to demand more government intervention.
Jeppen - you're right about us yanks and the strange outlook. There is as Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid strain" in American politics, which assumes vast conspiracies of the right or left and manipulation of media and markets always. It dates back at least to when Thomas Jefferson's adherents accused John Adams of being a French spy. Back here in the 21st century, the strain lives on as the party out of power hangs on the paranoid proclamations of Limbaugh and Beck. Of course, any conservative reading Hanson's piece might say that it provides evidence of the socialist conspiracy in itself!
Matt-
You lefty! Hanson is just denying my divine right to prosperity, and promoting a communist take over.
But seriously, capitalism obviously has some very big problems with reality and resources, and rewards sociopaths and their behavior, and even idolizes them.
communism nor capitalism. Cuba's and North Korea's resource extraction
Errrr, are Cuba and North Korea Communism in action or in name?
Is 'communism' what Marx talked about? If so, is that what Cuba/North Korea does?
How many of the 10 points of Marx does the US of A do?
(Is the US of A more communist because it doesn't allow kids to work in factories anymore VS Marx's original 1848 work?)
Cuba and North Korea more or less defines the range of where any attempt to implement communism will end up. Of the Manifesto's ten-point plan in USA - nothing much, fortunately.
Of the Manifesto's ten-point plan in USA - nothing much, fortunately.
Want to show how 10's not happened?
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
How about 9? Do go ahead and show how 'factory farms' is an incorrect label.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries,
How about 8? (Laws existing on equal employment show that its a goal)
8. Equal liability of all to labor.
How about 7? What happens to what you 'own' if you don't pay your taxes? Executive orders allow the State to take what's needed "in times of war". Various Bureaus of Mines and Departments of Ag.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state,
How about 6? The FCC, the DOT, the 'domestic wiretaps' that have been claimed to happen under the past Administration...these - like your support for slavery are a mere triffle?
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
How about 5? Is that not the case only because the Federal Reserve is a private owned by banks thing? They got the monopoly part - look at what happened to Liberty Dollar.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
#4 - a tax protesting rebel will have a confiscation. Various asset forfeiture laws by DEA/ATF/IRS.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Only the absolute language of #3 makes this a no go.
Yet the estate tax does take a hunk.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
How about #2? Want to argue that?
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Number 1 makes for an interesting case. If the laws can be applied to take what you have but are not - do you have private property?
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
None of this gets into the way the electronicly connected/stimulated youths share their lives with the world via the web. Kind of an ultimate communist expression.
Very creative interpretations, as usual. (I won't call you a liar this time, I'll just go with "creative".) I stand by my "nothing much, fortunately".
But the particular form of communism in the FSU had its benefits when the Soviet Union collapsed. Per Dmitry Orlov in "Reinventing Collapse" the fact that people didn't own their own homes but rather had gov't apts.meant that after collapse everyone pretty much stayed put and no one was out on the street. The fact that food was not great or plentiful meant that soviet women had already started garden plots and were prepared to feed their families. ETC. If you think as Dmitry does that we will soon be the FUSA then it is likely that we will be much worse of in the collapse than those in the FSU.
Without giving too much away, one of the plot points is about a dutiful husband who hasn't been paying attention. He is stunned to discover his world isn't what he thought it was.
I think it's kind of the same for those who believe in the myth of "free markets" and in the supremacy of unfettered capitalism.
Realizing that we stand on the apex of the Peak Oil curve changes our perspective somewhat.
Oh c'mon. That is completely backwards! ;)
Labor is just an incredibly expensive form of energy. Especially when you add healthcare and pension schemes on top of feeding the poor schmucks.
Industrialism has been about substituting mechanical effort for human labor. Heck now we're going so far as to convert food directly into energy forms the machines can use, bypassing labor's wasteful digestive system altogether.
Take the energy is labor perspective and introduce a little moral value statement like the UU's "there is an inherent worth and dignity in every human being" and you are on a slippery slope of having to appreciate and respect and cherish and preserve all of the universe's bounty.
When labor is seen as inefficient energy, then we can exploit it all under the invisible hand and create huge invisible beings called corporations and fatten them up with lots of invisible future energy, called debt. To gaze upon these marvels is to see....
Eric,
Did you see yesterday's New York Times editorial, Ayn Rand’s Revenge ?
John Glat's 'lecture' kind of says it all about the haves and their disdain for the have nots:
I think your interpretation says a lot about you - maybe not so much about the "haves".
I agree with Jay that the goal of the global system, which is the acquisition of wealth, needs to change to something less capitalistic--perhaps to "acquisition of well-being" instead. I'm concerned about his retirement of everyone; most humans need to feel productive and to feel as though they contribute to society. Unless nature takes care of it first, we are about to have a problem with the distribution of our population.
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/populationPyramid.php?US|2020
Perhaps it would be better to let the boomers retire anyway, with their SS and some slimmed down version of Medicare, and decrease work hours for all as we transition to slower living. We are definitely going to need many more millions of dispersed farmers, which might be a good role for the older folks. You say 5% of us can produce what everyone needs, using modern technology. Hmm. Make up your mind, Jay. Will we have an industrial society or not? I disagree with Jeppen's idea that capitalism is efficient, especially in its later stages as it evolves. But I agree with Jeppen that energy scarcity will demand more hands on deck to provide for basic needs, since we will be losing our energy slaves shortly.
The idea of a Manhattan project actually scares me. Science has become devoted to technological reductionist solutions, for the most part, and invariably we are going to pick the wrong scientists to lead the charge. If you doubt me, go look at the syllabi on MIT's Open Courseware. Somewhere, at some point, science has generally gone astray, and is just as addicted to oil as everyone else. At least, don't use the Manhattan project as your comparison in the meme for what we need. Maybe get the Druids or the Amish or just a more matriarchal society to clean up the mess?
And a dictatorship may be what we end up with, but the results of that will hit or miss, depending on whether it's a religious Hitler or a more benevolent version. I certainly agree that on a political spectrum such as Rokeach's, we are headed in the future for less freedom and less equality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
I agree with the one child idea, but it's probably not achievable politically. Why not just let nature take its course through famine, war, or plague? It's coming very soon anyway?
As I have shown on TOD many times before, human population growth has been slowing tremendeously, and we are most likely headed for a stable world population at some 9-10 billion. If we can continue per-capita growth, that is, but we probably can.
At the median, the standard of living on Earth has already peaked and is in decline, so any discussion of increasing global per capita growth should include the mention of widening disparity between haves and have nots globally. Currently, ave life expectancy is lower than in 1998, after increasing steadily for decades.
A quick check over at gapminder.org tells me that you are wrong on both counts. (I knew this beforehand, but I wanted to check anyway.)
Good thing you know how to read that site-it looks like Picasso designed it. Show your numbers, then you can convince me.
Sorry you have a problem with graphs. But just put the slider on 1998 and press the play button - I think it is quite obvious.
The figures are available there too. For instance:
Life expectancy 1998 India: 62 years
Life expectancy 2007 India: 65 years
Life expectancy 1998 China: 71 years
Life expectancy 2007 China: 73 years
GDP per capita 1998 India: $1528
GDP per capita 2007 India: $2452
GDP per capita 1998 China: $2264
GDP per capita 1998 China: $4959
Japan and the US also improved, and so did Russia, Iran and Ethiopia, for instance. And almost every other country.
Now, why don't you provide some basis for your original claims? I have provided something at least, while you only provided false claims and then demanded that I disprove them.
And since we had this debate before, just be a little more specific and spit out the numbers. Tremendously is a growth rate of 2.0% per annum to about 1.1% in 40 years (yes, the transition takes time), and Earth adds about 75 million per year as compared to maybe 85-90 million at a peak. You think that's good enough. And who's so sure it will stabilize at 9 billion--the U.N.?
Do most here think that the human population has been slowing tremendously?
Exactly what numbers do you need? Here too, gapminder.org is instructive. Plot the children per woman statistic on the vertical axis and play from 1960 to now.
Yes, a halving population growth rate is fantastic when you consider the advancements in health and longeivity. Please remember than when the number of children per woman gets down to around two in a country, population growth continues for some 70 years as the population pyramid transforms to a column with the same width as the base of the pyramid.
As much of the world is below two children per woman and (Russia at 1.36 and Germany at 1.33, China at 1.76 and Taiwan at 1.1, even Iran at 1.85!), we may very well find ourselves in negative population growth at the end of this century.
That being said, I'm not sure at all we'll peak at 9 billion, but it should be considered the most likely BAU scenario.
Jeppan, please remember that we are just one species among many sharing this planet. Billions of people 'need to die' if the Earth's bio spherical life support systems are to recover. Because of our plague like numbers and the way we allocate resources, we are running up against 'Peak everything'. Especially our most fundamental resource, water. Besides, I don't think per-capita growth in it's current form is a valid societal measure to take into the next economic paradigm.
"Billions of people 'need to die' if the Earth's bio spherical life support systems are to recover"
And they will. In a world of unsure bets, I will take the one sure bet...give me a population number for the world, what do you say, about 7 billion people? I will bet you that 7 billion people will die.
Much more interesting is the number being born.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_increase_history.svg
RC
Whatever the population of the world is the number of people who have to die BECAUSE we are all mortal.
The correct statement should be "The population of the Earth has to be reduced by billions by way of reduced births and earlier deaths."
What newly faces us is not death because death is our fate from the moment we first breathed air. What newly faces us is the likelihood of a reduced lifespan. Of course in such a disruption the way we die may be different than we had come to expect as well.
If the reduction of population only takes place through reduced births we have a bit of a problem, too many old people with not enough young people to take care of them, but that could lead to their earlier deaths and so both mechanisms end up in play.
Thanks RC. I have followed your threads with interest. The graph in the link is fascinating. The barking heads on the idiot box have been predicting the human population will 'stablise' around 9 billion sometime in the not too distant future. What they fail to acknowledge is that this 'stable' population will be more unsustainable than what we have now. I think we should morph the oil drum into 'Peak Population'. This message needs to get out over and above the hysteria surrounding the current strategy to address climate change right now. By drastically cutting population growth we can drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions (and importantly, take pressure off the Earth's biodiversity). There is a link to this here somewhere on the drum.
Agreed,
population and over consumption are the root cause of our problems of resource depletion and environmental degredation. There is plenty of debate about how to mitigate the effects of climate change but this is just greenwashing the real situation. Unfortunatly I dont think society can deal with the issue of population for the same reasons they cant deal with resource depletion and that is it just goes against our genetic makeup to do so.
Were heading for a bottleneck and were going to drag most of the other species on the planet through it at the same time.
Personaly I think we should stop calling it bio diversity loss, which I feel trivalizes the matter, and name it instead the 'Holocene Extinction event'. I'd like to see the look on the CNN reporters face when he reads that off the autocue.
I don't agree, obviously.
Our capitalist system was devised as the best social system to utilize an enormous resource bounty. It provides effective social control because an expanding resource pie satisfies our genetic drive for "inclusive fitness". Its intuitively obvious that capitalism breaks down into anarchy and chaos in a situation of continuously declining resources, which we will soon be experiencing. Jay is trying to find a way to mitigate the horrors of a collapsing society. There is no "solution" to the problem, only mitigation is possible.
What may be "intuitively obvious" to you is quite a strange claim. Capitalism doesn't break down by itself - but of course it can be broken by democracy or whatever system of government you have. Perhaps capitalism will be dismantled during a resource crunch, but it would be the gravest mistake ever, because it would effectively cripple our capacity to adapt and operate efficiently.
Companies and products are under an evolutionary pressure from the market. If conditions change, companies and products try to adapt and millions of ways of mitigation are tried in parallel, and the best survive. Do you suggest that the government could just pick the winners beforehand and deploy them as efficiently? You might as well say biological evolution would be ill suited to mitigate a lower oxygen share in the atmosphere and that you'd like to try gene manipulation instead. (The oxygen share has been much higher, you know.) Of course, ONLY evolution will mitigate efficiently.
Do you suggest that the government could just pick the winners beforehand
Government does pick winners beforehand.
Tax code. Contracts. Just 2 examples.
Of course, ONLY evolution will mitigate efficiently.
No. Evolution is haphazard. Things are tried that waste resources and fail. Resources that could have went to the 'right' and 'correct' choice.
I hope you are kidding me. Otherwise, you need to get a clue. (About something at least, and then shut up about everything else.)
Wow. What a stirring rebuttal.
Go ahead, show how the comments are wrong.
Eric you are exactly right. Another way Gov't picks the winners is for states and counties to give tax advantages etc to new businesses they want to attract to the area but not all businesses who might want such advantages. Happening right here in our home town....
You are also right about evolution. Since evolution is a process and not a being it has no foresight. Mutations occur. Some work, some are better and drive out old versions and some don't work at all. Some work but poorly such a sickle cell. One gene for sickle cell gives protection against malaria, two kill the unfortunate who has it but after they have had a chance to pass it on. Obviously a mutation that gave full protection but had no drawbacks would be less wasteful but since it gives more advantage than not having it it persists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease
In the US which has wiped out malaria the gene has no value. However as society breaks down and global warming heats up those who carry it (African Americans) will start to have a selective advantage over those who don't
That isn't picking winners. That is creating winners AND losers, with an overall efficiency loss. One of the advantages of the EU is that we are curbing such sub-optimizations.
Of course evolution isn't optimal resource-wise or outcome-wise, but it is massively parallel, very adaptive and very automatic, and so is better and much more robust than planning. Sickle-cell, sure, perhaps evolution got stuck in a local maxima there - evolution's main drawback is that change is gradual - you can't make new designs. But when can gene manipulation create better protection? We obviously have a hard time creating drugs to battle resistant bacteria strains, for instance. If you didn't have any evolutionary competition in, for instance, the home electronics market since the 1960-ies, what kinds of TV equipment, computers, cell phones, cameras and so on would we have? Would we have any at all?
And to continue the economic evolution analogy - why can't socialists create their own societies inside of a free market paradigm and start growing due to superior efficiency or robustness? They just need to build their socialism with contracts. Or, for that matter, why is it that more socialist US (or other) states seem to fare worse than their freer counterparts?
Oh come on, pick, create what's the difference. Ok the picked out winners to create and by so doing created some losers.
The reason we notice suboptimal evolution with sickle cell is that it happens to humans who find that dying an early painful death is suboptimal. When that happens to other creatures and plants well we just don't notice.
I think your use of evolution for TV equipment etc is a valid use of the word as used in popular talk, but it is not a valid use of the concept. Evolution in nature is random and without any agency. That kind of evolution say in a computer program would involve the programmer with no intent to make random one letter changes in code and see if the program runs and what it does. After millions of such test perhaps the programmer would have a program that did something but not necessarily anything useful for humans.
Capitalism gives us all sorts of electronic crap and food crap etc that don't necessarily make us happy. It creates pretty much insatiable wants that must be filled all the time with some new thing. And it creates opression in the rest of the world to feed our hungry maw.
Song by David Rovids, Coke is the Drink of the Death Squads
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HFZ3cH1UAI
True story first told to me by Katie Knight from the Colombia Support Network in Montana. Something like half of the union organizers that are killed in the world each year are Colombian. Colombia is also the biggest recipient of military aid in the hemisphere. This, of course, is a coincidence.
-----------
Coca-Cola came to Colombia
Seeking lower wages
They got just what they came for
But as we turn the pages
We find the workers didn't like the sound
Of their children's hungry cries
So they said we'll join the union
And they began to organize
So Coke called up a terrorist group
Called the AUC
They said "we've got some problems
At the factory"
So these thugs went to the plant
Killed two union men
Told the rest, "you leave the union
Or we'll be back again"
Now Coke did not complain
About this dirty deed
Why give workers higher wages
When Coke is all they really need
They phoned the AUC
Said "thanks, without you we'd go broke
And to show our appreciation
Here's one hundred cases of Coke"
(Chorus)
The baby drinks it in his bottle
When the water ain't no good
The dog drinks it
But he don't know if he should
Some folks say
It's the nectar of the Gods
But Coke is the drink of the Death Squads
Well the workers wouldn't take
This situation lying down
Some went up to Georgia
Said "look what's happened to our town
You American workers got downsized
And as for us we just get shot
And those of us who survive
Our teeth begin to rot"
(Chorus)
Well now that's the situation
What are you gonna do
'Cause death squads run Colombia
And they're paid by me and you
We can let Coke run the world
And see what future that will bring
Or we can drink juice and smash the state
Now that's the real thing
(Chorus)
Created March, 2002
Copyright David Rovics 2002, all rights reserved
I'm amazed that you can ask such a question. Your school really failed you, man.
So?
First, evolution is not random. Evolution has devised a few clever ways of steering changes and mutations in ways that are much more likely to succeed than blind randomness. First relevant link:
http://kriswager.blogspot.com/2008/01/evolution-is-not-random.html
Second, evolution in the marketplace is an analogy. It is quite tiresome when people throw out analogies by focusing on irrelevant differences instead of trying to understand what's relevant and alike. The market provides evolutionary pressure, a sort of natural selection, for companies and products. That's whats relevant, and that's the useful insight (provided you understand how well evolution works, of course, which it seems you don't).
Nevertheless, self-reported happiness, longevity, health and so on is very well correlated to GDP/capita.
That seems to be another PO dogma, yes. I don't buy it.
That is more of a socialist dogma, and a faulty and very dangerous one, since the complete opposite is true and the dogma probably prevents quite a bit of trade and progress.
I agree foreign aid is most often destructive. Let me ignore your "proof by quoting song lyrics".
Jeppen, if you create a winner you have also "picked" them to be the winner - you are playing with words, I am talking about reality. Playing with words doesn't change reality
Evolution is not an actor of any sort, it is a process therefore it does not devise anything. Devising is something done by someone with agency. While the success of traits that occur due to mutation, recombination or reassortment depend on the environment they occur in that success could be said to not be random. Ways that seem to us to be clever occurred and were successful and persisted, but they were not devised and therefore the existence of those seemingly clever ways of maximizing the process occurred from random changes to the genome. Unless of course you think that the great Rabbit god is maximizing rabbit traits and the great Fox god is out there maximizing fox traits or Evolution the God of all gods is hard at work maximizing everything. Just because words of agency such as selection are used as short cuts in talking about evolution doesn't mean that any "selection" is going on. What happens is that some creatures make copies of themselves and some don't. Those copies may or may not make copies of themselves. The successful self replication or failure to self replicate is evolution.
Analogies are helpful to understand things but since they are rarely exact they do not PROVE anything. You were trying to prove something by using the evolution analogy and that is not valid. I really get tired of people trying to prove things by analogy. "FallaciousReasoning. You can't prove anything from an analogy, only hope to improve informal understanding. Abuse of analogies can teach people to hate analogies completely (See: StopUsingMetaphors). However, sometimes they can be used to good effect. Let's sort this out... " full article at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ArgumentByAnalogy
In this happiness index the US which uses more energy than any other country in the world is behind Costa Rica and Malaysia
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index
A slightly different happiness index puts us at 178
The countries that scored well showed that achieving long, happy lives without over-straining the planet's resources is very feasible. InVanuatu for instance, people, roughly 200,000, live simply and happily even those who have little or no money. The poor never go hungry because they could always grow the food that they need on their fertile lands. Land is a big part of their culture.
The index uses the following indicators:
1. Ecological footprint — whether the environment can meet the demands of the country and other countries it supplies. For example, a banana plantation inCosta Rica won't necessarily be included as part of that country's ecological footprint, but will be part of the footprint of the country that consumes the bananas.
2. Life satisfaction — self-reported estimates of how satisfied people are with their lives overall.
3. Life expectancy — life expectancy rates of each country.
http://salaswildthoughts.blogspot.com/2006/07/happy-planet-index-happine...
The lyrics I quoted were based on facts that are repeated over and over in the world by our empire in its lust for wealth. But since you don't like song lyrics how about this. "The United Steelworkers union and the International Labor Rights Fund have filed suit against Coca-Cola alleging that the company and some of its bottlers utilize right-wing paramilitary groups to intimidate and assassinate labor organizers. [story from The New York Times]" http://www.therationalradical.com/dsep/coca-cola-colombia.htm
We have offshored our slaves. I could quote you facts and history till I was blue in the face and you would just deny it. But that doesn't change the fact that the US is an empire that feeds off of the poor in other countries. Perhaps you should read "Confessions of an Ecconomic Hit Man" by John Perkins. No better not it would upset your beliefs that allow you to consume the products oppression in mental comfort.
I'm amazed that you don't understand the difference between betting on the right horse and rigging the race to have a particular horse win.
That wasn't meant to be taken literally. Please assume that I have a deeper understanding of evolution than you - that will waste less time.
Yes, and thus the process of genome change, which is subject to evolution, is now more efficient than just a few arbitrary changes in arbitrary places in the offspring's DNA sequences.
Can you prove that I was trying to prove anything? I was merely trying to make solardude and you understand that the "mitigating" power of the market is better than that of Gosplan.
I think there are cultural explanations to some rankings, but what is most striking is how well the happiness indices correlates with GDP per capita.
If true, that's bad, but so what?
Workers in the export industries of poor countries typically has better conditions and wages that other workers in those countries. Export-led growth has lifted many hundreds of millions from poverty and fast-tracked their path to a middle class life. So, it is equally true that the poor in other countries feed off the US consumer. That is the essence of trade - it only exists when both parties involved feel they gain something.
I have. Perhaps you should read "In defence of global capitalism" by Johan Norberg.
Coca-Cola [alleged to have] assassinate labor organizers.
If true, that's bad, but so what?
Ya, so what if labor organizers are assassinated?
The irony is that Coke now owns Juice companies... :(
The so called incentives -handouts -given to businesses to locate in a given locality appear to me to be a race to the bottom as far as actual usefulness is concerned-may be they were good for the first few localities that used them but now they are more or less expected and do not result in more total businesses being started or expanded-at least not useful businesses that will stand on thier own feet later.
Socialism is a good idea if it is PROPERLY MANAGED-just as capitalism is a good system if it is properly regulated.The thing about socialism is that it needs to be restricted to those things where it works best, such as police and military services.It is not clear to me that socialized medicine would necessarily wprk better than a properly regulated free enterprise medical system-it certainly works better than the system we have now, which is a mongrel and in bed with the agencies that are supposed to protect us from it.
The problem with socialism is that some socialists are always more equal than the rest, depending on how strong thier particular lobby is.
So Fred-a newly arrived liberal with a hobby farm-is talking to Bill, an old time rockribbed conservative Vermont farmer and explaining socialism to him.
Bill :If I understand this correctly, if I haven't got a farm and you have two farms , you give me one of yours.
Fred: That's right.
Bill:and if I haven't got a truck and you have two trucks youy give me one of yours?
Fred: That's right .
Fred:That's right.
Bill:And if I haven't got a pig and you have two pigs you will give me one of yours?
Fred:Now dammit Bill that aint fair-you know I got two pigs!
It is so hard to manage socialism that I prefer that it is used when there is no other better alternative. I have seen socialism work well in some areas but there are manny local failures.
Another thing to think about is the centrally planned economy. Most corporations are centrally planned and we get some fabulous successes but manny companies go bankrup each year and few last over the decades.
A state needs to last for generations rather then decades or a business cycle or two and thus it needs mechanisms to renew itself. My two favorite ones is democracy and market economy, the realy good thing about them is that they are good for respecting individual people and leave room for the new and unexpected.
Where I live on Sweden we need to continue dismantlig badly working socialism and create better markets where there is competition and renewal. But at the same time we have some state institutions like our military and the justice system that dont work very well and their problems cant be solved by introducing new markets. And there are combinations, our socialistical health care system realy need markets and competition at the hospitals to become more customer friendly.
We are way over in one extreme in the socialism scale in a western culture country. The only country that is worse is probably Norway. But there is a danger in this line of reasoning and that is if you define the goal as finding the right level of socialism. Its not about defining a percentage level, its about having funtioning institutions.
I have a good example in the financial crisis. When the Swedish investment bank Carnegie failed the solvency levels and broke the risk taking rules in 2008 it were immediately taken over and bailed out by our government. This saved Carnegies clients and the business were not wiped out but all the owners who had taken the large risks were wiped out. Carnegie were then sold ASAP on the open market and most of the cost for the taxpayers were recovered. What kind of bitch slapping has the risk takers behind the US financiel crisis recieved when the US government bailed them out? And have the government bailouts helped the market to normalise to a free market situation?
I find it worrying that one of the more socialistical western countries seems to know more about the value of free markets then the old free market champion that have waged hot and cold war for personal and economical freedom. But we have been digging ourselves out of a socialistical hole for about 20 years while USA seems to be blundering into one, or rather some kid of corporativism.
The so called incentives -handouts -given to businesses to locate in a given locality appear to me to be a race to the bottom as far as actual usefulness is concerned-may be they were good for the first few localities that used them but now they are more or less expected and do not result in more total businesses being started or expanded-at least not useful businesses that will stand on thier own feet later.
Socialism is a good idea if it is PROPERLY MANAGED-just as capitalism is a good system if it is properly regulated.The thing about socialism is that it needs to be restricted to those things where it works best, such as police and military services.It is not clear to me that socialized medicine would necessarily wprk better than a properly regulated free enterprise medical system-it certainly works better than the system we have now, which is a mongrel and in bed with the agencies that are supposed to protect us from it.
The problem with socialism is that some socialists are always more equal than the rest, depending on how strong thier particular lobby is.
So Fred-a newly arrived liberal with a hobby farm-is talking to Bill, an old time rockribbed conservative Vermont farmer and explaining socialism to him.
Bill :If I understand this correctly, if I haven't got a farm and you have two farms , you give me one of yours.
Fred: That's right.
Bill:and if I haven't got a truck and you have two trucks youy give me one of yours?
Fred: That's right .
Fred:That's right.
Bill:And if I haven't got a pig and you have two pigs you will give me one of yours?
Fred:Now dammit Bill that aint fair-you know I got two pigs!
Another way Gov't picks the winners is for states and counties to give tax advantages
Alas, I can not find the 2 scholarly papers showing the ROI on lobbying elected officials to get favorable laws as I can't find the correct search engine magic (the author's names)
But that was one of biggest ways winners are chosen - they choose themselves via lobbying.
But lets take the bank bailout as an example.
The banks with the large profits, big bonuses and government bailouts sure seem to have gotten an advantage at the hands of government action.
AMEN BROTHER !!!
Except ...
If I recall my basic biology correctly ...
Blood sucking parasites who feed on people,
and give them diseases and help them to die more quickly
merely because the parasites are taking care of number one
Creatures who pretend to be one thing but are another
Creatures who blindly stampede en mass over the cliff
The first two I agree with, but we typically don't allow such a "full ecosystem" in our economies. We disallow fraud and slavery, for instance. (Real fraud and real slavery that is - not advertisments and wage labour.)
The third I don't really agree with. But I guess to you, it is an important metaphor for PO ignorance?
jeppen,
I must say you have been one entertaining hoot and holler on this thread.
But it's time to move on to off-troll topics.
The point was that unregulated and free "evolution" leads to all sorts of outcomes, both good and bad. The bad ones (i.e. parasites, Ebola viruses, HIV, etc.) do not disappear simply because they are "bad". Sometimes they flourish and dominate the system.
Similarly, unregulated and free wheeling markets "evolve" to have all sorts of outcomes, both good and bad. The bad ones (i.e. parasitic corporate entities, online viruses, freakonomics, default swap hedges, etc.) do not disappear simply because they are "bad". Sometimes they flourish and dominate the system.
The horses represent all of us. We are all creatures of the herd.
"Entertaining" and "troll" is just ways for you to convince yourself that what I say can be dismissed, right?
I think it is meaningless to talk about good and bad in nature.
When are parasites and diseases most likely to really dominate a system? When you have established planned monocultures! The centrally planned system isn't very robust. You keep out weed, parasites and diseases - for a while. Then you get overwhelmed by something new. The PO community's worry that the system isn't robust enought should make them scream for economic freedom.
You think you can avoid parasites and diseases with the correct regulations? Perhaps, sometimes - but often it's the stuff you can't avoid or even stimulate with the regulations that will really bite you. And you'd be well advised to be careful about what the market is better suited to take care of itself, and when regulations do more harm than good. This is much more common than people ordinarily assume. Central planning and activism comes naturally to people - they feel insecure when they leave stuff to sort itself out.
In agriculture it is called "pest control".
For human (and animal) populations it is called "vaccination".
And yet, in GB, 4.4 million cattle was killed in response to the mad cow disease. Fortunately, there was pigs, chicken, lamb and fish, and also Britons could import milk and meat. Now, monocultures may be very efficient at what they do, but they are not very dynamic and not very robust. (They are wide-open for black swans, in PO-speak.)
But hey, we can stop discussing this analogy. The point of it all was to transfer understanding of the strengths of natural selection/evolution to the field of economics - to explain why markets are strong, robust and agile in adapting to the demand of grass roots. But if those strengths of nature is not understood by you guys, then there can be no transfer either. We may leave it at that.
Jay's piece does come across as disturbingly naive in many ways. Yes.
A decent proposal would have to take account of much more than energy - intergenerational conflicts, technological and social change, inequalities and oppressions, renewable resource depletion ... all difficult and intertwined problems.
A comment on your comment, though, Jeppen. "Capitalism has always proved more efficient". Jay is in large part talking about ends (although he does not articulate that well), and you are talking about means. At what is Capitalism more efficient? At exploiting resources to produce profit.
Why is Capitalism efficient? Well, Capitalism is a special case of bureaucracy, which has proved to be the most efficient organisational system -- of the ones tried so far. ;-) Capitalism is bureaucracy with the single purpose of producing profit.
Jay proposes to replace this form of bureaucracy with a (single-instance) Huxleian bureaucracy of technical types, which would have the purposes of maximising the equity of distribution while minimising resource consumption. Of course this bureaucracy would never produce the same quantity or type of goods as Capitalism: it has different goals.
"The single purpose of producing profit"? This may or may not a capitalist owner's purpose. The governments' or the voters' purpose with allowing capitalism may be that it allows widespread wealth (or even wellfare).
Minimizing resource consumption (why would you want this?), you can do with far less government intervention - just add taxes to energy and materials. Maximising equity of distribution, well, then you need communism, I'll admit as much. But for me, that is an evil purpose, for example in the sense that it is not compatible with human nature and so will need heavy repression to uphold.
Also, from an even more practical viewpoint, maximising equity of distribution is not conducive to innovation, which has been the prime driver of growth and improved standard of living and well-being in the world.
Jeppen you might want to read the case of Dodge vs Ford in which the "The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders, as opposed to the community or its employees. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Company
It may be that the Michigan Supreme Court overstepped the law, none the less this ruling is often cited to keep alive the idea that the single purpose of a corporation is to make money. I bet if you polled the owners or boards of every for profit company in the US 99.99 would tell you it is to make profit. That is why there is a separate type of corporation called a "non-profit" for organizations that have social good as their purpose. For profit organizations are FOR PROFIT.
I agree that that is the typical case, especially when ownership is spread among stockholders, but owners can and sometimes do have other goals.
"Also, the idea that "everything is the commons" seems totally unfounded. My labour and my property is not commons, thankyouverymuch".
Jeppen IMHO 'private property' and its 'private use' are some of the dysfunctional spin offs of humans moving from a roaming hunter gatherer culture to a sedentary agrarian culture. As long as we hold on to the concept, and the exploitative behaviours of 'private' and 'mine', there can be no way forward. Especially in an increasingly crowded, desperate world. The question is not can we change. It is will, in its essence, we change.
Efficiently enforced private property rights are among the strongest predictors of countries' economic outcomes. Exploitation is great - without exploitation, there is no progress. Your dreams of change leads back to hunter-gatherer societies, at best. Trade and property is necessary and good in any large-scale community.
No, that is your cultural bias. I think you are fractally wrong! Capitalism is as dead as the dodo, it is not a viable system anymore. There are other ways of organizing societies. IMHO we need a completely new paradigm. I don't think that any of the systems that have served us in the past will do so in the future. I don't have a clue what the next paradigm will look like or be called when historians look back on it. I am however willing to wager, that if humans do not go extinct and we find a way forward, it will look nothing like any of the more recent historical "ISMS". Either we achieve Enlightenment 2.0 or we crawl back into the caves for a while, either to die there or to emerge again into a completely new order.
http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/DISCUSSIONS/N55_TEXTS/AB_LAND.html
Cheers and best hopes!
No, not cultural bias - scientific fact. Other than that, you just say that you have no idea about the future. I can believe that.
WTF?
And you have what a crystal ball? Oh, tell me please what will the future be like? Perhaps like the Thanksgiving Day Turkey's? A la Nassim Taleb's BlackSwan...
Methinks you are either in severe denial of reality or you have been so profoundly brain washed into defending an indefensible ideological position that you are completely incapable of thinking that anything outside of your narrow perspective could ever come to be.
I think Jeppen is being too much of a true-believer in this thread, and when he's talking about the successful 'Outcomes' of these Capitalist behemoths, it is about the fantastic velocity we've achieved. But.. ANY car can do a couple hundred Miles per Hour if you toss it off a cliff, which is what Capitalism has done by modelling itself on the 'efficient' (FAST) extraction of all the resources it can grab. All that potential (energy), spent so hard!
Looking at China's growing GDP doesn't tell us how close that big dog in mid-leap is to the end of it's chain. But so far, it's been one glorious bound!
Bob
Yeah, Chinese growth is about as sustainable as a lead balloon. There is no way the costs of their environmental degradation will not end up biting them in the butt. Hip Hip Hooray for Capitalism!
Do you think China and other developing countries will do more or less environmental damage than western countries did during their industrialization/maturation phase. I believe "less". Why? B/c tech is better now and because their phase will be more compressed in time due to more knowledge and so on.
Tech may be 'better', but the times and money concerns have become more desperate. Which do you think carries more sway? We KNOW how not to pollute, but it's the money that keeps the US from doing it with any real commitment. You still can't eat freshwater fish in Maine without fortifying the Mercury in your amalgam fillings.
The 'compressed time' hardly sounds like an advantage, if you look at both ends of what's compressing it.
I don't see that times and money concerns are more desperate. What do you mean?
I think there is much more commitment now. Regulations have tightened across the board. And also, better tech often yields great improvements even in the absence of regulations.
When is the last time you have been there and had a meaningful number of datapoints to come to any conclusion?
Rgds
WeekendPeak
p.s.
In general, the Jay Hanson article has so many holes in it that it isn't funny.
How did it pass TOD editor scrutiny????? There are statements without facts to back them up, a complete lack of understanding of business, capital formation and human behavior and drive.
Sloppy, very sloppy.....
Jokuhl thank you for that image --- yes our civilization is like that - we think we are accelerating towards heaven when it is in fact the hard ground of reality that we are soon going to hit.
Every civilization before this global one we are now in has failed. That is a historical fact. Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for almost 200,000 years - that is also a fact. We don't need to find another way of living. If we don't go extinct we will likely be forced to live as the mammals that we are and forget our delusions of being gods.
You still doesn't say anything useful. Historically, economic freedom have resulted in better outcomes. That's the scientific fact. Now a lot of you guys are saying that "it won't work in reverse", "capitalism needs growth" and so on, but that seems to be little more than an arbitrary dogma.
What the future will be like? I don't know, but economic freedom seems to work best for us in handling whatever comes our way. It is possible that, with some luck, limited state interventions can improve on things, especially when it comes to (real) externalities, but then they have to be well designed so as not to disturb the market too much. For instance, a carbon tax could work out nicely, as tobacco taxes have before. (Carbon taxes could also prove to be quite bad, but as I said, with some luck...)
Historically? What part of history? What scociety? Better? For whom?
Perhaps a good place to start examining these questions might be Jared Diamond's Guns Germs & Steel.
You might also agree with most of what Gregory Clark chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California has to say in this talk given in October of 2007.
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0/gr...
However I would be very curious as to what Professor Clark has to say of the prospects for the survival of "genetically evolved capitalists" if the environment changes, as it now seems to be doing, in a world of diminishing natural resources.
In 2007 when he gave this talk the economic collapse of the US had not yet occurred and there is little to indicate that he was aware of the implications of "Peak Oil" and limits to growth because of resource depletion.
What I am saying is, that what happened historically to bring us to our current predicament, makes the so called beneficial aspects of capitalism moot! Darwinian survival of the fittest system does not guarantee that capitalism is going to continue to be the most adapted system going forward. Capitalism flourished because the environment provided very cheap energy for a while. Unless you know of a way to contine to provide that it can't continue.
Again, you don't say anything useful. You just give a few vague references and repeat the dogma.
And you haven't answered these questions:
Which is why I suggested Jared Diamond as a starting point, at least he is scientific in his analysis whereas you are not, you can't even define your parameters or provide data points. You just keep repeating the same line, It's better, It's better!
For example: Is capitalism better than some other system for the 40 plus million working US citizens who do not have access to health care because profit is supposedly good for the shareholders of the health insurance companies?
If so, how are you quantifying the parameters? How are you defining better?
You can't really have an honest scientific discussion about this issue unless you do that and unless I've missed something in your post I haven't seen anything other than blind, unthinking, spewing of ideology from you. That is about as far as one can get from "Scientific Fact".
Whoa, man, you really think name-dropping Jared puts you in a great position to demand that I disprove your nonsense about capitalism being dead and Chinese growth unsustainable? How about you proving your theses instead?
In the rest of this discussion, I have provided numerous links to support my viewpoints with statistics. Regarding economic freedom working, you can have a look at an index of economic freedom near you. If you need to know when it has worked better, I guess the answer is "since the dawn of industry, at least". Better for whom - for all, of course.
Now, please feel free to whine some more about me being unscientific, while you provide nothing but unsupported dogma and irrelevant name-dropping yourself.
I think the 40 million Americans who don't have health care might beg to disagree.
Or the people losing their jobs and homes all over the country while the free market capitalist who can't stand on their own, need to be bailed out with corporate welfare. It does seem to work for the 1% of the population who control resources and energy and hold political and economic power. Certainly not the disenfranchised majority.
Not much to base your assertions on when compared to 10,000 years or so of human civilizations.
BTW for the record let's not confuse "economic freedom" with what we currently call "capitalism" as it is exists currently in the US.
Anyone who argues that economic growth, Chinese or anyone else's, is sustainable, obviously is not making a scientific argument.
I'll eat every word I have written if you can provide "Scientific" proof that China's economic growth is sustainable
They might, but they would be wrong. They too profit enormously from healthcare innovation and overall productivity. The US poor is the envy of other countries' poor. (And BTW, 10 million of those 40 million without insurance has household incomes of more than $75,000. It's quite rational to ignore insurance if you can afford to pay yourself.)
Well, everybody wants free money, even capitalists. That's why economic freedom is so important.
This is just more socialist propaganda. In the real world, it is clear how HDI and happiness improves with GDP per capita.
To find out what works with the global advanced society of today I have checked what works with the advanced global society of today. (Surprise!)
Let's not. But let also admit that the US is very high up there in economic freedom indices.
Then define "sustainable". Taiwan and South Korea started earlier than China and has had good progress long after they passed the point where China is at today.
Sure, you might take the standpoint of Chairman Mao when asked what he thought of the French Revolution: "It's too early to tell." But if we are talking about whether China's growth can continue as Taiwan's did, not whether a PO armageddon is going to kill off most humans, then the answer is "yes we can!".
Sustainable growth is an oxymoron, either you get that or you don't.
So if China ever ends up in a recession, however temporary, it's growth weren't "sustainable"? Strange definition.
You obviously do not get it! Growth is described by an exponential function. By definition it can not continue once the resources that fuel it run out. There is *NO* such thing as infinite sustainable physical growth in a finite environment. China like all growth based economies will hit a limit wall beyond which it can not go. Why is this simple concept so hard to understand?
BTW, This has nothing to do with ideology other than to show that dogmatic belief in "ISMS" and free market ideologies is at odds with mathematics, physics and the immutable "Laws" of nature.
You might try to repeal the laws of thermodynamics I'm sure some smart lawyer would be willing to petition the universe for you for a modest fee in Latinum...
Yes, I obviously got it. Your statement of Chinese growth being unsustainable IS meaningless. Thanks for clarifying that. I don't care whether growth becomes impossible in the year 2300 because we have invented everything already.
The Chinese economy until recently was growing at 9% a year, do the math yourself.
Maybe you should watch this presentation by Dr Bartlett:
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461
I fully expect the Chinese to have setbacks and just as Japan, they will, at the latest, stop growing that fast when they catch up to the western world. It's easy to play catch up - the rest of the world boot-straps you. It's harder to lead the way.
When I say that Chinese growth is sustainable, I mean that they can keep growing fast in the coming two decades at least (likely more) and eventually get to the per-capita level of Taiwan (that is, fivefold, but Taiwans GDP should be seen as a moving target.)
While you use a definition of "sustainable" that in practice is meaningless.
Jeppen,
As long as you believe you are one of the "winners" in the game, it all sounds fair and good.
Once you end up on the loser's side, it doesn't look so fair and just any more.
Consider the captains of capitalism in pre-bailout days: Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, etc. None of them would have agreed to bail outs for others. But when the outcome of the game changed for them, so did their tune.
As I said, all are winners under economic freedom and capitalism.
And as I have also said, even capitalists want free money and subsidies for themselves. That's why we need economic freedom, so politicians don't bail-out and don't subsidise.
As I said, all are winners under economic freedom and capitalism.
*points at*
http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5859#comment-554288
Yup, all the things that are wins about the freedom to exploit and make a profit.
I have learned a lot about health insurance because that's my business. Here are some points you may not be aware of:
13 million of those 45 million are illegal immigrants
Another large percentage (I believe 13 million more) are kids under 25 who think they really don't need it
Another large percentage is people I speak with people every week who have SUV's or are heading for a vacation but don't think it's a priority.
That said, another percentage is people with pre-existing conditions who have to go to the state reinsurance pools (in 44 states) which are very expensive (and should be subsidized by the govt.) That is a problem the govt should get involved in.
My other point is that health insurance is outragously expensive in America by far in most part because of Government actions and inactions
1. 13++ million illegal imimigrants get free health care from hospitals who have to pass on the cost
2. Medicare for over 65 and medicaid for poor reimburse doctors and hospitals miserably and they have to pass on the cost to the under 65 crowd
3. Medical malpractice premiums are though the roof and govt refuses to limit. Not only does this drive up costs it creates defensive medicine. A close relative was given a very expensive medication for a tumor that was cut out because the doctor was concerned about lawsuits and if she had begun the medication she would have had to take it for life.
4. 6 States like NY have really terrible enrollment rates (a rich State like NY is 5th lowest in the country) because the government mandates coverage for all with no age discrimination and no denials and young people cann't afford premiums two to three times higher than states like Ct.
5. Goverment mandates from states say insurance companies have to pay for psychologist,chiropracters, invitro fertilazation. They have to pass on the cost.
6. Insurance carriers are prohibited from selling insurance across state lines so there is no free competition.
The insurance industry operates on very thin profit margins (36th from the top of industries) at about 3%.
Blaming capitalism is buying into what the govt has been feeding you. Get the govt out of the way and premiums would probably be less than 1/2.
And that's not even mentioning that medicare and social security have most of 53 trillion in debt that along with energy will crush the American lifestyle.
Interesting! However this is from Gallup:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/123509/at-16.6-number-uninsured-americans-tie...
Note: They are not saying residents or illegal aliens, they are saying American adults, which I understand to mean citizens, certainly at least legal residents.
16.6% of the American population is roughly 50 million people. Are you disputing those figures?
I don't care how you slice it or dice it the system that is supposed to provide health care to the American people doesn't seem to be doing that.
53 trillion dollars Ass-turd-oid?
Teabagger wallstreetexpress
is channeling Fuxnutjob Glenn Beck
('I'm thinking about poisoning Nancy Pelosi')
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/26/beck.deficit/index.html
What a dope.
13m. Out of 350m+. Clearly, a big problem...
And no where in your 'learning' have you addressed the government policies that bring the US of A the high fructose corn syrup and all the other things Americans put in their mouths.
Huh.
Exploitation is great - without exploitation, there is no progress. Trade and property is necessary and good in any large-scale community.
Yea, the greatness of the slave trade.
A fine example of exploitation, trade, property and operation in a large-scale community.
Haha, very funny. You are the TOD clown, yes?
You Ma'am are the one taking the position that slavery is acceptable.
Actually beyond acceptable. You've declared exploitation great. All I have done is pointed out a case of exploitation with all the features you liked and you've not said "no, I am wrong".
You're a liar - nowhere have I said slavery is acceptable.
No Ma'am. You are the one who said that Exploitation is great.
I've pointed out one of biggest historic cases of exploitation - slavery.
You've not stated "Seems I was wrong about exploitation" - You've instead held fast on your point that exploitation is great Ma'am.
And what makes the slavery position relevant to Mr. Hansen:
http://dieoff.org/page34.htm
'Make us your slaves, but feed us.' - an endpoint that Mr. Hansen feels is the best case.
I'm not very inclined to discuss with liars. Sorry.
You speak about capitalism and communism as if it were the only two form of social organisation who ever existed. These two notions appeared after the industrial revolution, so just about two centuries ago !! And the problem with peak oil is precisely a problem with industrial society. Capitalism has proved to be efficient in increasing production, nothing else, except if you consider well-being being just about material consumption.
Don't mix trade and capitalism, it's true that trade have proven to be a good factor of progress but it has not allways been between capitalist societies. Besides, more than the exchange of good, it was the exchange of ideas, cultures and science wich was proven to be good and most of the profound inovations which allowed technical progress took place before capitalism. Before the industrial revolution, there were some system that you would like to call capitalism but it was not : the merchant were organised as guild or fellowship not as modern multinationals, the people was not organised as individuals (individualism appeared also 2 or 3 centuries ago). People defined themselves by their positions in a communities, or in a feudal system, or in a felloship or in a family but not as independent entities.
I don't say those societies were better, i just say there is room to imagine new form of social organisations
It optimizes the economy for some people but not for every one : 1 000 000 vaccines cost the same than a rolls royce, does it means that a rolls royce is as beneficial for the societies as 1 000 000 vaccines ?
It dynamically optimizes the economy through the price but the price doesn't necessarily reflect the true value of things because you can't put a price on a human life, you can't put a price on a ressource which a future application has not been discovered yet, you can't put a price on the whole earth because there is just one for six bilion peoples!!!
First, it is proven every day on tv that the demand of consumer can be manipulated!!
Second, what you should say is "Capitalism adapt to ever-changing information on aggregate buying powers". The word buying power is important because if you don't have a middle class, this system just doesn't work and the word information is even more important because the "free market" is all about information wich is a constructed thing and as such does not allways reflect the real world, especially if it's done by economists, lobbyists and traders. That's why scientists (from both human science and hard science)should participate in the construction of this information, and the actual crisis prove me right!!
Excellent.
Wrong. Let me be a bit lazy and just quote wikipedia: "Capitalism as a system developed incrementally from the 16th century in Europe, although capitalist organization existed in the ancient world, and early aspects of merchant capitalism flourished during the Late Middle Ages.[6][7][8] Capitalism became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism.[8] Capitalism gradually spread throughout Europe, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, it provided the main means of industrialization throughout much of the world.[9]"
This is nonsense, of course. Everything else, soft values such as health and happiness, improves with increasing production.
It seems capitalism is what we'll get, assuming economic and social freedom. If other organisations were more efficient or made people happier, such organizations would slowly emerge from below and gradually take over, just as capitalism once did.
Yes. If the medicine capitalist can't buy rollses, why would he produce a million doses of vaccine? We work and we invest because of the payoff and because of property rights. Dismantle those and health care, among many other things, will deteriorate (or stop improving as much) as well. You can dream about a world of altruists working for the pure joy of helping others, and you can dream about benevolent governments that always do the right thing and are all-knowing. But you won't get it. Experience tells us economic freedom drives progress - not socialist dreams.
Sure, but on average, it is a force for progress that corporations compete for our demand. Banning commercials, ads and so on would be tremendously stupid.
Information would be lot less accurate if it weren't for those.
You didn't really read this definition of wikipedia : the word capitalism appeared in the XVIIIe century(after the begining of the industrial revolution). Why ? Because before that, even if it marginaly existed, it was not the main structural standard of organisation for the societies. (note that the definition in wikipedia is not exactly the same under differents languages and it could also change with time)
Anyway, I don't know what is exactly your definition of capitalism, it seems to me that you are mixing a lot of differents concepts in a kind of big mash and at the end, the only conclusion looks like : "the US system is the best one and the only one".
It's like they can just be capitalism or communism and there is no nuance : capitalism, finance, freedom, competition, democracy vs communism, big state dictature...etc
Yet each of this concept have a history and are sometime linked but they can also exist separately :
- you can have capitalism witout democracy : for example Italy with Mussolini or argentina with Pinochet.
- and democracy witout capitalism: the first greek democracy was not based on capitalism
- you can have freedom witout capitalism : ask the natives before cristophe colomb if they were less free than americans today
- and capitalism without freedom : freedom is not a simple concept, you can be free by certain aspects and not free by other aspects, there is economic freedom, freespeech, private freedom, if it were simple, there would be no lawyer and you would be free to buy the land of your neighbour for 1$ with the help of a gun : No rules doesn't mean free !
- you can have free trade without capitalism : bartering, trade between cooperatives of farmers...etc
- you can have big banks without capitalism : The Medicis were bankers for lords and kings of europe not for private compagnies
- You can have free trade without finance : see for example the system of trade between rich arab countries during middle age.
- you can have economic freedom without economic mobility : recent statistics shows that the economic mobility in the US is now worst than in europe due to the high cost of education in the US.
- you can have inovation without competition : see the open source community and ask Google, and note that most of big discoveries are made in public labs
- you can have capitalism without competition : monopols and collusions are more frequent than you think in the US...
- you can have capitalism without meritocracy (inheritence) and meritocratie without capitalism (ancien china)
- you can have competition inside a public agency and cooperation inside a private company
...etc
In fact you are very ideological. Concepts are tools, it's not black or white and as every conceptual thinking, when the gap between the idea and the reality become too wide, the concept become at best useless, at worst dangerous. If a society doesn't even want to think outside the box because of ideology, it's doom !
It's obviously linked but it's not obviously equivalent. (if it were equivalent you would soon have to move to china because they are starting to produce much more than the US and they have an exotic definition of capitalism ). Anyway I have travelled quite a bit and I can assure you that you can't predict the well being in a country just by looking at the GDP number.
Have you ever heared about Human Development Index or Genuine Progress Indicator ?
Maybe you don't see it but it's happening now under diverse aspects. Which pills do you want, the blue or the red ?
I don't wan't to argue about the healthcare system in the US but indeed it's a way to give a price to a human life ! In a lot of countries around the world, they still produce vaccines and they don't buy rolls with that... and doctors works for a good salary but their aim is not to buy a yacht! Pasteur, the guy who invented vaccines didn't do it for money !
I never said that but i could dream of a world of people working for a descent wage and not people looking forward to stop working because they have enough property. Anyway it's already the case for 99% of people even in capitalist economy.
You don't seem to understand that democratie means that govt is elected by people. When people say "big goverement vs us", it meens the democracy is ill !
There is a thousand way to organise a democracy from the small scale of local gvt to the big scale with a thousand way to distribute roles between public, semi-public, communities and private sector. All that require a working democracy, is it the case in the US, i'm not sure.
Corporation doesn't compete for your demand, they compete for your money ! If you have demand without money, you are worthless! If in a post peak oil economy, you have less and less money, what happens ?
This is just an affirmation and the work of the three last Nobel Prize for Economics is precisely to argue with that.
Yes, I have been mixing some, but capitalism as such isn't that well defined. We can talk about economic freedom instead, if you like, b/c that's what I'm really after. I think capitalist organization is a consequence.
And you then give a lot of nice examples, that I won't address individually. Let me just point out that democracy and capitalism seems to work extremely well together, and that your example of freedom without capitalism was perhaps the weakest of them all (the Christofer Columbus example). I think democracy is hard to attain and not very robust in the absence of capitalism and a healthy measure of economic freedom.
China is poor per capita. (Btw, I'm not American, I'm a Swede.)
I have. But do you know how well those correlate with GDP? Look at this:
http://www.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/posts/Human1.jpg
Or what about happiness vs GDP:
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/09/09/standing-up-for-gdp/
No, I don't see it much. But if you're right, then lets wait and see.
Then you are "giving a price to a human life" everytime you use you money for something else than survival instead of giving that money away to African charity, right? I don't accept that line of reasoning. Your money is yours. You have earned them, or somebody has given them to you. You may do with them as you please, and that is generally both moral in principle and in consequence. If your resources and labour were means for the well-being of strangers, you'd be a slave and that would be morally wrong both in principle and in consequence.
I think they do almost everywhere. Also, please note that 76% of all biotech research funds are spent in the US. The US is driving innovation and the rest of the world is cherrypicking the results and complaining about the costs.
So other countries doctors are more altruistic than US doctors?
Of course, people do not always choose what's in their long-term interest. Thus big government.
If you don't have money, you aren't a part of the demand. And no, "you" are not necessarily worthless b/c you don't have any money. (You socialists like to confuse people's general worth or value as human beings with the value of what they do or of what they have.) You get paid for what you do - the employer don't value your whole being. And in the store, you buy with your money, not with your heartfelt needs.
I hope we demand economic freedom, so we get the most real value for the little money we have.
No, they are not.
I'm curious : you come from a country which is rank 7th on the HDI, 10th by the GDP per capita, 4th most competitive economy though only 27th on the Index of Economic Freedom, a healthy democracy, a country where even the conservative party would defend universal health care and a certain level of social safety net, a country where public sector spending amounts to 53% of the GDP so that you can qualify as a mixed economy. So where are you in the political spectrum in you country ?
So, maybe when you talk about a healthy measure of economic freedom, we can still agree on that, it depend on what you call a healthy measure !
Anyway, the subject here is not general politic in a business as usual way but is capitalism still viable in a declining ressource context and constraints on the industrial society?
Well it's like saying temperate climate and development seems to work well together but non-Democracy and capitalism seems to work extremely well together also. I think democracy is hard to attain and not very robust in the presence of too much unregulated capitalism when you can vote with money.
As always, you just recite textbook free market ideology and everything looks like we live in a perfect world...
Why is the Christofer Columbus example the weakest ? can you explain ? Is this example too far from your dichotomous way of looking at the world ?
About the corellation between GDP and Human Development Index, I really don't understand because the GDP is already part of the calculation of HDI (I generally like what Stiglitz say but here I really don't understand !!)
So let's speak about genuine progress indicator....
Anyway my personal experience is that, a few years ago, I have worked or visited countries such as Djibouti, Ethiopia, Yemen, Viet Nam
There respective rank in term of GDP at the time was :
1 Djibouti - 2 Yemen - 3 VietNam - 4 Ethiopia
My subjective rank in term of which country seems more happy and liveable:
1 VietNam - 2 Ethiopia - 3 Yemen - 4 Djibouti
This is subjective but an observation as a witness can't be rejected just because it doesn't match the theory.
You are twisting the argument in a very agile way but your premices are wrong : except if you live in an isolated farm in Siberia, you didn't earned all your money all by yourself : you can't earn money without the whole complex system of infrastructures, educative system, fundamental science research and all other externalities ! That's the whole principle of development ! And so you have to pay for it one way or another !
Another twisted argument, I don't argue for charity, I argue for human rights : Your freedom is a right, there is a cost to protect it, human cost, financial cost but there is no price, no market price for your freedom. Maybe in some countries, there is a market price for the right not to be killed by your neighbour, you have to pay corrupt cops for your protection, would you advocate a market price for the right not to be killed ?
If I think there is a right for each children in my country to see a doctor when they are ill, there is a cost which society as a whole try to manage but it can't be a market price that each individual has to bear by himself.
I'd like some number about how much of these funding come from company like monsanto which research are often... useless!
Let's be more precise and let's speak about pharmaceutical companies : seven out of the ten Market leaders come from country where there is universal healthcare !
well... maybe yes, but i guess it's the system which make you more or less altruistic
Very very twisted
Anyway, I'm not a communist or a socialist !!
Joseph E. Stiglitz (Nobel price 2001)
"Traditional neoclassical economics literature assumes that markets are always efficient except for some limited and well defined market failures. More recent studies by Stiglitz and others reverse that presumption: It is only under exceptional circumstances that markets are efficient. Stiglitz has shown (together with Bruce Greenwald) that "whenever markets are incomplete and /or information is imperfect (which are true in virtually all economies), even competitive market allocation is not constrained ".(wikipedia)
Roger Myerson(Nobel price 2007)
"Myerson made a path-breaking contribution to mechanism design theory when he discovered a fundamental connection between the allocation to be implemented and the monetary transfers needed to induce informed agents to reveal their information truthfully. Mechanism design theory allows for people to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not."(wikipedia)
Oliver Williamson (Nobel price 2009)
Oliver Williamson is credited with the development of the term "Information Impactedness", which applies in situations where it is difficult to ascertain what the costs to information are. This condition exists mainly because of uncertainty and opportunism, though bounded rationality is involved as well. It exists when true underlying circumstances relevant to the transaction, or related set of transactions, are known to one or more parties but cannot be costlessly discerned by or displayed for others."(wikipedia)
Don't know how "public spending" is defined. The taxation is around half of GDP, but much of that is routed to welfare checks - pensions, parental leave, unemployment benefits, illness benefits and so on, and the recipients spend that money for real. The government runs almost all healthcare and education, but most parts of the economy is fully private.
I routinely vote for the the biggest right-wing party, the "moderate" party, which is also dominant in the current right-wing coalition government. Unfortunately, in our parliamentary system, probably for historical reasons, we don't have very ideologically pure parties, and thus no libertarian party. The moderate party consists of both libertarians and conservatives.
Capitalism works well in many contexts, but we want democracy, and thus the question is if we can pair democracy with anything else than capitalism. I believe not.
Is that thought compatible with the history of industrialization? I think not.
We can't ask 1400-ish natives what they think, and if we could, they wouldn't understand the question as they have no experience with the modern world, and we couldn't compare their answers to anything. Instead of rural natives, let's ask the metropolitan gay (especially if he has moved from a rural context) where freedom is.
It is, but the other parts also correlate well with GDP per capita.
There is no theory here that is not derived from empirical data and statistics. As I say, subjective happiness correlates well with GDP per capita.
Your argument amounts to me being morally obliged to be a slave to others b/c Swedish society has paid for my education, my ancestors have built the systems and so on (never mind my parents paid their taxes). It would be morally reprehensible for me to, for instance, move to low-taxing USA, right? But I don't buy that moral argument either. Everything I have, I have gotten from voluntary exchanges, except from the government services and so on, but those I or my parents have paid for with taxes. I don't accept slavery. Everyone should be allowed to be his own end, not a means to someone elses end.
That is twisted if anything. Many of the "human rights" are charity, pure and simple.
Not for the right, but for the protection. I subscribe to negative rights but not to positive rights. I don't agree that there is a right to healthcare, for instance, because that implies someone elses slavery. If you feel there should be a right to have X, then you and others who think like you can pay for it.
Such companies research are often very useful. Are you an environmentalist nut who hates gene manipulation and so on? Are you advocating inefficient agriculture? Or have you just overread on leftist populist writers?
As I said, where is the innovation? In the US, mostly.
And so on, which is totally beside the point. You argued that information is less accurate due to economists, traders and lobbyists. I pointed out that you are dead wrong - that those professions obviously try and to a large degree succeeds in improving information availability. None of your citations support your thesis. (They do contain the word "information", but that isn't enough.)
Are you sure about that? Here is a quote from John Mavrogordato who proudly labeled himself a socialist (He published these words in 1917 when socialism was more intellectually respectable than it is today.):
Do you really disagree with this statement?
I think that you are right not to want shoehorn your thinking about the best form of economic organization under the label of some particular ‘ism’. However, I do not think that the statement ‘I am not a socialist' is very meaningful. Furthermore such a statement tends to strengthen the Manichaen world view in which socialism is a narrowly defined, rigid ideology which all lovers of freedom and virtue must despise and reject, when, in fact, socialism is a label which covers a broad range of speculations about economic organization by people who perceive that the competitive accumulation of consumption rights is an inadequate organizing principle for a sustainable and just civilization.
You are right but as you say, the narrow view of the word socialism for Jeppen is a too much convenient way for not thinking. Secondly, I think socialism, in its historical direction, is still too linked to industrial and western society and so it is becoming less and less meaningfull for me. For example, I think Ivan Illich, a philosopher I like can't be describe as a socialist.
You are both right, I do percieve socialism quite narrowly, at least in comparison to Rogers ... sometimes I fail to find the right English words ... well, silly smoke screens. Socialism is always different degrees of punishing productivity, rewarding weakness, taking other guys' money to use for your own ends, forbidding different types of voluntary agreements and generally planning the economy. The motivation is always different combinations and degrees of envy, hatred, ignorance, hubris and paternalism. Everything else is sugar-coating.
Democracy, in its historical direction, is also closely linked to industrial and western society. Does that mean that we should reject the concept of democracy? I have read Illych myself and he is certainly not opposed to the use of industry as means of advancing human welfare. The problem with our current economic system is not industry per se, but the emphasis on the use of industry for the endless and indiscriminate accumulation of consumption rights. We need to use technology to promote long term community welfare rather than to promote short term gains in consumption rights for private financial investors.
I realize that the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ have been poisoned by the excesses of Bolshevism and other fanatical political movements of the twentieth century, but what other words do you wish to substitute in their place? Language is important. If we are going to break through the spell of ‘normalcy’ cast by our current cultural paradigm we are going to have to invent names to describe our new paradigms. Maybe the time for such naming has not yet arrived, but until it does I will neither eagerly claim nor eagerly reject the title of socialist.
I think we almost agree on that.
I certainly do not reject socialism as a whole and I do think european countries which have stronger socialist parties and so have social safety net (which work as automatic stabilizers in a context of crisis) and have a tradition of regulating the economy for more long term goal will be better able to deal with peak oil (sweden for example). But still, I do not see a socialist or social democrat party in europe which is curently debating about the concept of growth as it is now. I can only see that in green parties. And for me it is the critical point of the problem.
"soft values such as health and happiness, improves with increasing production"
- Evidence for this?
Plot whatever soft value you like on the vertical axis and have the GDP per capita figure on the horizontal axis over at gapminder.org. (More people should spend an afternoon playing with that - it would dispel lots of myths.)
.. and those lifestyle or soft improvements will also track well with the availability of cheap energy to our societies. Giving credit to the free market or the precepts of capitalism for these improvements is still missing a much needed causal connection.
There ARE efficiencies in private enterprise, but there are also deadly blindspots, for which society must be engaged with all its members to take a longer view, or one with less mercenary goals.
As McDonough said in 'From Cradle to Cradle', 'Efficiency isn't a positive when you're talking about concentration camps' .. you don't improve the world by efficiently decimating rainforests or the Athabasca River Basin.
If us decimating rainforests and depleting oil reserves keep up growth, this has a nice side effects - poverty reduces, wars are reduced, technology improves (and thus mitigation capacity), population growth abates. All of this gives us an increasingly good platform to improve things from.
That's the danger of great carbon taxes - it might slow growth, and thus make the other stuff worse, which might lead to real population overshoot, nuclear wars and so on. Of course, I realize most of you peakers think we are fucked as it is, but I don't. I feel the waste is regrettable in a way, but the boost it gives to the world economy is potentially very beneficial. I think we have a window of opportunity to get humanity on the right track, and growth is the primary means to reach the goal in time, and economic freedom is the primary means to create growth.
If I had to choose an example of glaring cognitive dissonance, this comment would be it!
Do you really not understand that what you are in essence saying is that the lumberjack that sits on a tree branch and is sawing through the branch at a point between himself and the trunk of the tree just "THINKS" he is sitting on a solid platform, while he is actually undercutting his own support? When he finishes the cut he will fall to the ground together with his platform...That might be construed as an improvement in the sense that it eliminates one more moron.
What kind of cool aid have you been drinking? Your arguments are not based on logic.
Good Example.
I keep getting the feeling that he will tell you that his feelings are based on the 'Scientific Proof' that the branch underneath him is still supporting our weight, so what's the problem? Keep cutting, cause it's always worked so far, and it always will.
Man, the guy is a freakin trip!
I like is pro-slavery position. Almost as good as the 'Fox News is OK' quote.
*sigh* Can't you argue without lying?
Your 'so what' attitude about assassinations of union leaders shows your moral compass is a tad off.
Well, you know, in the real world, outside of TOD, you are the nutjob. In here, I may be seen as the nutjob, but my arguments are quite sound and well thought out. Rainforests are not that important and oil may eventually be replaced. But growth can't be replaced as peace-maker, as poverty-reducer, as population-growth-stopper.
Jeppen,
You do yourself and all the folks in your philosophical camp a great disservive by revealing a lack of understanding of the basic physical facts of the world we live in.
The rain forests are a critical part of the environment that keeps us alive.At the rate we are losing the natural infrastructure that keeps the air and water clean and the weather within reasonable limits we will be in one hell of a fix before much longer-take that for what its worth from a former dyed in the wool cornucopian tech oriented conservative with enough background in the sciences to judge the facts for myself, once I have had my nose rubbed in them.
I am sympathetic to a lot of your arguments but like most conservative commentators you lack any serious knowledge of the natural world.
In here are many people who are well versed in the sciences-and a lot more who are here to learn what the professionals have to say.Mostly I listen when the guys here talk science, or ask questions, and keep my commentary to the social and political aspects of the subject under discussion.
In this forum when you call the denizens nut cases, you brand conservatives as yahoos ignorant of the sciences-a branding that is unfortunately all too often well deserved.
I don't mean to imply that you are either ignorant or unintelligent-far from it-you are obviously well informed in many respects.
It's just that your information is based on what has been, rather than what will be-the rules are changing fast and the" business as usual" crowd-your crowd, by and large-is in for a series of very rude awakenings.
If you keep on hanging around here maybe you won't be taken so badly by suprise by unexpected events later.
I don't agree that rainforests is that important, sorry. If you can prove otherwise, I'm willing to listen.
Other than that, I don't think much of what you say about me sticks. For instance, I'm not conservative, I'm libertarian. And when I called someone a nut case, it was quite provoked, but I don't see you give him the same tirade. Generally, I think a give out a bit less abuse than I get.
Or the doomsday sect will keep postponing doom a few years at a time, and one day find that oil isn't even that important anymore, as most have been quietly replaced.
You may could go the gapminder site and compare Haiti and The Dominican Republic for some stats like infant mortality and lifespan. They are on the same island and are similar in several regards, one notable difference is that one's forests have been overexploited and the other one's hasn't.
I think high infant mortality and overexploited forest have a common cause (bad government), rather than overexploited forests was the cause of high infant mortality.
Could it be that good governments don't overexploit forests? Are there examples where overexploitation of forests has been good?
Depends on what you feel is good - some regulars here seems to dream of being hunter-gatherer, and then I guess every step of civilisation was bad. But, for instance, mining in the old days, before explosives, meant you heated the rock during the night to make it brittle, and then you hacked away during the day. The demand for wood often laid barren quite large areas around the mine. Also, forests sometimes have had to give way to cities or agriculture.
Jeppen,
I'm not sure you are willing to listen, but on the off chance that you are sincere about that comment, please take 24 minutes out of your life and "LISTEN" to E.O. Wilson's talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-txR1WSPBs
Sorry, listened for four minutes and was bored to tears. Jumped a bit and didn't find much. What is it with you guys - can't you present some naked facts and figures once in a while? Do you need to say "read this leftist propaganda book", "listen to this boring speech" and so on all the time?
Bro E.O. Wilson is a biologist of the highest caliber. If you got bored with what he said after 4 minutes your are truly too unintelligent to comprehend anything that I might consider worth discussing.
He provided 100% naked facts and figures. Perhaps you suffer from ADD. You're just a boring little troll, now go away.
So, not enduring a really slow 80-year-old for half an hour in the search for some facts an insulting ignorant bastard says is there is a sign of unintelligence? I don't really see the logic in that, but hey, your arrogance probably is a good substitute.
Even the best and brighets can benefit from an editor. The interesting parts of his speech could have been said in four minutes, the rest were the unintresting history of his life, mood pictures and getting the audiences appriciation. It were the worst TED video I have seen and also I fast forwarded a lot. A big disappointment since TED talks use to be brilliant.
And who would agree that needless destruction is good? When we eradicate different kinds of habitats to get room for our own lifes it is of course good to know what we destroy and that it is likely that the benefits outweigh the risks. But this requires knowledge and a rich society, poor societies needs to grow their economy to stop living hand to mouth and be able to pay specialists and make long term investments.
The suggested project reminds me of "nationalnyckeln".
http://www.nationalnyckeln.se/english/index.asp
I have not subscribed to it yet but I will as soon as I start earning more money.
I wish that every country can be prosperous enough to undertake a 20 year project to try documenting every species in their country.
I followed your advice and played with your thing.
Effectively each time, for about every value you have something like that :
So you can say there is effectively a link between GDP and other value. It's almost like saying more developped countries are more developped
But if you zoom, (which would means you compare countries more comparable) you have something like this :
So if you can find a correlation in this, which can justify your blind trust in gdp, you'll have to explain a little more !!
Well, strange methodology. "There is a connection, so let's zoom one end of the graph enough so that the connection is harder to see..."
But hey, to see the correlation even in the zoom, just look at each color separately (each color is a geographical region).
Btw - rethoric like "blind trust" doesn't really solidify your argument, does it?
Jeppen, I had the good fortune to know well two indigenous farmers from Brazil. They had far less in life than I did but were happier than most Americans I know. In fact most Americans are rich. Even when I worked in a homeless shelter in NC those men had more to their name than many people I worked with in Port-au-Prince Haiti. Americans are rich allright, but the bitch and complain all the time. They get breast implants, ear and lip plumping by inserting god knows what, liposuction, etc because they are not happy with their bodies. They buy and buy and buy, and still need more to buy to fill the gaping holes in their hearts. Wealth makes you comfortable, but does not make you happy. Hunter Gatherers had far more leisure time than capitalist work slaves. Reports of the !Kung people from people who lived with them for a while is that they are exceptionally happy people.
Location and Environment: Shaping Traditional Lifestyle
The !Kung population is located in isolated areas of Botswana, Angola, and Namibia. They refer to themselves as the Zhun/twasi, "the real people," and are also referred to as the !Kung San. The semi-arid region in which they live features some trees but is mostly brush and grass-covered low hills and flat spaces. Rainfall during the wet season varies from only five to forty inches. Temperatures during the winter are frequently below freezing, but during the summer are well above 100F.
This harsh environment was avoided by most outsiders, but the !Kung are able to survive by adapting to their surroundings. The villages, consisting of 10-30 people, are semi-permanent; once the water source dries up, the band has to carry their belongings to a new site where a reliable source of water can be located. The huts are small and built of grass with all doors facing the center, circling a large communal area where children play, women cook, and all family life except for sleeping takes place. A fire is burning in front of each hut at all times.
"The !Kung are hunter gatherers, adapting to their semi-arid environment by gathering roots, berries, fruits, and nuts that they gather from the desert, and from the meat provided by the hunters. Both women and men possess a remarkable knowledge of the many edible foods available, and of the medicinal and toxic properties of different species. !Kung men are responsible for providing the meat, although women might occasionally kill small mammals. Game is not plentiful and the hunters sometimes must travel great distances. Meat is usually sparse and is shared fairly among the group when a hunter is successful. Every part of the animal is used; hides are tanned for blankets and bones are cracked for the marrow. Typical game sought in the hunt includes wildebeest, gemsbok, and giraffe; they also kill various reptiles and birds, and collect honey when it is available. The men provide household tools and maintain a supply of poison tipped arrows and spears for hunting.
!Kung women provide the majority of the food, spending two to three days a week foraging varying distances from the camp, and are also responsible for child care, gathering wood for fires, carrying water, and cooking. Typical foods they might return with are mongongo nuts, baobab fruits, water roots, bitter melon, or !Gwa berries. Children are left at home to be watched over by those remaining in camp, but nursing children are carried on these foraging trips, adding to the load the !Kung women must carry.
Leisure time in !Kung camps is spent singing, visiting, playing games, and storytelling. They have no formal authority figure or chief, but govern themselves by group consensus. Disputes are resolved through lengthy discussions where all involved have a chance to make their thoughts heard until some agreement is reached. Travel to visit relatives occurs during or following the rainy season, when a source of water and food is assured during the trip. During the dry winter months, a number of bands may settle around one permanent spring. During this time, ritual life increases, including the frequency of trance dances. "
http://www.ucc.uconn.edu/~epsadm03/Kung.html
I don't want to live in such tribes. As I have mentioned in other replies here, happiness follows GDP per capita quite well. That being said, latin america is unusually happy relative to its wealth, while eastern europe is unhappy relative to wealth. But they all follow the same pattern anyway, even within countries.
Some people in prisoner of war camps in Japan didn't want to eat bugs in their food. But those who did eat them survived longer (sometimes long enough to die somewhere other than in a prisoner of war camp) than those who didn't because the bugs were protein. What you want and what the future holds are probably not the same thing. How much you try to hang on to BAU in your own life may well have a negative bearing on your life expectancy.
Perhaps, but that doesn't really matter to me at this point or any other point. I want humanity to go forward, not regressing into more primitive societies.
> I want humanity to go forward, not regressing into more primitive societies.
Me too, that is a major incentive to try figuring out ways to handle problems like peak oil.
I can say that my Budgie can sing "Campdown Races", but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
One has to admire Jeppen, taking on all comers and never running out of ammunition.
Funny, the same GDP argument is taking place in most of the world's governments: The demand for more and more growth.
It will be a neat trick, getting any more growth out of the old gray mare. The growth machine has been stalling for a long time. Not just in the USA, but in Japan and the rest of the OECD. The costs of maintaining the growth infrastructure increase as growth increases. 'Investments' become liabilities, like shopping centers.
I went to a big, regional mall in Northern Virginia a few days ago; I had to buy a set of tires for my car. About 80% of the stores are vacant. At the middle of the afternoon on a weekend, there were very few customers. A store build- out that had been offered to me a few months ago is open - and sporting a "50% off clearance!!" sale - not a good 'market indicator'.
A draft proposed turning the mall into a 'town center', getting the financing is unlikely, however.
This is the problem, not the issue of buying/selling decisions. People will always buy and sell or barter/trade. It's both human nature and the expression of individual talents. A person who paints pictures needs an audience, so do singers and seamstresses and stone masons. All cannot be all.
'Getting the financing' has become a trap. Nobody can pay for it. I know, I know, there are some here and there who still have some residuals, but the finance system is working overtime to scrape all the remaining residuals from the bottom of the various barrels. Don't believe me, ask someone who has had their credit card rates increased for no reason, who have been charged fees for services never received. Much of finance operates like this article describes in Wall Street Manna, this fellow is a stock- picker and trader, never to accused of being a socialist. Here, he describes a scene from the movie 'Goodfellas':
It's hard to square the behavior of AIG - and CIT, Lehman, Bear- Stearns, Goldman, the actions of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) as well as the 'outright crooks' like Bernie Madoff with any notion of finance possessing any integrity at all. Some things are easier to defend than others, but the establishment has lost any right to any rational defense. Better all be swept off to prison, certainly any claims this group might make to 'end poverty' anywhere ... are worthless.
From the vacant and depressing malls in Springfield, Virginia to the see- through speculative apartment buildings in Beijing or roads- to- nowhere in Japan ... where is the difference? Cause and effect cannot fail to make a connection. Statistics - or 'facts' - are invisible, but one can count empty stores, empty streets, empty rotting houses, empty lots, more and more failure.
Failure isn't hard to find in America; Baltimore, Camden, New Jersey, New Orleans, Detroit, Gary, Indiana, Sacramento, California, Bridgeport, Connecticut. The auto industry is failing, the air travel industry, the real estate industry ... the banks, the finance companies, the insurance companies. Finance has failed, it was tasked with creating an alternative to hard work and toil and it left a bagful of debts that can never be paid, except by Jesus H. Christ himself.
Even Jesus cannot multiply dollars as well as Ben Bernnake. Unfortunately, multiplying dollars doesn't work for Bernanke. The process is appealing, but the consequences are of no real value. 'More dollars' is like statistics, it's abstract; not enough people have the dollars, unlike Jesus, Bernanke doesn't give any sustainance. There are many multiplied dollars and more and more vacant stores in shopping centers.
Success in life is not about any particular system. No system is any better than its participants. Some of the most effective regimes in history were run by dictators; Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar and the Antonines come to mind. Our finance- driven American democracy has failed, frankly. Much of the success of the American experiment has been the outcome of persons who outside the periphery of American- style of business; Andrew Jackson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickenson, Aaron Copeland, Jackson Pollock, Martin Luther King, Miles Davis, Thomas Eakens, Frank Lloyd Wright, FDR. These and others represent the best of America, to the world and to humanity, not the corrupt business 'types' who have stolen all not nailed down.
I am old, I am watching the world change. It is interesting to watch the massive imaginary instututions that so many have bled for crumble into dust right in front of my eyes. That a mighty 'investment' worth so many hundreds of millions of dollars would turn to almost worthless in the matter of months is astounding ... and hard to deny. It is also hard to deny the cost of carrying on, the price on the gas pump has been climbing relentlessly for years with no end in sight. Certainly this has meaning and the outcome of the inexorable increase cannot end well for those dependent on that pump, regardless of what they believe to be true.
Nietzsche created the idea that a man could remake himself above the rest by force of will. Will is indeed powerful, but the making is contained in the person, it never travels well. I can remake myself into a 'superman' but i cannot remake you. The system that we are currently enduring in its death throes cannot remake anything, such is beyond its grasp. It cannot remake itself- it cannot bring itself out of poverty.
How under this circumstance, can it lift any one or any group out of poverty?
The smart - not just the rats - abandon the sinking ship. In capitalism, you have to be able to play both sides of the market - to short the market. If you cannot short the market that exists for financial capitalism, you don't belong in the market.
Steve,
Well said.
Last weekend I saw a new Coen Brothers movie called "A Serious Man".
It's kind of, about that, namely, watching imaginary kingdoms and institutions crumble into fairy dust.
The movie is not for everyone because it studies a particular ethnic group, perhaps in not the most fully explanatory way. But if you get past that and appreciate the overarching theme of imaginary institutions and how they suddenly crumble for the main character, you might get a hoot out of the movie.
Yes indeed.
Our modern civilization is built around many imaginary kingdoms, including those people on Wall Street who run around trading "paper" and believe the paper has real "value".
Who will give me $1000 for this hedge on a credit default swap? Do I hear $1500? How about $2000? OK. $1500 going once, going twice. Sold! to the man in the gray flannel jacket.
> How under this circumstance, can it lift any one or any group out of poverty?
Its not a theory, it is a fact that growth has lifted millions of people our of powerty.
This holds true for manny definitions of growth.
But having left powerty is no guarantee for staying out of powerty, being wealthy only makes it easier to stay wealthy.
The resource issues are from my point if view about refocusing from growth that damage productive assets like the environment or social institutions to growth that is more sustainable.
If all goes well we will some day end up with a situation where growth in one area more or less equals decline in another area, group or generation. I think this is observable in the fact that it is much easier to grow a poor economy that manages to become well run then an already rich and advanced economy.
But rich and andvanced ecnomies has not reached the limits in smart technology use, personal freedom, resource efficient services and so on. We dont know how much more the real economy can grow in its ability to produce services and tools that makes life better in different ways.
I would very much like to see our culture and economy to continue to grow. And when the growth some day levels off or we get a period of shrinkage or catastropies it is vitally important that people have freedom, free markets and democratic societies that allow for churn, for rotation between classes where there allways are different kinds of opportunities. This is important since it provides a much nicer society then a solidified faschist like one were those who got it fight those who can do new stuff. And it gives a good starting point for new growth.
This also leads to the concluson that it overall is a good thing when inefficient structures go bankrupt and institutions that hail growth but actually dont add anyting of value goes thru creative destruction.
Steve, sorry for being harsh, but that thoughtless rant had very little substance. It's easy to hate the financial institutions, it's easy to give in to rage and fear. But that is the dark side of the force. And the empire that force may create would not be a nice sight.
We'll have a bad 2010, so you may have momentum in strengthening the dark side for a while yet. How the US will do after that depends on the policies pursued - with a socialist at the rudder, you are in for some problems. But overall, for the world at large, prospects are quite bright. There is enormous room for growth.
I have a hard time loving financial institutions that are starting to behave like corportivistic entities in a bid to keep BAU rolling a little longer.
I am torn between two goals or rather scenarios.
BAU is good for the local socielty I live in since we are making relevant investments for the future and it is good for winning the next election and avoid giving power to socialsts that has not renewed their politics. A crash in BAU could be horrible.
But at the same time we globaly need enourmous change in investment and habit patters to get from a fossil fuel dependant economy to an economy with a bright future. Bailing out GM, suburbia, failed financial instututions, etc is not a good way of making a society agile since it locks up resources in failed businesses and thus hinder people who has new ideas. And since it is paid with debt it is a claim on whatever the future can provide to keep the stuff we need to change rolling a little longer. A crash in BAU could be a much neede restart.
I even dont know wich outcome would be best for me personally.
I dont want to aid "the dark side" but I am less sure about the shades and who the good guys realy are then when I were younger. Life were easier when I were more like you Jeppen but I realy like that you are fighting for the constructive potential in freedom and market mechanisms. We are fucked if people cant take new constructive initiatives in both the micro and macro scale. We realy need to take care of those parts of our culture and they are usefull regardless if the times are good or bad.
What we are experiencing now in global markets is by some dubbed "the Big Recalculation". We had a financials crash, a lot of uncertainty, swiftly changing commodity, stock and currency values and also overgrown financial, home construction and auto industries. Now the markets are trying to figure out where to put resources and under what conditions to do so. In the meantime, lots of productive capacity lies idle. That's bad, of course, an enormous waste.
I agree that more should have been allowed to fail, but I do understand the motive for not doing so - the recalculation would have been bigger and capacity would be even more underutilized. The bailouts likely trade this for a more drawn-out recalculation. Given that this recalculation is going on, I think 2009-2010 would be the worst time ever to force the market to adapt to new conditions such as steep carbon taxes or carbon caps.
Btw - I'm not sure who the good guys are either. But I am convinced that bastards are more productive and less harmful in a free-market setting. Others believe that we should suppress bastards with regulation, but I think that doesn't hamper them as much as it hampers lots of other people. It's a bit like the gun debate - gun laws stops good guys, not criminals. (But depending on setting, I am for gun regulations, but that's another topic.)
Amen
Governments and corporations are like huge dysfunctional families with too much money sloshing around.
Corrupt crony capitalism has much in common with corrupt crony communism, socialism, or anything-ism.
What we are doing is making more weapons, killing off more people, and destroying more precious habitat every year. This seems to be what we humans do.
No one can foresee what will come out of the violent cocktail that is pouring through the bottleneck of the next couple of decades.
Chances are very high that most people will die violent deaths after a relatively short and brutal lifetime.
Human survival depends upon people with very high and wholistic development -- that is mature inspirit, intellect, and body.
All of our ideological systems try to channel our violence through some kind of rule of law.
Eventually all of the systems developed to nurture this maturity are corrupted by concentrated money and power. So we spiral ever closer to open and chaotic warfare.
Rumsfeld loved the phrase "full spectrum global dominance." This dream is psychopathic in every way. Our species is ungovernable. Our planet may very well shake us off in a matter of years or decades, if we do not destroy ourselves first.
World War III was the Cold War. World War IV is happening now.
No one will win this war. The last man standing will have enough time to look around at the toxic fog, cough, wretch, and fall over dead.
Some victory, eh?
But this is by far the most likely scenario.
I think that Jay Hanson does present a plausible alternative.
Getting people to believe in and act upon that alternative is a daunting task. We have thoroughly indoctrinated ourselves with the meta-narratives that assure us that we will live long, comfortable lives with ever more material pleasures.
Our toys will be more plentiful and bigger and better all the time.
As I posted on another thread recently, Catton explains in "Bottleneck.." how we are prone to lie to one another in order to manipulate each other. We are also all very prone to lie to ourselves in order to feel more safe and comfortable. Our ideological and religious narratives seal people into such narratives. People invest themselves into certain ideas and cannot bring themselves to see anew, or to repent -- to use an old phrase.
Perhaps the voices crying in the wilderness will be heard and heeded -- at least Jay Hanson is giving it a try.
As usual, Mr. Hanson delivers something that is ahead of the curve and as thorough as it can get given the scope it addresses. But I still find myself disagreeing with the author...
I think the problem is of a global nature and needs to be addressed on that level. One country getting a version 2.0 will simply not be able to solve the problem. Even if we assume that the same plan is made out on a global scale, maybe it could have been pulled off, save one challenge...
It is, rather ironically written in the article itself... “The Tragedy of the Commons” To be more precise why we have the "Tragedy of The Commons" and I don't think it is because people want more money. I think it is because people want more Power. Today the store of value of Power is Money. Tomorrow it could go back to something like Land as it was during the Mediaeval Period, those who held the land held the Power. Or Stone Tools during the Stone Age, whoever had the latest Stone Tools had the Power. By Power I mean very specifically the capability of a living organism to pass on its genes.
What it leads to, is that people are inherently power hungry and then it becomes a human defect. A very critical defect in our species. Something that Mr. Nate here has been trying to point out for a long time now. The human species simply puts too much value to the present, a little to much, at the cost of the future.
In the last year and a half I have discussed the issues of Peak Oil / Resource Depletion / Human Behaviour, with a lot of people and often I come across an answer which goes like this... "This will not happen today or in my life time and hence, it is of no importance to mi." To which I point out that it will happen to your children then, would you not like to make life a little easier for your children. To which, I often get a, "Then it is their problem to solve." or "I will not have any children." The other two most common answers being, "God will save us" and "Technology will save us". At which point, I find it pointless to pursue the matter any further.
The chain of reasoning does sound rather crude but I hope I get the point across. In the end it just boils down to... We are just not wise enough and that it is more or less a genetic defect. In which case the only way out / solution (if there was ever to this wicked problem) seems to be, that we evolve as a species. Actually start thinking, become wise. But then you know how evolution works...
This, I find to be a great drawback that turns, Mr Hanson's otherwise very well thought of and well intentioned proposal into an impossibility :|
Yes, there are a few people who you could claim are more wise that others but I fear, that the number is rather small and greatly dispersed to make any difference. Hope, well I frankly don't have much much of it, but then, that's all I got these days :) As always, I hope, that my understanding of our current situation is completely wrong.
Sudeep - I know very little about India - but would such a proposal be feasible in your country? It seems the 'get rich' carrot in both China and India has created enormous amounts of stress to compete. Are there lobbyists in India like in the US? Is there separation of political system and economic system?
Nope. This is not feasible by a long shot. One of the reasons being, as you put...
Whatever might be projected about our golden past and simple living is now firmly in the past. We are now more or less a nation of consumers or wannabe consumers same as China, or any other part of the world.
To make the situation more complicated, we are a land of believers in miracles. There is a lot of population that will simply say, God will take care of us. If God does exist I am not sure he/she would be in too helpful a frame of mind. The more damaging aspect of this is, IMO, that we will not be able to muster enough people to stand up and try to make a change.
Another reason being there is a lot of division internally, we are a very deeply and finely divided hierarchy of people. Everyone is either suffering from a superiority complex or holds a grudge to some other group. At which we are not different from any other people of the world just that the sheer range of divisions on the lines of race, caste, creed, sect, region, religion is simply mind boggling.
Diversity in itself is not the problem but when you add resource constraint to the picture... You get a concoction that will explode on it's own, no need for any stimuli, and it already regularly does. There are riots, naxals, ethnic violence, exploitation of all kinds... Which I believe is only going to get worse as resources dwindle.
Lobbyists, nowhere near the quality you have in the US or EU, there are days when I feel that, what you have are, lobbying artists. In India we have more of outright corruption. Which kind of answers is there separation of Political and Economic System. Nope, no separation but, it just works differently here. Politicians are directly involved in corruption so is the rest of the governance. They regularly get caught and are regularly let off and the whole charade continues...
But, in a way, it is already quite a miracle that our country exists in the shape it does today. It is quite counter to the reality on the ground.
Great post. I have come to similar conclusions myself, but I hope to be proven wrong.
It just amazes me that people can publish graphs like the first one in this article...a parabola with a "you are here" at the top. There's not even a hint of humility, or any sound information on what the author bases his forecast. It seems the author would have us believe he could see the future in perfect detail.
The notion that he can predict our energy use in to the future is based on a lot of assumptions...so many in fact that his prediction is rendered useless.
It's too bad that even though I'm sure the author has some good points, I stopped reading and decided Hanson was full of crap.
"Net energy cliff which leads to the end of capitalism"??? Talk about a worthless string of non sequiturs.
TOD has sunk to new lows...
"You are here" the question is why?
I cautioned Jay about that when it first came out, as the graph he added those words to was a theoretical one, based on historic data but projected forward using some assumptions - he links to those assumptions in his essay. And, that graph approximates the net energy just from oil, not total energy gain from all sources, but one could argue that without a 10-20 year head start, there would be decent correlation because of joint energy inputs.
And why would TOD sink to new lows by putting this essay on our Campfire section?
And by definition, ANY prediction of energy use in the future is based on assumptions - my personal view is that the graph above will be closer to the oil reality than the CERA "Asian Phoenix" graph that gets far more media attention, and ignores biophysical principles, non-energy inputs, net energy and societal affordability.
The graph itself is of oil production, gross and net. But it's labelled "net energy cliff."
Oil =/= the totality of energy on the planet, neither practically nor necessarily.
It's just sloppy.
Given the climate change denialist nonsense that's been posted on TOD, the extraordinarily sloppy piece on nuclear, and the piece published lobbying in favour of the US oil industry in South America written by an authour who was given an all-expenses paid and supervised trip there, I don't think this particular article by JH represents "new lows". But with its doomerism and "war socialism", it's not TOD's finest hour.
You could have just put it in the Drumbeat, "JH says we're all doomed, and if we let him become the Dear Leader it'll all be okay."
Just as a point of clarification, are we discussing energy use, or oil use, or does TOD consider the two terms interchangable? (The chart refers only to oil...) And yes I know, we have been having that discussion since about 2 and a half years ago since I first came here...:-)
RC
this is someones essay that they crossposted here. I'm pretty sure TOD doesn't 'consider' it right or wrong or the definitions in it correct or incorrect. (And I doubt that anyone disputes that energy use is far larger than oil use).
Alaskan You have only been here for 23 weeks. How do you know how low TOD could have gone?
perhaps by reading for several years, and only creating an account recently??
One can only imagine what a thoroughly awful and yet energy-guzzling loaf of bread that will become a few years down this road. Probably a bit like those Haitian mud-fat cakes. Probably produced with mind-boggling resource inefficiency making even current practice seem unimaginably and quaintly frugal. Probably inedibly stale - consider how government runs bus lines, airways, and the crash-prone Amtrak, even with no truly serious practical issues having arisen just yet. Tired old 20th collectivism peeks out of its coffin for the umpteenth time. What a joke: there must be a shortage of wooden stakes.
No, they can't. Communities where the rules are especially oppressive will need to imprison their people, as happened under the Communist experiments that began with the Russian Revolution. Otherwise the best and brightest will leave and said communities will collapse - and it may be unaffordable to abandon infrastructure for such reasons. In addition, this totalitarian approach will force people to make horrific choices between oppression and family ties. (I also wonder where such provincialized balkanization would leave the current ideal of "diversity", which is sometimes a load of rubbish, but at its best implies tolerating and respecting other people of different religions or cultures. Probably in the dust.)
Of course, in theory oppressive communities could modify their rules. However, rulers and zealots in the real world rarely do so even under threat of collapse (which may be one reason, ironically, that we're discussing this.) They're just too bloody sure they are the gods of the right answers, or they're just plain drunk with power. IIRC Israeli kibbutz participation had to fade away to a mere 0.5% or so of the population before the zealots got it even partway through their thick heads that people might find it odious and exhausting to have to audition at length before a board of snide busybodies every time they needed a pair of socks.
This question is not new. I vaguely recall being required as part of a test or assignment in junior-high-school 'social studies' to comment on a quote asserting (prior to 'inclusive language') approximately that "Europe wastes men to conserve materials, while America wastes materials to conserve men." While academics and would-be revolutionaries seem often to revel in complex obfuscation, perhaps materials are simply too cheap. Or perhaps materials are still cheap because a problem serious enough to justify "wasting men" has not been seen just yet to materialize in a way that actually matters very much.
At the end of the day, and as a practical matter for the real world outside the ivory tower, I find it hard to imagine a more odious and noxious prescription for what ails us, than to force everyone to become a fear-ridden tyrannized ward of the government. In view of the horrors that starry-eyed naïveté about unlimited government power created in a variety of cultures during the tortured course of the twentieth century, I can't quite imagine why anyone should see anything to desire in it.
"I can't quite imagine why anyone should see anything to desire in it."
Because the alternative would be worse.
"Because the alternative would be worse."
How do you know that?
Our current system relies on growth to function. As we peak in the production of various resources things will break down as we try to maintain this growth. An economic growth model is not going to work with an ever declining resource base. You either adapt and attempt to control the decent, as Jay proposes, or you go into freefall in which case you will be looking at an increase in violence. This can occurr either on the state level through international war or civil infighting as various groups of people try to control ever smaller amounts of resources.
Its no accident the last 60 odd years have been one of the most peacefull times in human existance. Many of us have had, not only our needs, but also our wants met. This will change when both cannot be met in the future.
Theres a very good reason why humans resort to warfare and that is its an effective way of aquiring resources for ourselves. Several billion years of evolution cant be wrong.
Why wouldn't it function without growth? It just has for a year.
Why would we have a problem maintaining growth in the face of PO? Per capita oil use peaked around 1970, but real GDP/capita has doubled since then.
Do you consider the last year to have been business as usual? How many of the top ten banks in the US went tits up? How many of those banks that still survive are in good shape today? Hows the airline industry getting on? There is a whole host of examples of things that have gone wrong without the growth needed to back up the system.
The corporations that have survived have mostly done so by cutbacks and layoffs. All of this occured after a housing bubble and and a 3% decline in production. Whats going to happen when we hit a 10% per year decline slope?
No I dont have a crystal ball but extrapolation suggests that the system will not be able to cope with such a steep decline year on year.
The banks' problems weren't that we entered a recession, as you know. The only other example you give is the airline industry. Those have struggled for quite some time, and is sure to struggle at PO. But then we'd do best to have an even more free economy, so that production can rearrange quickly.
And we won't ever hit a 10% per year decline slope.
The banks problems began when the growth in the housing market stopped. The sub prime mortgage debacle was there attempt to keep that growth going.
The IEA are predicting a 9.1% decline slope without the proper investment. Concidering the fluctuations in price we have seen over the last few years and the declines we have seen with Mexico I think a 10% decline in world oil production is a good possibility.
No, that is not correct. Who has fooled you?
Is there any industry that keep up for long without investments?
When?
Paul, your answer to the statement "Because the alternative would be worse", with "How do you know that?"...I wondered the same thing...Nate states (with no doubts shown in his belief in his own statement,
" America will face anarchy, rebellion, and civil war on the downside of the net energy cliff"
Hmmm, either that or the assured living death in Maoist type cattle pens...somehow "anarchy, rebellion, and civil war" at least seem to be more interesting. :-) (okay, I'm being provacative and sarcastic, but the point is still made...)
RC
Roger - must I point out (again), that I put these essays from others here to generate discussion, debate-debunk-defense by other smart people. The above is not by work, nor are any of the guest postings we have. Please don't attribute quotes to me that aren't mine.
I'm convinced that Jay Hanson has never picked up an economics textbook in his life, because his broadsides at economists do little except illustrate his own ignorance. Neoclassical models are models of the "real" economy and are expressed in terms of physical production and exchange (i.e. prices are expressed in terms of the rate that one commodity can be exchanged for another). From Gregory Mankiw's introductory microeconomics textbook: "Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources." Money is a subject that has vexed economists, and is generally difficult to incorporate into formal models is a satisfactory manner.
broadsides at economists do little except illustrate his own ignorance.
And economics somehow is correct and works?
Money is a subject that has vexed economists,
Errr, so if a basis of the 'economic formulas' is "vexing" - how much actual real value can be found in economics?
I'm not offering a defense of neoclassical economics. I'm simply pointing out that Hanson is attacking a strawman.
Ahh, but who set up the strawman? If Hanson set up the strawman then attacks it that is one thing. If others have set up the strawman then you are moving from strawman into the classic 'emperor is naked' story.
Much of what passes for economics is now in the naked land. Really - is the US government bookkeeping valid?
You're a funny guy...you're upset people comment on communism without knowing the "10 points," but I see little evidence that either you or Jay have any familiarity with the neoclassical school of thought in economics. Which, by the way, has little to do with the accounting practices of the US government.
neoclassical school of thought in economics.
neo - new.
neoclassical characteristic of a revival of an earlier classical style
Wikipedia:
Variously? Approaches?
That is implying many.
You are chiding others in what appears to be the singular.
Why don't you come back and define EXACTLY what 'classic' is being 'neo'ed?
It already is under our capitalist system - balloon "bread" that is an energy guzzler. Want the whole wheat alternative? Why, just add some caramel color...the goal of the capitalist system for bakeries is to make the most money, not to deliver the most nutritious bread.
As to inefficiency of delivery - why have the postal service, UPS and FedEx following each other down the street, in 2-3 ton trucks, carrying maybe 300 pounds of packages and all making deliveries at the same addresses? What about going back to having the mail and other goods delivered by bicycle? We all know that bicycle delivery is probably the most energy efficient, but with wide roads and oil subsidized for the trucks, it is not feasible in today's economy.
Thus, the allocation of money as determined mostly by lobbyists, not the market rules the economies of the world instead of the wise allocation of resources, much less the efficient allocation of fewer and fewer limited and constraining resources.
The death rate per 100 million passenger miles for buses, airlines and Amtrak are .05, .02, and .03, respectively. The death rate for highway travel by personal vehicle is .80, more than 25 times higher than Amtrak. So, tell us, who is crash prone?
"...the goal of the capitalist system for bakeries is to make the most money, not to deliver the most nutritious bread..."
Groundhog, where in the world do you live? Is it really so hard to find a fairly decent loaf of bread in your area, or are you just cherry-picking the very worst loaf you can possibly imagine, merely to posture in a silly way?
"why have the postal service, UPS and FedEx following each other down the street..."
The postal service, still somewhat subsidized by that prize chump the taxpayer, is usually cheaper in price than the others, so if there were any practical way to impose discipline on it - i.e. reliability, timeliness, and customer service - the others would be out of business in a trice and we simply wouldn't be having this discussion. But it's a government entity that will do whatever it feels like doing heedless of its environment or its customers, such as opening post offices only briefly and only on weekdays when most people are at work. Silly as it must seem to a certain kind of naïve erg-counting engineering mentality, competition seems to be the only way anybody's yet found to impose even the most minimal discipline. And all of those trucks seem to be full, so the status quo is still better than having three postal service trucks following each other down the street...a month late.
"The death rate per..."
Risk and compromise are utterly unavoidable in this life - just consider the random pile of wastefully short-lived semi-dysfunctional kludges that is the human body itself. So I'd not like to die by being wounded in the process of transportation, but I'd also like not to die of old age waiting forever for the slow, tardy, unreliable modes run by shiftless overpaid incompetent immovable government jobsworths. Greedy me, I'd like to have that loaf of bread in hand before it petrifies to the point where a geologist's hammer is required to break it - even if doing so entails an almost immeasurably small risk. I'm already 'safe' enough to make overwhelming odds that I'll outlive both my mind and my body by a number of years, so the risk doesn't exactly paralyze me with worry, though I'm certainly not averse to, say, reducing purely gratuitous danger by clearing drunken rubbish from behind the wheel. Sorry.
Now, should there be others wish to be strapped in bed (or into Hanson's totalitarian paradise) all their lives in order to avoid absolutely all risk, that's not my problem, and I invite them to stay the hell out of my life, thank you very much. One thing I don't get at all, though - if one is so terribly fraught over tiny risks, how can one possibly contemplate delivery of goods unprotected on a bicycle of all things, rather than (relatively) safely cocooned in a sturdy enclosed airbag-equipped vehicle???
Did I say I was terribly fraught with concern over risks? Nope - you seemed to be the one, with your distortion of the relative safety records of the transport modes...
...which really was a substitute for you're being terribly fraught for anything government. Obviously, you've never ridden the NEC on Amtrak. It's a kick-ass ride despite being slower than high speed rail systems in other countries - you know, the systems run by governments...
My local post office is open 8 am to 6pm M-F and 9 am to 3 Saturdays. The nearest UPS location - 10 miles away - is open 8:30 to 11:30 am, 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm, and only on M-F.
And don't get me started about Fed Ex. They could not find us in a rural area to save their lives - because they subcontracted out their local delivery. When the county put up signs on the state highway identifying the cross roads, my kids referred to them as the "Fed Ex" signs - put up for the Fed Ex drivers. I even had the local dispatch office call us and ask us to come in and pick up the package, because they couldn't find us....
Sorry, PaulS, but you seem to be bereft of facts to support your politically prejudiced claims...
>Remove the “personhood” Constitutional protections from corporations.
Yes. You can have privacy or limited liability, but not both.
>Assemble teams of the country’s best and brightest
Another favourite of mine. But remember that scientists and engineers are often not keen on being involved in public disagreements. Once again a very transparent process is needed. It also needs to be vigorous and well-funded, with powers of investigation, so that when it says "we need to find out X" it can set about it immediately.
I think the scientific method is one of our biggest assets for finding the truth. But the problem, especially in times of stress, is that scientists are human first, and scientists second. Also, there is real science and increasingly a large sphere of polity that masquerades as science. Not sure what can be done about that - science works best over long periods of percolation.
>Assemble teams of the country’s best and brightest
I can see how this might work fairly and equitably. Those that think themselves worthy of the title "best and brightest" submit themselves to a process where the people each have one vote to cast for their chosen representative. Once these best and brightest are chosen, they can all gather in a house of assembly and debate and decide on the best way forward. Then, having decided what to do, they can then choose from among themselves the best people to implement the new solutions. Periodically the people would get to decide if they have done a good job, or select a new crop to have a go. Sounds good in theory, not sure of the practical application.
Nice. :-)
I'd make a slight enhancement to your proposal:
"Those that think themselves worthy of the title "best and brightest" submit themselves to a process where the people watch them being burned at the stake."
The last possible people on the planet that should be allowed to formulate policy would be the "best and brightest" in anything and especially scientists and engineers. How on earth can those that enabled the problems we have be trusted to fix them? And how can they put their talents to use in a high entropy environment which they've been instrumental in creating and when the answer to it is in effect to do less or as close to nothing as we can get away with? They're essentially redundant in the new order of things.
+1
I would like to add: Look around - this is the world created by the "best and the brightest".
Al
But we've learned!!
On reading this, I first thought it might be satire, along the lines of Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal. Unfortunately, it's not satire. The world that Hansen proposes is the nightmare that millions in the twentieth century thought they woke up from when the Berlin Wall fell. Imagine being dubbed one of the "5% producers" and being told that your work will subsidize a 95% welfare state. Imagine the class of apparatchik grandees that would evolve to tell us all where to live, what to consume, and what to say. Imagine how they, the Kim Jong Il's of America, would live in luxury while the rest of us wait and pray for the bread truck to pass our hovel today. This then, is Hanson's paradise. Apparently, he has studied many things, but human nature is not one of them.
Hanson's article represents a new height of Doomer Porn, even for The Oil Drum, where Doomerism thrives. It allows no acknowledgment of the almost unlimited ingenuity of the human race, as well as the ability of a nation in crisis to adapt, when it absolutely has to. Yes, democracies only face crises when they absolutely have to, and that's a flaw in the system. But face the crisis we will. A USA driving SMART cars, building smaller homes, traveling less, and buying fewer throwaway goods would use far less energy and still be free. I certainly would endure privations far worse than that to not live in Mr. Hansen's USA 2.0, which is suspiciously close to Lenin's USSR 1.0. We have been there, and done that folks. Let's keep working on a HUMAN solution.
And here is the biggest fault I find with the proposition. The USA, with its anti communist history, doesnt not have the ability to adapt to such a socialist system. If it was somehow instigated it would create civil war.
The USA, with its anti communist history,
And yet - if you go through the 10 points Marx came up with - you can find examples of each implemented in the US of A.
Not very Anti if you are implementing the ideas.
Hi Eric,
How many US citizens know or understand this though? Whats Joe Sixpack with his 1.7 firearms going to do when hes told that these obvious socialist principles need to be imposed to prevent societal collapse? This proposal goes against the grain of mainstream US culture.
How many US citizens know or understand this though?
Most have never read Marx. Or Engel.
Or even the 10 'planks'. If you've not read the 10 basic things communism wanted - at least do that.
A few have and taken it to an extreme. George Gordon has his 'are you a practicing communist' stichk - and for the data points he's chosen - he's right.
obvious socialist principles need to be imposed to prevent societal collapse?
Grab his bible, thump on it and say 'its what Jesus would do'.
This proposal goes against the grain of mainstream US culture.
American culture is years and years of 'the commies are bad'. And yet it can be argued that the 'communist' commentary on race treatment resulted in changes, the removal of kids from factory labor in the US of A, and well, the space race.
"Imagine being dubbed one of the "5% producers" and being told that your work will subsidize a 95% welfare state."
I cannot imagine 5% of the population (US or World) supporting the other 95% in a sustainable fashion under any conceivable political system, pre or post peak oil.
It could be argued they already do. If you work in food or energy production, or some corners of manufacturing, you could be deemed a "producer". Everyone else lives off the surpluses created by those producers. It probably isn't 5%, but I doubt it's more than 20%. We organize a bread and circuses consumption society to keep most of the rest "busy" but in essence it's not that much different than welfare. It's much better psychologically, but much harder on the world.
@ Matt O:
A certain number of “producers” could be drafted and trained by society to produce for a fixed period of time. In Hanson's original version of this essay, Society of Sloth, (and which postulated a global, not just an American solution), that period would be for two years.
A casual acquaintance with his writings will reveal, above all, that he has spent a lot of time studying human nature over the years. Whether you agree with his conclusions is another matter.
Society of Sloth, which, as mentioned, forms the basis of this essay, was written in 1999. Hardly new or ground breaking "doomer porn". As for TOD being a hive of doomerism, I think quite the contrary, that much quality doomer thinking has been driven out, or held back, by the constant thunderings of techno-optimists that we can have our planet, and eat it too.
So does that include the continued trashing of the planet through overconsumption? After all, what is all the whizzing about in SMART cars (sic) really about, except the perpetuation of BAU by other means? Hanson's essay may not be perfect (what is?), but at least it presents an interesting idea of what a low energy, low consumption world might look like, (if we weren't slaves to our nature), whilst sparing a die-off.
Matt
Jay has spent a huge amount of time and energy to present a possible solution to the crisis you agree we face.
Your critical analysis and proposed solution is of interest and I would be interested in reading a serious expanded version of your thoughts on this.
I agree that Jay's paper is a "little off the wall" but can we not give him credit for putting forth the effort. Why so much fear?
Because it's been done, and his proposed solution is crap. The Soviets did the "government produces the food and distributes it" schtick, and the result was mass starvation and, in the best case, having to stand in line for hours for the right to purchase basics. While party bosses and their mistresses got to shop at the "special" stores. And anyone brave enough to dissent was sent to the gulag to work to death.
Whatever the answer is, a giant bureaucratic nightmare is not part of it.
I'm not looking to steal Jay's thunder, but it is as if he had been reading my blog for the last several years.
With regard to governance, in particular, I have been exploring the application of hierarchical control theory (from systems science and explicable from many biological examples) in what I call Sapient Governance. You can access the several series' through this index page. It helps to take a look at the first series titled "Sapience" to get an understanding of the meaning of sapience applied to governance (essentially your brain is a hierarchical control system with strategic control sitting at the top). But the second series, Sapient Governance, and the third, Implications of a Sapient Governance delve into alternative ways to think of markets and government. Or look at the blog site, Question Everything for additional essays on various aspects of our situation.
Basically, our current system is one of many along an evolutionary trajectory toward a more integrated (sapient) hierarchical cybernetic system that I suspect is emerging from our human social experiences. If it weren't for that pesky peak oil and global warming, given enough time, I suspect we humans would culturally evolve a more 'perfected' union based on the hierarchical control architecture. Reciprocally such a system would aid the co-evolution of mental sapience in our progeny (see the first series for an explanation). But I don't think there is time for ordinary evolutionary processes to work themselves out. Too bad.
At any rate, most of the subjects covered in this essay I've covered over the past two years. For example the question of the role of profits and corporations having personhood, etc. do all connect to the larger questions of how could we organize to achieve the ends of a sustainable population (at the 'right' size) and a sustainable Ecos.
Glad to know others are thinking along these lines. We need all oars in the water.
George
I'm not looking to steal Jay's thunder, but it is as if he had been reading my blog for the last several years.
Excecpt that Jay's been writing like this back when the way one talked with a large group was UseNet.
t any rate, most of the subjects covered in this essay I've covered over the past two years.
Do go to his dieoff.org site sir. Spend the few weeks/months to read all the stuff. Odds are you'll find stuff you think he's wacked on, other that he's dead right and plenty you'll go 'hrmmm, that's a different POV'.
This is so bad that I only have two things to say:
1. When part of a system fails it do not mean that every principle thats is being associated with it is failing. Corruption and bad bailouts is not the same thing as a market economy and capitalism being a bad idea.
2. It will be good with another glass of red wine this late saturday evening. Wonder where the focus of the debate will go if ToD is taked over by bad political pamflets?
I can't figure out if this is serious or satire, making fun of who I'm not sure.
If we were to 'get rid of' special interests and select a panel of scientists to choose the best path, then they would become the new special interest (or nomenklatura).
In theory scientists are like unemotional vulcuns choosing the correct path, but in practice you just have to watch the global warming debate on realclimate.org to see that if they had the power to jail global warming deniers it would happen tomorrow. Just imagine what will happen when it's not grant money at issue but food for them and theirs.
It's going to be a long scary slide down from the oil peak, our only hope that I see is if the price of oil stays consistently high enough that society makes the needed changes over the next 20 years through individual action and new technology. If we get oil spike, crash, oil spike, crash like is currently happening, then we'll need a nice commissar to come and arrest Tina Turner from her thunderdome.(satire)
Couldn't agree more. As someone trained as a scientist, I can only shudder to think of a world run by scientists. Furthermore, the more pseudo-scientific jargon you see in wonkish political discourse like that above, the further it is from any common sense at all. Marx and Engels were theorists - a world run by theorists ends up being inhuman. That goes for free-market theorists as well, by the way. There is more to intelligence than book smarts and analysis - someone who understands human nature would always make a better elected official than a pure policy wonk. Let's hope our current administration starts showing us something besides just theory as well.
One of the more absurd doomer theories is that it would take 20 years to convert to renewable energy, and that it's already "too late". I was able to install a solar system over a weekend. I could swap a motor in about the same length of time. The question is - why go through the trouble when fossil fuels are still cheap and plentiful?
Wow. You were able to install a solar system in 2 days, I'm impressed. The last dude I knew who took on that challenge required 6 days... and he was God.
Sorry, couldn't resist. : )
The 20 years to convert to renewables comes from the Hirsch report, sanctioned by the US government. I've never really thought of Robert Hirsch as a doomer. Hes not in the same league as the methane hydrates crowd anyway.
The Hirsch report makes the tacit assumption that personal auto use (and fuel use in general) need to grow exponentially forever which is why we need GTL, CTL, heavy oil, ect... in order to buy us time to develop renewable energy and advanced batteries, so that we can have cars that run 600 km on a charge and can be recharged in 5 minutes, and we can drive them everywhere. This is necessary to protect the American Way of Life (tm) and is non-negotiable.
Hirsch is a little more upbeat than some of the hardcore doomsayers, but he's wrong on many counts. Here he's predicting $500 oil by 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=489IEnzg6GU&feature=related
$500/barrel would probably mean $25/gallon = $1/mile. Why would anyone pay $1/mile when they could run an EV for 5 cents/mile?
GTL and CTL use a lot of energy in the process, plus you're using it to feed a motor that's only 20% efficient.
conservative -- I suppose the critcal question is: how long would it have taken you to install that system had you not started? I tend to ignore all the discussions as to how fast this alt or that alt could be utilized. It makes no difference, IMHO, how fast alts can be ramped up. The question is: how and when will the American people be motivated to take such actions to a meaningful degree? From that stand point that I see nothing in the near term (and probably mid-term) that will push this country in that direction. The need and capabilities are of secondary importance IMO. It's the actual application, on a large scale, that's of sole importance. In that sense you are certainly free to classify me as a doomer.
Then you must not believe oil production has peaked. Because if it has, then the price will definately be going up. High prices are what will push Americans (and everyone else) to alternatives.
That there are no alternatives, or that it would take 20 years to implement them are doomer myths.
Oil saw a more than 10 fold increase in price during the period 1999-2008. Plenty of incentive to move to so-called alternatives of oil. So, where are they?
Also, how do you know that the oil price will go up? It's more likely to remain extremely volatile, as is demonstrative of supply constrained resources generally. We also know that the world economy cannot endure a figure around $100+ for long before crashing, along with the oil price, postponing/cancelling many high risk/cost oil and alternative/renewable projects as a result. Therefore it's unlikely that we'd see much higher prices before we had another world recession, especially as the world economy is in a more weakened state now than before.
How are you going to bootstrap to a new energy paradigm, especially overnight (suspending all disbelief with this one) on a declining oil base and with an economy in the toilet as a consequence of peak oil/high prices?
Sorry, that's not something we know, that's just a piece of PO dogma. I'm convinced we can endure $100.
What's the problem? There is so much oil waste today that infrastructure and new energy will have plenty of oil to use. We'll curb waste first, b/c that is cheapest.
@Jeppen;
Ah you are misrepresenting what I said which was; We also know that the world economy cannot endure a figure around $100+ for long before crashing...
Why don't you read these articles The oil shock and recession of 2008: Part 1 & The oil shock and recession of 2008: Part 2 and see if you change your tune.
Well there are a couple of problems from what I can tell. Firstly a lot of that waste (as a by-product of economic growth) is supported by tons of cheap debt which will, and is contracting/disapearring as a consequence of the current financial turmoil, spurred on in part by the onset of high oil prices.
Imagine the catastrophe that awaits the world economy when we actually start having peak oil induced spot shortages as well. A contracting economy built on expansion and debt plus relentless decline in the availability of oil, it's lifeblood, at any price. A one two punch to the solar plexus followed by the climate change hay-maker.
"Around $100+" is not very precise. What oil price do you think the world economy can't stomach?
I don't understand why debt supported waste would be harder to curb. If anything, it should be easier. Btw, it's interesting to see how fast you peakers adopted the debt problem as another way to prove that doom is imminent. Is it peak oil that is important to you, or is proving imminent doom the primary goal? What will be the next proof of doom when the debt problem has subsided?
Btw, lot's of oil producing moslem countries are wasteful with their oil, but moslems don't do debt, AFAIK. Also, spot shortages should be more or less impossible if prices are free.
It's obvious that it can't handle sustained high prices for very long. I think the day after oil went $100 (Jan 2 2008?), Wall Street sank. Coincidence? Perhaps. But tell that to the exurbanites who have gone to the wall with their exotic mortgages (line of equity, interest rate reset etc) facing increasingly expensive super-commutes. Something had to give.
Dude, waste IS the economy.
To a doomer any doom is good, if it results in the elimination of industrial civilisation before it eliminates us, and the rest of the species. Savvy Mr Strawman?
Oh, Wall Street sank? It's settled then.
Then came January 2. Although oil retreated from the $100 mark by the end of that day on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the damage had been done. Stocks on the New York Stock Exchange plummeted, suffering their worst loss on a New Year debut since 1983. Gold, meanwhile, soared to an all-time high -- a sure indication of international anxiety about the vigor of the U.S. economy.
Flake.
Oil did increase in price, but it's still relatively cheap. Average Regular gasoline is $2.50 in the US. So if you drive a subcompact that gets 25mpg, that's 10 cents/mile. Over 100k miles your fuel cost is $10,000. Drive a Prius and you can cut that number in half. So is it worth the extra money to buy a hybrid? Probably not at $2.50/gallon. When oil goes over $150/barrel then you will see alternatives take over. This is one of the reasons why the Saudis do not want high oil prices.
However bad your bottom line is, it would be worse paying for high priced ($500/barrel) oil.
Here's some new energy paradigms for ya. I think they even ship overnight:
http://www.change2e85.com/servlet/StoreFront
http://www.cloudelectric.com/
The world economy couldn't take $147 oil, so it's unlikely to take anything very much higher either, considering the global situation is even more parlous than before the 2008 crack-up, which led to the oil price undershooting to a level that caused many oil and so-called "alternative energy" projects to be postponed or cancelled. Why would the next installment of the never-ending recession run any differently?
Also, and assuming for a moment that somehow economic growth resumed long enough to cause very high oil prices above $100 again, why wouldn't all economic activity, including "alternative energy" activity, go up in cost as well, seeing that industrial civilisation is absolutely dependent on the reliable availability of cheap oil?
Once upon a time (up until c.2002) the Saudis didn't want to see the oil price go above US $33 for the same reasons, but it did, as capacity constraints were breached, which goes to show that even a four fold increase in price, within a short space of time, was still not enough to get the world off of the stuff. In fact during this time (until the 2008 crack-up) higher oil prices even helped producer and resource exporting countries grow "richer", and as a result, more dependent on oil too, as a by-product of all that cheap credit fueled demand coming from the U.S., the U.K. etc.
Agreed, but I think we'll never see such very high prices, and even if we did, if you think $147 was bad for the economy imagine what a gutting it would get with $500 a barrel oil!
Great, so your solution to peak oil, being merely a symptom of unchecked industrial growth, is to spend money that we may or may not have (consume more/get into debt more) to convert one's car to run on ethanol/batteries (consume more oil and other non-renewables) so we can continue going madly to and fro, destroying what remains of the environment, one shopping spree at a time? BAU all the way to extinction - fabulous paradigm change...
You are saying that the US couldn't handle $147 oil and thus crashed, dragging Europe with it. (The same Europe that all this time DOUBLED the price of gasoline by taxes! Nice logic there.)
I'm saying the whole world couldn't handle $147, not just the U.S. Europe was always going to crash being enmeshed in the same infinite growth ponzi scheme that you are so engrossed with.
And you know this because ...?
The economy tanked after that pal.
Roubini
It seems you have you own pet theory of what caused the crash but you can't even grasp the fact that much of the rest of the world's markets get by with far higher energy prices than the US, in which the crash orginated. Even if you are a peak oiler, you can't explain everything with oil.
>I was able to install a solar system over a weekend. I could swap a motor in about the same length of time.
Big deal. When you can boast of digging up and separating all the necessary elements from your backyard, refining them with nothing more than a solar powered magnifying glass, producing a 80% efficient solar panel and fititng it all to you car with an electric motr, produced by similar means, then I'll be impressed. Otherwise you have only demonstrated how easy it is to be a consumer of trendy green technologies that salve yopur conscience but do little to solve societys greater energy dilemmas.
I am leaving for the night. I predict when I view this thread in the morning, I am going to be enormously stressed...;-)
Nate - don't be stressed - most fun I've had all month!! ;-)
Nate,
Your comment"govt control...makes me viscerally squirm" sums up in a tight little nutshell my remaining a "conservative"-but (mostly) not one of the sort that is the butt of so many snide remarks here.
I fully recognize the shortcomings of our current system but for the life of me I am convinced that as many others have pointed out down this thread if things change we will most likely change one set of masters for another-and worse-set.
We don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.The concept of capitalism in my opinion is worthy and probably as well or better suited to createing a healthy and sustainable world as any other system -IF it is properly regulated.
We need to consider the concepts Hanson puts forth as ideas to be discussed -dissected and thoroughly examined inside and out-rather than a PRESCRIPTION.
But nearly everybody is reacting as if the piece is to be considered "as is" to be voted up or down by congress and ruled on "as is " by the courts.
When we had a hot little discussion of the works of AYN Rand a while back nearly every body who joined in betrayed an appalling inability to distinguish a NOVEL from legislation, an exploration of a set of ideas from a plan to put them into effect.
Even though you specifically pointed this out in your introduction in slightly different words ...
I personally have long been convinced that if the Founding Fathers of this country could have envisioned the power of saturation advertising and the rise of giant corporations prohibitions against such abominations would have been incorporated into our constitution.
As a practical matter I simply cannot see any way to get from "here " to Hanson's "there" except via a revolution-The one thing that has always left me wanting to grab my liberal buddies by the lapels(figuratively ) and shake some sense into them is thier lack of understanding of human nature.As a rule I cannot even get them to understand the general level of ignorance of the human race-except when it suits thier prejudices to gloat over the stupidity of those who disagree with them.
As I see it,our society is somewhat akin to a chimp society, but we have many alpha males both natural(congress critters and plutocrats)and synthetic-corporations.
In a chimp society there are usually a few lesser ranking males who if pushed to it work together and kick the alpha males butt if he gets too far out of hand and prevent the worst of possible excesses on his part.
I see our courts ,welfare nets,and so forth as our second tier males.The system is far from perfect but as others have pointed out,anything that is actually likely to replace it will probably be worse-and the only LIKELY way I can see the current system ceasing to be is thru a collapse followed by a revolution.Given the interconnected nature of our world today if there is a collapse my guess is that we will revert to something along the lines of kingdoms or chiefdoms run by warlords.
But there is a possibility that we might get lucky and sail right thru the rocks and shoals while getting a scare that actually focuses our attention to the extent that change is possible.
The attack on Pearl Harbor focused our attention on fighting WWII.
If we are lucky some Black Swanish event will focus our attention in the near future on the obvious failures of our current unsustainable use of energy and credit as well as the destruction of the carrying capacity of the overall environment.
It will have to be an event that knocks us flat on our butts but not so hard that we cannot get up again and still retain a functioning govt-one that leaves us so nearly broke that the bullxxxx is swept right out of the system-no more money available for locking people up for doing drugs, no money for "economic stimulus" no money to pay social security -meaning that he checks would still go out but only to those who pass a means test-if you have big bucks, no more ss.
No more money for patented pharmaceuticals and other technology-some sort of emergency powers act would abolish patent protections if doing so means easing the pain-
Doctors and dentists go on salary-and malpractice lawyers go to work on gangs building raised bed gardens in highway medians.
In this sort of environment we could probably get rid of the (as I see them )worst of the parasites that are sucking the lifeblood out of our people and our environment.
We could be rid of profit generating but not life enhancing business activities-somehow I doubt very much that all the advertising done by the restaurant industry has ever resulted in more meals being eaten-more meals eaten out, yes.
Who thinks we eat better because our towns are full of chain restaurants ?What possible USEFUL purpose is served by having an office building full of people shuffling paper somewhere a thousand miles from you and your night out?
We drive and fly long distances to visit places such as New Orleans just to get away from such abominations masquerading as restaurants.!
We could have a food merchandising system that works effectivelyand economically and far more stable localized businesses supporting us in far more human ways.
A Real world first hand example:
All the local chain groceries have apples shipped all the way across the continent in cardboard boxes that are no better than the apples grown locally-not as good actually, after beeing packed , chilled and hauled-they are usually at least three weeks or more off the trees even in the middle of the season.
My grandparents sawed Poplar trees logged right on the family farms into slats and made reusable wooden boxes buying only the nails-boxes that have been in continious(seasonal) use since the sixties that have probably been reused between one hundred and fifty and two hundred times.We will probably never need more as we are winding down our operation and will cease commercal production when the old folks are gone most likely-we can grow a fine apple but we can't sell it anymore.
The possibilities are endless in nearly any kind of business.
If we get our lucky breaks some of Hanson's ideas might just come to pass in some form or another.
IF we get our Pearl Harbor on the economic front.
As with all Utopian ideas, the only problem (initially) is who gets to pick the scientists to make the decisions? Human animals being human animals will always and all ways react to garner power for themselves and their cohorts. The world as we know it and the U.S. especially will be in for a long slide back down the energy slide. Individually we can mitigate the worst, but collectively this way of life is over.
--Jay was far more fun when he was debating assorted cornucopians on the USENET. That was before he became obsessed with unworkable quixotic political solutions.
--For some early Jay Hanson (mid to late 1990's), go to google groups and search
sci.energy, sci.environment
or sci.geo.petroleum for mclynch + jay hanson or john mccarthy + jay hanson. Michael C. Lynch is well known to TOD readers. John McCarthy is a retired Stanford computer guru.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/
The idea of getting the lobbyists out of politics is a good one, although first you'd have to get the rule past the lobbyists, which is sort of like the mice trying to get the bell on the cat.
I guess the writer has never worked for a public bureaucracy to observe how little people will do if they have a chance. On the other side, perhaps he's also not observed how hard people will work if there's a direct monetary compensation even for what may be tedious and boring work. Public spirited and ideologically driven people are probably a very small percentage of the population, not more than a couple percent. Plato's Republic, I believe,was one of the more successful attempts to describe the type of society which he would find desirable.
Like Nate Hagans and others I don't see how our current society is going to pay its debts, or more particularly, how the government can continue to operate with business as usual. I know my humble State of Illinois has something like a $7 billion or $9 billion deficit, and the State has used accounting gimmicks to avoid doing anything. The City also has a big deficit and sold off its parking meters for 75 years which should cover things for a couple years. The local transit agency which had a tax increase and fare increase two years ago, also is way in the red again. The County recently had a big tax increase and so is making it so far, but the tax increase was very unpopular. The federal government's deficit is way more than any of the outfits closer to home, and at some point there has to be some balancing, perhaps the boom will fall as soon as tomorrow...
From Mr. Hanson's article, one could say, well, for fairness sake and because of the oil situation, some major city, such as NYC or Chicago, could just not allow driving at certain times or on certain streets, eventually leading to a complete ban. However, I see no municipality anywhere doing anything like this, even to a limited degree.
First, that talk is US-centric - you debt problems is yours - they are not global problems. Then, I don't see the problem with you paying off your debts or balancing your budgets. You just need to get it over with. It might take a decade of saving and a few tax increases, both of which is a bit painful, but as you lived beyond your means for a while, you now have to cut back for a while. You just need to be less stupid than the Japanese. Don't build roads to nowhere, don't do stimulus packages, don't socialize medicine and so on. Just normalize and stabilize and let the economy recalculate how to devote its resources.
(Btw, the Illinous debt is a percent of it's GDP. Nothing to fret about.)
Wrong. All countries use fiat currency. European countries have more debt per capita than US on average - some have an order of magnitude more (Ireland). All countries on growth path have gone into a relationship between debt and resources - those with advantages are not the ones who are least in debt but have the most productive capability for what matters in the future. I don't think you can extrapolate Swedish model to rest of world because of population density. If rest of world had population density of Sweden we wouldn't have resource problems for a long time.
Are you thinking about national debt? I'm thinking more of debt overall. And what about current account balances, trade deficits? Who finances those? China has sent you goods, you have sent them green paper in return. That green paper is IOUs. What happens if they use their green paper to get goods from you? You produce as much, but you won't use it yourselves for a while. You'll "save", in essence, to get you act back together.
Then, I don't see the problem with you paying off your debts or balancing your budgets.
There is a phrase - Not worth a continental
Far simpler to declare the debt void and walk away from the obligation.
I presume quite a few people have seen Denneger's recent post called Possible Credit Dislocation: Be Warned.
I don't know whether he is crying wolf or not. Denninger points to the recent sharp rise in credit card interest rates for many companies, not just Citibank; reported deterioration in JP Morgan's cash position, and supposed preference by banks with foreclosed property of cash buyers over those with credit.
I know Obama is a fantastic salesman, but when he has to explain to the public that the same financial institutions that have recently paid out monster bonuses are again going to be taxing the shmucks, a tipping point in public mood might occur (or not). IMO they will try to avoid this by leaving the funds rate at basically 0% for as long as possible (sweet deal for "banks" like Goldman) and have the lucky participants take the free cash and invest it in anything they want. Not such a sweet deal for the rest of the country that doesn't have a ticket for the dance.
He's not alone... Jesse's warning of Steep Market Declines Coming
(I'm not an ecnomist, and I've no positions, but...)
To be clear, by definition, at all times there are SOME calling for steep market declines and SOME calling for sharp rallies - the market is an aggregate dollar vote of capital flows and expectations. The fact that you read Jesse's blog is self-selection - you probably just don't frequent the uber-bullish sites. (that being said, I happen to agree with Jesse - psychology of situation is about to deteriorate, and financial companies are little better than they were a year ago, nearly the same prices, and diluted, not to mention many of fed/govt one time bullets have been spent).
I'm going with the weather.
It was nice for summer
so up the markets went.
Dark and cold falling now
so time to get depressed
and crash the markets.
;-)
(Partially serious)
Nate -
I don't know much about this guy, Hanson, but man, he strikes me as one scary dude!
His vision ( ... Dear Lord, spare us from all visionaries, because throughout history they have caused the most damage, pain, and suffering....) appears to be one of benevolent totalitarianism - an oxymoron if there ever was one. If I get this straight, a small group of Enlightened Ones are to totally run the show and equitably produce and distribute the goodies to the docile flock.
Think Pol Pot, Edie Amien, Kim of Korea (whatever maximum leader's name is), and Chairman Mao during that horror called the Cultural Revolution, all rolled into one - and bingo! you have what Hanson's world would look like, in the very unlikely eventuality that it would even come close to happening.
While I couldn't stand the late Bill Buckley, he did come off with a good one now and then. I believe he once said that he'd rather pick 100 names at random from the phone book to be our top leaders than the faculty of Harvard or Yale. While I never cared much for the man and his ideas, I DO see the point he was trying to make: never put an intellectual in total charge.
Jaysus Nate, I beg you .... no more of this undiluted shite!
Amen, Joule, but beware: In Hanson's utopia, all of us who criticize his vision will be unpersons.
yes joule similar concern.
committee of scientists, engineers,.. thinkers...
the 'commons' is really protected when we 'feel' re those sharing the 'commons'. thinking alone is not how humans 'live, & relate'. thinking alone can't make the myriad of quick decisions of everyday life. we relate by feeling; & thinking.
so i want some premo intuitive folks along with the premo 'thinkers.
but gov by 'committee' is not the gov we need.
the commons has a chance of being 'safe' when we know/relate to those[include the entirety of 'our' web] that are primary to 'our' commons.
jay has made many contributions to our understanding of our problems; & the logical, natural dire scenarios ; collapse, war, & dieoff.[i get aware of shutting off my 'feelings' as i write these last sentences].
appears to be one of benevolent totalitarianism
How is that not close to what is already here?
Go hang out with the 'lets have social change' groups - they point out a 'low level of harassment' that can exist for those who are asking for change.
Try and step outside the present money system as an example.
Joule said:
That's Idi Amin to you, Joule. Now there was a man who believed in "de smack o' firm gumment". In fact, in Amin's Uganda you could hear the smack of firm government for miles on a clear night.
"Couples would be allowed only one child."
you didn't get any brother/sister hu?
Please, let's be serious...
As someone above said, "where to begin..."
Hanson quotes Madison but seems to be not aware of another Madisonian quote, "Liberty is to faction as air is to fire." What exactly defines a "special interest group?" Usually it means an interest group I don't agree with. Free and independent interest groups are one of the criteria for assessing if a state is democratic. The only place they are not found is under authoritarian governments.
"Very well," one might say, "an authoritarian government is just what we need to address the coming crisis - enough of this democratic dithering!" The only problem is that authoritarian government have historically had a tendency to run with some very bad ideas (see Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward) - which is why competing interest groups are a good idea. Incrementalism can be frustrating but overthrowing democratic socio-capitalism is as unlikely an scenario as it is an unlikely recipe for successful transition.
There is another great aphorism to keep in mind. "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." JK Galbraith
I was just reading an article on BBc News about the utopian schemes of the New Economic Foundation with their plan for The Great Transition. It seems that people are desperate for ways to save capitalism. Jay's proposal is more of the same, although they both have many good points.
There's way too much to comment on in the article and the comments, but let me comment on a couple of things in particular. The idea that you can separate politics and economics I find baffling. Every government (including in "state capitalism") serves the interests of the ruling economic class. This is because they own or control almost everything - jobs, credit, education, the media, legislatures, think tanks, etc. with their money. They run things, and naturally, they run things for their own benefit. You can pressure them to make some reforms, but you cannot take away their power to rule by just trying to make reforms. They won't let you. If you try, you will suffer the fate of progressive people in Nazi Germany, Suharto's Indonesia, or Pinochet's Chile, and other countries.
The reason capitalism always has to grow is because capitalism is dedicated to making profits, part of which becomes capital, which is then reinvested to make more profits, etc. ad infinitum. This is the very definition of capitalism. As markets get saturated, they have to find new investments for their capital. They extend credit to a ridiculous degree, and then move on to all kinds of banking schemes such as derivatives. They can't just use their profits to lower prices or give dividends to their stockholders, because they would then not have the capital to compete with their rivals, edpecially if there is an economic downturn. You can't just pass laws to stop this, unless you cut off their power, which means you get rid of capitalism.
there also seems to be the view that the Soviet Union was expansionist like other countries. Not true! One reason they failed was that they did not strive to always increase production and profits (after the initial period of industrialization). They made a conscious decision to NOT produce a consumer society like the United States; e.g., car ownership was greatly restricted. They subsidized the countries in Eastern Europe, especially in the provision of cheap oil and natural gas. It caused a lot of trouble when capitalist Russia cut off those subsidies, especially in the Ukraine.
You can have a democratic system of socialism, but not corporate capitalism. The system Jay is advocating looks a lot like feudalism to me, and it may be the direction we go in. Back to the Fuure!
Capitalism does not have to grow. Your reasons that is has to is nonsense.
For an ignoramous you sure have a lot to say. If reading Marx is beyond your level of comprehension, maybe you should write the US Chamber of Commerce for their opinion.
More nonsense. Why not provide some relevant arguments to support the claims made?
I'm surprised by the intensity of the reaction to Hanson's essay. It strikes me that much of it is driven by people's fear of change. Even Oildrummers, a progressive, nonconformist group get upset at the prospect of change.
There are a few aspects of Hanson's essay that strike me as naive, unpractical, or counter productive. But I do believe he has the vision to see that change is coming and the courage to propose a possible and productive direction. A lot of us on this site talk about the day when TSHTF or TEOTWAWKI. But if you look at example after example of great change within a society forced by outside forces you will find that these are also times of great political change. When the decline of fossil fuels causes serious societal upheaval political upheaval will be in lock step. That political change could take many faces, scapegoating will be rampant. People will be desperate for a new paradigm. Hanson at least is proposing a positive model to fill the coming vacuum.
The issue I believe he most accurately grasps is the need to remove corporate influence from the political discourse. That may have been impossible 10 years ago or even today. But 10 years from now, it might be a different story. Corporations are the fundamental corruption of our political process. When things get more chaotic, that can change. It doesn't take a constitutional amendment to correct that, only a supreme court ruling.
The second area where Hanson is optimistically visionary is in his suggestion that the country evolve towards a meritocracy. It is one of Obama's election promises that science will inform policy instead of being denigrated. This idea may very well have tremendous traction when our incumbent process is fully exposed as ineffectual in dealing with peal oil.
Politics is the art of the possible. The scope of the possible is set to expand mightily as the decline of fossil fuels shakes the status quo. I commend Hanson for his proposal and his vision that we can evolve into something better and more effective.
"It strikes me that much of it is driven by people's fear of change."
Oh, dear. I'd say that this "fear of change" meme, in its current usage as a mandatory conversation-stopper, must be one of the more pernicious political inventions of the last few decades. "Change" is not automatically good - indeed a considerable portion of it turns out to be for the worse - so worshiping blindly at its feet is an act of sheer stupidity. Even some change for the better will prove too costly to be worthwhile short of magically erasing the world and starting over with a blank slate, which is a major reason utopias are just that. The academically idealistic
beanerg-counting utopia will never be attained, and we may as well get over it.We may as well also get over some of this nonsense about corporations. Just because of sheer scale, we will have them, or something else called by a different name for political effect but nonetheless very much like them, for as long as we have seven billion, or even one billion, people on this little planet. Call them quangos, call them limited-liability companies, fiddle at the margins of the rules and call them what you like, and there they will be.
And the notion that entities employing tens or hundreds of thousands of people apiece will have no influence is just so wildly fatuous as to be beyond words. Shoot all the lobbyists tomorrow morning, and the political arguments tomorrow afternoon will still not change materially. The Senator from Exxon, or Microsoft, or wherever, will still be seeking special privileges for his or her pet entity, and still telling his or her constituents that said privileges are in the interest of their jobs. The only real issue here is an ancient one - participants in politics nearly always find it convenient to silence their opponents if they can; at the moment, "corporate" happens to be a useful curse-word to employ for this purpose.
+1
well said
I think that the power of corporations will continue to increase, and corporations will continue to intertwine with, and become harder to distinguish from, governments. We have gone too far down the slippery slope...too many vested interests are at stake in BAU now. Any concerted attempt to enact profound change to corporate/government fascism will be crushed. I truly wish that I may be wrong.
To all:
A common theme on this posting today has been the failings of capitalism. No doubt there are many - it is a human endeavor, after all. In particular, several people have discussed capitalism as a system that was "devised", as though there was a planning committee, and Mr. Hanson simply wants to replace it with different sort of planning committee. This portrayal of capitalism is in error. Various institutions within capitalism are "devised", e.g. the Fed, but the capitalistic impulse (and that dirty nasty yucky profit) is one that is INGRAINED in the human makeup.
We are trading animals. You can't read any history without this fact hitting home. Where there is not money, people trade for more tangible things, and also influence, status, security, sex, etc. It has been so since the first caveman traded an animal skin for some food, or sex for protection. No system whatsoever will ever stop the human impulse to trade, increase one's security, and provide for one's family. Even in a completely communal society, there will be trading - just read about the politics of the Soviet Union. Imagine the frantic bargaining that occurred in the worker's paradise of Pol Pot, where eating a full meal was a triumph.
So: By all means, let's have suitable regulations to prevent systemic collapse, e.g. maybe Christopher Cox of the SEC should have really considered regulating credit default swaps instead of just being absent without leave. And let's protect people from having absurd amounts of debt being pushed at them like heroin at a junkie. But let's not kid ourselves. No system, no matter how coercive or "fair", will ever remove the impulse of we humans to indulge in commerce, whether it be financial, political, emotional, sexual or otherwise. To create a system that assumes otherwise is to create one that is doomed, and will doom us as well.
How would Mr. Hanson legally define "employed by a corporation"? When someone is lobbying an elected official, if employed, how would we distinguish when they were lobbying for their employer from when they were personally lobbying. After all, when I contact my representatives, I am lobbying on my behalf. If we ban one group of people from interacting with our officials, we must presume that all groups are at risk from being disenfranchised. This sounds like a good idea, but would only result in further control of our government by fewer and fewer people.
The fundamental incentive to lobby is because our federal government has a ridiculous amount of power. If you can convince congress to legislate your company $10 BILLION dollars, why are you even doing anything else! We don't need to alleviate the symptom, we need to cure the disease. But of course, Jay is proposing what amounts to a large increase in government power which would only increase the incentive to lobby. And even if "lobbying" were to be banned, I'm sure it would still be there. Just like the war on drugs.
I'm glad that Jay's solution to this political gridlock (composed of a 2 party system) is to give those currently in power the means to indefinitely stay there. If it's bad enough now that 3rd party candidates can't get on TV to promote their election bid, just wait until it's ILLEGAL. There is no reason to believe that those who will write the public financing bill won't write everybody else out of it.
Some other poster above me already stated this: Jay is recommending we assemble teams of special interests but NO special interests are allowed!
Phew! By the tone of his article, I though Jay wanted to dictatorially ram all these changes down our throats without even an attempt to placate our republican system.
I think it's easy to say that "Capitalism" has failed us. That if only we had enough smart people in enough places with enough power, all of our problems would magically solve themselves and we'd all sing Kumbaya around a campfire. I hate to break it to anyone who thinks this, but that's what people have been saying since the dawn of humanity. Has it ever reached that state of nirvana?
I agree that the free market sucks in some respects, I agree that we can't support 100 billion people on this globe and still be considered humans. Sometimes you just can't win. We either fight for a freer market, a place where enterprising individuals can make water potable from piss, generate power from underwater ocean currents, create websites like theOilDrum, OR we can live in a glorified concentration camp where the environment will probably get f***ed up anyway. 'Cause we're never gonna have a Ghandi-Einstein-MotherTeresa-BenFranklin-osaurus ruling over us with a benevolent, intelligent, iron fist.
What, rein in the pursuit of happiness?
In my opinion Hanson is correct that capitalism will not run in reverse. When I say this I'm not talking about the person-to-person level of "human commerce" that someone above talks about. I'm talking about capitalism as an organizational and motivational system for societies. It won't work in a time of persistent and dramatic declining energy inputs.
Hanson is also right to be thinking about what kind of government we want to have before the crisis is fully upon us. I can think of a lot of things worse than his proposals, and among them would be the continued unfettered growth of corporations at the expense of the vast majority of mankind. That outcome will lead only to misery and violence.
All the arguments people are presenting are based on thinking that developed in a climate of seemingly endless societal growth. In terms of the impact on the economies of societies, we're looking at the equivalent of something like gravity becoming a repelling force while people keep trying to describe it as an attracting one. That's not a great analogy because the change will not be a polar opposite. However it WILL be completely different.
There will always be some sort of comerce going on even if its just a small farmshop selling to the locals but the big corporations wont be able to downsize quick enough to cope with steep declines in oil production. Some will obviously do better than others though.
Like many of the others Nate - I do not know where to begin on this one. So I will not try to pick it apart. It is not worth it. But it gave me a sinking feeling when I read it - not because I am worried it would be implemented - but because it drags down TOD to a lower level in my view. I am a relatively short termer (months - not years)on TOD and mostly a lurker. But I have been so impressed with this site because of the quality of the posts - whether I agreed with them completely or not.
The integrity you have built up over time by the quality of the postings may have just taken a major backward step. Please try to return to dealing with reality. As someone else said - this guy has absolutely no appreciation of human nature. How many people would be content to sit back and assume the government will deliver them their one loaf of bread per day.
Maybe this really was satire and I was snookered. If not it was really really bad.
How many artists musicians and writers are there that are wasting away doing work that would be better left undone.
Give it another read, I do not agree with all Hanson says but if you feel that a equitable division and distribution of wealth is impossible then it is time to get ready for the last round up, right Tex?
I do not agree with all Hanson says
Jay 'says' 2 things:
1) the things he calls raw data (his observations)
2) where the observations/data lead him to think how things should be.
I can grok why #2 is troubling - but how often is he not 'correct' for #1?
Nice article, except for a few major things:
I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure the reason we've used so much oil is that we haven't found a better alternative. Just like discovering the advantages of oil we will discover the advantages of another resource. But if by chance oil is the best and most efficient thing out there, then I still think we'll be alright because we have already cut the consumption of oil by cars by huge percentages in just the past decade. Imagine how many mpg's are cars will get in 2030. So I don't suspect we will have an "oil crisis" at least not to the proportions that you have described.
Second, your idea of separate "communities" that would have their own laws, religion and culture. Yeah I might be mistaken but I think those are called COUNTRIES. Really? That's your groundbreaking idea? I think you're a little behind. And even dividing up America? Oh wait our founding fathers thought of that too, they called them STATES.
Third, while you have the right to your own opinion and freedom of speech, you also have the right to live anywhere you want to. Why would you want to fundamentally change America when you could just live in Europe, which is where I'm guessing you got most of your ideas from. You just described in your article the same kinds of socialist regulations and government that have been tried or are still being tried in European countries. Most of these ideas have failed. Which makes since why America was formed in the first place. There was no country like it, where you could make your own choices and suffer your own consequences.
And finally, what I got from reading your article is that you favor full government control on our economy and our individual lives including, how much food we can eat, who works and who stays at home, and how many children we can have. I pretty sure this is communism. And if you are a socialism supporting communist then I want to ask you "Why are you living in the US?" (I'm assuming you do). There are great communist countries out there a lot better than the little old USA. Why don't you go and live in the great Republic of China they seem to believe about the same stuff you seem to. You can be a hard working parent of a single child and go home to your hut or maybe if you get lucky (because it won't be based on your working merit) you can live in a nice 1 room apartment on the side of a hill and ride your bike to your government assigned factory and put in a nice 12 hour day of work. But no really you would rather be in your nice climate controlled housing sitting at your computer knowing that all of this was made possible by dun dun duh!! CAPITALISM!
Little advise, Trash the players not the game itself. Or just move to China.
Jay Hanson's dieoff.org is a wonderful resource and should be required reading for any educated person.
I don't think this article by Hanson is satire, but I also don't believe it is his prescription for or prediction of future events.
It is a description of a possible (but highly unlikely) future, through which he illustrates the vast energy-inefficiency of modern life.
When we say that modern technology is "efficient" we mean to say it's "time-efficient" or "labor-efficient" but almost never "energy-efficient." This distinction is important and often overlooked.
Pre-industrial agriculture produced more food calories than labor calories were spent, by definition. Industrial agriculture spends vastly fewer labor calories, but spends ten fossil calories for each food calorie produced. If only more people understood this fact.
The article by Hanson claims that modern life is vastly energy-inefficient, and describes ways in which it could be less so. I think he's right that we will see a return to the milkman food distribution system, for the simple reason that it's energy-efficient. As for the talk about a scientocracy, well er doubt that can happen.
For hundreds of years, science has been a by-product of military spending. Calculus and differential equations were developed because these were required at the time to improve artillery. Therefore, leaving society in the hands of scientists is tantamount to leaving it in the hands of their military masters.
I think, looking at many of the comments here, that one needs to seperate, and be aware, of the differences between political ideology, dogma, predujice, faith, self-interest and and, for want of a better term, I'd call, rationality, or an objective, scintific way of looking at the world.
This is, of course, extremely difficult, as it's the 'lies' that we believe that scare me most of all. One of them is the 'label game'. Calling one economic/political system, 'free' or 'democratic', or 'capitalist' compared to 'communism' or 'socialism'.
The utopia, or public ideology of capitalism and 'free markets' is miles away from the reality of how the system functions in practice, and is comparable to the psuedo-socialism practiced in the great totalitarian dictatorships of the Soviet Union, or present day China.
Personally I believe the United States, as witnessed by the current 'socialist' bailout of the financial system, has definitively abandoned the core principles of official, capitalist ideology and dogma, and replaced it with the corporate state, where increasingly the market and the state, become one and the same.
Clearly, capitalism, no longer really works in the United States, if it ever did, but this is a massively complex subject to get into here, so I'll step back a bit from that historical can of worms!
What I find amusing, no perhaps grotesque is better, is how closely free market ideologues, resemble socialist ideologues in their increasingly desparate attempts to defend their corner at all costs, even to the point of self-contradictory absurdity, and if only capitalism/socialism was allowed to evolve into a pure and uncorrupted form, how everything would be fine.
Capitalism, is, I believe, at heart, like the other major ideologies, about Power and how it is distributed in society, not primarily about economics or markets. The collosal concentration of economic power and wealth which characterises the modern United States, also has profound implications for our concepts of democracy and how society is ruled. It would appear to be close to impossible to have a healthy and functioning democracy and at the same time vast disparities in power relationships.
So, in the United States, as an example, one has not only pushed old-schoool capitalism to one side, but 'democracy' as well.
This brings us to the thorny question of how exactly one introduces profound change in a society ruled by an incredibly powerful elite whose interests are so different from the rest of the population, so that they, the elite, de facto, live in an alternative society, a virtual, global, Versailles, compared to the great mass of humanity.
Writerman,
Wow. Been a loooong time since I read a real 'Writerman' comment.
I am with you fella on this debate.
I worked for IBM for 30 yrs and then retired. When I started I took a cut in pay to go to IBM for they told me this "you will not earn the large salary that many in other companies do(it was a corp but we always called it a COMPANY)...you will not BUT you will receive extremely good benefits and a very good pension plan plus medical plus much much more.
So I did. Go to work and the culture was astounding there. They had 3 Basic Business Beliefs and 6 further Principles. Guess where 'earning a fair return for the shareholders' was at...it was next to last. The first was "Respect for the Individual"...the next was "Excellence in Service" and followed by "To provide the Best Customer Service possible"...........
And they made these beliefs and principles very upfront and enforced them. Such that IBM was the best company in the world at that time IMO to work for. You had to be very good, you had to believe in what you were doing and you had to be loyal to them. If you were a slacker you were soon let go...termed then as Being Fired!
That was my introduction to conserative business and a way to thinking and working that made a lot of very good sense. We produce both extremely high quality products and service.
That was then and this is now. Where is IBM on the Fortune 100? It went the way of the Dodo bird. Due to proclivities of the economics and the yuppie takeover of corporate Ahmurkah. It started in the 80's as I saw it. The 'I want it ALL and I want it NOW' generation that the boomers raised up assisted by the Soceer Moms and others. Spoiled , lazy and full of bullshit they took over it all and so here we are.
Sitting right next to the large LCD screen and my keyboard is a black IBM Selectric II that I picked up at a yard sale last summer. A mechanical monster. One that I was trained on since it was the I/O box for some of our earlier mainframes...like the 7070 series..and maybe the Model 40 System 360s.
I love to tear into its innards. Marvel at the genius of its mechanical heart. Think back to the days of fixing serious problems and rendering service to major companies and corporations. My past until I became a programmer and moved on and upwards.
Today I still get my generous pension and my secondary Medical Ins thru IBM costs me only $16/month.
Others whine about this but I put in my time and earned it by hard honest work. Something most today cannot deal with...hard work and integrity.
So capitalism..or mercantilism..was sucessful but only as good as those who ran it. Then they were Chairmen of the Board and Presidents of the Corp...not CEO,CIO,COO and the other arcane terms that hide out and create the chaos we now see.
Its called Integrity and takes a good man. Not the filth we see running it all now.
It also requires a large measure of patriotism..IMO. A very large measure. Love of country and not the destruction of same.
Airdale
PS. Writerman you need to comment more. I miss some of the old crowd.
I don't post much anymore for TOD has now gone to places and beliefs I no longer inhabit.
When I read discussions of "dystopias" of this type, I try to visualize what they would actually look like, down at street level, to live in. Since I am not a great visualizer, I turn to fiction. Being a liberal arts man myself, I am not averse to using great (or lesser) works of fiction as a guide. I simply take the descriptions of what should be done according to the said visionary prescribing the cure, and look for works of fiction that I am familiar with that most seem to match it. They may not be an exact match, but they can get pretty close...
The world order being prescribed by Jay Hanson has the feel of two dystopian fictions of the middle of the 20th century. His vision could fall somewhat between the two in fact, with elements from either or both. The first is very well known as something of a masterpiece, François Truffaut's film version of "Fahrenheit 451". The travel of the working class by way of mass transit (the monorail) the tiny apartments which one could visualize as being very efficient, the complete government control, the suppression of information to retain social order...otherwise, life was pretty good! Entertainment was provided by large interacive screens, with no need for the wasteful luxuries of travel, sport, art or especially liteature, which only would cause people to yearn for a life of more variety and excitement...the very things which cause consumption of resources and carbon emissions.
The other dystopian fiction most resembling a Hanson future would be one that is not nearly as well regarded as Truffaut's work, the b-grade (though something of a cult classic) science fiction movie "Logans Run". Again, we use the film version for easy visualization.
"Logans Run" with its "shopping mall" chic setting, but all enclosed in giant domed cities with mass transit tubes providing automated transportation, (one could picture the nuclear reactors hidden somewhere to power them), and resource consumption controlled by the expediant of forced death at 30 years old (because we all know that the older wealthier codgers in their big cars and desire for luxury travel are the ones who consume the resources...birth controlled sex and again the reliance on advanced video entertainment (because a world without cars is much more acceptable than a world without television)...again, not such a bad life...if your under 30, and really, what fun can you have past 30 years old anyway?
So there you have it, two views of a low carbon/low consumption future, all you need is a single party government with the will to silence opposition and make it happen...
It is said that the writer Virginia Woolf, already suffering from the depression which had been with her throughout her life, was driven further into her melancholy illness by her certainty that England would be invaded and conquered by the Nazi regime of Hitler. She had suffered her dementia in years previous and survived, but being the free thinking artist she was, she could not abide the thought of living under a totalitarian racist regime. On March 28, 1941, she put on an overcoat, filled the pockets with stones, and walked peacably into the river Ouse near her home. Her remains were recovered on May 18th of the same year. The only advantage of horrible dictatorships is that they make our inevitable death more bearable, a worthy choice worth making. Nature in its infinite wisdom always provides a way out.
RC
RC,
I tend towards The Bladerunner but your picks are more likely.
GMO,Genetic alterations,frozen eggs and manipulating lifeforms,the whole Frankenstein schtick.
Yet in my own life.Not down on the street level as you , but out on the farm?
I envision a return to a more pastoral life of what I knew as a youngster. Mules pulling our wagon to town on Saturday to trade cream , eggs or butter for a few staples. The rest of the time spent enjoying the farm life. Close to nature. No more than a hundred acres. Playing with and visiting cousins , aunts and uncles. A huge extended family.
Breathing clean air , drinking clean water and eating the best food possible. No illnesses to speak of. Healthy and happy. Hard work yes. But many days of rain when you sat on the porch and relaxed. Winter and no work except to bring in wood and water or a ham from the smokehouse.
This was my grandfather and grandmother my brother and I lived with on a hundred acre sharecropped farm where he raised 14 children with not that hard a deal.
It was done and can still be done if the earth can ever recover to allow it. If they quit destroying what is left of the wood lands. Quit depleting the water systems and poisoning the environment with the constant chemical assault.
Yes the weak and uncapable died young or did not survive. Some become handy men and some never married. There was room for those. Thetr were the landowners. You could become one as well if you wanted.
But today? My friend with no wife and only one son finds it hard to support even that while farming 3,000 acres!!! Of which he owns about 100 acres. Finds it hard to do what just 50 years ago was accomplished by much less and no divorce in the offing.
That way of life? Most here cannot envision it. Most do not have a clue about it. Yet it was there. I lived it. For the first 14 years of my life. Also with other relatives for varying lengths of time and theirs was the exact same way.
Currently I have returned quite a bit to this style of life. I live a very simple life as much as possible. On land my ancestors once owned. I just finished canning 24 pints of wild Elderberries for jelly. Then made 12 pints of pear preserves. I bake most of my own bread with a wild yeast I captured myself for sour dough bread. Tend my garden when needed and chop my wood for heat. Watch this country circling the drain.
Airdale
Hi Airdale,
although a huge extended family sounds great and reminds me of my youth too I dont think its going to be a sustainable arrangment with an ever smaller resource base to work with. You dont want too many mouths to feed unless you have the means to support them all.
The proposed solution could never work. It's effectively communism. I grew up in Soviet Union and have pretty good idea what people's attitudes are in socialist environment - nobody will really care about 'common good', economic efficiency plummets and whole system breaks down. Why do you think the country went bust???
Unfortunately I'm seeing similar utopian approach in many Oildrum posts. No wonder the peak oil community is sometimes viewed as mad scientists on the fringe of society... we have to figure out a solution that works in conjunction with human nature, not against.
Well maybe we should try socialism instead? Oh right,even if we get rid of totalitarian style leadership the undeserving may get something all the deserving figure they shouldn't. Oh well I guess we best just soldier on in the Bonusland army, raise the corporate banner and give our joyous battle cry of, "Quantitative easing will set us free".
Well, as E O Wilson pointed out: Communism, great idea, wrong species.
However, his analysis of capitalism is scarily correct and well developed, and Marx may of proven Time Travel, as no one could of been that right 150 years in the past.
Nonsense. Marx couldn't even see how industrial work would specialize enormously - his theories of wages dependent on the exchangability of labour broke down early on. Wages have apparently risen for factory workers, right? And it isn't due to unions, mind you.
I always find it amusing that the very tonics prescibed to cure the human condition always seem to run contrary to the way natural selection makes us. Jay is unfortunately like the other clutch of lateral thinkers desperately trying to save humaity when in actual fact humanity only has a minor part in the universe and probably shouldn't be saved. I'm beyond lateral!
If indeed there is a grand creator of it all then his biggest joke was letting us evolve the intelligence to realise we are screwed.
Marco.
The Earth is God's dime novel. Or one man's answer to the age old question; What is the meaning of life?
After his first revision came out on the 14th, I have been studying his words carefully, slowly, hoping to reconcile the loose ends there with my own. I had to stop early on: the argument that its founders based America on tragic assumptions has thrown me off because I have yet to run across these in either the Federalist or Anti-Federalist Papers, or the Constitution. Trying to be generous with Jay, who has contributed much, I have been trying to figure that out.
I completely agree that special interests have taken over and that we should moderate, if not completely stop these eternal, legal constructs, completely; however, we won’t do it, we can’t. Contributors to the Oil Drum are sitting on the top of a cliff watching two trains coming around blind curves at break neck speed on the same track, Peak Oil on the left and Population on the right. We, the smarty pants, are too high up for the trains to hear us, and even if those driving them could hear us, the momentum is too great to avert a collision. So . . . get used to it. Prepare personally. Jay’s got good points, many jewels throughout his essay, but he gives up hope near the end. If there is any hope realize this: 1. Pain and Suffering is Temporary. 2. There is an Outside Chance of an Afterlife.
Hmmm . . . does anyone at the Oil Drum want to form a corporation that sells quality hand tools, including coffee and pepper grinders, that work great and last a long time?
Waveman,
Great post.
I would add that the trains are probably accelerating, the off button is broken, and the engineers are asleep or already jumped off.
WRT your comments:
1.Pain and suffering is temporary (happiness and joy may not be)
2. There is an Outside Chance of an Afterlife. (In my book that is high 100% probability, else this life silliness makes no sense and has a really poor EROEI.)
When you get your salt pepper corporation set up, I'll contribute my solar grain grinder - drop a line if that was not sarconal.
email is on my stats.
Craig
Shouldn't the title of this post be called America 5.0?
America 1.0 - pre-native american (no humans)
America 2.0 - post native american migration but pre-European colonization
America 3.0 - European colonization with European rule
America 4.0 - post Revolution
America 5.0 - Hanson???
Or, are we just at another dot release of America 4.x?
Bob
...
America 5.0 - Post 9/11
America 6.0 - Post Global Peak Oil recognition
America 7.0 - Post Balkanization
As Matt Simmons said it is better to start with the data and arrive at a conclusion rather than starting with a conclusion and looking at the data.
Hete are many facts and data that should be deeply considered:
1. Adam Smith one of the original major founders of capitalist thought specifically wrote about "social goods". Those social goods,which could be exploited by the society without limit, along with the military were the two rare exceptions to where free markets were not to have unrestrained rein and government would coud have a legitamate role.
Oil is the perfect example of a social good.
Perfect example of where there is a legitamate social good. This does not mean capitalism has failed just because we reached a point where a physical resource needed some reallocation.
2. In general, capitalism is by far the MOST efficient system to create wealth in the world. The data is that the United States has been, and will be for a little longer, the richest country on earth. We became so rich that 300 million of us could command the use of 25% of the worlds resources.
3. One reason we now have a peak oil problem is that many other countries figured out that capitalism was very efficient. Twenty years ago China adopted a modified form of capitalism, essentially abandoning their socialist economic system, and has been on a growth tear ever since. They are growing at almost 9% this year BECAUSE of capitalism (that's effeciency). The last time the U.S. grew that way was when we were a newly forming society.
3. Are we capitalist now? I don't know. 1/2 the workers in America work for the government and another 17% controlled by government if healthcare becomes public. Is a society capitalist if 67% of workers work for the government?
4. Two billion Chinese modified Capitalists). One billion Indian Capitalists. Billions of others outside the U.S. 4 billion people with cell phones. We are in the information age and the information is out. In the past those billions were non-resource users who could be partly kept ignorant by total government control over information.
5. In case anyone didn't noticed, not only has communism faded throughout most of the world but socialism is on the retreat outside the U.S. Canada has a conservative government (that is even considering privatizing part of healthcare). France recently elected a conservative government. The new head of France said only a little after his election (I heard it and was surprised) that the United States was the greatest country that ever existed on the face of the earth (Pretty amazing considering that included his own country). Germany just elected a conservative majority government.
6. Abandoning free trade will do nothing for the U.S. The rest of the world needs us less and less every day anyway. So many believe China is growing because of the U.S. If fact China already has a middle class that is larger than the Entire population of the United States.
Also, China is now a 10% an export driven economy. They don't need to support the U.S. consumer forever and are learning to consume themselves. They are also just as entitled to live a decent life above starvation level and minimal resource use as anyone is and capitilism is taking them there. India is capitalist and their people want to heat their homes and like having tiny efficient autos as opposed to their feet.
Do we have problems in the U.S.... absolutely. I have little faith in our new Government can control everything philosophy. Government by it's nature makes political decisions that are very inefficient because they can often ignore economic reality in favor of political reality.
As to our new government, as well as all those of recent U.S. history, that continually move away from real capitalism and toward governmental control, while incurring unbelievable government debt (53 Trillion dollars)and making untenable political promises that government can somehow support 1/3 of our population in retirement with social security and medicare...The only thing I can personally do besides attempt to edify (and move every dollar I can find to countries that do not have their head in the sand and mainly to Canadian oil companies).
7. Have the government pick up and deliver the food? Just like in Russian communism when people stood in line for hours for bread. Very efficient.
(and note that Russia is a country which had lots of natural resources - #1 in oil in the world)
Finally, everything in life needs balance. Unfettered capitalism,...no...so regulate social goods as Adam Smith proposed. Unfettered government...just watch what happens in the U.S. during the next few years.
Unfettered environmentalism...the army corps of engineers tried to build a dam around Lake Ponsitraine which would have prevented most of the devastation from Katrina but were blocked by a lawsuit by environmentalist...and farmers in the San Juaquin Calif., the countries vegitable basket, are going bankrupt because they cann't get any water due to preservation of the darter fish.
Unfettered corporations, no... but that is why we have antitrust laws.
Thomas Sowell, a free market thinker proposed a simple and great idea for government. Make all laws applicable to all people equally. If one person gets a favor from government than all do. Not happening in the next four years. As Margaret Thatcher said the problem with socialism is that eventually the socialists will run out of other people's money to spend. Well... guess what...we are about to run out and it will be called a devalued dollar/inflation which will be far more palatable to the political elite than unemployment. The real problem with government is they do so often hide the truth and point to problems they created (poverty created by welfare and government housing, a mortgage crisis created by mortgage agencys, outrageous health system costs created by government in devastating ways, even I discovered today Iranian zealots given power by Jimmy Carter) as being the blame of someone else.
(P.S. no response doesn't mean anything, I just don't have that much time but might take some questions)
You simply don't get 'it'.
Wealth is material possessions(aka junk). We all know that energy is needed to produce 'things' and today tremendous numbers of energy 'slaves' are required for our level of 'civilization'.
Energy production is going to fall in the near future due to the depletion of fossil fuels. The green revolution which feeds 7 billion people(and millions of animals we eat for protein) depends of huge amounts of energy. As Jevon pointed out, more efficiency
just means consuming energy faster. More efficiency puts us on an unsustainable exponential curve as every scientist will tell you.
A source of infinite energy has not been found and probably never will be.
Your 'efficient' system is doomed to fail.
majorian, do you think he possibly meant to say "MOST rapacious system to reallocate wealth in the world"?
You might be surprised that I agree that you may be right. Every system, whether most efficient or least, that we know might be headed for failure.
I do disagree that wealth is junk. Everyone values different things and they have that right but even basic food and basic transportation and housing are forms of wealth.
I hope that with a lot of sacrifice in America and the rest of the world that we will successfully adopt. There is a lot to give up in terms of big cars, big houses, distant vacations, long commutes, working five days a week, etc. before we have to give up food.
Excellent summary.
Wallstreetexpress -
Some point-by-point comments/questions:
1) 'Social goods?' Exactly how is oil a social good, as opposed to just another essential commodity?
2) Perhaps capitalism is creating wealth in the world, but the pressing question is: for whom? Is the fact that the US has become the 'richest country in the world' an indicator that things are OK or an indicator that things are NOT OK? Guess it all depends on who you are and how you look at it, don't you think?
3) Uh, I think we have a peak oil problem because everybody wants the stuff, capitalist, communist, Moony, or whatever. This is hardly an ideological question.
4) So, four billion people with cell phones is a good thing?
5) One could call these 'conservative governments', but some others might call that trend a sign that the powers that be are retreating to a reactionary posture, so as to ensure that the people running the show don't lose their privileged status.
6) While China and India are doing relatively well, I doubt it's because they have seen the light and have become Adam Smith capitalists. They are doing well largely because they are well organized in exploiting their cheap labor.
7) Ah, something I can finally agree with. Hanson's vision is truly grotesque and totally unworkable, and attention must not be paid.
So, in my book one out of seven ain't too bad. By the way, your opinions are quite eloquently expressed, and I look forward to hearing more from you at TOD in the future.
1. You could read Adam Smith who explains it better than I can but it's very similar to the commons concept. Oil is a limited resource that society will use up without some intervention.
2. Things are not generally OK anywhere under any system as we have 4 billion people in all sytems who (reasonably) want to live above minimal subsistance and a shortage of resources to do it and especially not ok in the U.S. (unless ok means ready for a simpler lifestyle). Capitalism may be efficient and a wealth creator but it has essentially created too much wealth for too large a population (economically too much wealth, not ethically)
3. Stuff can be food, housing, a car or motorcycle, a battery, a power generator, heat. I totally agree, it isn't ideological but some would make it that. It's simply economic, supply versus demand throughout the entire world.
4. It just is a fact that indicates the world's previously poor are developing.
5. Don't understand?
6. Read Jim Roger's the commodities guru who has spent a lot of time in China. I think he lives there now. They adopted managed capitalism 20 years ago and that's when they began their tremendous growth trend. There are now profits and private ownership of businesses in China.
7. Grotesque they are, or at least very confused. Thanks much for the complement.
"7. Have the government pick up and deliver the food? Just like in Russian communism when people stood in line for hours for bread. Very efficient."
From the 1950s to 1980s in Britain they used a nationwide service of electric vehicles to deliver dairy and other products, including bread, directly to the consumers door. I'm not really sure why the system fell out of favour but I suspect it was due to both adults in the household working and therefore no one was able to take direct delivery of the goods.
I wasn't aware of that but the fact that the Government intervention worked for a while but it fell out of favor likely indicates that it might not have worked in the long run?
Hanson repeatedly refers to the problem of special interests influencing government decisions. My personal perception is that our social problems stem from uniformity of interest rather than from diversification. From the CEO of Goldman-Sachs to the latest migrant farm worker to slip across the border our economic goal is identical: To accumulate consumption rights. This desire is deeply built into our social infrastructure both from the point of view of practical institutions and cultural propaganda. It follows as the night the day that an economic system whose motive force is the competitive accumulation of consumption rights will be striving to maximize current consumption.
The great problem of our time is to figure out how to revise the social contract so that other kinds of interest can be substituted for the universal, unvarying, and (to borrow a french adjective) funeste preoccupation with 'making money' which currently dominates global culture. Whatever else you think about Hansons's ideas he is a least proposing a concrete change in the social contract which addresses the underlying structural problem.
I like to try figuring out how to make lemonade out of lemons.
How can something constructive be made from the Jay Hanson position?
I think the best tactic is to do small implementations of ideas about reorganizig society.
If you start a corporation or some other kind of collective you get something that is
of managable size. It can also be active in the already established framework of laws
and institutions. Its ideas will then spread far and wide if it works out ok and be
copied or franschised. Every kind of non aggressive initiative that does something
constructive will also strenghten the fabric of the local society.
I also think that drastic political changes are much less risky on lower levels, in municipialities and counties. An its better to experiment within states then on the US federal or EU level since bad decisions can be contained while bad federal or EU decisions can hurt a whole continent
It seems very strange to critizise large corporatinos and special interest corruption of politics and then want to reorganize everything in a scale that is as large or larger. That ought to repat the same kind of problems or create even worse ones. If it is a good idea it should work on a lower level and if it could work on a high level implement it and keep it warm while waiting for the high level to grasp for it.
Another way of making lemonade from ideas about rational planning of the whole society is to stop pretending that they can replace the current economy and make people happy. Develop such ideas as a civil defence to be used in natural catastrophies, during wartime etc with the limitd aim of helping as manny people as possible to survive and do whatever they can do about the new situation within the framework of the normal economy and institutions.
This would lead to stockpilig of basic foodstuff, fuel and basic medical supplies, emergency water sources and distribution, emergency powerplants, preplanned priortization of renewable fuel sources and a large part of the local oil and gas production, on-the-same-continent production of vital spare parts etc, more upkeep and redundancy in various infrastructure and training more people in helping other people, red cross, part time fire brigades, etc, etc.
Its intresting to think about such stuff and I have done it a lot. But such an emergyency plan will never replace the ordinary economy, its a crutch and an insurance against disasters but it is not a new way of life or a new economy. Changes leading to a new way of life need to be done bottom up in a process that includes people and their initatives and it is not about tearing down institutions, its about adapting institutions and trying to get their usefull functions to survive.
And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. --Nietzsche
Jay Hanson perfectly aware of this danger but he dares to gaze into the abyss anyway.
OTH, we only momentarily look down as we become giddy then offering up silver bullets to look away.
The problem is we are reluctant to think what a world without energy will be like. Before the Industrial Revolution the average lifespan was 40 years, there was no medical science, 50% of the population(1 billion in 1800) lived at the subsistance level.
At that time the solution was in the discovery of a whole, relatively unpopulated Western Hemisphere( like finding a second Earth).
Today we have a lot of energy intensive science and technology but the environment and climate is degrading rapidly.
It's no accident that Malthus and Darwin(Descent of Man) were concerned with human overpopulation even at the very begining of the Industrial Revolution.
Hanson is being as 'optimistic' as he can be under the circumstances.
We will not get a world withouth energy, what we might get is a world withouth cheap energy.
Electricity and all that follows from it wont be un-invented.
But the countries and regions that looses their ability to invest and adapt will fade into insignifcance. And lots of people will die if we get bad politics at the same time like resource wars, fachism and utopia builders that dont understand people.
It seems worth saying that a number of commenters have, I think incorrectly, equated "markets" and the current US version of capitalism. Competitive markets are a tool for doing unconstrained optimization. What markets won't do is evolve constraints on their own -- constraints must be imposed from the outside. It is interesting to note that at the PhD level, intro to micro sails pretty quickly past the "markets do optimization" part and spends a lot more time on the ways that markets can fail (hence require that constraints be imposed).
Given an adequate set of constraints, I feel quite comfortable trusting markets. Imposing constraints in the US is difficult at this point in time because there is an influential group that argue that because some past constraints have not worked out particularly well, all constraints are suspect.
Although it would be wise to emplace remedies in advance, let the market cogitate as the oil winds down. In the case of commercial transport, that being of a scale to hedge against famine, we seek a "Guarantor Of Societal & Commercial Cohesion". See Christopher C. Swan "ELECTRIC WATER" (New Society Press, 2007) for compendium of new generation mobility and energy links.
Start from scratch if you prefer. With the knowledge at hand in our 2010 era, step back to the century before oil. Eighteenth century: slavery a necessity at American beginnings, but the 19th century brought engines for manufacturing and railways and eventually for the fields. Slavery was replaced by sharecropping (another unfortunate example of owners finding ways to exploit labor), and the economy was on an upward trajectory, still without internal combustion engine mobility. So we find ourselves at 100 years ago, having tasted of oil but not dependent or addicted.
This is a request for examination of 1910, and applying what we know now, (with electricity at the forefront) with oil requirements say, 5% of current US demand. Getting along on 1 mbd of crude oil, ad infinitum. A starting point for cogitating on near/midterm, not what may necessarily be the situation 50 years from now.
Other source of liquid fuel will add significantly, but that's frosting on the cake. For strategic, not impulse aviation, delivery and specialty trucking, etc. Agricultural equipment and remaining rubber tire transport, critical needs met with natural gas and batteries, hydrogen, fibre/ethanol, algae, too many to list...
As part of the program, we restored the dormant rail branchline footprint, facilitated with reformed US Army/Guard railroad operating & maintenance battalions (James A. Van Fleet, 1956 ~from Association of American Railroads librarian 202-639-2100. We dusted off the NAWAPA water project specifications, and recharged the Central Valley and Ogallala Aquifers, respectively, to drastically diminish need for deep well irrigation supply.
The capitalism/socialism/distribution argument was rendered irrelevant by realization of need to invest in civil engineering infrastructure. Cash flow return was adequate to pry wealth out of vaults, and gold was called in early on to prevent currency collapse. USA managed to avoid widespread anarchy because EVERYONE had a stake in the process, could see and use the benefits of adequate, if not always convenient, transport.
Canada participated as a partner, with early agreement regarding the MacKenzie Watershed waterflow (NAWAPA) and continued petrochemical feedstocks. Mexico partnered in with continued food production tied to NAWAPA water delivery (Rio Grand flows raised & maintained) and security arrangement on Mexico's southern flanks, and coast watch. Water heading south also conditioned on slow of immigration headed north.
tahoevalleylines recommends modest papers in (peakoil.net) articles 374 & 1037, respectively. See ASPO Newsletters 42 & 89. The probability of homeland attack increases as the oil producing nations become aware of the true facts on limits. It is important for planners, and planners at heart, local organizations and family councils to understand the value of rebuilding the early twentieth century US railway matrix: Mains, secondary trunk routes, branchlines, and the shadow system of Interurban Electric Railways. Swan's ELECTRIC WATER is useful as a classroom text, with a savvy instructor...
Jay Hanson is invited to comment on USA return to railway oriented transport. Maybe, look at Chinese example, largest railway engineering projects in history now underway. Hanson's comments on Chinese railway building can take on new depth, if Jay will correlate China's behavior with the teachings of SunTzu... SunTzu absolutely calls for "trade' as a tool for a lessor power to gain pre-eminence over a superior adversary. They have our money and now they are building railways. Anyone from Chicago, USA Rail Hub, get it?
Is this really a valid assumption? Do we really know this to be true? Can free markets really not operate in an era of long-term economic decline?
I suspect that the direction of the trend curve is less of a problem than the rate of change. We do know that markets do indeed tend to not perform very well when there are sudden discontinuities. They clearly do better when operating in a relatively steady environment. While a fast crash would very likely indeed render free markets non-functional, I am not at all so sure that would be true in the case of a slow decline.
A slow decline would indeed change the whole economic calculus. In an economy in long term decline, long-term investments would have to be made very carefully, an in many cases would no longer make sense at all. On the other hand, in an economy in long term decline, and especially in an economy where energy resources (and likely most other resources as well) were declining, there would be strong incentives to minimize waste, and to conserve and stretch out the useful lives of existing capital assets rather than to invest in new ones.
That would be the case with a free market in operation, anyway. Hanson seems to assume that governments are marvelously free from wastefulness of any kind. He must know about different governments than the ones I have seen on operation on planet Earth.
Given a long term economic and energy decline, the balance between labor and energy would shift, and it would make more economic sense for production to become more labor intensive. Thus, instead of Hanson's vision of most people not needing to work, it is more likely that everyone will need to be working as much as possible, and more/longer than they are now, even while the compensation for labor will diminish. This will happen regardless of whether it is corporations or the government that is doing the hiring.
Hanson's vision of an economy with no corporate advertising, no corporate competition and presumably a limited, standard array of necessary products for sale only, all available through centralized outlets, is extremely reminiscent of what Bellamy envisioned in Looking Backward. If implemented in practice, it would more likely be reminscent of the stores with empty shelves that have been the actual experience of places that have actually tried to implement similar utopian communistic visions.
Very interesting essay with even more interesting comments. This thread seems to have brought out lots of folks who are hypercritical of Jay’s essay. By implication, they appear as happy-talking supporters of so-called free market capitalism, entrepreneurism, and technology. It seems these folks are basically happy with the current US political, economic/business, environmental, and financial models – they seem to have faith that these models (for the most part) will serve future generations well. Of course, they have opinions about how to tweak BAU, but certainly not to the extent of Jay’s willingness to look at all the fundamental underpinnings of US culture and economic systems.
I think many of Jay’s proposals will never materialize, but I really respect his attempt to describe his version of a better world. I had the same feeling when I read the proposals in “Web of Debt”. I think we need a much wider conversation about the fundamental underpinnings of western culture/economy/governance – regardless if the people starting these conversations are a bit “out there”. Dismissing his ideas as utopian, communist, or socialist does little to advance a serious discussion about how to survive what most of us believe to be some pretty serious challenges in the next few decades.
I think the happy-talking commenter’s, for the most part, fail to address:
- This is a risk management issue. There are genuine risks for both the current generation and future generations: human population overshoot, energy, GW, species extinction, habitat destruction, fishery destruction, water supply, etc. Regardless of the specific data/evidence, only a fool would dismiss these issues.
- There is almost no evidence that the current US models (of most everything) mentioned by the happy-talkers will mitigate the risks. They have “hopes” (which I share) but there is little evidence that capitalism, free markets, technology, etc. will make the risks disappear.
- This is the ultimate “gamble”: the happy-talkers ignore (ridicule) proposals like Jay’s so that we can continue with BAU – they proclaim he is wrong while they utter useless platitudes about free enterprise and such.
This conversation should basically focus on six basic things (or something like this):
- When will fuel prices rise beyond historical levels - and stay there?
- When will all the negative consequences of FF use and population overshoot start to kick in?
- Given some credible timeframe predictions for the above two events, what goals should be set (possible examples: 350 ppm GHS by 2050, 2B human pop by 2100, alternative energy replacing 80% of FF by 2030, elimination of private, none commercial, ICE vehicles by 2025, etc)? Where is the real debate of these types of goals based on solid science?
- What obstacles need to be removed and what innovations/solutions are critical for achieving these goals?
- How can an individual lessen the personal hardship that will most likely result from these events?
- What can the government do to soften the impact for the general public?
I submit that neither wishful thinking about technology coming to the rescue, nor being resigned to a total collapse – is useful. I think there is some potential for future generations of humans to survive on the planet and experience life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Maybe not a big potential but the chances are certainly better than zero (IMHO).
Jay’s POV should at least be awarded an honest discussion free of ideological knee jerks.
There is a sensible middle ground between murderous totalitarianism and unrestrained exploitative and destructive capitalism.
Saying that if I reject Hanson's ideas I must be in favour of the status quo of the US is like saying that if I support capital punishment I must want to execute people for jaywalking, or that if I oppose capital punishment I must want to let all criminals go free.
Between two absurd and destructive sets of ideas, there is a sensible middle ground. Hanson's stuff ain't it.
Hi Kiashu,
Yes, you make a valid point. Although I really don't think that Jay is advocating "muderous totalitarianism" - even if his ideas could lead to that result.
In another thread you posted:
I like that comment - especially the part about "a better world". This was my frustration with many of the reactions to Jay's essay. As I implied in my comment, I don't seem much potential for his ideas. But, I do think that some radical thinking needs to be tolerated and debated to see if there is any kind of plan that might actually help reduce the pain for our grandchildren and lead us to a "better world". I think we need to tolerate a some fringe ideas to facilitate creative discussion - some of the TOD commentors can be pretty harsh.
I was reacting (perhaps not very well) to many comments that trashed Jay without looking for some small value in his essay - I did think he made a few useful observations. I just did not get the feeling that many folks were trying very hard to find the path to that better world.
I take it you mean "exploitative and destructive democracy"? It would make just about the same amount of sense. Capitalism isn't destructive and "exploitation" is just a way to bad-mouth trade and other voluntary agreements.
Uau, so, like peak oil isn't a big problem by itself, let's add a totalitarian technocrat central planned state ruled by the prescient and all knowing scientists who are magically unaffected by lobbies and don't have special interests.
Is this for real?
I find it funny that some doomers(?) believe this could work without massive oppression and suffering, witch i guess was to be avoided in the first place. So what will Jay and the Illuminated Scientists do to people who disagree with him and have different opinions on how to face peak oil and live their lives?
Seriously, we are facing troubling times ahead, i guess imposing a one way solution, restricting liberty, is not the way to go. I choose the peak oil zombies over this depressing dystopia any time.
There is not ONE solution to the problem we face, we will have to adapt and cope, the little solutions and adaptations will be local and diversified. Free markets, the right to own the product of one's labour is the best way to guarantee the diversified approaches that will be needed. This meme that private ownership, freely agreed contracts and free initiative will not work in a declining energy world remains to be proved. I'm not saying it will be heaven on earth but that will minimize suffering and maximize solutions.
What i know is that central planned economies are inefficient and have failed tremendously, no matter how wise the expert committees were, we have many examples of this in the 20th century, and this during a energy boom, do you think the "experts" will get it right this time?. There are no singing tomorrows and flows of wealth and abundance at the end of the road to socialism, only more misery at greater scales.
This seems to be one more side effect of the anthropocentric belief in science, that is, technological progress and the progress in sciences have a corresponding progress in our ethics and our nature. All in all is just another technofix for those who want to live in a world created and controlled by humans. Luckily, that will never happen. I find the thought of human extinction more appealing than this so called fix.
I just found this essay and its 170 comments, and was stunned to see that a search shows no instances of the word "Technocracy," which was a movement that flourished during the last Depression. If I recall right, Hubbert was either a participant or sympathetic to some of its program (I may be misremembering that last, since I can't recall where I acquired that idea).
I did a little digging into Technocracy when one of its very old adherants died and left half his estate to the remnant Technocracy organization (in NYC I think) and half to our church. I had never heard of it and was interested in a social movement that seemed to attract some rather interesting followers.
My conclusion about Technocracy was perhaps best summed up by a witty line I saw quoted about communism (perhaps here at TOD): "Right theory, wrong species."
UPDATE: Ahhhh, the remnants of Technocracy, Inc. (!) -- see Technocracy.org -- are still around, although they've moved to Ferndale, Washington, it seems, probably for the coffee. Anyone interested in Hanson's opus above would do well to read more about the history and program of Technocracy. Hanson seems to have adopted an awful lot of their ideas.
Lovesalem,
You might be interested in looking into the French way of getting things done-it works rather well for them.
If I understand what your old technocracy organization was about there are many similarities.
The Technocracy gets mentioned on TOD at least once a month.
Hanson seems to have adopted an awful lot of their ideas.
Have you ever read dieoff.org? All of it?
He's the go-to link on the eMergy lawsuit. And I believe somewhere in his pile of data he'd like to see a Technocracy but doesn't think it'll happen so he's pointed out you are all going to be slaves and hopes you ask for a benevolate dictatorship.
Given the fundamental heresies already invoked here, I figure one more probably wouldn't be amiss.
Consider the notion that perhaps the problems we are facing now is due to the fact that, as a country, we are too big. There are too many ideologies, too many differing (and in some case wildly diverging) viewpoints about the way that the country should be run, and because of that, we end up with what amounts to a lowest common denominator problem in that governments are effectively paralyzed because there is too much centralization of control.
Break up the US into ... say fourteen or so distinct countries, Canada into three or four. Each of them becomes an independent government, with independent control of the currency, independent laws concerning the role of corporations, in effect independent economies. Let each regional government choose its own form of governance - surely, the Pacific Northwest will likely have a vastly different economic system than the Deep South.
What happens as a consequence? It becomes much harder for organizations to build massive accumulations of wealth, becomes much harder to establish long term offensive militaries, and makes it more difficult as a consequence for those pesky special interests to game the system. What's more, different regions can in turn experiment with different political processes. You can have a libertarian government in Texas, a capital-socialistic government in Arcadia, and theocracy in Utah and a direct (vs. representational) democracy in New England. California would be ... well, California.
I'm making this suggestion somewhat tongue in cheek, but only somewhat. Assuming that oil inputs are likely to drop quickly over the course of the next couple of decades, then large scale economies will have a tendency to devolve into more but smaller systems. Right now, we're in the vortext of a giant hurricane, but once that hurricane makes landfall, it tends to break up into a number of increasingly decentralized cells.
We tend to think of the US in its current configuration as being stable, but that real stability has only in fact coincided with the rise in oil production and usage in the last one hundred years. Depression I took place when there was still considerable room for growth in the US economy, where technological innovations were really just beginning to hit their stride, and where the population is much smaller. Eighty years later, things are very different - the population has grown by nearly five times, the resource base - oil, food, water - has been severely compromised, and the percentage of GDP that is in fact going to governance is now exploding in comparison with the private sector.
I think that Jay's comments above are idealistic in the extreme, primarily because they assume that ultimately the country itself will remain in its present form. I don't think that will happen. I think that ideological splits, bankrupting of state governments even will the Federal government loses credibility, the need for independent currencies that could more effectively be tied in with business partners and not be controlled via a centralized agency, and an increasingly sophisticated communication grid will in fact make a de facto disintegration to regional governments almost guaranteed.
I agree. I think the problems coming are severe. Far worse than most people realize. The world has never faced the ultimate issue of global resource depletion before. What will happen, no one really knows. There has never been 7 Billion people on the planet before. That is the fundamental change.
It gives me great concern that 80% of the people in this country seem to be little more than mindless sheep. They don't read the real news, they watch the Prozac mainstream TV news, and they believe the government. They trust our government. As Sun Tsu said over 1500 years ago: "All warfare is based on deception". When things get tough, as they surely will, I expect our government to lie as never before. And they have already lied plenty. 80% of the people will follow the lies. It does not give one much cause for hope.
In roughly 10 more years China will be the #1 economic power in the world. It will no longer be the US. Everything will change. They have 4X our population. They currently produce 97% of the world's rare earth metals, and now they are talking about an export ban. Our media loves to talk about Green Jobs. What the idiots do not understand is that "Green Jobs" mean Chinese jobs, not US jobs. Wind mills, electric cars, batteries, etc all require high tech metals that China holds the monopoly on. Whatever hopes lie ahead for a non-oil future are entirely under the control of China.
I find it very telling that nearly all of the Chinese leaders have hard science degrees: engineering, physics, chemistry, etc. Compare that to the incompetent self serving lunatics running our country: politicians, lawyers, finance, etc. They do not even understand the technical challenges we face in the years ahead. The next 20 years will be nothing like the previous 20. As was the case with Rome, France, Britain, etc, the American Empire is coming to an end.
I dont think China is going to have a good time of it either once we're on the downslope. They are also dependent on a lot of imports to keep things going. They expect civil unrest if their growth drops below 6%. They will have plenty of internal propblems.
NAVIGATION query:
I see that the web host's system notes how many comments there are in total and how many "New" comments have appeared since my last visit, so presumably it knows which ones I've had a chance to see before.
My question is how do I select to only see those new comments (i.e., suppress the ones that I've already read/skimmed/skipped over)?
The utility of this comment organization format would be greatly enhanced if there was some way to only have to wade through haystack once.
If there is a way I have never found it. I've already made my complaints about this forum set up though so shall leave it at that.
Happy wading.
login
Ctrl F
[new]
you can usually even get by with "[n" in the search box. Only very rarely does it stop at something other than a NEW comment. (Using Firefox)
B
Thanks for the suggestions -- however, (Apple-F) -- the equivalent search to CTRL-F -- stops at every single comment on the words "Reply in NEW thread" and "Start NEW thread."
Is there some way to search for the tag that's being counted as "new" comments?
He told you - don't search for "new", search for "[new". :-)
Naked Capitalism post on Sunday:
Capitalism, Socialism or Fascism
So how do we get to free market capitalism, then? B/c, you know, less economic freedom means more looting, that much is clear.
Re: "free" market capitalism, it's interesting to me that another free market capitalism zealot (and and committed Ayn Rand acolyte), Alan Greenspan, had to admit during congressional hearings on the current financial crisis that his world view was fundamentally flawed. Fanatical free marketers are often adept at making the data fit the model, as opposed to the other way round. But that model is, indeed, fundamentally flawed as it is based on those flawed assumptions that are familiar to all readers who have been victimized by a 'dismal' economics 101 course (see: homo economicus).
Alas, arguing 'facts' with a zealot is a waste of everyone's time; the starting assumptions are simply incompatible (learned that the hard way debating bible thumpers; round and round..). So fine, free markets are magical panaceas.. invisible hand.. blah, blah.. you win. Now can you go home and let us get back to rational debate.
Thanks
What you just did is called rational debate? Where?
You accuse others of being fanatical yet you provide no argument, you bring up a false analogy and insults.
I didn't see anybody in this thread saying that free markets are the answer to all our problems. Free markets, unlike Marxist theories who promises heaven on earth, a new humanity and the end of scarcity for all true believers (you could make a better analogy between this kind of utopia and the Christian idea of Salvation at the end of times), are about maximizing liberty, maximizing solutions and the very important idea of personal responsibility. There are no golden bullets!
Austrian economic thinkers, in my POV, have very interesting theories that i intuitively relate to ecology. Their assertion that credit can only be conceded based on previous savings (no money creation out of thin air) and a 100% reserve system are policies that would have not allowed the credit expansion (bubbles) and the resulting bad investments, overexploitation of resources and their misallocation.
Is it possible to build bridges between those who defend freedom (including economic freedom) and those who are worried with peak oil and a declining energy world? I think it's possible and preferable to the old and failed idea of central planned economies and their mighty committees of all knowing wises.
It's becoming a zero-sum world because the natural resources are declining.
Your wealth is my poverty.
Your freedom to pursue profit is at my expense.
The problem with libertarians is that they're hypocrites. Their right to accummulate property is defended by the state (or deadly force) while they attack the state for redistributing their wealth.
Their property rights are all that matter.
Innovation is the shit. Not natural resources.
Work some, then, and you'll get some money.
I can't persue profit without offering people something they want at a price or quality better than they can get otherwise. How is that at anyones expense? I would say that stopping people to persue profit is at everybody's expense.
I don't quite follow the reasoning here. I want the state to defend my property, thus I should find it natural that the state expropriates my property? Why?
No, the freedom matters. For socialists like you, however, what matters is that someone else pays for stuff you'd like to happen. (Or else you'd just shut-up and make the stuff happen yourselves.)
You must read my book when I get it printed. Its main scenario is more or less between "innovation is the shit" and "its a zero sum game or worse" and I argue that it can end up either way depending on the local societies ability to adapt.
Bad politics and a lack of investments and long term thinking and we get a "zero sum game" that at its worst might end up in fachism hell. Well oiled markets(*), people that innovate and adapt, more work for less pay when times get tough and we get "what peak oil?".
(*) Ownership, trade and honest competition, not fraud, bailouts and bizzare litigation.
Jeppen is an 'innovation cornucopian'.
The innovation will save us meme is just plain wrong.
Have you noticed that scientific innovation has slowed over the past 50 years?
Despite massive investments in science engineering science is not
producing answers.
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=16
I feel science engineering IS providing answers. Also, very much needed tech is already there and will be used in the event of a liquids crunch. Infrastructure, logistics and tech choice will be reevaluated and rearranged.
Interesting, I will definately read it.
My overview is nearly identical to that of Jerry McManus. All living things are biologically hardwired to maximally exploit all available resources in their environment until overshoot conditions force collapse.
Beyond that I find it amusing the number of people who seem to have such unbounded egos as to wake up on any given morning with the thought, "Today I will reinvent Western Civilization!"
The fact that we have gotten to where we are at today as a result of a long lineage of thinking by the best brains humanity has produced starting with the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the western philosophers, the men (and women) who fought and died trying to overcome every description of tyranny seems to be so easily cast aside.
No one person is going to come up with a master plan to get us out of this. The only thing that that kind of thinking has ever led to is more tyranny.
Funny And Brilliant.
This is a very linear view of history and this linear view of history is very doctrinal. History is much more chaotic than you think ! This view of a constant progress to the "magnificent western civilisation" appeared just a few centuries ago and what we are discussing here is precisely why this doctrine show its limits and how it can evolve.
PS: If all the great men or women whose heritage you claim, were living today, they would maybe be more open to this discussion than you think !
Mr Hanson wrote:
By the 1970s, that number had dropped to about twenty-five barrels. Within a couple of years, that number will become one for one.
You said that a couple of years ago. It is obviously not true. Please retract your statement here and on your website. It undermines your credibility.
How many barrels do you understand it to be at today? I've been hearing something on the order of 10 to 8. I'm really curious to know what the Deepest Water wells are able to net at this point, as I'm sure their contribution to the average is only being bouyed by the countless older, easier wells as they dwindle down..
In either case, it's clearly heading fast in that direction, no?
The number is headed to one-for-one in the United States, as reported in The Oil Drum: Net Energy | The Net Hubbert Curve: What Does It Mean?. The number was 11-1 as of 2001, which had declined from about 30-1 in 1970, which had declined from about 100-1 in the 1930s. I've heard the CEO of Schlumberger suggest that it's around 8-1 right now.
Steve Mut, CEO, Shell Unconventional Resources Unit stated in 2005 (at the 2005 ASPO conference) that shale oil in North America had an EROEI of about 3.5 to 1.
Globally, EROEI has declined from about 35-1 as recently as the 1990s to about 18-1 now, as documented in REVIEW: A Preliminary Investigation of Energy Return on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas Production.
All of these sources indicate steadily declining EROEI. That it has not yet reached 1-1 is simply good fortune for us so far. Either we replace these energy sources or they become energy sinks. Ergo, what Hanson has stated is obviously true and in the process of occurring. You offer nothing but an assertion. I suggest you offer facts to counter this point, or accept that EROEI for fossil fuels is declining.
Grey, first, you said this:
I suggest you offer facts to counter this point, or accept that EROEI for fossil fuels is declining.
which is putting words in my mouth, which is typical of many denizens of this and similar forae, and why I have distanced myself from direct engagement with the "peak oil crowd" because of idiots like you.
Let's go over this again for those obviously less skilled.
Hanson said:
By the 1970s, that number had dropped to about twenty-five barrels. Within a couple of years, that number will become one for one.
Note: HE SAID THAT A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO.
You just said:
I've heard the CEO of Schlumberger suggest that it's around 8-1 right now.
A couple of years since Hanson wrote that IS TODAY. In fact, IIRC, (I don't have the docs right here) Hanson FIRST said that in 2005, which is a lot more than a couple of years ago.
Therefore HANSON IS WRONG - even by YOUR OWN STATEMENT.
I am not denying that eventually we will get to 1:1. WHEN is an interesting and valuable question.
HOWEVER, Hanson is engaging in simple fear mongering and you haven't the ability to see that.
This DOES NOT invalidate his larger argument. I am contesting his rhetoric and tactics, which I think are simply craptastic and counter-productive, and, SADLY, endemic to many of the people who engage peak oil theory. That you are incapable of seeing that only serves to underline the depth of your own tinfoil-hattery and wilful ignorance of the obvious.
The political system should be like this:
(1) Head of the state is selected (not elected) for life. He not have to worry about short term public opinion. That would free him to take long term strategic decisions whose benefits are not visible to the myopic eye in short term but is visible to all including by-birth-blinds in long term.
(2) People of country select a large pool of opinion leaders. This pool can be as high as 1/1000 of population. It comprise of engineers, doctors, economists, scientists, mathematicians etc etc. This pool should be large enough to represent all people in the system. It should be large enough to have diversity. This group would have no political power of its own, except it select from itself the head of the state. A majority vote in opinion leaders would install and replace the head of the state. Being large, this group can't be bribed. Being large it would be more open to public voice and its people would be more accessible to a common man.
(3) There should be a very, very strong judiciary who has its own income (perhaps by putting its own taxes and revenue generation). It should be powerful enough to replace the head of the state.
There should be no modern style democracy which is just a corporate play field. Head of the state not have to do any kind of campaign. There should be no use of mass media to attract people except what news comes out of meetings of opinion leaders. The opinion leaders could be as little in number as 1/10,000 of population. Opinion leaders should be professionals doing their own jobs and businesses and should take no money in any form from government. If it feels like an opinion leader had taken a bribe, people of the area should consult a court that should terminate his position from the opinion leaders for life.
Judiciary should be strong, large and independent. At the top most level there would be a group of top judges from all districts. This committee should have 500 to 1500 members, all of them would be top most judges of their districts. This committee should have the power of selecting and replacing the top judge of the country. There should be one judge for every 5000 people or 1000 families. Police should be in direct control of the top judge of the district.
"(1) Head of the state is selected (not elected) for life. He not have to worry about short term public opinion. That would free him to take long term strategic decisions whose benefits are not visible to the myopic eye in short term but is visible to all including by-birth-blinds in long term."
Assuming we are still talking about America 2.0 this is never going to happen. The American revolution was founded on its opposition to the 'King's Tyrany'. Its a core belief of many US citizens. Again any attempt to impliment this would result in civil war.
Having said that I totaly agree with the benefits you have pointed out. A dictator for life could sort out many ills that democracies are not capable of with their short term political thinking, and if benevolent enough, would have the support of the majority of the people.
A dictator for life could never sort the problem in the long term : a man is a man with all his bias. I think every solutions with a more distributed balance of power is better and not less efficient.
Ones persepective on Jay's paper depends on how large the gap of resources per capita will be in the future vis a vis expectations/needs. That remains a big unknown. But if you accept that we don't have enough resources/flow rate to allow financial capitalism to continue for all the worlds developed and developing countries, it is not that far of a reach to conclude we need to use less, on average, and possibly significantly less. I think Jay has concluded that this won't happen voluntarily, or via tax or market incentives, and therefore will likely have to happen via decree. That path, like any other, is not without extreme hazard - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If we acknowledge the developing world can't all have the throughput footprints of average american, then barring some sort of populations collapse, all these discussions boil down to aiming for the red circle on above graph - we get the bulk of well-being (for greatest number) without the bulk of the throughput. It is a question of cultural evolution on the spectrum between elitism and egalitarianism on an ecologically full planet. How/when/why/who to get there are questions wide open for debate and discussion.
I believe it is rapidly becoming clear that the average American can no longer continue to have the throughput footprints he or she has had until now. So the issue becomes how do we create conditions where a lighter footprint is seen as an ultimately desirable and attractive goal to strive for.
How can we transmit the knowledge that the status quo must go. Even more importantly how do we convince people that less is actually better and can be the basis for a much higher satisfaction index than the insane proposal "that he who has the most toys when he dies wins".
OT but here is a cosmological perspective to inspire a bit of humility, too bad the average American can't appreciate it because they have been deprived of an education in basic science and critical thinking skills. My hope is that more people will choose paths of less materialistic persuasion to pursue pure knowledge instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
I have long admired Jay Hanson and credit him with alerting me in the 1990s to the problem of peak oil. But when he says we need to divorce our political system from our economic system, I am apalled. I am simply not willing to give up my freedom to solve any problem. A government that is immune to economic conditions is not a very good government.