First, read Dmitri Orlov's latest post, How (not) to Organise a Community. It's a ripper! Actually it's not great literature: it's a little too long and with a "put together" feel, but also what he's saying is a hard thing to listen to and to understand because it runs against what we want to understand. We want to follow the grooves we know — we want to form committees, have meetings, produce agendas, tick boxes and then have some feel-good social functions under the guise of "networking", where we can slap each other on the back and congratulate ourselves for "doing something". 'Cause that's how civilised modern types like us solve problems, isn't it? But what Dmitri says is what I've been feeling deep down, but without being able to articulate as well as he does: that the reality of life is that it doesn't matter what you think or feel or believe. All that matters is what you do and what the situation really is. And right action can be for all the "wrong" reasons, via the "wrong" people in the "wrong" places.
I'm plugging away at a number of projects at the moment, one of which is my novel, "Alex" (I've been a bit slow cranking out the chapters but they will appear in due course!). I've been thinking that what is going to happen sometime in the next three to four decades is we are going to lose the federal government we have now. Instead we'll have a military government, which I'm calling the Military Commission in the novel. It will come in as an emergency measure but then stay on for all kinds of reasons. The state governments may well carry on for much longer as they are, because we don't invest too much abstract value in them: their job is to keep the machinery of our lives running as well as possible and that's a management task. The federal government on the other hand has "spiritual" values attached to it: our picture of something we call "Australia", and we project onto it an ideal of our national selves. As this image of ourselves fails along with the tax revenues which support the federal government, so will the democratic institution itself. The quality of our politicians will fall and they will become paralysed by our inability to realistically to map out an agreed role for them. We can see this already happening in relation to the war in Afghanistan. What we want the war to be like and what we want our role in it to be is completely at odds with the reality on the ground. Politicians at the highest levels spout the mindless platitudes we want to hear while the military are playing it for their own ends. The result is not likely to be good for the government's legitimacy.
The other thing I'm thinking about a lot and which Dmitri covers as well is, how do we build a viable economic structure for the future? Do we do it with nice reasonable people sitting around boardroom tables playing the game by the rules? I don't think so and neither does Dmitri. The future will not be "managed". It will be an eruption, a tearing of the social and economic fabric, a giving up rather than a trying harder. Our current system, where small businesses carry something like 50% of the economy, where basically it's survival of the fittest within a set of legal and economic rules, will just get harder and harder to continue. The big players, the 50% of the economy run by corporations, will be able to tilt the board in their favour because they can control politics much more effectively than us little fish — but only for a time and while generating a great deal of bitterness and anger. But the problem will be the rules which we are all playing within are going to lose their agency. If you stick to the rules you will be lucky to survive. For a start, credit, the lifeblood of business, is starting to dry up and will eventually be completely gone in its present form to be replaced by — nothing! And the desperation of the government for tax revenue, which up till now has been fine while the goods and services tax (the GST) has boomed along with the consumer economy, will mean small businesses will be squeezed very hard because the big boys will tilt the board their way. Couple this with a continuing drop in global trade and the outlook for the mass of Australian industrial style agricultural workers and self-employed people is not good.
This means that the successful entrepreneurs of the future will most certainly be criminal at one level or another. They will be outside the tax system for a start. It may well be that marijuana will be legalised simply so the government can get some tax back on it, but other drugs will not be and the general level of misery will ensure steady sales, helping the financial underworld.
Who will oppose the rise of this new class? Firstly the government at both state and federal levels due to the dropping tax revenue and the perception that an illegitimate power base is arising, threatening the carefully constructed system which has been evolving in Australia since Federation. Those classes dependent on state revenues for pay: public servants, the armed forces and teachers will see their living standards declining and tend to blame the decay on "moral delinquency". They will be joined by the mass of baby-boomer retirees who will be falling into much deeper poverty than they ever expected due to the losses on financial markets and the decline in tax revenues and hence pension payments. The teachers and other public payroll recipients will resent having higher taxes to fund the baby-boomers too, so the solidarity of the current system will be very shaky. Add to that the great mass of workers turned out of the building trade due to the impending popping of the Australian property bubble and we have a very volatile mix.
An attempt will be made to pin the blame on particular groups. We may find ourselves in a major war simply because the population will be so maddened with rage, so confused at the mysterious loss of prosperity and so helpless in their personal situations, that having an identifiable enemy to fight will seem a blessed simplification. The Muslims have a definite target painted on them at the moment: perhaps some new twist in Middle-East politics will provide the trigger.
But all these considerations must play out in our real lives: we have to avoid being thrown under the bus because we have a target painted on us, but we must also find a way to survive in a much more uncertain and dangerous, poorer world. I've been thinking about all this in relation to where I live, in the poorest part of South Gippsland in southern Victoria, Australia. I can see how this area, which at the moment has a certain level of prosperity and happiness that it's never had before, could just slowly fail, with the clever and energetic people leaving for more promising prospects anywhere else and the social fabric fraying and falling apart in consequence. I've seen it in other areas of Australia and I can see how it could easily happen here. So I'm trying to hatch a plan to counter this. My idea currently revolves around the idea of a couple of business incubators, but of course it is more than that. What I'm really trying to do is build an alternative way of life: a true counter-culture.
Who would want to be a member of such a beast, in an area like this where if you have any talent you can still count on being whisked off to some brighter future in the city? My gut feeling is that it will be the bad boys and girls. We have a few of them around here! Anyway I'm vaguely negotiating to lease a large abandoned factory in a neighboring town which I'm feeling more and more could be the centre of some crazy social experiment. I'll keep you posted.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
How do we really know collapse is immanent?
Aeldric has done a great post over at the Australia/New Zealand Oil Drum entitled The Networking of Resource Production: Do the Networks Give us Warnings when They are About to Fail? which goes straight to the heart of the problem I have: how can you tell in an unambiguous way that the system we are living in is approaching collapse? After all our human culture is full of legends of The End, replete with prophetic dreams, visions and revelations. If they line up with reality they get incorporated in legend and religious tradition. If they fail, which is vastly more frequent, they make page four in the newspaper under the "Quaint-goings-on-in-some-nutcase-cult" section: something a sharp student doing their Masters in psychology could use as a good subject for a thesis.
As an ordinary member of Industrial Society, what information do I have leading me to say a crash is immanent? What does an ordinary person "see" in their day-to-day existence which allows them to make these kinds of judgments? All of us have networks flowing through our lives but no-one can easily "see" these networks from start to finish or how they may relate to one another. We may understand our little bit very well and have a clear idea what is right and wrong with it. Our appreciation of other people's part is necessarily vaguer and tends to be tinged with the natural human suspicion that "others" are not as competent or hard-working as we and our colleagues. To quote from a comment Aeldric added to the discussion of the above post:
This situation is also governed by a time factor and a certain perception of "rightness". By "rightness" I mean that in Australia (at least for now!) there is a quite strong sense that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that everything is getting better and better incrementally, year on year, and the time factor means that even big changes often happen imperceptibly. So we have much better cars and sound systems, better roads, cheap international travel and the Internet which we can feel good about, while not noticing how much more difficult it is to buy a house and support a family than it was thirty years ago. We can be lulled by shiny novelties trickling into our lives while seeing our problems making our way in the world a lot of the time as "personal": that is, governed by our individual failings in a complex world where we are constantly struggling to find a role for ourselves. And strangely enough, this perception of struggle to be or at least appear competent increases amongst the more highly educated! As Jim Kunstler remarked in some context I now forget, if you go into any room full of educated people you can bet 90% feel that they are frauds.
Those of us who do want to understand the bigger picture must necessarily depend on abstract knowledge, of which we as a culture have a lot, but which in its sheer voluminousness and the difficulty in assessing its relevance poses yet another challenge. You can hardly blame the uneducated or moderately stupid for plunging headlong into dogma and cultishness which promise a shortcut to true knowledge, usually in the hands of a dubious leadership. Add to this the fact that certain professions such as economics suffer from alarming delusions and are just plain wrong in their very basis and it is little wonder that true knowledge of our real situation is limited to a very few. And even the knowledge of these few is very incomplete!
This is another reason why a political solution is simply not possible. Without the goodwill of a large proportion of the population no political party can push through a program which can address what is coming down the line towards us. And if only the tiniest minority of the population understands what is happening, how can that support appear?
Nevertheless there are people working on the problem in a rigorous and as far as possible, scientific way, so you can get reasonable quality information on what's happening. The problem is here that the phenomenon we are looking at is part of complex systems theory and therefore very difficult to quantify. So we depend on clever simplifications such as that posed by Aeldric in the article on The Oil Drum. But we still have to rely partly on less rigorous methods: "gut feelings" and intuitions which are very difficult to prove or even demonstrate to someone else. One of my favorite commenters on The Oil Drum is memmel but he drives some of the other regulars crazy, because his writing style is dyslexic and his ideas while having the ring of truth sound like a shorthand grab from a much more rigorous theorem which he never gives footnotes for. Here's an excerpt from his first comment:
In the end we have to make decisions about our lives based on hunches and intuitions as much as anything. It doesn't hurt to have some solid theoretical backup but that can be wrong too! I guess my gut feeling is that a collapse of the US economy is not far off: maybe one or two years. How that will play out in Australia is much more difficult to say as we are tied very closely to the Chinese and Japanese economies and how they will fair is open to question, seeing both are very export oriented at a time when the importing economies, namely the USA and the Eurozone are wobbling badly. And as at my public lecture in October 2008, I stated Australia was importing 1/3 of its oil needs and that proportion has remained the same (choose Australia from the drop-down menu to display).
As an ordinary member of Industrial Society, what information do I have leading me to say a crash is immanent? What does an ordinary person "see" in their day-to-day existence which allows them to make these kinds of judgments? All of us have networks flowing through our lives but no-one can easily "see" these networks from start to finish or how they may relate to one another. We may understand our little bit very well and have a clear idea what is right and wrong with it. Our appreciation of other people's part is necessarily vaguer and tends to be tinged with the natural human suspicion that "others" are not as competent or hard-working as we and our colleagues. To quote from a comment Aeldric added to the discussion of the above post:
This is not helped by the fact that the problem is hidden by complexity. The people who say "We have plenty of resource X" are not just saying this to inflate the share price - they truly believe it. From their perspective, it is true.Add to that the seemingly exponential increase in complexity when doing anything (My wife and I are building a house and the planning requirements have two extra levels to surmount from the time I built my first: bushfire rating and energy rating which is part of a large engineering bill I didn't have before) and you have a world where everything seems micro-managed for efficiency and effectiveness, yet is all too complex for the ordinary person to control or understand more than a tiny part of their own life.
The reason that low-quality reserves of resource X will never be extracted is only obvious when you look at the overall system.
Unfortunately, each entity only looks at their own area, the overall matrix in which we operate is treated as a "black box" that supplies our needs just as long as we continue to play our part. This faith in the system has worked thus far, but it is misplaced - we need to look at the overall system.
This situation is also governed by a time factor and a certain perception of "rightness". By "rightness" I mean that in Australia (at least for now!) there is a quite strong sense that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that everything is getting better and better incrementally, year on year, and the time factor means that even big changes often happen imperceptibly. So we have much better cars and sound systems, better roads, cheap international travel and the Internet which we can feel good about, while not noticing how much more difficult it is to buy a house and support a family than it was thirty years ago. We can be lulled by shiny novelties trickling into our lives while seeing our problems making our way in the world a lot of the time as "personal": that is, governed by our individual failings in a complex world where we are constantly struggling to find a role for ourselves. And strangely enough, this perception of struggle to be or at least appear competent increases amongst the more highly educated! As Jim Kunstler remarked in some context I now forget, if you go into any room full of educated people you can bet 90% feel that they are frauds.
Those of us who do want to understand the bigger picture must necessarily depend on abstract knowledge, of which we as a culture have a lot, but which in its sheer voluminousness and the difficulty in assessing its relevance poses yet another challenge. You can hardly blame the uneducated or moderately stupid for plunging headlong into dogma and cultishness which promise a shortcut to true knowledge, usually in the hands of a dubious leadership. Add to this the fact that certain professions such as economics suffer from alarming delusions and are just plain wrong in their very basis and it is little wonder that true knowledge of our real situation is limited to a very few. And even the knowledge of these few is very incomplete!
This is another reason why a political solution is simply not possible. Without the goodwill of a large proportion of the population no political party can push through a program which can address what is coming down the line towards us. And if only the tiniest minority of the population understands what is happening, how can that support appear?
Nevertheless there are people working on the problem in a rigorous and as far as possible, scientific way, so you can get reasonable quality information on what's happening. The problem is here that the phenomenon we are looking at is part of complex systems theory and therefore very difficult to quantify. So we depend on clever simplifications such as that posed by Aeldric in the article on The Oil Drum. But we still have to rely partly on less rigorous methods: "gut feelings" and intuitions which are very difficult to prove or even demonstrate to someone else. One of my favorite commenters on The Oil Drum is memmel but he drives some of the other regulars crazy, because his writing style is dyslexic and his ideas while having the ring of truth sound like a shorthand grab from a much more rigorous theorem which he never gives footnotes for. Here's an excerpt from his first comment:
I'd like to add what I came up with as the warning signal of collapse of a complex system in particular ours.Do you see what I mean? Personally I love his comments because his intuitions have for me a ring of truth but I can understand people finding them repellent. But if we try to be more rigorous, dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s we end up with this, quoted from an article available here (warning, it's a pdf):
You have outline the overt signals but whats missing is what the system itself does to counteract the situation.
Indeed to the point that it obfuscates its real state.
What I believe starts to happen is the system plays whats basically a grand game of musical chairs. Its no longer capable of any real growth yet its forced to fake it.
A simple example is every job in Mexico or China results in the loss of a job in the US with a dramatic reduction in costs. No new job is created yet profit margins go up. For this to work obviously demand has to remain robust for the product of the job. Rising debt loads allow this to take place. In a real expanding economy wages would have risen rapidly in Mexico and China as they demanded they purchased the goods they where making. The wage arbitrage would have dissipated rapidly.
The same of course works for resources as well as labor the economy shifts to increase profit margins as constraints arise. Its a complex system thus a tremendous amount of shifting around is possible.
It becomes difficult to discern that its really just running around in circles and nothing is happening indeed only the explosion of debt really shows the underlying system has peaked.
As you note eventually everything becomes correlated with money and thus the final signal is in the financial arena. And its pretty simple its debt.
Next its worse than that really by the time the debt load grows to horrendous levels the system is well past its peak. This is because a lot of the debt was issued based on equity valuations supported by the previous debt expansion. Ever cheaper debt aka credit serves to support previous valuation rounds making new debt safe to issue.
So given that eventually everything gets correlated with money the signal that the system is now unstable is easy to see its debt. To understand how the system can pull off such a situation you need to look into this game of musical chairs or circular economics which eventually results in trading partners allowing debt to balloon.
Everyone has to reap real benefits even as the debt bubble expands. If now it won't expand.
This is done by allowing gains to be made on each individual transaction. Eventually of course it ends with central banks forced to carry tremendous amounts of debt in one form or another. The profits are of course skimmed off and the debt load is socialized.
On can actually construct a small variant of this. Consider a village where everyone works to build houses for each other. As each villager gets his house built by the village he owes the village for the house. Assume that resources are constrained and each house costs more than the last all paid for via credit back to the village which acts as the bank. Eventually the last house is built and its ten times the cost of the first house and the village owes itself immense sums of money as notational credit. Indeed many of the villagers that had their house built first are notational multimillionaires. Then what?
The theoretical basis of the work on early-warning signals in simple models is quite strong, and the first results from more elaborate models suggest that similar signals may arise in highly complex systems (23). Nonetheless, more work is needed to find out how robust these signals are in situations in which spatial complexity, chaos and stochastic perturbations govern the dynamics. Also, detection of the patterns in real data is challenging and may lead to false positive results as well as false negatives. False negatives are situations in which a sudden transition occurred but no early-warning signals could be detected in the behaviour before the shift. This can happen for different reasons. One possibility is that the sudden shift in the system was not preceded by a gradual approach to a threshold. For instance, it may have remained at the same distance from the bifurcation point, but been driven to another stable state by a rare extreme event. Also, a shift that is simply due to a fast and permanent change of external conditions (Box 1 Figure a) cannot be detected from early-warning signals.And so on for many more qualifying paragraphs. I think memmel is easier!
In the end we have to make decisions about our lives based on hunches and intuitions as much as anything. It doesn't hurt to have some solid theoretical backup but that can be wrong too! I guess my gut feeling is that a collapse of the US economy is not far off: maybe one or two years. How that will play out in Australia is much more difficult to say as we are tied very closely to the Chinese and Japanese economies and how they will fair is open to question, seeing both are very export oriented at a time when the importing economies, namely the USA and the Eurozone are wobbling badly. And as at my public lecture in October 2008, I stated Australia was importing 1/3 of its oil needs and that proportion has remained the same (choose Australia from the drop-down menu to display).
Monday, September 20, 2010
Right actions, right thoughts
What is right action for us doom-and-gloomers? I'm caught up in our local Transition Town group. Sure, it's what some people want and it gives us members mutual support, plus we may be getting a big community garden and orchard going at the bottom of the town. But I have mixed feelings about, it in the sense that I can't see it being The Whole Answer to the problems coming towards us and I'm still copping it as well from a few people, accused of being too negative in a more general sense.
I guess my last post on the Aussie housing bubble was guaranteed to upset a lot of folk and was a typical snarky comment on things as they are now — I admit it was negative although I think it was a necessary corrective. But I think it's a good time to give a background on what I think is right action, which must first of all spring from right thoughts. And this implies a lot of what is going on amongst the chattering classes is wrong thoughts leading to wrong actions.
Why can't we just save the world by recycling plastic, buying an electric car and growing our own vegies? Why can't we do all this while making politicians pass good laws restricting pollution, exploitation and simultaneously saving the whales, while working for strong international covenants to stop those developing economies making things worse by letting their big populations to buy in to the consumer dream?
This is what I'd label the standard left-wing program save-the-world program.
The standard right-wing save-the-world program is a little different but we need to mention it too. The world is fine as long as I and my significant others are doing well! Those pesky foreigners trying to grab our stuff? Nuke 'em! Drug addicts? Kill 'em all — except for my son of course, for whom I've just paid thousands to spring from a prison in India after he was caught trying to smuggle some ganga back to Australia. The Chinese are all sub-human — except for George, with whom I go to watch Collingwood playing each week. And all these pollution laws — an evil impost on business! Except for the ones which stop the spraying of pesticides in those areas where our honey producing subsidiary has seen profits cave in over the past few years.
The right-wing is easy to mock: after all, these types always depend upon the left-wingers working for them to keep the show on the road. It's only on a few points that they can stick to their convictions. This also leads on to another not-much-mentioned paradox (to be discussed some other time): how come left-wingers and right-wingers end up building very similar societies?
But I'm more interested in the illusions of the left because they underpin a lot of what goes on in politics. Why can't we legislate to fix our problems with Peak Oil/Climate Change? Surely if everyone made a big effort to conserve, we wouldn't have a problem — right? We could all drive a Toyota Prius and presto! This is where the explanation gets tricky because it's counter-intuitive. When we make more efficient use of a resource it simply makes it available to more people, so consumption rises rather than falls. This is known as Jevons Paradox. This only applies to increases in technical efficiency of course — it's still possible to tax or otherwise restrict the availability of say, oil, in order to reduce its use. But can we restrict our use in Australia and tell the Chinese and the Indians they can't use it too? Of course you can run on and imagine some United Nations action that might force the nations of the world to restrict consumption if you put aside how utterly unlikely this is. But if it were possible, would this solve the problem of Peak Oil and carbon dioxide induced climate change? How could it, when at best, it might slow down (slightly), the rate of use of oil and coal, but the oil and coal would still get used anyway, just over a few more decades and it is still unrenewable and still adds CO2 to the atmosphere.
The fact is, the toothpaste is out of the tube. We (by which I mean the human race) will go on using oil until we can't — same with coal. You may swear off it (as far as you can, given that everything we use in day to day life has a fossil fuel component) but in the end it will all get used up anyway, irrespective of your decisions. So what if it takes fifty years longer to disappear, than if we continue to fly like mad moths around the planet? The effect will be virtually the same. Electric cars? Where does the electricity come from? From solar panels you say? How much embodied energy do they contain? You see, there is no escape. We can't have a complex industrial civilisation based on extracting sunshine from cucumbers to quote Jonathan Swift . We may entertain fantasies of a world where doves alight on the shoulders of young people dancing round the maypole at harvest time in Kabul, as well as in Korumburra, before everyone jumps on their bicycles to go back to the town hall for an election of councilors followed by a hoedown to a string band, but let's not confuse ourselves even further with these idle fantasies.
Of course it — that is, industrial civilisation — will end, and maybe quite soon. Nature will impose upon us the discipline we can't impose on ourselves. Our problem is not to save the World, but to save ourselves. By all means aim for a low carbon lifestyle, because pretty soon we will be living one anyway whether our politics is anarcho-syndicalist or slightly to the right of Ghengis Khan. Our issues will revolve around dealing with the consequences of a declining world industrial civilisation, not fixing its underpinnings.
The Heroic Materialist project is over, for all kinds of reasons. For a start, capital in the form of debt is in the process of vanishing, which is rushing us towards an economic collapse after which large-scale capital intensive projects will simply be impossible. Want to solve the energy crisis by building a nuclear fusion power station? Sure, hold a few fundraisers in your town and build one at the end of your street. Because that is about the level of economic co-operation we can expect to see in the future. The only projects which get done will be on a small scale, except in countries which can't maintain security, where we can expect large scale marauding warlord lead armies who will swiftly reduce the territories they prey upon to sparsely populated wastelands in any case.
I don't expect anything like that in Australia. We may have quite serious civil conflict if the industrial system's dispossessed citizens are victimised —always a possibility when a narrow, suspicious world-view amongst the elites replaces the boundless optimism of a time of growth. But a collapse of society I don't foresee. Instead I see the gloomy crumbling of individuals who are unprepared for the changes we are going to have to face, to be a followed by a new generation who accept the world they find as a given and get on with inventing their lives and their own goals and meanings. Some will be happy, some unhappy, but it was ever thus. Our task as the transitional generation is to smooth the way, cutting the suffering which will be inevitable while making the way clear for the next generation to find their own direction.
This will mean letting go of inappropriate dreams and plans as much as anything — at a federal level, dreams such as turning Afghanistan into suburbia and building the high speed rail link down the eastern seaboard of Australia. At the state level, we need to stop pretending we can go on living in our cities as if consumables such as oil, water and electricity are in infinite supply. And at the personal level, fantasies of a leisured retirement with overseas cruises will be snatched away.
On the other hand we will have a return of the natural world, which will no longer be under the extreme pressure industrial civilisation has been placing on it. We will eat more healthy food, get more exercise and use our wits to build viable communities rather than manipulate symbols on screens. Our lives will be in our hands, not those of "experts". For a short period, until a new system solidifies (as they always do), the world will be ours to mould in the image we think best.
I guess my last post on the Aussie housing bubble was guaranteed to upset a lot of folk and was a typical snarky comment on things as they are now — I admit it was negative although I think it was a necessary corrective. But I think it's a good time to give a background on what I think is right action, which must first of all spring from right thoughts. And this implies a lot of what is going on amongst the chattering classes is wrong thoughts leading to wrong actions.
Why can't we just save the world by recycling plastic, buying an electric car and growing our own vegies? Why can't we do all this while making politicians pass good laws restricting pollution, exploitation and simultaneously saving the whales, while working for strong international covenants to stop those developing economies making things worse by letting their big populations to buy in to the consumer dream?
This is what I'd label the standard left-wing program save-the-world program.
The standard right-wing save-the-world program is a little different but we need to mention it too. The world is fine as long as I and my significant others are doing well! Those pesky foreigners trying to grab our stuff? Nuke 'em! Drug addicts? Kill 'em all — except for my son of course, for whom I've just paid thousands to spring from a prison in India after he was caught trying to smuggle some ganga back to Australia. The Chinese are all sub-human — except for George, with whom I go to watch Collingwood playing each week. And all these pollution laws — an evil impost on business! Except for the ones which stop the spraying of pesticides in those areas where our honey producing subsidiary has seen profits cave in over the past few years.
The right-wing is easy to mock: after all, these types always depend upon the left-wingers working for them to keep the show on the road. It's only on a few points that they can stick to their convictions. This also leads on to another not-much-mentioned paradox (to be discussed some other time): how come left-wingers and right-wingers end up building very similar societies?
But I'm more interested in the illusions of the left because they underpin a lot of what goes on in politics. Why can't we legislate to fix our problems with Peak Oil/Climate Change? Surely if everyone made a big effort to conserve, we wouldn't have a problem — right? We could all drive a Toyota Prius and presto! This is where the explanation gets tricky because it's counter-intuitive. When we make more efficient use of a resource it simply makes it available to more people, so consumption rises rather than falls. This is known as Jevons Paradox. This only applies to increases in technical efficiency of course — it's still possible to tax or otherwise restrict the availability of say, oil, in order to reduce its use. But can we restrict our use in Australia and tell the Chinese and the Indians they can't use it too? Of course you can run on and imagine some United Nations action that might force the nations of the world to restrict consumption if you put aside how utterly unlikely this is. But if it were possible, would this solve the problem of Peak Oil and carbon dioxide induced climate change? How could it, when at best, it might slow down (slightly), the rate of use of oil and coal, but the oil and coal would still get used anyway, just over a few more decades and it is still unrenewable and still adds CO2 to the atmosphere.
The fact is, the toothpaste is out of the tube. We (by which I mean the human race) will go on using oil until we can't — same with coal. You may swear off it (as far as you can, given that everything we use in day to day life has a fossil fuel component) but in the end it will all get used up anyway, irrespective of your decisions. So what if it takes fifty years longer to disappear, than if we continue to fly like mad moths around the planet? The effect will be virtually the same. Electric cars? Where does the electricity come from? From solar panels you say? How much embodied energy do they contain? You see, there is no escape. We can't have a complex industrial civilisation based on extracting sunshine from cucumbers to quote Jonathan Swift . We may entertain fantasies of a world where doves alight on the shoulders of young people dancing round the maypole at harvest time in Kabul, as well as in Korumburra, before everyone jumps on their bicycles to go back to the town hall for an election of councilors followed by a hoedown to a string band, but let's not confuse ourselves even further with these idle fantasies.
Of course it — that is, industrial civilisation — will end, and maybe quite soon. Nature will impose upon us the discipline we can't impose on ourselves. Our problem is not to save the World, but to save ourselves. By all means aim for a low carbon lifestyle, because pretty soon we will be living one anyway whether our politics is anarcho-syndicalist or slightly to the right of Ghengis Khan. Our issues will revolve around dealing with the consequences of a declining world industrial civilisation, not fixing its underpinnings.
The Heroic Materialist project is over, for all kinds of reasons. For a start, capital in the form of debt is in the process of vanishing, which is rushing us towards an economic collapse after which large-scale capital intensive projects will simply be impossible. Want to solve the energy crisis by building a nuclear fusion power station? Sure, hold a few fundraisers in your town and build one at the end of your street. Because that is about the level of economic co-operation we can expect to see in the future. The only projects which get done will be on a small scale, except in countries which can't maintain security, where we can expect large scale marauding warlord lead armies who will swiftly reduce the territories they prey upon to sparsely populated wastelands in any case.
I don't expect anything like that in Australia. We may have quite serious civil conflict if the industrial system's dispossessed citizens are victimised —always a possibility when a narrow, suspicious world-view amongst the elites replaces the boundless optimism of a time of growth. But a collapse of society I don't foresee. Instead I see the gloomy crumbling of individuals who are unprepared for the changes we are going to have to face, to be a followed by a new generation who accept the world they find as a given and get on with inventing their lives and their own goals and meanings. Some will be happy, some unhappy, but it was ever thus. Our task as the transitional generation is to smooth the way, cutting the suffering which will be inevitable while making the way clear for the next generation to find their own direction.
This will mean letting go of inappropriate dreams and plans as much as anything — at a federal level, dreams such as turning Afghanistan into suburbia and building the high speed rail link down the eastern seaboard of Australia. At the state level, we need to stop pretending we can go on living in our cities as if consumables such as oil, water and electricity are in infinite supply. And at the personal level, fantasies of a leisured retirement with overseas cruises will be snatched away.
On the other hand we will have a return of the natural world, which will no longer be under the extreme pressure industrial civilisation has been placing on it. We will eat more healthy food, get more exercise and use our wits to build viable communities rather than manipulate symbols on screens. Our lives will be in our hands, not those of "experts". For a short period, until a new system solidifies (as they always do), the world will be ours to mould in the image we think best.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Cruising along in our Aussie cloud of unknowing
Ah, Australian exceptionalism! Could there ever be a more persistent yet fragile weed? Will a cold winter wind ever arise breaking those delicate fronds? Or will it be the relentless heat of summer which shrivels them to wisps of brown? No doubt we shall find out in due course.
In the meantime those guardians of our prosperity, the banks, are hard at work spreading the Love. Consider this, from News.com.au, which tells of yet more loosening of the purse strings helping feed our insane housing bubble (Bubble? It's demand lead isn't it? Another example of just how blessed, virtuous and better than everywhere else this great country is! Everyone wants to live here! In our endless good-news Aussie paradise!).
And these august Aussie banks, bastions of goodness and competence, would never, never tell fibs would they? Well, that mean man Steve Keen thinks they do. Have a look at what his digging has found out here about what the Commonwealth Bank has cooked up to suck in those overseas investors.
How thin our world view really is. Just because 95% of the population believes a particular delusion (witchcraft, the Earth being flat, endless rising real estate value) doesn't make it any truer. It just makes the bust when it comes that much more miserable.
Oh, check out Mish's take on it too.
Edit: David Llewellyn-Smith at Henry Thornton's pulls apart the Commonwealth's scheme even further. He also links to this blast in The Australian's business section. And Steve Keen weighs in again here.
In the meantime those guardians of our prosperity, the banks, are hard at work spreading the Love. Consider this, from News.com.au, which tells of yet more loosening of the purse strings helping feed our insane housing bubble (Bubble? It's demand lead isn't it? Another example of just how blessed, virtuous and better than everywhere else this great country is! Everyone wants to live here! In our endless good-news Aussie paradise!).
And these august Aussie banks, bastions of goodness and competence, would never, never tell fibs would they? Well, that mean man Steve Keen thinks they do. Have a look at what his digging has found out here about what the Commonwealth Bank has cooked up to suck in those overseas investors.
How thin our world view really is. Just because 95% of the population believes a particular delusion (witchcraft, the Earth being flat, endless rising real estate value) doesn't make it any truer. It just makes the bust when it comes that much more miserable.
Oh, check out Mish's take on it too.
Edit: David Llewellyn-Smith at Henry Thornton's pulls apart the Commonwealth's scheme even further. He also links to this blast in The Australian's business section. And Steve Keen weighs in again here.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Warning! Rant coming on!
I went to a Transition Town training session on the weekend. I had misgivings before going but they turned out to be misplaced. It was a different style of learning to anything I'd done before, conducted by a pair of very competent women. We were given all the materials they used for the session plus a lot of extras at the end of it all, which is good because I can't see myself using what we learned for a while, as our group is still in its formative stages and I'm sure I'd forget most of it if I don't use it straight away.
I was interested in the attitudes and opinions of the other participants. Why do people get involved in something like this? Generally it is well-educated middle-class people like me I suppose, with some commitment to "doing good". However I found that there are some deep-seated ideas that are perhaps unhelpful even among the well-intentioned and well-educated. We did an exercise which was designed to help us explain rising carbon dioxide levels and the greenhouse effect. It seems from the reaction of the people I was working with that it is common to believe that by bringing pressure to bear on politicians and getting the message out to the public we will somehow reverse the trend. There seemed no understanding that nothing will be done, until the consequences make it impossible to carry on.
What do I mean by this? It is simply that anything the individual does is almost irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. I think we are well beyond remedial action on the macro, society-wide scale. We (the great Middle Class) seem to still be suffering from the illusion that we have Power. Power to change other people's behavior. Power to influence those in power. There is no general understanding, even amongst the educated, that freedom disappears the higher up the hierarchy one moves — that those at the top are so hedged in by prior constraints, massive inertias, debts owed and obligations that come with the job that our leaders have almost nowhere to move at all. And as for telling the Chinese and the Indians and the Brazilians that they need to radically restructure their societies — well it's not even worth a laugh.
We seem to be unaware that our behavior is animal behavior: we are no different from voles, slugs, armadillos or trout in our desire to produce descendants and make some space for ourselves in the larger world. And the sum of the actions of six billion humans is no different from the actions of six billion armadillos in this regard, no matter how intellectual and above "animal" behavior we think we are. Politicians know this instinctively and fear the animal passions of the "mob" — the great mass of the population — and usually (if they are "successful") stay within safe limits. But the average punter doesn't see this. We don't see ourselves as being part of some powerful mob. Instead we ordinary people are aware of our own feelings of weakness in the face of what seems to be overwhelming forces — we project our fantasies of real power onto our leaders, little realising that both feelings of weakness and fantasies of power are illusory phenomena. They come and go, depending on our immediate circumstances and the state of our digestion as much as anything. The middle classes —even the well-educated technocratic elite, working the cogs and gears of the system — don't seem any better at understanding this than the most illiterate forklift-driver.
Amongst the educated, frustration often turns into the blame game. The world is a mess, we see clearly what is wrong, nothing is being done, it's the fault of the Keynesians (if you're an Austrian economist like Mish or Gary North). Or it's the nervousness of the do-nothings in Congress who don't see the need to spend if you're Paul Krugman, the Keynesian. Or moving down the ladder into the unsavory depths, it's the liberals (if you're Anne Coulter), the right-wing demogogues and their puppet-masters (if you're a follower of Counterpunch) and so on downward to infinity where dwell the gamiest of conspiracy theorists, crazed religious nut-bags and scary eco-fanatics like Derrick Jensen. Don't get me wrong: each of these characters possess a fraction of the truth and there may be value in listening to what they say in order to see how the world works. But all of them are entirely primitive when it comes to Answers, because each of them believes in Salvation and Atonement. They believe that following their prescriptions will lead to Heaven on Earth. That's why they're dangerous. Like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
Why do these people suffer from a common fallacy? Why do they have such broad followings? Well I could spend ages raving about our Judeo-Christian world-view (which still forms the way that most of us think, even if we believe we're athiests). But I'll let you, gentle reader, think all this through in your own time. Suffice to say there are some still, small voices which do talk sense. Steve Keen on economics, Dmitri Orlov on social realities. Nobody's perfect but some are definitely better than others and popularity is a poor guide to excellence when we are so embedded in the Judeo-Christian schema and we love good-and-evil dichotomies so much (beware dichotomies!).
So what is real and how do we choose actions which are effective? Well, look out the window. Smell the flowers. Smile at your neighbor. This is reality, the single endless moment we all live in. There is no future, except in our imagination. There is no past except in our memory. If you're crossing the road and a bus is coming, step back onto the curb! And likewise with the great changes pressing down on us. To go to an analogy, if the Titanic has hit an iceberg there's no urgency in arguing with the captain about whose fault it is. Your job is to get you and your charges into a lifeboat! So try and look at what is really going to happen, not what you hope will happen. What you hope will happen is that enlightened leaders will guide us to the Promised Land. What is really going to happen is complex, messy and unpredictable in many ways, but it will include the climate changing, the financial system seizing up and the economy going down the tubes. You can't stop any of these things from happening! All you can do is try and protect yourself from the consequences. Nature, in its majestic impartiality, will deal with humanity as it deals with everything.
Ok! That'll do for now!
I was interested in the attitudes and opinions of the other participants. Why do people get involved in something like this? Generally it is well-educated middle-class people like me I suppose, with some commitment to "doing good". However I found that there are some deep-seated ideas that are perhaps unhelpful even among the well-intentioned and well-educated. We did an exercise which was designed to help us explain rising carbon dioxide levels and the greenhouse effect. It seems from the reaction of the people I was working with that it is common to believe that by bringing pressure to bear on politicians and getting the message out to the public we will somehow reverse the trend. There seemed no understanding that nothing will be done, until the consequences make it impossible to carry on.
What do I mean by this? It is simply that anything the individual does is almost irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. I think we are well beyond remedial action on the macro, society-wide scale. We (the great Middle Class) seem to still be suffering from the illusion that we have Power. Power to change other people's behavior. Power to influence those in power. There is no general understanding, even amongst the educated, that freedom disappears the higher up the hierarchy one moves — that those at the top are so hedged in by prior constraints, massive inertias, debts owed and obligations that come with the job that our leaders have almost nowhere to move at all. And as for telling the Chinese and the Indians and the Brazilians that they need to radically restructure their societies — well it's not even worth a laugh.
We seem to be unaware that our behavior is animal behavior: we are no different from voles, slugs, armadillos or trout in our desire to produce descendants and make some space for ourselves in the larger world. And the sum of the actions of six billion humans is no different from the actions of six billion armadillos in this regard, no matter how intellectual and above "animal" behavior we think we are. Politicians know this instinctively and fear the animal passions of the "mob" — the great mass of the population — and usually (if they are "successful") stay within safe limits. But the average punter doesn't see this. We don't see ourselves as being part of some powerful mob. Instead we ordinary people are aware of our own feelings of weakness in the face of what seems to be overwhelming forces — we project our fantasies of real power onto our leaders, little realising that both feelings of weakness and fantasies of power are illusory phenomena. They come and go, depending on our immediate circumstances and the state of our digestion as much as anything. The middle classes —even the well-educated technocratic elite, working the cogs and gears of the system — don't seem any better at understanding this than the most illiterate forklift-driver.
Amongst the educated, frustration often turns into the blame game. The world is a mess, we see clearly what is wrong, nothing is being done, it's the fault of the Keynesians (if you're an Austrian economist like Mish or Gary North). Or it's the nervousness of the do-nothings in Congress who don't see the need to spend if you're Paul Krugman, the Keynesian. Or moving down the ladder into the unsavory depths, it's the liberals (if you're Anne Coulter), the right-wing demogogues and their puppet-masters (if you're a follower of Counterpunch) and so on downward to infinity where dwell the gamiest of conspiracy theorists, crazed religious nut-bags and scary eco-fanatics like Derrick Jensen. Don't get me wrong: each of these characters possess a fraction of the truth and there may be value in listening to what they say in order to see how the world works. But all of them are entirely primitive when it comes to Answers, because each of them believes in Salvation and Atonement. They believe that following their prescriptions will lead to Heaven on Earth. That's why they're dangerous. Like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
Why do these people suffer from a common fallacy? Why do they have such broad followings? Well I could spend ages raving about our Judeo-Christian world-view (which still forms the way that most of us think, even if we believe we're athiests). But I'll let you, gentle reader, think all this through in your own time. Suffice to say there are some still, small voices which do talk sense. Steve Keen on economics, Dmitri Orlov on social realities. Nobody's perfect but some are definitely better than others and popularity is a poor guide to excellence when we are so embedded in the Judeo-Christian schema and we love good-and-evil dichotomies so much (beware dichotomies!).
So what is real and how do we choose actions which are effective? Well, look out the window. Smell the flowers. Smile at your neighbor. This is reality, the single endless moment we all live in. There is no future, except in our imagination. There is no past except in our memory. If you're crossing the road and a bus is coming, step back onto the curb! And likewise with the great changes pressing down on us. To go to an analogy, if the Titanic has hit an iceberg there's no urgency in arguing with the captain about whose fault it is. Your job is to get you and your charges into a lifeboat! So try and look at what is really going to happen, not what you hope will happen. What you hope will happen is that enlightened leaders will guide us to the Promised Land. What is really going to happen is complex, messy and unpredictable in many ways, but it will include the climate changing, the financial system seizing up and the economy going down the tubes. You can't stop any of these things from happening! All you can do is try and protect yourself from the consequences. Nature, in its majestic impartiality, will deal with humanity as it deals with everything.
Ok! That'll do for now!
Monday, August 9, 2010
My outlook for 2010-2011
I'm going out on a limb but hey! — I'm not afraid of heights, just scared of hitting the ground. Anyway, I think we are not going to be so bad in Australia over the next few years as I thought a few months ago. We've just got a big price boost for mineral exports feeding into the system. The high temperatures of the northern summer seem to have done damage to the size of the Russian wheat harvest. I just drove back through several hundred kilometres of our wheat harvest and the way rainfall is going, it could be a big one. High wheat prices + world shortage + bumper Australian crop = $$$.
Longer term I think we're going to cop it along with everyone else. But we'll have the melt-down of the USA as a wake-up call over the next year or so, and that may generate the grass-roots political will we need to move to a more gentle energy descent. That and a bursting of the property bubble we've been in.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Really our greatest asset is our lack of population pressure, of the sort evident in more naturally well-favoured countries where the numbers of people have had time to grow to the limits of the environment. Not that the way of life in our cities is in any way sustainable at the moment, but it can change radically without killing half the population which is more than you can say about a lot of the world.
Longer term I think we're going to cop it along with everyone else. But we'll have the melt-down of the USA as a wake-up call over the next year or so, and that may generate the grass-roots political will we need to move to a more gentle energy descent. That and a bursting of the property bubble we've been in.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Really our greatest asset is our lack of population pressure, of the sort evident in more naturally well-favoured countries where the numbers of people have had time to grow to the limits of the environment. Not that the way of life in our cities is in any way sustainable at the moment, but it can change radically without killing half the population which is more than you can say about a lot of the world.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Our presentation to the Councillors
It was a little intimidating to sit at a table facing all the Shire Councilors, the CEO and various other high-ranking officials. I was just there to support Peter who did a great job, plowing on manfully through the piece that he'd written giving an outline of the dangers facing us with peak oil, with both of us unable to read the reaction of the councilors who were not on "our" side. I handled one question from Cr Mimmie Jackson — not particularly well as I strayed a bit off topic, but Peter was better with his responses.
After our five minutes we stayed on to listen to the other people there to present their various cases, then at the end we went out to have our pictures taken by the reporters covering it. We were joined by our three Councilors who reassured us that it had gone well and that we must keep it up in future!
If any article about it comes on line I'll link to it in a future post.
After our five minutes we stayed on to listen to the other people there to present their various cases, then at the end we went out to have our pictures taken by the reporters covering it. We were joined by our three Councilors who reassured us that it had gone well and that we must keep it up in future!
If any article about it comes on line I'll link to it in a future post.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Preparing to Ride the Whirlwind
Next week one of my fellow transitioners and I are going to do a presentation to our local Shire Councilors. It is our first and so it will be an interesting exercise in doing a pitch, so to speak, to group of average politicians. We already know three are on our side — they come to our meetings — so we won't be aiming at them. Instead it will be a case of persuading the skeptics, or maybe just the indifferent. How to do this?
There has been a very interesting post on The Oil Drum's Campfire discussion in the past few days entitled Dear Candidate - What Will You Do if Growth Is Over...?. I read the whole thing — all the comments, which is the point of the exercise — the other night. I was struck by the general gloominess of outlook from most commentators. I wonder if it is a reflection of the disengagement of people from their communities and from politics or whether it reflects a different political scene in the USA. Or maybe I'm a little naive. But it seems to me that it should only be a matter of casting the situation in the right light.
Politicians must read the future with some degree of accuracy if they're to succeed. I see our function as letting them know what they're facing. After all, in ten years time when we will be in the very eye of the storm which is now breaking over us, there will still be Shire Councilors in South Gippsland. The more accurately they have gauged the situation, the better I think our situation down here will be. Yes, there will be some terrible economic times ahead. But these times are going to also allow opportunities which the clever and energetic can seize. Whether good or harm comes from this depends very much on our preparation now.
Our transition group is focused necessarily on issues which mean most to our members now. These issues are generally focused on food security which is something individuals and families can take care of. The bigger picture is very important though. How does South Gippsland support itself now and how will that change in the future? This is what I'm thinking about.
Talking of the big picture, today I listened to a talk by Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth to a transition group in the UK. It's quite long but it gives the clearest picture of what is about to befall us all that I've heard lately, so if you can, give it a listen.
There has been a very interesting post on The Oil Drum's Campfire discussion in the past few days entitled Dear Candidate - What Will You Do if Growth Is Over...?. I read the whole thing — all the comments, which is the point of the exercise — the other night. I was struck by the general gloominess of outlook from most commentators. I wonder if it is a reflection of the disengagement of people from their communities and from politics or whether it reflects a different political scene in the USA. Or maybe I'm a little naive. But it seems to me that it should only be a matter of casting the situation in the right light.
Politicians must read the future with some degree of accuracy if they're to succeed. I see our function as letting them know what they're facing. After all, in ten years time when we will be in the very eye of the storm which is now breaking over us, there will still be Shire Councilors in South Gippsland. The more accurately they have gauged the situation, the better I think our situation down here will be. Yes, there will be some terrible economic times ahead. But these times are going to also allow opportunities which the clever and energetic can seize. Whether good or harm comes from this depends very much on our preparation now.
Our transition group is focused necessarily on issues which mean most to our members now. These issues are generally focused on food security which is something individuals and families can take care of. The bigger picture is very important though. How does South Gippsland support itself now and how will that change in the future? This is what I'm thinking about.
Talking of the big picture, today I listened to a talk by Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth to a transition group in the UK. It's quite long but it gives the clearest picture of what is about to befall us all that I've heard lately, so if you can, give it a listen.
Monday, May 17, 2010
More thoughts on complexity
I've posted already a couple of times recently on complexity, once in response to the Archdruid's take on it, and an earlier look at Anne of Tagonist's argument. I'm not convinced complexity per se is a problem. After all we humans are very complex physically, but that doesn't matter most of the time to us and we don't need to understand it in order to get through the day. We know we'll wear out in sixty or seventy years all being well and there is really nothing we can do to change that.
I've just been listening to a talk by Niall Ferguson called Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments which you can listen to here. In the second part of the recording, the Q & A section, there is some talk about how the complexity of the modern financial system might make reactions to current events inherently unpredictable, versus the situation which existed even say twenty or thirty years ago before computerised, automated trading took off. All such discussion seems to me to contain the unspoken assumption that the system can somehow be fixed: modified and reformed to be safer, better. But the question is, better and safer for whom?
The financial sector of the economy has grown hugely in the past twenty or so years and the amount of money thus allocated to it for wages and dividends has become a large "take" from the wages of non-financial workers. The Global Financial Crisis showed that when you are big enough to have the welfare of the rest of the economy wound around your finger, you can dictate the terms to governments, even when the crisis can be partly shown to be as a result of your own actions. This talk of predictability and control, or loss of it, really applies to how the financial sector might see their continuing share of power maintained.
Those of us who are outside the financial sector need not worry about any of this — we just need to avoid being under it when it falls. To those of us who still imagine they need to worry, all I can say is any illusions of you being part of that class which think they have a future of living without working — and this is what all the talk of investments and superannuation is all about — are unlikely to survive the catastrophes which will engulf the world of money over the next few years.
For someone living outside the financial world, the problems are simple. How do I feed/clothe/shelter myself and live in a peaceful community? But for those who want to jump on the gravy train, of course the problem becomes one of complexity! If you think that you can live in a fashion that ignores the limitations of a sustainable existence, you are necessarily involved in game playing on a huge scale with millions of other anonymous predators, both individual and corporate, all looking for a percentage of the action, which comes down to the power at some future date to force other people to work for you. This leads quickly to fantasies of legal oversight, punishment and control, with you being a beneficiary as one of millions of superannuation fund holders or self-funded retirees who imagine that your government can look after your interests.
Let me put it to you plainly. The world economy is in the early stages of a profound financial collapse. For now you can watch the riots in Greece on TV and feel a certain smug aloofness. Soon it will be coming to a town near you. The game we have been able to play for the past thirty years, starting from the nineteen-seventies where even the moderately intelligent soon realised buying and selling real estate in an inflationary economy was a great leg-up, is over. So are all the slightly more sophisticated schemes of getting involved in investment funds.
Find another game to play!
I've just been listening to a talk by Niall Ferguson called Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments which you can listen to here. In the second part of the recording, the Q & A section, there is some talk about how the complexity of the modern financial system might make reactions to current events inherently unpredictable, versus the situation which existed even say twenty or thirty years ago before computerised, automated trading took off. All such discussion seems to me to contain the unspoken assumption that the system can somehow be fixed: modified and reformed to be safer, better. But the question is, better and safer for whom?
The financial sector of the economy has grown hugely in the past twenty or so years and the amount of money thus allocated to it for wages and dividends has become a large "take" from the wages of non-financial workers. The Global Financial Crisis showed that when you are big enough to have the welfare of the rest of the economy wound around your finger, you can dictate the terms to governments, even when the crisis can be partly shown to be as a result of your own actions. This talk of predictability and control, or loss of it, really applies to how the financial sector might see their continuing share of power maintained.
Those of us who are outside the financial sector need not worry about any of this — we just need to avoid being under it when it falls. To those of us who still imagine they need to worry, all I can say is any illusions of you being part of that class which think they have a future of living without working — and this is what all the talk of investments and superannuation is all about — are unlikely to survive the catastrophes which will engulf the world of money over the next few years.
For someone living outside the financial world, the problems are simple. How do I feed/clothe/shelter myself and live in a peaceful community? But for those who want to jump on the gravy train, of course the problem becomes one of complexity! If you think that you can live in a fashion that ignores the limitations of a sustainable existence, you are necessarily involved in game playing on a huge scale with millions of other anonymous predators, both individual and corporate, all looking for a percentage of the action, which comes down to the power at some future date to force other people to work for you. This leads quickly to fantasies of legal oversight, punishment and control, with you being a beneficiary as one of millions of superannuation fund holders or self-funded retirees who imagine that your government can look after your interests.
Let me put it to you plainly. The world economy is in the early stages of a profound financial collapse. For now you can watch the riots in Greece on TV and feel a certain smug aloofness. Soon it will be coming to a town near you. The game we have been able to play for the past thirty years, starting from the nineteen-seventies where even the moderately intelligent soon realised buying and selling real estate in an inflationary economy was a great leg-up, is over. So are all the slightly more sophisticated schemes of getting involved in investment funds.
Find another game to play!
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