To some degree or another all of that is true and yet I cannot predict whether the near future will be bleaker, hard to imagine, or marginally better. From where I sit much of the dysfunction seems sociological. Yes, prices are higher and there is less stuff but not so much so that we should be seeing something akin to collapse. And yet, collapsing we are.
I'll skip the litany of woes that plague my neck of the woods but basically all of the systems bar a few are failing and in decline. Virtually no civil or criminal enforcement exists where I live. So OD deaths, open drug sales, illegal toxic dumps, people with w/o sanitation services, rats, filth, burning dumpsters to clear them of piled up waste... All becoming the norm. This isn't a linear progression, there have been a few good months here and there and some official interventions to keep people safe and clean, etc. but overall real Hollywood style collapse doesn't seem that far off from where I stand.
Whether this is based on a decline in living standards and consumption, I don't know. Seems like even under the current scenario some progress and improvements would be possible if we had the will to do something, anything. But from state officials to local residents everyone seems to be giving up or withdrawing into their own partially fantasy fueled alt. reality. Escapism or denial remains possible because some places and institutions continue to work rather well. On a bad day, my neighborhood could be mistaken for the set of a Mel Gibson era Road Warrior movie but a few miles away I work in relative comfort in a secure office with reliable heat and sanitation, etc... Which version is real?
In Maine there appears to actually be a constituency for something I don’t even have a word for, something like anti-development. For example, locals sometimes sabotage road repairs to keep people out. On a larger and more abstract level people vote, albeit in minorities, for clearly failed polices that even the most ignorant cannot believe would lead to material progress. There is, at least in Maine, a constituency for actually reversing material progress. I don’t think I am stretching the truth here at all. I hear people complain that the "legit" businesses are limiting their ability to engage in what I think of as "extra or ill-legal occupations" like drug sales, chop shops and stolen goods all of which occur pretty much openly anyway. No one seems bothered by this at all.
I haven't a clue how this will work out locally or internationally but it does seem different this time. I also think we all undervalue the basic services collective society offers. You cannot sell stolen chainsaws on FB without a lot of hidden supports and labor for example. Even the very lowest rungs of our social ladder are dependent on vast bureaucracies and intricate technologies that they do not understand and take for granted. I guess we will probably muddle through with some places more livable than others but I hope we all understand the important role that each worker, each computer server, sanitation code enforcer, farmer, fire dept, etc... does. I see these things slipping away without replacement and begin to fret.
Any discussion of inflation that doesn't include monetary supply is missing the largest factor by far. Trillions of dollars printed by central banks to prop up inefficient and dying institutions had to go somewhere. It was mostly exported, inflating everyone else's currencies, and was spent on real estate and bonds, until the pandemic, when uncertainty upended the bond market and vast government stimulus pushed enough dollars into the M2 system that it caused an uptick in inflation, which was seized upon by corporations raising prices to "compensate" for disrupted supply chains. When inflation rose above the yield on most corporate and Treasury bonds, which was only a few percent, the bond market became functionally illiquid, forcing banks to use the reverse repo facility at the Fed (currently over 2 trillion dollars parked with them overnight in return for a few percent interest because they couldn't get better returns elsewhere), and to raise prices further to offset their losses on debt. Cue inflationary spiral. The central banks tried raising rates to reduce lending and the supply of money, "hopefully" causing a rise in unemployment and a slowing down of the economy, but this only increased the supply of money being pumped into the system with nothing good to buy with it.
The climate crisis has been making things worse, especially for the insane last-minute supply chains that we built in the last 30 years, and they add to inflation in a serious way that should be addressed, but holy fuck it is nothing compared to the debt trap the Fed has been plunging into for decades. The Triffin Dilemma is coming home to roost: force everyone to use your currency abroad by printing dollars and spending them abroad, and inflate global currencies against your own,
keeping your own prices low and giving you leverage over the world, untill the amount of dollar denominated debt causes massive demand in a period of economic shock that requires either you stop printing dollars (increasing demand and inflation) or you print more to inflate your way out of it (causing hyperinflation).
Shock is the key here. The rich will use this economic shock to scoop up yet more of the world's assets; our land and water and infrastructure, and they'll rent it all back to us, keeping us in our place. It's a predictable cycle and it's what the central banks have orchestrated for as long as they have existed.
"The indigenous peoples knew nothing of the complex global geopolitics that had led to their home temporarily becoming a forward operations base for the world's major industrial powers."
Just a word on the Ukraine War: it may spare us the need to watch civilization collapse around us, since every day it continues brings the mounting inevitability of The Mistake, The Miscalculation.
We in the West are awash in industrial-strength Russophobic propaganda — never more potent than over the past year. I live in Europe &, for once, can say it's no better here than in the US.
It's full-blast war hysteria from Lithuania to Los Angeles.
"The standard view is that many of these things have always occurred and we're just heading through a rough patch right now. The combined ‘black swans’ of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine are temporarily causing disruption, the thinking goes, but soon we'll be back on our regular track of everything getting better for everyone in perpetuity."
Yes, it’s the beginning of the end. Entropy rules: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Conclusion: civilization ain’t what we’re evolved for.
“the hard limits of biophysical reality”
Correct. The School of Rome has been the haha whipping boy of our ruling elites for half a century now. But it was right all along — all the more idiotic everybody who listened to the elites.
I’ll tell you a thing about Dijon mustard. When I was kid in 1960s Ontario, there was only one store in the province (maybe the country) where you could get it: a specialty outlet in Toronto. Since then it suddenly became available in every freaking supermarket in North America. That’s Globalization. And all the hubris accompanying it, including “cultural cachet”.
And yes, most of Spain is a fast-growing desert. Flew across it two weeks ago & gazed at a long succession of reservoirs visibly wayyy down, & that in Early March. Shockingly graphic.
You’re doubtless right about the labour shortage. The pandemic merely shoved it in our face.
“a large pool of desperate and disposable labor”
That’s one of the fuels that capitalism runs on.
Your Cargo Cult analogy is perfect. Indeed it isn’t even analogy, just us showing we’re no different from Whoever in the mountains of New Guinea.
“MMT gets a bad rap”
So true. MMT has always got large-scale economics right, but it challenges the sacred totems of our ass-backward, greedhead, wealth-gap Western World.
I don’t know how Stephanie Kelton keeps her cool through so many superb lectures comprehensively ignored by our elites.
Yes, the wheels are falling off the civilization bandwagon as we watch. But it was headed this way all along. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Very insightful. I agree that the major issues of civilization often result from a blindness or inability to diagnose the problems at their core. It’s stunning how many believe we can trudge along carrying the same collective myths and values as we have and find a hopeful and abundant result. Degradation of the planet cannot be overcome. We must create a new story.
As always, an excellent article. I'm sure you've read John Gowdy's phenomenal essay "Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture, and unicivilization" - while he says that the process will take "centuries" to unfold (likely to please the peer-reviewers who'd call him "alarmist" otherwise), it seems more likely to happen over the time span of a few, chaotic decades. The entire system is rotten to the core, and reforms can not change this. In the long term, we will have to look beyond civilization, IMHO.
absolutely NOT. You missed the boat not by a mile but by light years on this one. it's ALL by design, none of it has to be occurring. None of it. The war in Ukraine, the high food prices, everything else you mentioned. All carefully crafted and orchestrated by the powers to be.
1. "War in Ukraine". USA/NATO wanted Putin to attack Ukraine and they have bee baiting him for years, Ukraine is practically in NATO, receiving weapons and training from them. Yes Putin made the mistake of the century, allowing Ukraine to fall into the hands of the West. Russia is now crying bloody tears over it. if Putin had acted in 2014, NONE of this would be happening.
Besides, Ukraine's grain is poisonous, the Bulgarians just threw it out. So the "Ukraine's grain is being stopped by Russia" is another lie concocted and spread by the West Corporate Owned Media. And we are back again at the perpetrators. Who are they? We all KNOW them. All by design. They want to exterminate 90% of humanity, too many people to feed and control.
ah the typical "feigning ignorance" trick. you MUST be an American. OK. I'll answer your fake question with a question. Who is making Europe commit economic suicide by forbidding them to buy cheap Russian gas?
If you Can't answer my question, then sorry pal, you aint smart enough to know my answer.
I don't feign ignorance, and I'm not from America. What does that have to do with one's continent of birth anyway? You make some pretty serious claims in your comment, so I asked you to clarify.
As for your question, it is my personal belief that the US empire has (or at least *thinks* it has) a great interest in escalating this conflict further, so I'd guess it's the business and government elites of the US (mostly). They blatantly lied about Iraq, so I find it really difficult to believe everything they now say about Russia. I'm not a friend of Putin, and I don't have the expertise to make grand claims about the issue, but I keep a healthy skepticism when it comes to this issue. Who bombed the pipelines? I don't know, but immediately pointing fingers east is a little premature, I think. It was the Yankees who blew up centrifuges for enrichening uranium in Iran, so who knows how far they'd go?
But, war aside - what does that have to do with killing off 90% of the human species? Who could plan something, and who would execute such plan? How could the survivors be sure they don't die as well?
To some degree or another all of that is true and yet I cannot predict whether the near future will be bleaker, hard to imagine, or marginally better. From where I sit much of the dysfunction seems sociological. Yes, prices are higher and there is less stuff but not so much so that we should be seeing something akin to collapse. And yet, collapsing we are.
I'll skip the litany of woes that plague my neck of the woods but basically all of the systems bar a few are failing and in decline. Virtually no civil or criminal enforcement exists where I live. So OD deaths, open drug sales, illegal toxic dumps, people with w/o sanitation services, rats, filth, burning dumpsters to clear them of piled up waste... All becoming the norm. This isn't a linear progression, there have been a few good months here and there and some official interventions to keep people safe and clean, etc. but overall real Hollywood style collapse doesn't seem that far off from where I stand.
Whether this is based on a decline in living standards and consumption, I don't know. Seems like even under the current scenario some progress and improvements would be possible if we had the will to do something, anything. But from state officials to local residents everyone seems to be giving up or withdrawing into their own partially fantasy fueled alt. reality. Escapism or denial remains possible because some places and institutions continue to work rather well. On a bad day, my neighborhood could be mistaken for the set of a Mel Gibson era Road Warrior movie but a few miles away I work in relative comfort in a secure office with reliable heat and sanitation, etc... Which version is real?
In Maine there appears to actually be a constituency for something I don’t even have a word for, something like anti-development. For example, locals sometimes sabotage road repairs to keep people out. On a larger and more abstract level people vote, albeit in minorities, for clearly failed polices that even the most ignorant cannot believe would lead to material progress. There is, at least in Maine, a constituency for actually reversing material progress. I don’t think I am stretching the truth here at all. I hear people complain that the "legit" businesses are limiting their ability to engage in what I think of as "extra or ill-legal occupations" like drug sales, chop shops and stolen goods all of which occur pretty much openly anyway. No one seems bothered by this at all.
I haven't a clue how this will work out locally or internationally but it does seem different this time. I also think we all undervalue the basic services collective society offers. You cannot sell stolen chainsaws on FB without a lot of hidden supports and labor for example. Even the very lowest rungs of our social ladder are dependent on vast bureaucracies and intricate technologies that they do not understand and take for granted. I guess we will probably muddle through with some places more livable than others but I hope we all understand the important role that each worker, each computer server, sanitation code enforcer, farmer, fire dept, etc... does. I see these things slipping away without replacement and begin to fret.
This is some trash analysis.
Any discussion of inflation that doesn't include monetary supply is missing the largest factor by far. Trillions of dollars printed by central banks to prop up inefficient and dying institutions had to go somewhere. It was mostly exported, inflating everyone else's currencies, and was spent on real estate and bonds, until the pandemic, when uncertainty upended the bond market and vast government stimulus pushed enough dollars into the M2 system that it caused an uptick in inflation, which was seized upon by corporations raising prices to "compensate" for disrupted supply chains. When inflation rose above the yield on most corporate and Treasury bonds, which was only a few percent, the bond market became functionally illiquid, forcing banks to use the reverse repo facility at the Fed (currently over 2 trillion dollars parked with them overnight in return for a few percent interest because they couldn't get better returns elsewhere), and to raise prices further to offset their losses on debt. Cue inflationary spiral. The central banks tried raising rates to reduce lending and the supply of money, "hopefully" causing a rise in unemployment and a slowing down of the economy, but this only increased the supply of money being pumped into the system with nothing good to buy with it.
The climate crisis has been making things worse, especially for the insane last-minute supply chains that we built in the last 30 years, and they add to inflation in a serious way that should be addressed, but holy fuck it is nothing compared to the debt trap the Fed has been plunging into for decades. The Triffin Dilemma is coming home to roost: force everyone to use your currency abroad by printing dollars and spending them abroad, and inflate global currencies against your own,
keeping your own prices low and giving you leverage over the world, untill the amount of dollar denominated debt causes massive demand in a period of economic shock that requires either you stop printing dollars (increasing demand and inflation) or you print more to inflate your way out of it (causing hyperinflation).
Shock is the key here. The rich will use this economic shock to scoop up yet more of the world's assets; our land and water and infrastructure, and they'll rent it all back to us, keeping us in our place. It's a predictable cycle and it's what the central banks have orchestrated for as long as they have existed.
"The indigenous peoples knew nothing of the complex global geopolitics that had led to their home temporarily becoming a forward operations base for the world's major industrial powers."
The irony is palpable.
Just a word on the Ukraine War: it may spare us the need to watch civilization collapse around us, since every day it continues brings the mounting inevitability of The Mistake, The Miscalculation.
We in the West are awash in industrial-strength Russophobic propaganda — never more potent than over the past year. I live in Europe &, for once, can say it's no better here than in the US.
It's full-blast war hysteria from Lithuania to Los Angeles.
It's one gargantuan lemming charge.
"The standard view is that many of these things have always occurred and we're just heading through a rough patch right now. The combined ‘black swans’ of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine are temporarily causing disruption, the thinking goes, but soon we'll be back on our regular track of everything getting better for everyone in perpetuity."
Yes, it’s the beginning of the end. Entropy rules: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Conclusion: civilization ain’t what we’re evolved for.
“the hard limits of biophysical reality”
Correct. The School of Rome has been the haha whipping boy of our ruling elites for half a century now. But it was right all along — all the more idiotic everybody who listened to the elites.
I’ll tell you a thing about Dijon mustard. When I was kid in 1960s Ontario, there was only one store in the province (maybe the country) where you could get it: a specialty outlet in Toronto. Since then it suddenly became available in every freaking supermarket in North America. That’s Globalization. And all the hubris accompanying it, including “cultural cachet”.
And yes, most of Spain is a fast-growing desert. Flew across it two weeks ago & gazed at a long succession of reservoirs visibly wayyy down, & that in Early March. Shockingly graphic.
You’re doubtless right about the labour shortage. The pandemic merely shoved it in our face.
“a large pool of desperate and disposable labor”
That’s one of the fuels that capitalism runs on.
Your Cargo Cult analogy is perfect. Indeed it isn’t even analogy, just us showing we’re no different from Whoever in the mountains of New Guinea.
“MMT gets a bad rap”
So true. MMT has always got large-scale economics right, but it challenges the sacred totems of our ass-backward, greedhead, wealth-gap Western World.
I don’t know how Stephanie Kelton keeps her cool through so many superb lectures comprehensively ignored by our elites.
Yes, the wheels are falling off the civilization bandwagon as we watch. But it was headed this way all along. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Very insightful. I agree that the major issues of civilization often result from a blindness or inability to diagnose the problems at their core. It’s stunning how many believe we can trudge along carrying the same collective myths and values as we have and find a hopeful and abundant result. Degradation of the planet cannot be overcome. We must create a new story.
As always, an excellent article. I'm sure you've read John Gowdy's phenomenal essay "Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture, and unicivilization" - while he says that the process will take "centuries" to unfold (likely to please the peer-reviewers who'd call him "alarmist" otherwise), it seems more likely to happen over the time span of a few, chaotic decades. The entire system is rotten to the core, and reforms can not change this. In the long term, we will have to look beyond civilization, IMHO.
absolutely NOT. You missed the boat not by a mile but by light years on this one. it's ALL by design, none of it has to be occurring. None of it. The war in Ukraine, the high food prices, everything else you mentioned. All carefully crafted and orchestrated by the powers to be.
1. "War in Ukraine". USA/NATO wanted Putin to attack Ukraine and they have bee baiting him for years, Ukraine is practically in NATO, receiving weapons and training from them. Yes Putin made the mistake of the century, allowing Ukraine to fall into the hands of the West. Russia is now crying bloody tears over it. if Putin had acted in 2014, NONE of this would be happening.
Besides, Ukraine's grain is poisonous, the Bulgarians just threw it out. So the "Ukraine's grain is being stopped by Russia" is another lie concocted and spread by the West Corporate Owned Media. And we are back again at the perpetrators. Who are they? We all KNOW them. All by design. They want to exterminate 90% of humanity, too many people to feed and control.
All by design.
I'm curious, who is "they" in this narrative? Who wants to exterminate 90 percent of humanity?
ah the typical "feigning ignorance" trick. you MUST be an American. OK. I'll answer your fake question with a question. Who is making Europe commit economic suicide by forbidding them to buy cheap Russian gas?
If you Can't answer my question, then sorry pal, you aint smart enough to know my answer.
I don't feign ignorance, and I'm not from America. What does that have to do with one's continent of birth anyway? You make some pretty serious claims in your comment, so I asked you to clarify.
As for your question, it is my personal belief that the US empire has (or at least *thinks* it has) a great interest in escalating this conflict further, so I'd guess it's the business and government elites of the US (mostly). They blatantly lied about Iraq, so I find it really difficult to believe everything they now say about Russia. I'm not a friend of Putin, and I don't have the expertise to make grand claims about the issue, but I keep a healthy skepticism when it comes to this issue. Who bombed the pipelines? I don't know, but immediately pointing fingers east is a little premature, I think. It was the Yankees who blew up centrifuges for enrichening uranium in Iran, so who knows how far they'd go?
But, war aside - what does that have to do with killing off 90% of the human species? Who could plan something, and who would execute such plan? How could the survivors be sure they don't die as well?
Your theory just seems a bit off the charts.