PEAK
EVERYTHING: THE ‘SOLUTION’ IS COLLAPSE
So
the root problem is the system, human nature, blah blah blah. There
are no “solutions” that can fix those defaults. Thus the
“solution” is collapse.
8
June, 2012
Policies
create incentives and disincentives. Some
are intended, some fall into the category of unintended consequences.
Regardless of their intention, policies that create windfalls (“easy
money”) or open spigots of “free money” (or what is perceived
as free money by the recipient) quickly gather the allegiance of
everyone reaping the windfall or collecting the free money.
This
allegiance is soon tempered into political steel by
self-justification: humans excel at rationalizing their
self-interest. Thus my share of the swag is soon “absolutely
essential.”
Humans
don’t need much incentive to pursue windfalls or free money—seeking
windfalls in the here and now is our default setting. Taking the
pulpit to denounce humanity’s innate greed, avarice and selfishness
doesn’t change this, as seeking short-term windfalls has offered
enormous selective advantages for hundreds of thousands of years.
That
which is painful to those collecting free money will be avoided, and
that which is easy will be pursued until it’s painful. Borrowing
$1.5 trillion a year from toddlers and the unborn taxpayers of the
future is easy and painless, as toddlers have no political power. So
we will borrow from the powerless to fund our free money spigots
until it becomes painful.
It
won’t become painful to borrow from our grandkids for quite some
time, and it will probably not become progressively painful, either,
because we will suppress the pain with superlow interest rates and
other trickery. The pain will more likely be of the sudden,
unexpected, “this can’t be happening to me” heart-attack sort:
the free-money machine will unexpectedly grind to a halt in some sort
of easily predictable but always-in-the-future crisis.
“Solutions”
that turn off the free money spigots are non-starters, not just from
self-interest but from ideology. Any
attempt to tighten the spigots steps on ideological toes, as each
spigot is ideologically sacred to one political camp or another.
Liberals
don’t want to hear about scamming of their sacred “we must help
everyone in need” welfare programs, and conservatives don’t want
to hear about cartel looting of their sacred “free enterprise”
system.
And
so we have gridlock, what I call profound political disunity.
Everybody at each trough of free money fights tooth and nail to keep
their spigot wide open, and so the “solution” is to borrow 10% of
the nation’s output in “free money” every year until the
free-money machine breaks down.
Each
ideology worships their own version of cargo-cult economics: if we
wave the dead chicken over the enchanted rocks while dancing the
humba-humba, prosperity and abundance will magically return and we
can “grow our way out of debt.”
We’re
like a sprawling family bickering over the inheritance: we’ll keep
arguing over who deserves what until the inheritance is gone. That
will trigger one final outburst of finger-pointing, resentment and
betrayal, and then we’ll go do something else to get by.
The
“solution” is thus collapse. This
model has been very effectively explored in The
Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of
Civilization by
Thomas Homer-Dixon. The basic idea is that when the carrying costs of
the society exceed its output, the whole contraption collapses.
The
political adjunct to this systemic implosion is that the productive
people just stop supporting the Status Quo because it’s become too
burdensome. The calculus of self-interest shifts from supporting the
bloated, marginal-return Status Quo to abandoning it.
So
the root problem is the system, human nature, blah blah blah. There
are no “solutions” that can fix those defaults. The
“solution” is collapse, as only collapse will force everyone to
go do something more sustainable to get by.
Until
then, arguing about “solutions” is a sport to be enjoyed
sparingly
.
.
Here’s
my latest YouTube presentation with Gordon T. Long on “Peak
Everything.” Lots of interesting charts:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.