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neonvincent- Dark Age America: Involuntary Simplicity.
"[I]t’s far from surprising that all the people whose jobs are dependent on intermediation, all the way up the corporate food chain to the corner offices, are increasingly worried about the number of people who are trying to engage in disintermediation—to buy food, health care, and other goods and services directly from the producers."
I'll provide you and your readers with an example outside of health care--the effort by states to prevent direct sales of cars by manufacturers. Right now, there is only one company trying to bypass the network of dealers to sell directly to customers--Tesla. So far, all the states that have outlawed direct sales have Republican governors and Republican majorities in their legislatures. This includes Michigan, which whose governor, Rick Snyder, just signed into law a prohibition against direct sales. This has allowed partisan critics of the GOP to paint this as an attack on electric cars by fossil fools. This spin ignores these laws having bipartisan support from politicians who benefit from campaign contributions by the car dealers. What's really going on looks more like an effort to resist disintermediation; that it happens to involve an electric car may just be a contingent accident of history.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, thank you -- I hadn't heard of that example, and it's a good one.
Me: @JMG: Quite welcome.
Here's another observation from my experience that illustrates one of your points.
"If growth continues far enough, though, the production of illth overwhelms the production of wealth, and we end up more or less where we are today, where the benefits from continued growth are outweighed by the increasingly ghastly impact of the social, economic, and environmental “externalities” driven by growth itself."
I show an example of this having already happened in the U.S. to my classes when I demonstrate the shortcomings of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of economic health. One of my slides places a bar graph of U.S. GDP next to a bar representing the total of all the negative externalities as calculated by the people who put together the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). The externalities are much taller, so the result is negative. People are actually worse off. Only the positive externalities (all of the free services done by friends and family, for example) that also contribute to the GPI allow the economy to be positive at all.
Also, while the GDP per capita has gone up and up since World War II, the GPI per capita has been stagnant since the mid 1970s. It seems that we hit the point of diminishing returns 40 years ago.
Speaking of diminishing returns...
"By the way, a thank you and apology to all who posted comments to last week's essay here"
I never did follow up on my promise to critique your future history, and I won't do it tonight. Instead, I was wondering if any of your readers had another image when they read your title--giving a female fairy a pink slip to wear as a present. That occurred to me, but then I recalled that lusting after the fair folk tends to be bad for one's health, safety, and sanity. Think about the metaphor that alternative interpretation yields!
Greer: Pinku-sensei, yes, I thought about five seconds after posting last week's essay that some people might think I was talking about rose-colored underthings for a minor figure out of the writings of L. Frank Baum. The GDP material makes perfect sense to me!
Pinku-Sensei said...
"[A] minor figure out of the writings of L. Frank Baum." I had in mind a supporting character from the works of J.M. Barrie. So, how many people are clapping for the Progress Fairy to keep her alive?
Greer: Pinku-sensei, too funny.
GHung said...Pinku-Sensei- "...giving a female fairy a pink slip to wear as a present..."
...for some reason brought to mind Cheech Marin rocking out in his tutu in "Up In Smoke" (Earache My Eye), which closely follows the great jam "Lost Due to Incompetence".
- A Pink Slip for the Progress Fairy.
- Dark Age America: The Hour of the Knife.
- Dark Age America: The Collapse of Political Complexity.
- The Buffalo Wind.
Pinku-Sensei said...That's an amazing future history and scheme of the fall of our current civilization, both of which I'll comment on later. Instead, I'm going to share a piece of news about collapse that's being repackaged as progress, both in terms of energy conservation and financial stability, but is really a sign that Detroit has embraced the salvage economy, converting waste into resources. For years, Detroit has been fighting scrappers, losing up to $1,000,000 per year in copper wires alone. As part of the bankruptcy, Detroit now plans on recycling up to 85% of its copper wires, an action made possible by LED streetlights requiring much less energy. The city could earn between $25,000,000 and $40,000,000 as a result of this action. The city would now become the biggest scrapper. If you can't beat them, join them.
John Michael Greer said...Pinku-sensei, no doubt. Detroit being Detroit, they were probably just jealous because the money wasn't going into white people's pockets.
Pinku-Sensei said..."In the teeth of all this bad news, I’m pleased to say, Paul Krugman rose to the occasion and gave all of us in the peak oil scene something to laugh about."
I'm glad I shared that link with you last week and even more pleased that you enjoyed it and got to use it.
"Krugman’s response—it really is a comic masterpiece, better than anything I’ve seen since the heyday of Francis Fukuyama—involved, among other non sequiturs and dubious claims, assailing mere scientists for thinking that they know more than economists. Er, let’s see: which of these two groups of people is expected to test their predictions against hard facts and discard a theory that produces inaccurate predictions?...consider the IMF’s continued advocacy of austerity programs as the road to prosperity when no country that has ever implemented them has ever achieved prosperity thereby, or for that matter the huge majority of economists who insisted the housing bubble wasn’t a bubble and wouldn’t crash, right up until the bottom dropped out."
To be fair to Krugman, he has been pointing out the folly of "expansionary austerity" for years and was one of the few economists who thought that the housing market was in a bubble at the time. However, he had no idea how bad the bubble bursting would be. He's also made a few other predictions that have come true, such as expanding the money supply would not create inflation so long as interest rates were so low, but which other economists and policy makers have generally ignored. Just the same, those are successes within his paradigm, which means they don't fit in a world of limits to growth. Speaking of which...
"That the needle on the world’s fossil fuel gauge is swinging inexorably over toward E, to him, thus can only mean that some other source of cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy will have to be found to keep the engines of economic growth roaring on at full throttle. That there may be no such replacement for fossil fuels ready and waiting in Nature’s cookie jar, and that economic growth can thus give way to an economic contraction extending over decades and centuries to come, has never entered his darkest dream."
That's pretty much what I've been saying about him. Peak oil? He's not having it.
However, he's not alone in assuming that "they'll think of something" because otherwise the assumptions of his world will be shown to be false. The most read article on Reuters as I type this is Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project. Here's the lede: "Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade." Hope springs eternal. Also, a decade away? Well, that's an improvement over it being 30 to 35 years away, but I don't believe it. After all, nuclear fusion would be even better than flying cars, and I don't think those will happen for the mass market, either.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, I got pelted with links to Krugman's piece -- for which thanks are owed to all, as I needed a good belly laugh. So fusion's going to be the next big subsidy dumpster! I figured it would be something nuclear; sooner or later we'll probably see a huge program to build fission reactors, which will get very few (if any) actually built, cause one of history's truly great bankruptcies, and delay the recognition of the inevitable for a few more years. Still, that's further down the road.
Pinku-Sensei said..."Imagine for a moment that one of the current US elite—an executive from a too-big-to-fail investment bank, a top bureaucrat from inside the DC beltway, a trust-fund multimillionaire with a pro forma job at the family corporation, or what have you—were to turn up in some chaotic failed state on the fringes of the industrial world, with no money, no resources, no help from abroad, and no ticket home."
This is the basis for the taunt directed at Libertarians from what passes for the Left in the U.S. that if the Libertarians really want a minimal state paradise, they can always go to Somalia. Of course, the targets of the taunt won't ever take their critics up on it.
"There are people in North America who could probably carry off a feat of that kind, but you won’t find them in the current ruling elite."
In the now-cancelled post-apocalyptic show "Revolution," the first villain the viewers met was an militia commander played by Giancarlo Esposito. When asked what he was before the blackout that never ended, he replied "an insurance adjuster." He personifies the trope From Nobody to Nightmare. I expect a lot of the new ruling class would fit that theme as well.
@Andy Brown I've eaten grasshoppers before and found them delicious. I ate them in Oaxaca, Mexico, where they are a local delicacy, and did so in part because of the superstition that if one ate them, one would come back to Oaxaca. I hope I can do that before collapse gets too advanced and travel becomes too difficult. You and I might be part of a trend, as the U.N. says eating bugs is the future, at least if one wants to feed a billion more people, which seems to be baked in short of a fast collapse, and have them get protein.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, of course not -- most of the "libertarians" I've met were even more attached to their government handouts than the rest of us.
Eric S. said...Re: Pinku, Andy, and JMG on eating bugs:
When I started working through the Green Wizardry Handbook, I decided to take advantage of my invert zoo background and my past living in small apartments to try out insect eating and breeding. It's hard to get people to actually eat them, but people are always asking me how various types of insects have been traditionally prepared around the world. My hope is that the adventurous spirit and appetite for the creepy and crawly that fills the air this time of year might inspire some of my grove mates to take a leap and try out some mealworm and cricket cookies I'll be making for this year's Samhain potluck, maybe it enough people try and enjoy them it'll inspire a few more people build a future with edible cricket and/or mealworm farms in every home.
Also, Pinku-Sensei: If you ever make it to Washington, DC there's an Oaxacan restaurant called Oyamel that has Chapulin Tacos (grasshoppers) that you need to check out.
Pinku-Sensei said...Your juxtaposition of the denunciation of Zero Hedge by CNN with the Ebola epidemic was most fortuitous. In the wake of the first Ebola case diagnosed in the U.S., markets fell more than one percent for the day as anything involving transportation got clobbered. The only stocks that did well seem to be the ones of companies that could make vaccines for Ebola. Despite the exhortations of authority figures, including physicians, politicians, and the press, not to panic, investors did exactly that. I don't blame them.
As for the other half of your essay about the reintroduction of the bison to reservations on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, that ties into two of my lectures. One of them I gave a couple of weeks about about the lack of integration between the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service around Yellowstone National Park. Inside the park, the bison are protected. Outside the park, the Forest Service allows ranchers to harass the buffalo and herd them back into the park. Things were worse for years before that. Because of fears of brucellosis passing from the wild animals to cattle, bison in the National Forests could be shot! Recently, I read that practice has stopped. The same page that reported that good news also mentioned the reintroduction of bison that you reported. I see it as a good thing.
The other lecture is one I'll give tomorrow about the effects of keystone species and trophic cascades. I can add the anecdotes about wolves and bison that you related to that explanation. That should be both entertaining and enlightening.
Speaking of animals that produced winds, last month was the 100th anniversary of the death of the last passenger pigeon. Both of the major state universities here in Michigan are hosting exhibits on the extinction of the species. That event connects to the survival of the bison because the loss of the passenger pigeon, which used to number in the billions, made people realize that the bison and other once-abundant species could follow them into oblivion and should be saved. So the bison were, and may roam again because people heeded the warning.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, I was impressed; there are times when the world just seems to want to cooperate with me, or something. ;-)
Dwig: Pinku, thanks for the passenger pigeon reference. Mann also gives an interesting account of their nature and fate. Before the epidemics, the pigeon and the people were competitors for many of the same resources, so the people ensured that they never got too numerous (think of rats with wings -- my image, not Mann's). So, the vast throngs of pigeons that the "new bosses" encountered were the natural result of the lifting of an ecological constraint.
Pinku-Sensei said...One of the subjects of your essay last week, Paul Krugman, has yet denounced people who say there are limits to growth. Here's how he opened his blog entry today.
"Environmental pessimism makes strange bedfellows. We seem to be having a moment in which three groups with very different agendas — anti-environmentalist conservatives, anti-capitalist people on the left, and hard scientists who think they are smarter than economists — have formed an unholy alliance on behalf of the proposition that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is incompatible with growing real GDP."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/slow-steaming-and-the-supposed-limits-to-growth/
This time, his target is not the Post-Carbon Institute. Instead, it's Mark Buchanan at Bloomberg, who posted a response to the same opinion piece that prompted your essay last week. The title of Buchanan's piece is revealing--"Economists Are Blind to the Limits of Growth."
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-05/economists-are-blind-to-the-limits-of-growth
This sent Krugman off into a discussion of how economies can use energy more efficiently, doing the same with less, using an example from shipping. He completely ignored the possibilities arising from resource depletion. Peak oil? As I wrote before, he's not having it.
Krugman also revealed that he's been critical of "Limits to Growth" for 40 years. When he was the research assistant to William Nordhaus, he picked up the latter's distain for both the ideas expressed and especially the execution.
It turns out Krugman has been beating up on "Limits to Growth" and its predecessor Jay Forrester’s "World Dynamics" for at least six years. Here's a link to an blog entry from 2008. Paradoxically, it also notes that things on the energy front haven't worked out as well as the optimists in the early 1970s thought they would. As Churchill once wrote, people will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them will pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had ever happened.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/limits-to-growth-and-related-stuff/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Avery said...What an astonishing link, Pinku-Sensei. Not to say that JMG should waste tomorrow's installment by attempting to seek out some logic in that post, but it's like Krugman is purposefully trying to make cornucopianism look ridiculous.
