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neonvincentI'm resuming what I started last month.
- Dark Age America: The End of the Old Order
Me: “The pundit in question was no less a figure than Paul Krugman, who chose the opinion pages of the New York Times for a shrill and nearly fact-free diatribe lumping Post Carbon Institute together with the Koch brothers as purveyors of 'climate despair.' PCI’s crime, in Krugman’s eyes, consists of noticing that the pursuit of limitless economic growth on a finite planet, with or without your choice of green spraypaint, is a recipe for disaster.”
I mentioned on your blog before in a comment that I recycled into 'A Steampunk calculator' and six other sustainable technologies from The Archdruid, that, if any mainstream economist should understand Peak Oil and other resource limits to growth, it's Krugman. In a New York Review of Books article, Krugman revealed that he was the research assistant for William Nordhaus’ landmark paper, “The Allocation of Energy Resources.” He “spent long hours immured in Yale’s Geology Library, poring over Bureau of Mines circulars and the like.” If someone with his experience with the economy of energy doesn’t get Peak Oil, then it’s probably hopeless for most economists to comprehend the issue. Krugman will examine the costs of pollution, but as for the economics of resource depletion, he won't hear of it. That's why I list him among the conventional economists when I lecture about economic schools of thought to my classes, but mention Kunstler and Joel Salatin when I describe the ecological economists. I'd mention you, but I don't think I'd show "The Sproutwood Faerie Festival" to my classes. That's the only film IMDB lists you in.
Krugman will acknowledge one limit to economic growth--decreased population growth. He recognizes that population growth is slowing down in the U.S. and it's a problem for economic growth. Escapefromwisconsin, who comments here, did an admirable job of summarizing Krugman and his readers on the issue and I link to his entry from mine. Krugman thinks that a stable or slowly shrinking population would be good for the planet, but the way the economy is currently structured would mean that the economy would be stagnant and not provide enough jobs for everyone. That's one area where he thinks the system needs reform to accommodate this reality. The idea that the system might collapse irreversibly to achieve the same goal in a way more severe than the Great Depression seems to be literally unthinkable for him.
JMG: Pinku-sensei, I think he knows the score, or would if he could bear thinking about it. If Post Carbon is right, though, his entire world is toast, and it takes quite a bit of moral courage to face that reality squarely.
Me again: diogenese said...
"The Black death in England is a perfect example of your treatise; though the 'nobility' survived in place infinitely poorer, the 'middle management' of yeomen were destroyed."
That's one subject I neglected to mention in Plague in the news and in history. I used to play a game called "Kingmaker," which simulated the Wars of the Roses. Plague was an important random event in that game. When it struck a city or town, any royal heirs there, along with any player-controlled nobles, were killed. The nobles would respawn back at their castles the next turn, but the royal heir was gone forever. We players took the loss of the heirs in stride; there were so many that there was almost always another to capture and crown king or queen when the time was right. That written, we made sure to stay out of the cities as much as possible. They were bad for our nobles' health!
On the subject of collapse, I use this game as an example of how a plague that hits a society on its way up that manages to keep its system of government intact has very different effects than on one that is in the middle of collapse. Yes, the population went down, but the English monarchy keep right on going and the lives of the survivors were better after the plague than before it. That's not how the plagues that hit the collapsing Roman Empire played out. The Eastern Empire shrunk (the Western Empire was already long gone), the population shrank, and the survivors were worse off than before.
JMG: Pinku-sensei, I played that game, too, back in the day. I probably need to do a post here on the likely role of pandemic disease in the transition to the deindustrial dark age. Given that Ebola cases are doubling every twenty days at this point, that may be a more immediately relevant point than most people like to think...
k-dog: On his blog Pinku-Sensei mentions that the true astronomical equinox is not until Sept. 26 this year. That being the case. In my heart I'll pay homage all week:)
Scotlyn: @pinku-sensei I wonder if you have encountered an "ecological economist" of a previous generation, by the name of Frederick Soddy?
http://technocracy.wikia.com/wiki/Thermoeconomics
Ben: HI JMG, for what its worth, I agree with Pinku, you may want to throw in a post about the impact of epidemic disease on civilizational collapse. I know you touched on it in an earlier post, but it might be worth an specific post. I doubt that Ebola will be one of the major pandemics this century b/c the symptoms are fairly unmistakable and it isn't that easily transmitted person to person.
As for senile elites, our current crop of political, economic and cultural leaders are surrounded by yes-men. I'm sure this is always a problem for people 'in charge' at all stages of civilizational growth and decline, but the problem seems pretty bad now.
Me: @Varun The CDC has announced that the patient has tested positive for Ebola. You were right, just premature. As it is, that's one more prediction about Ebola coming true.
@Scotlyn No, I hadn't heard of Frederick Soddy. Thanks for the name and link.
Me: That's a very interesting model that you devised nine years ago and the most rigorous one I've seen of how an economy works using the assumptions of ecological economics. You made the issues of resource depletion and pollution central to your analysis, exactly what I tell my students is the distinguishing feature of ecological economics. In particular, I found the inclusion of waste into your model very interesting. Other models of the economy ignore waste or don't treat it the way you do. It's either theoretically impossible (the supposed efficiency of the invisible hand of the market), an externality ("not my problem"), or an evil inefficiency to be deplored and eliminated. It's not treated as an integral part of the system, even if any environmentally based analysis of an economy as a system includes waste in the form of trash and pollution as an inevitable output of an industrial process.
The one aspect of the model that I found puzzling is that while you made the cessation of maintenance of capital in order to convert it into waste for the purpose of "balancing the books" an essential part of collapse, I couldn't find the extension of the ecological metaphor that would entail converting the waste from physical capital into resources that I expected from your writings about a salvage economy. Is that something you hadn't considered a decade ago? If so, do you plan on adding to an updated version of the model?
@Tom Hopkins: We wish Iraq were Gaul. That's a territory conquered when Rome was on the upswing. Instead, I want to point out that the last major addition to the Roman Empire was Mespotamia, almost exactly the same territory as modern Iraq. It was also one of the first territories lost during the contraction of the empire. Ponder that coincidence, if you dare.
JMG: Pinku-sensei, that was a detail I missed in the original paper. You'll have noticed that it's been included in subsequent discussions here, and yes, it'll be factored into the new essay when the time comes to create that.
Me again: Purple Tortoise wrote:
"Given the widespread obvious discontent, I have been surprised to see that no mainstream politician has really gone for grabbing the populist center and run on reining in the banks, restricting offshoring and immigration, and ceasing involvement in foreign wars. It seems like it would have been a great vote-getter to me. What am I missing?"
What you're missing is that none of the top four parties in this country will support that combination of positions. Each party will support some or even most of them, but will find at least one of them anathema, so there is no home for that platform among them.
The Republican Party won't considering reining in the banks or ceasing intervention in foreign wars; the closest one got to those positions in the GOP was Ron Paul, who was interested in "Ending the Fed," but I don't know what he thinks about other big banks. I don't recall his son Rand continuing that policy. Both are still anti-interventionist, and both make the mainstream power brokers in their party furious. Note that Ron Paul didn't even get as far as either Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich in the 2012 primaries. Ron is going to have an uphill fight getting through them in 2016 as well.
The Democratic Party won't support strong restrictions on immigration; they're having enough trouble on illegal immigration. Restrictions on immigration would be considered an expression of racism, and the Democrats include racial and ethnic minorities in the coalitions, some of whom would be most displeased by an anti-immigrant stance.
The Libertarians would find restrictions on the banks, outsourcing, and immigration against their principles. The party actually advocates for open borders for both money and people.
The Greens might go for restricting immigration except that they don't want to be seen as racist, either. Since being pro-redistribution and anti-racist are both Left positions, it's hard to be anti-immigrant and be seen as Left in the U.S. these days.
The largest party in the U.S. who might be for all those things is the Constitution Party. Any politician in that group who can wrap those ideas in a flag while carrying a cross will get away with them. Pity the party is the personification of amateur hour in politics.
(I turned this last comment into a post already, On American political parties held captive by their interest groups and ideologies.)
- Technological Superstitions
- Dark Age America: The Cauldron of Nations
Me: "The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has continued to spread at an exponential rate as hopelessly underfunded attempts to contain it crumple, while the leaders of the world’s industrial nations distract themselves playing geopolitics in blithe disregard of the very real possibility that their inattention may be helping to launch the next great global pandemic."
President Obama actually talked about Ebola on Meet the Press, saying that it could pose a danger to the U.S. and that the country should send troops and resources in. That might be wiser in the long run than chasing ISIS, AKA The Sith Jihad, around Syria and Iraq, even though that would be a more popular thing to do, as people understand a fight with a human enemy better than an effort to contain The Red Death. Speaking of which, the same people who observed relationship between food prices and unrest and predicted the onset of the Arab Spring and then the current spate of crises in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere, are calling attention to a model of Ebola spread that could turn into a global pandemic by just adding intercontinental transportation into the mix. That's an issue that was pointed out in "The Hot Zone" 20 years ago. Welcome to the science-fiction future of two decades ago.
Ebola may already be spreading through travel. There is a patient exhibiting Ebola-like symptoms in a hospital in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, right across the river from Detroit. That's very close to home, literally.
JMG: Pinku-sensei, Obama's fairly good at talking. It's doing anything when he's finished with the speech that's his problem. At this point I think a global pandemic that could leave a quarter or more of the world's population dead in five to ten years is a serious possibility.
Me: "It’s quite another thing to talk about exactly whose descendants will comprise that five per cent. That’s what I intend to do this week, and yes, I know that raising that issue is normally a very good way to spark a shouting match in which who-did-what-to-whom rhetoric plays its usual role in drowning out everything else."
What you've invited is a round of "fact and fantasy about immigrants," never mind that the facts are about the role of immigrants in modern industrial society (studies show they are generally beneficial, not a malign influence as many fear) and not about the results of Volkerwanderung and its aftermath that you describe here. Good luck on taking the side of reality against the tide of fantasy you should expect in the comments.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2012/06/fantasy-and-reality-about-immigrants.html
Speaking of fantasy and Volkerwanderung, the confluence of the two is an older subject on your blog than a lot of the newer readers expect. That goes back to 2007's "Fascism, Feudalism, and the Future," in which you brought up the persistent myth of mindless hordes erupting out of the cities to devour the countryside. Your readers turned that into a discussion of zombies in pop culture that eventually metamorphosed into a comment about immigrant hordes. You really were quite sanguine about those, and pointed out that wasn't the fantasy you wished to debunk. However, you did describe an early version of the kind of North America that you projected today, full of climate refugees and others who could better handle the environment of a Dark Age America. I distilled that conversation at my blog.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2014/02/more-from-archdruid-and-his-readers-on.html
JMG: Pinku-sensei, I did my best to chase off such discussions with those first four paragraphs -- we'll see how well it works. As for previous mentions of this same issue here, why, yes: it's a big part of the future ahead of us, so deserves close study.
