I tend to spend too much of my time reading, and too much of that reading economics articles.
Two articles caught my attention today, one from the conservative Economist, and the other from the slightly more extreme News Target. The first, titled The Coming Financial Collapse of America (and Why Today’s Market Bloodbath is Only a Small Taste of Things to Come…) (can you guess which one this was) struck a familiar theme. Apocalypse Now! America is doomed, the chickens are coming home to roost and we’re all going to hell!
If you have to generalise and pick one of the most significant differences between people, it would be their ability to accept change. And not only accept change, but desire it. From the conservative all things must stay the same to the we need to make things incrementally better to the revolutionary bring it all down and start again view, this dynamic shapes much of the human condition.
Again generalising for now, the young tend to be less afraid of change, and the old more so. I’ve noticed myself less keen to do things I once wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at – leaping out of aeroplanes, or spending the whole day digging through to new caverns in a crumbling sandstone cave, now have less appeal than they once did.
Fear is a great driver, and much of politics is an attempt (usually successful) to scare voters into continuing the status quo.
But back to the article.
Predicting the collapse of the dominant economic power is one such manifestation of the revolutionary wing, common among many in the left, and green circles, and the article fits into the mould.
The article is easy to dismiss, with it’s flourishing rhetoric and rampant ego (astonishingly fraudulent lending practices by dishonest banks, or The mathematically-impaired American masses, largely unable to follow basic economics, and I warned the public about the dot-com crash several years before 2001, and my warning about the housing crash was, as you can see, two years early as well.
But there’s much that is true, and fairly self-evident. The US economy has been artificially boosted by cheap loans, and funded by Asian and other foreign investments. It’s got itself into huge debt, reversing the balanced budget of the Clinton era, and splurging it all on an illegal war under George W. Bush (how that must sound strange to the business wing of the Republican party, who historically denounced the Democrats as the tax and spend party, and who are currently battling the religious and military wings for nomination of their favoured Republican party candidate).
Undeniably, America is a mess, and people react to that with something between fear and fervour.
The second article from the Economist, Face value: Totally different, looks at Christophe de Margerie, the boss of Total Oil, and his realisation that the world’s oil production is nearing its peak. It’s careful to differentiate what he describes from the oft-derided term peak oil, in case the Economist has to concede that those green nutters who’ve been predicting just such an event for years may actually be right. It uses the term geological peak oil, which of course will probably never be reached. But it doesn’t help the oil-based economies of the world if the oil is unreachable, or only at extreme cost, even taking into account the fact that some currently unviable oilfields will become viable as oil heads towards $200.
De Margerie stated last year that the world would never be able to increase its output from current levels (85 million barrels a day), much less reach the 120 million barrels a day expected to be required by 2030. That means peak oil, in it’s more commonly-used term, is now.
When the head of a major oil company states this, that’s quite a radical statement, and an affirmation for those green nutters, the talented economists who’ve predicted this for years, but haven’t had the credibility to be heard in the mainstream media.
What comes from that is fairly easy to predict. Transport costs, and therefore food costs, will rise dramatically. Suburban living, where food, entertainment and business are all far away, will become less and less viable.
The world is changing, and those of us who don’t fear change can help create a vision of where it should be going. We need to move away from oil, and everything it encompasses – food imported from around the world, and suburban living. We will need to produce more of our food locally, and organically, and live closer to where we work and play, and where we grow our food.
We’ll look back on our recent past with a mixture of bemused fascination and disgust, and wonder why no-one seemed to see it coming.
Related posts:
1 comment
Comments are closed.