[Lurker]

For later.

[ClearCase_guy]

I cannot see how this will NOT all collapse very soon.

[Rummyfan]

Each day when I drive to work I try to look at the surrounding communities, and count how many are working and how many of the able-bodied are not. I listen to the car radio and tally up how many stories, both in their subject matter and method of presentation, seem to preserve civilization, or how many seem to tear it down. I try to assess how many drivers stay between the lines, how many weave while texting or zoom in and out of traffic at 90mph or honk and flip off drivers.

Today, as the reader can note from the tone of this apocalyptic essay, civilization seemed to be losing.

[rbg81]

I think Hanson fails to take robots and automation into account. It is a fair question to ask: what will people do when so much is automated? Even what has been outsourced will be given to the machines & software when it becomes more cost effective to do so. Even worse, the abundance that technology has produced allows people to have all kinds of fanciful notions and ignore common sense. IMHO, technology more than anything else has enabled the rise of Liberalism.

The paradox of technology is that its invention is a product of our greatness, but in many ways it also facilitates our decline.

[GreyFriar]

thank you for posting Victor Davis Hanson

[odawg]

On many levels, this excellent essay is very perceptive, very true, and very disturbing.

[JackOfVA]

See “The Marching Morons” by Cyril M. Kornbluth.

[Chewbarkah]

Thanks for posting another good article by VDH. It is sad, and telling, that even on Free Republic, this article garnered only a handful of comments. His two central concepts need to be forced into the public consciousness.

His “economic” message touches on something I have tried to promote less ably: the need to replace the corrupt reportage of “Unemployment Rates”, with historical and current tracking of the “Carry Ratio” (actual workers per population).

Some of the problem results from an aging population, some from high tech efficiencies and globalism. But, the bitter truth is that far too few Americans are actually capable of producing enough value to sustain their lives at a decent standard of living, or even at all. Unless someone gives them a phone, food, health care, and housing, they will embarrass us by dying in public view. Facing that problem and doing something about it is not politically feasible, so our dear leaders postpone the reckoning with theft and national debt that can never be redeemed. Since the fundamental problem is unaddressed, the inevitable collapse will destroy the productive, leaving the dependents unsustained. But we can all thrill to the end of “income inequality” as we scrounge for the commissars’ scraps and gnaw the bark from trees.

[Popman]

Bm

[AllAmericanGirl44]

bkmk