Posted on 09/15/2011 11:01:54 PM PDT by doug from upland
Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (August 2011)
Economists insist that recovery is at hand. Yet, unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in our economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.
Richard Heinberg’s latest landmark work goes to the heart of the ongoing financial crisis, explaining how and why it occurred, and what we must do to avert the worst potential outcomes. Written in an engaging, highly readable style, it shows why growth is being blocked by three factors:
Resource depletion, Environmental impacts, and Crushing levels of debt.
These converging limits will force us to re-evaluate cherished economic theories and to reinvent money and commerce.
The End of Growth describes what policymakers, communities, and families can do to build a new economy that operates within Earth’s budget of energy and resources. We can thrive during the transition if we set goals that promote human and environmental well-being, rather than continuing to pursue the now-unattainable prize of ever-expanding GDP.
His thesis is self-defeating.
Whatever
Nonsense. Resource depletion? Hardly.
He misses a bit of low-hanging fruit in that one actually impactful thing will be the demographic shift, as the baby boom ages.
New resources are created all the time.
For example, we are able to create all the fundamental crystals, like rubies, or emeralds, or diamonds. We don’t have to mine them for industrial purposes like we used to do.
Plastics have replaced many metal parts used in machinery.
From wikipedia: He serves as the senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.
Yes, that figures. Thaks.
Demographic winter is the ineluctable gathering storm that signals our demise. Watch the video on youtube. A plummeting population is always, always a harbinger of stagnation and decay.
These converging limits will force us to re-evaluate cherished economic theories and to reinvent money and commerce.
We do that periodically anyway, and they're perfectly adaptable. What is not adaptable, what we will have to re-evaluate, to reinvent, is government. The model has failed. The system it created is failing. Increasing its scope through expansion of national government and a new international super-state will fail faster. The problem we have isn't resource depletion, air and water pollution, changes in the ambient temperature, irregularities in free market capitalism, species extinction, or a sense of anxiety that an unfriendly world is, well, unfriendly. The problem is government.
Also read: Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation.
Growth is ending due to excessive regulation and the lack of a new boom.
stupid.
While I do not necessarily agree with the author, I must admit I sometimes wonder if we haven’t reached some kind of economic dead end. The age of jobs may be over. Almost all manufacturing and low-skill jobs that were the traditional source of income for members of the working class are now done by machines, either the electronic kind (robots) or the biological kind (foreign sweatshop workers). Service jobs are being automated out of existence as well. Within ten years we can expect all fast food joints to be fully automatic, and all delivery, driving, and other transportation jobs (cab driver, delivery truck driver, OTR truck driver) to be done by GPS-guided robots as well.
What’s left? In the past, there were “crap jobs”, i.e. low-end service/retail employers, but how many do we need? A given community can only have so many nail salons and donut shops. Where are all the displaced going to work? Bookstores? Amazon. Shoe stores? Zappos. Optical shops? Zinni. Movies, TV, game, and software stores? Downloads. I guess pet stores, ice cream parlors, and sensual massage will need real people, but most retail jobs can be handled better by sophisticated 24/7 vending kiosks or by Ma and Pa Immigrant and their six kids who work for free.
The only jobs that I see as secure are those requiring heavy front-brain intelligence (e.g., engineering, chemistry, biology), advanced technical knowledge (e.g., medicine, dentistry, surgery), and a few creative jobs (high-end writing, motion picture authoring, game programming, etc.). These, along with a few trades and technical specialties (e.g. remediation, HVAC, plumbing, mechanics/electrics) and the arts (music, etc.) will soon be the only “jobs” left. Everything else will be done by First World robots or Third World bio-robots.
We can’t all shine each others’ shoes for a living, and the symphony needs only so many bassoon players. Those workers who are made obsolete by technology or sweatshop labor are not going to simply gather their families and crawl away to starve in a ditch in order to preserve free market capitalism. Mass unemployment could very well destroy our society if it were to become the norm. It may be that we will have to dust off some form of guaranteed income plan — Friedman’s negative income tax, Nixon’s basic income guarantee, Social Credit, or some other scheme — in order to prevent the rage of those deemed worthless by the Invisible Hand from causing the disintegration of the social order.
“The only jobs that I see as secure are those requiring heavy front-brain intelligence (e.g., engineering, chemistry, biology), advanced technical knowledge (e.g., medicine, dentistry, surgery), and a few creative jobs (high-end writing, motion picture authoring, game programming, etc.). These, along with a few trades and technical specialties (e.g. remediation, HVAC, plumbing, mechanics/electrics) and the arts (music, etc.) will soon be the only “jobs” left.”
All of which require the development of a real skill, beyond taking orders on an electronic cash register. The real problem (if that’s what you want ot call it) is that the era of plenty of jobs for an unskilled population is coming to an end. There will always be jobs, just not in the form of a sustainable corporate version of welfare. The ‘form’ the ‘welfare’ takes is that of union backed jobs for the shiftless and slovenly and people who do not think ahead. Manufacturing only works if in fact, the workers are skilled, quick learners, or are at all hard workers. It’s about production and meeting the orders, not about making employees rich. The advancement of technology made a lot of employees potentially disposable and then the chronic demands of the unions (along with the regulations) sent the jobs that ahd ot be done by humans, overseas. So it’s not like we didn’t do a lot of this to ourselves.
More crap from Socialists. Some of us remember “Future Shock”. Malthusians have been with us for a long time.
The new boom will come from those with online businesses and those who will have that one ‘good idea’ that will end up collapsing the excessive bureaucracy and streamline things to the benefit of all. Soon things like retail outlets for various services will be shut down as the internet streamlines everything.
1. "Monetization of Our Daily Lives" -- and by this I mean GDP growth that is tied to the contribution to GDP growth from economic activity for things that Americans used to do themselves. Perfect examples of this include landscapting work and child care. When I was a kid (not that long ago), it was typical for Mom to be at home raising the kids and for Dad to mow the lawn on Saturday mornings. Most of this activity never showed up in GDP calculations. Did our economy really "grow" just because more and more of us now pay others to do these things?
2. "Growth Driven by Other Peoples' Money" -- which may not really be growth at all. How much of the GDP growth in the last few decades involves sectors of the economy (health care and education are good examples) where economic activity would likely be much lower if people actually had to pay their own bills instead of relying on insurance companies and/or governments to pay most of the costs?
When I look back over my lifetime and look around today, I see very strong warning signs of a society that simply can't sustain its current standard of living.
Where is the evidence of resource depletion? Advancements in technology have made resources available to us today which only a few years ago were unavailable. Oil is one example with extraction of this resource from oil sand and shale now ongoing in Canada on a large scale. Natural gas is another resource which has had it’s reserves enormously bolstered by innovative methods of extraction from rock.
When I was getting my engineering degree in 1970, I fell hook line and sinker for “The Limits to Growth.” Now it is recycled as “The End of Growth.”
Interestingly, “The Limits to Growth” did not posit a particular date when things would collapse. They simply argued that exponential growth of the population would at some point outstrip the earth’s ability to provide resources for that population.
I’m sure the earth does have a “carrying capacity,” but what is it? 100 Billion people? 500 Billion? 20 Billion? 1 Trillion?
Today, with 6 Billion, the only limits on growth are government policies and malfeasance caused by them buying our votes with our tax money.
The fundamental problem is that we (the Human race) can now produce enough to survive without everyone taking part in the workforce. While in many ways this is good, it also renders a lot of people….useless. At the same time, we are also busy moving jobs to (offshore) locations where things can be produced more cheaply. Improvements in technology and foreign education/work ethic have made this possible. As these value-added jobs have disappeared, Government has picked up the slack by employing more people and handing out ever increasing transfer payments to poor people. After all, we Westerners demand high living standards and we don’t let people starve.
While our credit was good, this created an illusion of normalcy (prosperity) for a long time, but illusions have limits. People are slowly waking up to the fact that Government can’t deliver all it promised. However, politicians have yet to realize they can’t borrow their way to real prosperity. In the end, there will be a painful adjustment to everyone’s expectations.
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