Entry tags:

from the c-realm, tango of cash

Embracing the Long Descent
kmo had a couple of great podcasts on his C-Realm Podcast over the last couple of weeks. The first I'd like to mention featured John Michael Greer, an archdruid who speaks very well about economics and their peaks and valleys. From his September 24th entry:

Yet it also has to be remembered that not too long ago, economic depressions were simply a fact of life. In the 19th century, before government regulation restrained the excesses of the business cycle, major economic depressions happened every twenty or thirty years on average; most people could expect to live through two or three of them. The New Deal reforms of the 1930s, which restricted the vagaries of the business cycle, made depressions a thing of the past; still, those reforms were tossed aside in the deregulatory frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s, and unless they get put back in place, we will all likely have to get used to depressions again.

Counterintuitive though it may seem, furthermore, a serious depression right now may just be the best thing that could happen to the United States. I don’t say this by way of passing judgment, or in the spirit of schadenfreude that seems to surround so many predictions of social catastrophe. Rather, a good many of the dysfunctions that are dragging America to ruin will be immediately unsustainable in a time of depression, and a certain amount of economic suffering now could spare the American people a far worse experience later on.

I know, I know, those of you contemplating the blood and tears of employment spent just to squirrel away enough money in your later years to enable you not to produce more blood and tears in your later years might find these words revolting treacle. I'm sure everyone with their tootsies poised on Wall Street window sills in late 1929 thought exactly the same thing about other analysts explaining the robust economies that might emerge from the ashes of that crash. A lot of good a correction now does for my planned trip to Hawaii next year.

His bloggy entries, though, make a lot of sense. He makes a further observation in the podcast as well that jives very well with a concept I've been trying to articulate for several years now, an idea best expressed in an analogy between plants taking over a cleared lot and societies. Greer traces the development of agriculture and equated that to a dandelion on a vacant lot; the farms sprout where the soil is fertile, consume the soil nutrients, crash and disperse just like a weed growing in the soil briefly only to scatter as many seeds as possible:

The weeds that grow in a vacant lot; they maximize their resources, they reproduce themselves, produce lots of seeds. They don't cycle. They tend to burn through the available cheap and easy resources, and then they tend to get squeezed out by something else which is slower and more efficient.

And it goes, stage by stage, with increasing efficiency, more cycling, more . . . concern for durability, less concern for maximum production in any immediate period. (The) history of agricultural societies follows that trend.

Exactly. For years I have wanted to make a documentary that followed this line of reasoning, tracing human technology in terms of what the newer gadgets could deliver in efficiency. Yes, it's fun to light an open fire and try to cook a dinner; but over the long run one gets more efficiency enclosing and controlling the fire in a wood stove, then a gas stove, then electric, then induction; and so on. Each successive addition to the technological tool chest increases in complexity and often in support needs, but decreases the necessary operator input time and resource energy needed to support the tech. The weeds to forest analogy fits that old chestnut of mine very nicely.

Anyhoo, I encourage a look into Greer's interview and blog. Good stuff. This last week, kmo once again hosted ellenbrown to talk about why our financial future is crashing around us. She explains the derivatives market, a bizarre system of betting on both success and failure that pretty much works to inflate our economy. . . until it crashes. After all, in conflicting bets only one will prove a winner. The fact that both bets show their outcomes as positive assets? Well. . . that's proving a bit problematic of late, now isn't it? She describes this process in more detail. I won't bother to summarize this stuff. I can barely understand it.

Enjoy the depressing content I heartily recommend!