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Guest Post: What Happened To The Future?
Submitted by Gregor Mcdonald via Peak Prosperity,
Improbably, the global economy has returned to growth over the past four years despite the ravages of a deflationary debt collapse, a punishing oil shock, ongoing constraint from debt and deleveraging, and stagnant global wages.
The proof of this growth comes from the best indicator of all: the growth of global energy consumption. Halted in 2009, as global trade collapsed from the second half of 2008 into the first half of the following year, the global demand for energy inputs quickly returned to its long-term trend in 2010, growing at approximately 2% per year.
Ecological economics holds that human economies are subordinate to the availability of natural capital. Technology therefore does not create natural resources, nor does human innovation. Instead, technology and innovation mediate the utilization of existing natural resources. In other words, an improvement in the techniques of longwall coal mining (late 1700s), deepwater offshore oil drilling (late 1900s), and horizontal natural gas fracking (early 2000s) are all impressive. But these innovations only matter when the prize of dense energy deposits are actually on offer. No dense energy deposits = no value to innovation.
We are therefore obligated to acknowledge that when few natural resources exist or are too expensive to extract, very little economic activity is possible. Conversely, we are equally obligated to admit that when resources are available for consumption, then growth will likely result. And lo and behold, that is precisely the explanation for the world’s return to growth since the collapse of 2008: Despite the punishing repricing of oil from $25 earlier in the decade to $100, there was enough energy from other sources to get the global economy back to some kind of growth.
Of course, this is not the smooth and well-lubricated growth that many in the West had become accustomed to in the post-war era. The nature of today’s growth is highly asymmetric between East and West, and highly imbalanced between rich and poor. Today’s growth is also quite lumpy, or highly clustered, as certain domains and regions are benefiting while other populations are living in very stagnant conditions. We’ll get to these details shortly.
But first, let’s look at the longer-term chart of global energy consumption from all sources – oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, and biomass – denominated in Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent):

This chart is bad news for the many observers on all sides of the macroeconomic equation who are trying to puzzle out the post-crisis era. The fact is, there is enough energy to fund traditional, industrial economic growth in the phase after Peak Oil. Yes, the end of cheap oil did indeed shock the system, and along with the previous credit bubble, it has cast a pall on the potential rate of global growth. But many of the forecasts about the absolute end of growth have yet to come true. This is important because while the global economic system was highly sensitive to an oil shock coming into 2007, it is actually less sensitive now to an oil shock. Those who, ten years ago, correctly predicted the tail risk that oil presented to the system should declare victory. Equally, forecasting a repeat of that experience is probably unwise.
The Oil Crash is Now Behind Us
Why? Simply put, whereas oil used to be the key commodity on which a fast, just-in-time, high-functioning global economy depended all too much, now a combination of coal, natural gas, and other inputs to the power grid have taken nearly all of the market share over the past decade. It is axiomatic, therefore, that if the global supply of oil has only increased from 74 mbpd (million barrels per day) in 2004 to 76 mbpd here at the end of 2013, but total energy consumption globally from all sources has risen over 20% in the same period, then nearly all the growth in the global economy is being funded by other forms of energy.
So you can abandon the idea there will be a future oil crash – because we already had it. The world has been busily starting to wean itself off oil for nearly ten years now. Oil use in Europe and the United States peaked in 2004-2005. The decline of oil consumption only accelerated after 2008, and in the OECD, it's still declining. Will $125 or $150 oil crash the economies of Japan, the United States, or Europe at this point? Perhaps not. There is hardly any growth to crash in the OECD. It is as if the OECD economies are effectively bunkered, with no growth in wages, jobs, or construction, and nearly all progress is confined to asset prices, mainly the stock market. Perversely, this stagnation is the new strength.
Meanwhile, in the Non-OECD, where growth is actually taking place, the big drive that has taken world energy use higher since 2008 – from 11310 Mtoe in 2009 to this year’s projected 12726 Mtoe – continues to be funded by natural gas, various inputs to the power grid, and the world’s still fastest growing energy source: coal. Yes that's right, coal, which grew 2.5% last year. Again, ecological economics informs us that there must be energy inputs to fund economic growth. Well, the world has plenty of energy inputs in the form of natural gas and coal. There is no Peak Natural Gas and there is no Peak Coal. No crash is coming in either of these resources in the foreseeable future, either.
To give a better sense of the decline of oil and the rise of other energy inputs, consider that in almost every European country now, bicycle sales now outnumber automobile sales. Life After the Oil Crash, indeed! In the United States, oil demand has fallen to levels last seen over thirty years ago. The 5 mbpd of new demand in Asia, built over the past decade, has been supplied more from demand declines in the West than new global production. The real oil crash, now, the oil crash that matters most, is the decline of oil’s share in the total energy mix. A decade ago, oil provided nearly 39% of total global energy supply. Oil’s now down to 33%, and heading to 32% either this year, 2013, or by next year:

We would not say that the global economy is currently at high risk of losing its access to coal. So we should no longer be overly concerned that the global economy is going to lose its access to oil. It has already lost its access to cheap oil. And now coal, not oil, is in position to take the lead as the number one energy source, globally. But there is little room for complacency in this regard. Because there is little good news in this lower tail risk from oil and its lower-level threat to the global economy. Rather, the global economy is growing increasingly imbalanced.
The Grand Asymmetry
We can think of reflationary policy from Europe, the U.S., and especially Japan as an attempt to counter the West’s loss of access to cheap oil. Is that policy working? Not really.
The primary beneficiaries of this policy have largely been corporations, which derive most of their growth from the 5 billion people in the developing world but are located in the OECD. These corporations are sited in London, New York, Tokyo; the cash from worldwide operations rolls in, but they have little need for expensive, high-wage Western workers. Accordingly, stock markets in the West, composed of these corporations, continue to soar, while investment and growth in the OECD stagnates.
It’s bad enough that Western corporations do not hire domestic workers, do not raise wages, and have maintained capex (capital expenditures) at low levels for years. The huge cash piles stored in corporations represents their conversion, in some sense, to global utilities. Energy companies, technology companies, and infrastructure companies now operate at a very high level of efficiency. So high, and with the aid of information technology, that their need to invest in new capital equipment and especially human labor has fallen to very low levels. How low? A Standard-and-Poor's report on global capex released just this summer showed that investment is, unsurprisingly, far lower in the post-2008 period than before. Recent commentary from the folks at FT Alphaville lays some color on this data point, because at current rates, U.S. capex has only recovered to the previous trough levels of prior recessions. Worse, whatever meager recovery in capex has taken place from the lows of 2009 is now stalling again. From the S&P Global Corporate Capital Expenditure Survey, July 2013:
The global capex cycle appears to be stalling even before it has fully got under way. In real terms, capex growth for our sample of nonfinancial companies slowed in 2012 to 6% from 8% in 2011. Current estimates suggest that capex growth will fall by 2% in 2013. Early indications for 2014 are even more pessimistic, with an expected decline in real terms of 5%.... Worldwide, capex growth has become increasingly reliant on investment in the energy and materials sectors. Together, these sectors account for 62% of capex in the past decade. This reliance creates risks. If the global commodity "super cycle" is fading, global capex will struggle to grow meaningfully in the near term. Sharp cutbacks in the materials sector are a key factor in the projected slowdown in capex for 2013 and 2014.
Notice that the total volume of global capex is increasingly reliant on investment in the very capital-intensive energy and materials sector. This is highly revealing. In the aftermath of oil’s repricing and the repricing of many other natural resources, the global natural resources sector now requires significantly more investment to extract the same units of oil, copper, iron ore, coal, natural gas, and potash, and requires more expensive technology and more human labor. This is the sector holding up the average spend of global capex, so we can conclude that beneath that average, the capex in typical post-war industries like media, finance, real estate, and even infrastructure is not only low, but historically low. The very poor level of employment growth confirms exactly this conclusion. Most poignant of all, this is a wildly strong confirmation of ecological economics, showing that a larger and larger proportion of total investment needs to be devoted now to natural resource extraction, leaving less investment to other areas. The net energy available to society is in decline.
But it’s not just the private sector that has stopped investing. Public sector levels of investment have been dropping as well. In fact, according to yet another dump of recent data, U.S. government investment in public infrastructure is at the lowest levels since WWII. The Financial Times covered this on November 3rd and produced a rather stunning chart. The Financial Times writes, “Public investment picked up at the start of Mr. Obama’s term – temporarily rising to its highest level since the early 1990s – because of his fiscal stimulus. But that has been more than reversed by subsequent cuts. The biggest falls are in infrastructure, especially construction of schools and highways by states and municipalities.”

Conclusion (to Part I)
When neither the private nor public sector is willing to invest in the future, it seems appropriate to ask, what happened to the future? Have corporations along with governments figured out that a return to slow growth does not necessary equal a return to normal growth? Why invest in new infrastructure, new workforces, new office space, equipment, highways, or even rail, when the demand necessary to provide a return on this investment may never materialize?
Many sectors in Western economies remain in oversupply or overcapacity. There is a surplus of labor and a surplus of office and industrial real estate, as well as airports, highways, and suburbs that are succumbing to a permanent decrease in throughput and traffic. Perhaps the private sector is not so unwise. Collectively, through its failure to invest, it is making a de facto forecast: No normal recovery is coming.
In Part II: Why Social & Environmental Imbalances Are Becoming the Biggest Risks, we explore how the misguided policies being pursued worldwide to return to the growth we've been accustomed to are resulting in a volatile mix of imbalances in both wealth and resource availability.
As we move further into a future defined by less per capita – not more, as we've become accustomed to – dangerous rifts in our social fabric (both within and among countries) threaten to define the days ahead.
Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access).
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What happened to the future?
We stopped believing in it because it hasn't turned out to be what we expected 30 years ago!
And just look at all the post-apocalypse movies and shows in recent years all saying the good times are over.
So why would anybody invest in the future in terms of capex when then can speculate on the very near term?
Bearing Guy sees few good places to invest. I have been selling US stocks, stocks traditionally have been the future. Now, it looks like not so much.
Future growth looks paltry in the USA.
Peru, however imperfect (very imperfect), at least is an alternative where there is growth. They have energy and may be working towards opening up the economy even more.
As opposed to our leadership here.
Individual land ownership is the future. Humans suffer when they spread vertically instead of laterally.
For those of you not paying attention, go long sharecropping and black markets.
What happened to the future?
We borrowed and spent it. The future is gone.
Don't say "we." It was the government.
No, pretty much every one got in on the party...
The sun is setting on the Occident.
The problem with the end of cheap is not that the availability of energy is now less. It is that the return on energy invested is now much less.
The first offshore installtion in the North Sea broke even in thermodynamic terms after just 71 days, that means that the platform prouced enough energy to build a second platform after just 71 days (including diging the iron, forging the steel, constructing the platform and installation vessels, pouring the concrete, drilling the wells, etc, etc). The platform operated for 35 years. The return on the energy invested was staggering.
There is no other source of energy that compares with the ROEI of some of the 20th century oilfields. Now it is gone. So naturally a much larger fraction of our economy must be dedicated to sourcing energy.
This is why CAPEX in energy firms will rise, whilst it will fall for everyone else. It's a significant structural adjustment.
Back to the future...good movie
What happened to the future?
We borrowed from the future and consumed any real capital that otherwise would have been spent/consumed in the futue. That is why QE is being used as a substitute. Monetizing debt that hasn't been realized yet (in capital) means the future has been emptied of it's potential.
Wht happened to the future?
It died at some point in the past, when instead of rebuilding its infrastructure America bombed other people's infrastructure.
It died at some point in the past when the young able bodied man who went to Iraq returned in a coffin or is now a cripple.
It died when the voice at the other end of the telephone trying to sell you something no longer sounded like yours.
It died when the fine orator who gave hope for change turned out to be.a well dressed snake oil salesman
It dies when failed banks were brought back from the dead and scumbag bankers were rewarded with bigger bonuses instead of jail terms.
What happened to the future? People are more skeptical about the future because they are looking in closer detail at the present and they recognize inconsistencies with what their gut instincts are telling them versus what they read and hear in public media. The conversation about the end of growth from such authors as Heinberg appeals to the common sense of many people. Here is some similar commentary from more than 2 years back : http://web.archive.org/web/20111112074159/http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
Some of the links are now broken but it's still a good read.
Ask Larry summers.. just out - http://hedge.ly/1c74V6D
The oil crash is "behind us"? So are we using zero oil now? I don't think this person understands what "crash" means. Are we using less, sure. I am still waiting for gold to "crash" below $300 an ounce (the last time I bought physical).
Okay, so it's a slow-motion crash. We're seeing a lot of that lately. Try not to read into the article what's not there:
"So you can abandon the idea there will be a future oil crash – because we already had it. The world has been busily starting to wean itself off oil for nearly ten years now."
Nowhere did I see the author use absolutes like "zero" oil use.
So once you were "weaned" of breast milk, did that mean zero or not? I feel for your mom.
Starting to wean.
Yeah, okay, whatever. Your objective is not to confront the general premise of the article, but to pick on the author for some unexplained reason. Tangential disagreement is not very constructive. As for my mother, she knows I'm a bit of a coarse and vulgar person, so she's okay with that.
One of the Japanese carmakers announced full production of a hydrogen cell car by
2015. 400 mile range ,4 minute recharge on cell.
Goodbye electric(battery)cars.
Where's the energy coming from to generate the hydrogen? They shut down their reactors. Are they going to import more coal to burn to make hydrogen to burn? Solar to hydrogen is very, very slow. Even if you could get 100% efficiency (which we are no where near yet).
A whole lot less energy than making batteries with their short lives.
Off peak electrical power fpr H2 production.
A good first intermediate step,.
Quit making shit up about stuff you have no clue about...
Seriously...
Yes, we are all saved...
\sarc
What the current price for fill up? Where does the H2 come from?
BTW, Last I heard there were 9 filling stations in California...
Edit: this is a good intro to the Hydrogen issue
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax
Dude, check yer science faction! We can use solar power to make electric to frack the H2 from the O in our planet's H2O, the old junior high school gas-capture anode and cathode electrolysis.
We compress the H2 with solar-powered systems, bottle it in metal tanks and hang it on wheelmobiles. When H2 burns or oxidizes, it generates water vapor only, 2H2 + O2= 2H2O (gotta love balanced redox equations for all you ChemE majors out there).
Geeks are or will be adapting small electric wheel chair motors to power bicycle motor-assist vehicles with batteries or with an onboard H2-burning generator.
Cue the blue butterflies and cuddly golden puppies romping through the puffy-cloud greenspace! And it's all today's science faction, how cool is dat! We are so advanced that ZH can even support sub-script chemical equation notation in its comment section. Our planet is SAVED!
You forget the \sarc flag....
This sums it up
Energy is neither created or destroyed, it is only arbetraged
The future then became the present. Our present future will surely come. You can't destroy TIME.
The magazine??
The future isn't what it used to be. Ours will be the first generation to travel slower, earn less money, and have less freedom of choice than the previous one, in the last 200 years.
their (US Federal Govt/NWO) ideal would be a gentle downslope for the USD and middle class, however it will be more like a step down collapse and we took a large step down in 2008. all their efforts since then have only resulted in treading water, at best. investment into the future is almost non-existent (other than solar IPOs and Brazilian oil fields) so the next step down should be a doozy when the infrastructure buckles.
maybe even you will eat less????????
Gregor hits the nail on the head, over capacity in just about everything except oil production...
Net energy is flat at best, declining at worst...
Existing infrastructure is being used by corporations to make obsecne profits that are not being reinvested...
Correct, overlay the world population (or debt) curve with those charts.
And hear about stuff like this:
Here let me google it
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mcdonalds+advice+to+employees
Such nuggets as "break your food into smaller pieces to stay full longer"... or
“Selling some of your unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist could bring in some quick cash.”
My blood boils....
You posts always make me set aside more cash for ammo and another .308 with an IR scope.
Blahblahblah!
Nobody is fooled by the Fed's "magic trick" any more. That's what happened. We know it's fake and we know why. Who is going to invest REAL capital in a fake market?
What you do instead is trade liquid assets using unlimited liquidity like a couple drunk teenagers playing "chicken" in their cars until the inevitable crash.
There was a time when people were so hopeful about the future they sang a song about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNMVMNmrqJE
I'll take the liberty of reposting this from earlier today only because it echos what Gregor said about CAPEX in the energy sector
Came across this from a petroleum geologist with the handle Westexas:
The future ain't what it used to be.
The author claims that Peak Oil and its associated oil shock happened 2008 and is now behind us. It's amusing that not one western government has made any reference to these events.
This is the first time I've ever heard anybody make that statement. It sort-of agrees with my own view regarding timing and I have long pondered whether the crash of 2007-8 was actually triggered by rising energy costs.
I think the author is misguided to believe that the oil shock is now behind us. I don't think so; it will be a case of the oil price steadily rising year after year as we slide down the long road to eventual depletion. Hopefully his faith in alternative energies will materialise sooner rather than later.
Peak oil is a process not an event...
It is vigorously debated but you can make a good case that rise in energy costs up to 2008 tipped things over. Gail Tverberg has written extensively on it....
After all, every single recession since the sixties was prefaced by a spike in energy costs with the exception of the dot.com bust...
I've no idea who Gail Tverberg is, but your comments match exactly what I've been saying for more than 12 years. Have you been plagiarising my writings?? ;-)
Fwiw: as far back as 1994-5 I predicted fascism was on the rise and the future was more authoritarian. Lo.
It took you that long? Fascism took its greatest leap forward in the '80s...
And it hasn't looked back since...
The great leap forward was the fascist FDR. The 30's make the 80's look like...well shit I don't know cause this country has been a fascist, coporatist, warmongering, police state for pretty much all of modern history.
Take some time and read the deatils of the New Deal, FDR's admiration of Mussolini, and then overlay that on the social and economic programs of Nazi Germany and you will shit your pants 'cause it's not what they teach in skrool.
I did read it. In the monster's (Roosevelt) own words. Military build up. His commitment to war as early as 1936 and so on.
The 80's? Please. That was chump change compared to what cam before.
Sure... where ever did you learn this bit of history?
So Prescott Bush and his delightful stooges were a left wing cabal? Or were they playing to the centrists?
What defines a fascist in your opinion? We are all ears...
Well, it goes back even before the 80s. Were you asleep?? ;-)
For the purposes of debate, if you go back to the end of WWII (probably even earlier) you will find that the American model actually began its long march towards overt fascism/corporatism way before the 80s. But the world was conned into believing that because this model was violently against Communism - and we had the Cold War to prove it - that it therefore represented free market economics, Land of The Free et al, ie: the opposite of Communism.
In fact, as more and more people are now realising (many more Americans than Brits have worked it out), fascism and communism are two sides of the same coin with a small handful of differences. They are both totalitarian, centrally planned/controlled police states and vehemently anti-liberty. Socialism and collectivism are the order of the day. None of which has anything to do with freedom, liberty and all those other nice things spelt out in the American Constitution, sadly being trampled over by the likes of Bush & Obama and the out-of-control powerful agencies of The State (NSA etc).
As I've also said for a long time, you cannot negotiate with fascists and commies. You simply have to take them on and remove them from power. Else they will destroy the nation, just as Stalin wrecked Russia and Hitler destroyed Germany.
Exactly the same problem exists in Britain where the Conservative Prime Minister - yes a Tory PM - has frequently said "we're all in this together". WTF!! Collectivism if ever I've heard it.
So just where you would rank J. Edgar Hoover on your list of liberty trashing fascists?
The constitutional basis for American fascism is rooted in an 1886 Supreme court decision. Santa Clara Co. v. The Southern Pacific Railroad, note the the personhood of corporations was deemed a foregone conclusion and was not even under debate...
Last time I noticed Earth was little blue marble lost in space, so to speak, with no way off, so, yes, we are in this together...
Well of course Hoover was a pioneer in developing the American police state in his FBI days. But that adds to my point that it all started long before the 1980s as you previously stated. I used the end of WWII as a convenient start-point for debate. But I see you now refer to a particular case dating back to 1886, although it's unclear why that case was related to the emergence of American fascism any more than many other events. I think you will find it was a large collection of events going back a long way.
So it is in Britain where fascism/corporatism (by many other names) goes back to the days of Henry VIII and earlier. In fact the whole British system of governance emerged as a fascist system many hundreds of years ago. Cromwell attempted to move power from the monarchy (unelected despots) to Parliament (elected despots) and ended up allowing the monarchy to continue as Head of State with parliament in control of the levers. Nobody ever advocated the creation of a strong written Constitution owned by the people.
As for Earth being a blue marble and therefore "we are all in it together" is to ignore that global society is made up of several billion people, each with different aspirations and each being willing & able to input more or less effort to improve their personal lives. These people should not be dragged down and disincentivised by collectivism whether that be communism or fascism...or any other flavour of totalitarianism that might emerge.
While I appreciate a good debate, please do not attempt to blow smoke up my ass....
Seriously...
As for the implicit collective nature of H. Sapiens, now that we are more than 7 billion people and our collective mass dwarfs that of any other creature on the planet, please do not insult my intelligence..
Sorry, I don't understand several of your put-you-downs.....
You appear to be saying that because of mankind's numbers there is no alternative to collectivism for the betterment of mankind. IE: there's no room for individualism. Is that right?
That matches the arguments set forth by every dictator in history.
Who was it that said "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"?
You just created a a false dichotomy re: individualism...
And in your post, you went off on some tangent about English History... I will give you that since Fascism is very a likely evolutionary end point in a political system there are a lot places for seeds to be planted but the rise of Nationalism is far more relevant...
The 1980's saw the real rise of multinational corporations and their sucessful program of regulatory capture... What was once a feature became a serious bug....
You also confused or tried to conflate the collective effect of the humans on the planet with "collectivism"...
The numbers of humans on the planet are now such that we will have changed the planet, we now live in the Anthropocene geological era... And we quite capable of rendering the planet unfit for human habitation through our collective actions...
We are literally on a road to hell....
And there is no way off of the bus...
No false dichotomy. Just a response to you about your perceived attachment to collectivism (but I see you are now rowing back from this). {shrug}
My brief mention of English history was to reinforce that fascism didn't begin in the 1980s as you claimed earlier. Britain's history is one of top-down-authoritarianism in the shape of fascism (which I sometimes see as the impatient, bloody-minded, unphilosophical and unintellectual version of communism).
I don't think that fascism is an "evolutionary end point in a political system" either. I think it is the penultimate end point, often characterised by nationalism and war. It's more often what happens before a society implodes. Timing is difficult to predict.
Yes, we are consuming natures resources at one helluva rate which cannot go on for much longer. This feeds into my view of societal implosion as the fascists seek to grab what's left.
I never claimed Fascism started in the 1980s.....
It did enter a new more virulent phase though...
It certainly is an endpoint.... Not the only one, but an endpoint nonetheless...
Go play semantics with someone else...
Bicycle sales != bicycle use
Not sure if this is the business model of ZH but this sucks big time.
Loss leader type information brokering should not be the business model of ZH. Giving part of the information to hook the ZH fish or is it becoming sheep and then say I want something from you in return before finishing your read is SCHLOCK 101
Next time, please put a "sucker alert" in the title, or possibly "Signup will be required to read". Even Google does that.
As we move further into a future defined by less per capita – not more...
Seize some of the stolen wealth of the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, etc and we could see a growth in living standards for all for some time. Our species can likely solve the energy challenges. It is only the need for the exponential growth of power by the oligarchs that impoverishes mankind. To a man, most would be happy for a small piece of dirt to use to their ends and with it the means to provide for family. Remove the sociopaths of the .01% and a state of peaceful anarchy is possible.
Do you have a test to identify a sociopath?
Do you simply shoot them?
You also fail to grasp that living standards are highly correlated with energy use...
Some people are beginning to see the reality: the end of frontiers. We've conquered every conceivable space on this planet, and the tiny chunk of earth orbit we're in is way too expensive and not productive enough to return much on investment (at least in the near term of 15-20 years, barring some breakthrough in nuclear propulsion). Think of this: for the first time in the history of man, there are no real 'frontiers' left. Not when you can use the intertubes in Alaska, and enjoy Luwak coffee in Montana. The only places that aren't chock full of people are the places that we've either protected, or are too bloody useless (Sahara, Antarctic, west Texas) to exploit.
In the olden days, (surplus) young men would go off to the frontier to find their destiny. Kerouac was among the last. Nowadays, as both Macluhan and Leary predicted, we've turned inward instead of outward. Our bodies are the new frontier, hence the explosion of weird eating habits (lessee now, no meat, no fat, no carbs. What are we supposed to live on, soy protein?), weird and more intense drugs, and more and more weird sexual 'identities' (look up LGBTTIQQS2A; you'll either laugh or cry). But because there are no more frontiers, there is little left for growth.
As I've written elsewhere, the production of stuff becomes cheaper and cheaper every year. Five years ago, I was wondering if I could afford $3,000 for 32 inch LED TV; next week, MegaLoMart is selling them for $98. Even though food was supposed to be the problem, not many people are starving to death. Yes, there's a lot of people on subsistence diets, but there ARE ALWAYS going to be people on subsistence diets in a relatively free world. The lowest common denominator always predominates.
Until we figure out a new economic paradigm for a world without frontiers, we're going to slowly spiral the drain until there's a huge revolt, many banksters (and far more proles) get slaughtered, stuff gets redistributed, and we start again, or (I sincerely hope this doesn't happen, cause I have two wonderful daughters) war, pestilence or famine (or a combination of them) wipes out huge numbers of humanity without regard to status or strength. So, I'd appreciate it if one you could figure this out; meanwhile, Wheel of Fortune's about to start...
Excellent comment Frank Drak
But, the down slope will be populated by people that will fall off the social radar by dint of political policy, or will be left to wither by the roadside (metaphorically).
In essence, you cannot cull 7 billion down to a sustainable half billion, without anyone noticing. As we speak, those depending on foodbanks, or foodstamps, have already fallen off the radar screen of importance. And, who will notice that the elderly, who at one time, may have lived to their mid 80's, but now, due to a restricted health and social care budget, now only live on average to 78 or so?. This will not be a cull. It will be a 'whittling down'. A whittling down of those who are deemed unimportant. And of course, it goes without saying, that I don't place myself in that tragic category of unimportant, until the day that someone deems that (maybe), I am.
You take an INCONCIEVABLY narrow view...
Frontiers left:
Space. The unimaginable vastness of just our own galaxy may be attainable within the century if warp technology is achieved
Our physical world. What new wonders will nano technology expose and enable.
The mind. We get closer to the melding of man and machine everyday. What new conciousness could a Matrix enable?
Seriously dude... Your playing in the small sandbox.
And yours seems to have a few unicorns frolicking in it...
I'm quite sure they said the same things to Edison and Einstein. Take someone from $150 years ago and drop them in todays world. Now you tell me what the wonders of 150 years from now might look like to you.
You clearly have no clue regarding the content free quality of your above statement...
For the record, this is a person who hypothesized Warp drive two comments above,,,
Have you ever taken a physics course above the high school level?
BTW, if you think Edison and Einstein belong in the same sentence together, you clearly have no fucking idea about what they actually did...
Hint: Edison was a sharp entrepreneur, Einstein changed the way we view the Universe...
Both Edison and Einstein exemplified the best of human kind. To say they don't belong in the same sentence shows an intellectual snobbery on your part which warrants no further discussion.
PS Popular Mechanics recently ran an article on warp drive theory and where it stands currently. Who are you to say what is ultimately possible?
How about a nice engineered virus that wipes out a third of the people on Earth?
Energy use drops, labor shortages push up wages with plenty of availible work, property becomes cheap to own.
The trouble is that the CDC is a govt. agency and their swine flu was lame and nobody would take the death dealing flu shots.
If they subbed the work out to Blackwater, I'm sure they would get a pandemic virus worth it's salt and finally get us (who are left) on the road to recovery.
Let granny and the kids fertilize the garden and go organic.
Obama would be known as the "Ayatollah of Ebola".
Why is that I always hear this kind of stuff from people on the right hand side of the political spectrum?
Wealth is over concentrated.
The White House Nazi is deceptively creating a system (that will feed unions) to redistribute, but is failing and will fail.
When market forces redistribute, we will have our prosperity - that won't happen before 2016.
You are deluded into thinking that there is "prosperity" around the corner....
What unions? Unions have been utterly fucking crushed...
And you choice of year seems to hint that Team Red could make a difference... Fat fucking chance of that...
But you are correct, wealth is completely concentrated....at the top...
Hmmmm....this article does not take into account the over capacity of production in places like China either.
Years ago I tweeted (When I was still allowed on Twitter***) http://favstar.fm/users/YouriCarma/status/2279461357 "I know for a fact that SHELL has been betting it’s horses on Oil and Coal, they are not stupid." ***Youri Carma Banned from Twitter Since October 17th, 2009 http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v393/youricarma/Miscellaneous/YouriCarmaTwitterAccountSuspended.jpg U.S. gasoline use halved since 2006 http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=a103600001&f=a
Yep. And in a free market economy there is never a surplus of anything.
"Ecological economics holds that human economies are subordinate to the availability of natural capital."
Clearly, the best natural capital has been turned into garbage and pollution as fast as possible. What facilitated that is the problem that the short-term interests defeat the longer term interests, because those who are the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, defeat those who would care about anything else that could become more important in the longer term. WHAT ACTUALLY CONTROLLED THE WAYS THE CIVILIZATION DEVELOPED WAS THE HISTORY OF WARFARE, WHICH WAS ALWAYS BASED ON THE SHORT-TERM, NOT THE LONGER TERM. Since success in warfare was based on backing up deceits with destruction, and that was what actually prevailed, "what happened to the future" is that it was destroyed by the prolonged series of military imperatives deciding everything else.
IF we were able to be miraculously rational, then, all the way along, we would have developed in ways which had care and concern for the longer term consequences. Therefore, things like maximizing recycling of natural resources would have always been a priority. However, IN FACT, what actually happened was that the industrial revolution was based on the expediencies of those who were the best at being dishonest, and backing that with violence, who thereby got to direct what actually happened, which became a series of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, favouring monopolizations.
At crucial points in the history of industrialization, laws were passed to force the direction that industrialization took in ways which benefited a few. For instance, both the criminalization of alcohol and cannabis destroyed potentially more renewable resources, in order that the monopolists could make more profits from their products. Both alcohol prohibition and pot prohibition were funded by interests that wanted to put those industries out of business, and they were successful enough, during their times. Of course, the crazy pendulum of civilization, when bashed, tends to then swing back and forth from one extreme to another. Thus, there is now governmnet subsidization of alcohol production, in ways which are just as crazy, if not actually more so, than the suppression of alcohol production due to its prohibition. The fully manifested mad swing of pot prohibition has not yet finished demonstrating how insane that is going to be, but it is not hard to imagine how much more nuts it is going to become.
Those are just two particular examples. The most important chemical, ethanol, at the foundation of all organic chemistry, was criminalized, as was the best plant on the planet for people, hemp, for food, fiber, fun and medicine, also criminalized. The political campaigns to cause those things to happen were both deeply corrupted, due to the ulterior purposes of those who funded them. Those examples demonstrate what has happened almost everywhere else to destroy the future: THE TRIUMPH OF LIES, BACKED BY VIOLENCE! The most important and pervasive of all those things was the creation of fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems: the fraud, backed by the force of governments, whereby private banks were able to create "money" out of nothing, as debts, and then use that kind of "money" to buy up control over natural resources, and direct what economic developments happened, or were not allowed to happen. The triumphs of frauds, such as debt slavery in the past, accumulated to destroy the future, in such forms as debt slavery generating numbers which are debt insanities, which do not allow anything more to be done, unless more debts are created, which become no longer possible when the society as a whole is already drowning under its runaway debt insanity numbers.
At this point of time, it is impossible to be certain of the full extent of the degree to which our society developed in objectively insane ways, due to being directed by force backed frauds. At present, it is not possible to know for sure the degree to which other theoretically possible technologies were deliberately destroyed, and prevented from being developed by the monopolizing powers. However, there are good reasons to suspect that that has been of astronomically large significance, both in terms of stopping good alternatives, as well as in advancing bad alternatives, due to the considerations of whether those would benefit the monopolists, who could and did use every method of organized crime to control what civilization actually did. Thus, the entire way that the industrial revolution developed was due to force backed frauds, operating according to the maximum possible short-term benefits, obtained from being dishonest and backing that up with violence, whose eventual flip side would become the maximum possible longer term costs. As the profit from fraud was reinvested in more frauds, over and over, the best professional liars and immaculate hypocrites were able to end up controlling what civilization actually did, while doing that over and over again, more and more, Century after Century, is "what happened to the future."