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Why We Have An Oversupply Of Almost Everything
Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,
The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article called, Glut of Capital and Labor Challenge Policy Makers: Global oversupply extends beyond commodities, elevating deflation risk. To me, this is a very serious issue, quite likely signaling that we are reaching what has been called Limits to Growth, a situation modeled in 1972 in a book by that name.
What happens is that economic growth eventually runs into limits. Many people have assumed that these limits would be marked by high prices and excessive demand for goods. In my view, the issue is precisely the opposite one: Limits to growth are instead marked by low prices and inadequate demand. Common workers can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that the economy produces, because of inadequate wage growth. The price of all commodities drops, because of lower demand by workers. Furthermore, investors can no longer find investments that provide an adequate return on capital, because prices for finished goods are pulled down by the low demand of workers with inadequate wages.
Evidence Regarding the Connection Between Energy Consumption and GDP Growth
We can see the close connection between world energy consumption and world GDP using historical data.
Figure 1. World GDP in 2010$ compared (from USDA) compared to World Consumption of Energy (from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014).
This chart gives a clue regarding what is wrong with the economy. The slope of the line implies that adding one percentage point of growth in energy usage tends to add less and less GDP growth over time, as I have shown in Figure 2. This means that if we want to have, for example, a constant 4% growth in world GDP for the period 1969 to 2013, we would need to gradually increase the rate of growth in energy consumption from about 1.8% = (4.0% – 2.2%) growth in energy consumption in 1969 to 2.8% = (4.0% – 1.2%) growth in energy consumption in 2013. This need for more and more growth in energy use to produce the same amount of economic growth is taking place despite all of our efforts toward efficiency, and despite all of our efforts toward becoming more of a “service” economy, using less energy products!
Figure 2. Expected change in GDP growth corresponding to 1% growth in total energy, based on Figure 1 fitted line.
To make matters worse, growth in world energy supply is generally trending downward as well. (This is not just oil supply whose growth is trending downward; this is oil plus everything else, including “renewables”.)
Figure 3. Three-year average percent change in world energy consumption, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014 data.
There would be no problem, if economic growth were something that we could simply walk away from with no harmful consequences. Unfortunately, we live in a world where there are only two options–win or lose. We can win in our contest against other species (especially microbes), or we can lose. Winning looks like economic growth; losing looks like financial collapse with huge loss of human population, perhaps to epidemics, because we cannot maintain our current economic system.
The symptoms of losing the game are the symptoms we are seeing today–low commodity prices (temporarily higher, but nowhere nearly high enough to maintain production), not enough good paying jobs for common workers, and lack of investment opportunities, because workers cannot afford the high prices of goods that would be required to provide adequate return on investment.
How We Have Won in Our Contest with Other Species–Early Efforts
The “secret formula” humans have had for winning in our competition against other species has been the use of supplemental energy, adding to the energy we get from food. There is a physics reason why this approach works: total population by all species is limited by available energy supply. Providing our own external energy supply was (and still is) a great work-around for this limitation. Even in the days of hunter-gatherers, humans used three times as much energy as could be obtained through food alone (Figure 1).
Figure 4
Earliest supplementation of food energy came by burning sticks and other biomass, starting one million years ago. Using this approach, humans were able to gain an advantage over other species in several ways:
- We were able to cook some of our food. This made a wider range of plants and animals suitable for food and made the nutrients from these foods more easily available to our bodies.
- Because less energy was needed for chewing and digesting, our bodies could put energy into growing a larger brain, thus giving us an advantage over other animals.
- The use of cooked food freed up time for such activities as hunting and making clothes, because less time was needed for chewing.
- Heat from burning plant material could be used to keep warm in cold areas, thereby extending our range and increasing total human population that could be supported.
- Fire could be used to chase off predatory animals and hunt prey animals.
Our bodies are now adapted to the need for supplemental energy. Our teeth our smaller, and our jaws and digestive apparatus have shrunk in size, as our brain has grown. The large population of humans that are alive today could not survive without supplemental energy for many purposes, such as cooking food, heating homes, and fighting illnesses that spread when humans are in as close proximity as they are today.
Our Modern Formula For Winning the Battle Against Other Species
In my view, the formula that has allowed humans to keep winning the battle against other species is the following:
- Use increasing amounts of inexpensive supplemental energy to leverage human energy so that finished goods and services produced per worker rises each year.
- Pay for this system with debt, because (if supplemental energy costs are cheap enough), it is possible to repay the debt, plus the interest on the debt, with the additional goods and services made possible by the cheap additional energy.
- This system gradually becomes more complex to deal with problems that come with rising population and growing use of resources. However, if the output of goods per worker is growing rapidly enough, it should be possible to pay for the costs associated with this increased complexity, in addition to interest costs.
- The whole system “works” as long as the total quantity of finished goods and services rises rapidly enough that it can fund all of the following: (a) a rising standard of living for common workers so that they can afford increasing amounts of debt to buy more goods, (b) debt repayment, and interest on the debt of the system, and (c) and an increasing amount of “overhead” in the form of government services, medical care, educational services, and salaries of high paid officials (in business as well as government). This overhead is needed to deal with the increasing complexity that comes with growth.
The formula for a growing economy is now failing. The rate of economic growth is falling, partly because energy supply is slowing (Figure 3), and partly because we need more and more growth of energy supply to produce a given amount of economic growth (Figure 2). With this lowered world economic growth, the amount of goods and services being produced is not rising fast enough to support all of the functions that it needs to cover: interest payments, growing wages of common workers, and growing “overhead” of a more complex society.
* * *
Some Reasons the Economic Growth Cycle is Now Failing
Let’s look at a few areas where we are reaching obstacles to this continued growth in final goods and services. An overarching problem is diminishing returns, which is reflected in increasingly higher prices of production.
1. Energy supplies are becoming more expensive to extract.
We extract the easiest to extract energy supplies first, and as these deplete, need to use the more expensive to extract energy supplies. We hear much about “growing efficiency” but, in fact, we are becoming less efficient in the production of energy supplies.
In the US, EIA data shows that we are becoming less efficient at coal production, in terms of coal production per worker hour (Figure 5).
Figure 5. US coal production per worker, on a Btu basis based on EIA data.
With oil, growing inefficiency is shown by the steeply rising cost of oil exploration and production since 1999 (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Figure by Steve Kopits of Douglas-Westwood showing trends in world oil exploration and production costs per barrel.
Thus, it is for a fairly recent period, namely the period since about 2000, that we have been encountering rising costs both for US coal and for worldwide oil extraction.
The extra workers and extra costs required for producing the same amount of energy counteract the tendency toward growth in the rest of the economy. This occurs because the rest of the economy must produce finished products with fewer workers and less resources as a result of the extra demands on these resources by the energy sector.
2. Other materials, besides energy products, are experiencing diminishing returns.
Other resources, such as metals and other minerals and fresh water, are also becoming increasingly expensive to extract. The issue with mineral ores is similar to that with fossil fuels. We start with a fixed amount of ores in good locations and with high mineral percentages. As we move to less desirable ores, both human labor and more energy products are required, making the extraction process less efficient.
With fresh water, the issue is likely to be a need for desalination or long distance transport, to satisfy the needs of a growing population. Workarounds again involve more human labor and more resource use, making the production of fresh water less efficient.
In both of these cases, growing inefficiency leaves the rest of the economy with less human energy and less energy products to produce the finished goods and services that the economy needs.
3. Growing pollution is taking its toll.
Instead of just producing end products, we are increasingly finding ourselves fighting pollution. While this is a benefit to society, it really is only offsetting what would otherwise be a negative. Thus, it acts like overhead, rather than producing economic growth.
From the point of view of workers having to pay for higher cost energy in order to fight pollution (say, substitution of a higher cost energy source, or paying for more pollution controls), the additional cost acts like a tax. Workers need to cut back on other expenditures to afford the pollution control workarounds. The effect is thus recessionary.
4. The amount of “overhead” to the world economy has been growing rapidly in recent years, for a number of reasons:
- The amount of overhead is growing because we are reaching natural barriers. For example, population per acre of arable land is growing, so we need more intensity of development to produce food for a rising population.
- With greater population density and increased bacterial antibiotic resistance, disease transmission becomes a more of a problem.
- Increasing education is being encouraged, whether or not there are jobs available that will make use of that education. Education that cannot be used in a productive way to produce more goods and services can be considered overhead for the economy. Educational expenses are frequently financed by debt. Repayment of this debt leads to a decrease in demand for other goods, such as new homes and vehicles.
- We have more elderly to whom we have promised benefits, because with the benefit of better nutrition and medical care, more people are living longer.
5. We are reaching debt limits.
As economic growth has slowed, we have been adding more and more debt, to try to mitigate the problem. This additional debt becomes a problem in many ways: (a) without cheap energy to leverage human labor, there are not many productive investments that can be made; (b) the addition of more debt leads to a need for more interest payments; and (c) at some point debt ratios become overwhelmingly high.
At least part of the slowdown in economic growth that we are seeing today is coming from a slowdown in the growth of debt. Without debt growth, it is hard to keep commodity prices high enough. Investment in new manufacturing plants is also affected by low growth in debt.
* * *
Reasons for Confusion in Understanding Our Current Predicament
1. Not understanding that all of the symptoms we are seeing today are manifestations of the same underlying “illness”.
Most analysts think that the economy has stubbed its toe and has a headache, rather than recognizing that it has a serious underlying illness.
2. Academia is focused way too narrowly, and tied too closely to what has been written before.
Academics, because of their need to write papers, focus on what previous papers have said. Unfortunately, previous papers have not understood the nature of our problem. Academics have developed models based on our situation when we were away from limits. The issues we are facing cover such diverse subjects as physics, geology, and finance. It is hard for academics to become knowledgeable in many areas at once.
3. Models that seemed to work before are no longer appropriate.
We take models like the familiar supply and demand model of economists and assume that they represent everlasting truths.
Figure 7. (Source Wikipedia). The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.
Unfortunately, as we get close to limits, things change. Both wage levels and debt levels have an impact on demand; the quantity goods available is also affected by diminishing returns. The model that worked in the past may be totally inappropriate now.
Even a complex model like the climate change model being used by the IPCC is likely to be affected by financial limits. If near-term financial limits are to be expected, IPCC’s estimate of future carbon from fuels is likely to be too high. At a minimum, the findings of the IPCC need to be framed differently: climate change may be one of a number of problems facing those people who manage to survive a financial crash.
4. Too much wishful thinking.
Everyone would like to present a positive result, especially when grants are being given for academic research will support some favorable finding.
A favorite form of wishful thinking is believing that higher costs of energy products will not be a problem. Higher cost energy products, whether they are renewable or not, are a problem for many reasons:
- They represent growing inefficiency in the economy. With growing inefficiency, we produce fewer finished goods and services per worker, not more.
- Countries using more of the higher cost types of energy become less competitive in the world market, and because of this, may develop financial problems. The countries most affected by the Great Recession were countries using a high percentage of oil in their energy mix.
- The amount workers have available to spend is limited. If a worker has $100 to spend on energy supply, he can buy 100 times as much in energy supplies priced at $1 as he can energy supplies priced at $100. This same principle works even if the cost difference is much lower–say $3.50 gallon vs. $3.00 gallon.
5. Too much faith in, “We pay each other’s wages.”
There is a common belief that growing inefficiency is OK; the wages we pay for unneeded education will work its way through the system as more wages for other workers.
Unfortunately, the real secret to economic growth is not paying each other’s wages; it is growing output of finished products per worker through increased use of cheap energy (and perhaps technology, to make this cheap energy useful).
Increased overhead for the system is not helpful.
6. An “upside down” peak oil story.
Most people in the peak oil community believe what economists say about supply and demand–namely, that oil prices will rise if there is a supply problem. They have not realized that in a networked economy, wages and prices are tightly linked. The way limits apply is not necessarily the way we expect. Limits may come through a lack of good paying jobs, and because of this lack of jobs, inability to purchase products containing oil.
The connection between energy and jobs is clear. Good jobs require the use of energy, such as electricity and oil; lack of good-paying jobs is likely to be a manifestation of an inadequate supply of cheap energy. Also, high paying jobs are what allow rising buying power, and thus keep demand high. Thus, oil limits may appear as a demand problem, with low oil prices, rather than as a high oil price problem.
In my opinion, what we are seeing now is a manifestation of peak oil. It is just happening in an upside down way relative to what most were expecting.
* * *
Conclusion
One way of viewing our problem today is as a crisis of affordability. Young people cannot afford to start families or buy new homes because of a combination of the high cost of higher education (leading to debt), the high cost of fuel-efficient new cars (again leading to debt), the high cost of resale homes, and the relatively low wages paid to young workers. Even older workers often have an affordability problem. Many have found their wages stagnating or falling at the same time that the cost of healthcare, cars, electricity, and (until recently) oil rises. A recent Gallop Survey showed an increasing share of workers categorize themselves as “working class” rather than “middle class.”
It is this affordability crisis that is bringing the system down. Without adequate wages, the amount of debt that can be added to the system lags as well. It becomes impossible to keep prices of commodities up at a high enough level to encourage production of these commodities. Return on investment tends to be low for the same reason. Most researchers have not recognized these problems, because they are narrowly focused and assume that models that worked in the past will continue to work today.
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Oversupply of almost everything, consumer tapped out. Hmmm anyone think of a word for this? Maybe one that starts with a "D"?
We have an oversupply of human.
I think the WSJ called it a glut of labor. But your description is more on the mark.
Wrong
We have an oversupply of everything because at some point, jews were given over a franchise on printing money & that money was fractional reserve debt money. Whereby, naturally the process became to convince people that they needed to load up on debt to:
1. Fight wars against the boogeyman of the day that they determined (because they already owned the press & MSM)
2. Get people to 'desire' things and educate them to the notion that they could gladly pay on Wednesday for a hamburger today.
Of course, even an imbecile knows that a system like that is not sustainable over time, so when that time came, in 1971, they started making sure that the only FED CHAIRS from that time foarward would be jews. So now these same jews, just counterfeit money at their own leisure to manipulate the paper asset prices that will make their fellow jews stay wealthy.
Most likely, they're all privately buying gold and silver as we speak...
The 'Jews' would have very little success without the willfully compliant 7 billion or so zombie retards that support the entire system; but yeah, the 'Jews'.........
Willingly compliant = brain dead, yes, that's what we have here.
There is oversupply of everything because interest rates are at zero. The carry cost of excess inventory is zero. Same reason there was a shale oil boom- cheap money. It all goes back to Fed-induced malinvestment.
Class dismissed.
If I buy just one moar sweater, T-shirt, dress shirt or ANYTHING for ANY price ... my Mother told me she'd personally throw me out of the basement.
AIIB may have a point. I just began to think about the topic and it sounds plausible.
What if they had a bigger plan, like export their American wealth to 'their' country Israel. Lean heavy on the American Congress people to supply free nukes, money, any kind of welfare that they can to Israel. Fight wars for Israel so it can expand to 'Greater Israel'.
Then for some reason, out of nowhere, America crumbles. The currency fails, there is no gold in Ft Knox it all went to Israel. All of the jewish people leave America and go to Israel.
Don't worry sheeple, it'll never happen.
"What happens is that economic growth eventually runs into limits."
The amount of bone in the average (uneducated) American's skull never ceases to amaze.
Skull bone thickness appears to be the "only" thing growing in the global economy besides religious, hedonistic pursuit of self-aggrandizement.
"Business" is a "sub"-set of Economics called "micro" (as in Wall St. dicks) economics. Macro economics is a "sub" set of Sociology.
Wikipedia retards aside, Sociology is the study of the "Structure and origin" of Social Institutions.
Translation: the "beginning" (and history) of the family, government, economy, etc., and its structure…or who has or gets what, and how they get it.
What does this have to do with the article (I hear you asking so confidently)?
Economics is the measured economic "activity" of human beings.
Human beings are insanely unpredictable, unless "motive" supersedes all other inputs (variables).
In a "free" market (hint: not the one we live in), the "motive" is to live.
In order to live, one needs "subsistence" and shelter.
In a "free" market economy, MAKING shit (like food, shelter, clothing, transportation and machinery-not robots) allows the "use" equation to rule.
"Use" value (the amount of scientifically calculated calories in 'work' that it takes to produce something) more or less "equals" a "use" subsistence living-bartering is a good example (before Capitalism).
The amount of "use" value needed for "subsistence" living, is about equal to roughly 25-30 hours of a modern wage in today's "exchange" value.
"Exchange" value, is an "arbitrary" value set by the "ruling" class to pay "below" subsistence wages by valuing "labor" (real work) at less than the calories it takes to produce it.
The delta is actual "profit" from the caloric input of real "work" and its return in "real" use payment.
In today's, hyper-inflated, monetarized, laissez-faire, fluff, global fascist oligarchy, very little actual "labor" is involved, and "work" is even less involved ….in MAKING shit…..
No labor = no subsistence = no profit to fluff and monetarize.
The entire horrid, house of cards rests solely on the 99%'s gullible acceptance that the "exchange" value of fiat nothingness is a good trade for their physical (or cyber) "labor".
When we don't actually "work" (meaning make physical shit that we use and need), we "produce" dick.
All else is the moronic tracking and measurement of fluff, subservience to the "great Oz" and his henchmen.
Like all despotic, illusory, heartless, aimless infantile "great cultures", this one too, will follow the inevitable path (as planned) of burning to the ground, so the Phoenix can rise again...and continue the cycle all over again.
Hint: The "Phoenix" is nobody on ZH.
This may not be a free market but we are in a free universe, or, as free as natural laws allows for. Only natural law rules over us, every other rule can be broken because it was never an actual law.
Violence is fully compatible with natural law and so are concentration camps, thug cops and ISIS style insurrections.
The five schools of ZH thought:
Economic growth - The economy is growing.
"Economic growth" - They call it economic growth, but I call it a turd in a basket.
Economic "growth" - Something is happening to the economy, but it's not growth.
"Economic" growth - Something is growing, but it's not the economy.
"Economic" "growth" - There's something not growing, and it's not the economy.
Israel is hardly achieving its supposed goals of greater Israel. Since the six day war in 1967 its territory keeps shrinking.
Gave up on Sinai, on Gaza (yes, Israel does not occuoy gaza anymore), on southern lebanon, on half the west bank.
Sure at this rate its a matter of hours before Israel spreads from the nile to the euphrates /sarc.
Exactly, the David Stockman thesis. MALINVESTMENT....huh?
Brain Dead, no....
The problem with society is, it's got no balls!!!!
The tyranny taxing the hell out of everyone is the PERFECT EXAMPLE....
I guess the Boston Tea Party was just a feel good story huh?
People are just as susceptible to over-reproduction as industrial goods. Print cash and people will start printing eachother, thinking there are bright times ahead. You end up with a human bubble. When the bubble bursts you end up with a war - a population deflation.
All I got left to say is.... Nothing last forever but the earth & sky....
For everything else, there's Master Card.... (Slaves need not apply)
I'm a Loser Baby (So Why Don't You Kill Me)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQsZujjZWs0 (3:54)
David Byrne - In The Future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STZC2ZlOZJM
And a corresponding oversupply of not giving a fuck.........
A supply/demand curve!!! How quaint!
Agree, I always get a kick out of the supply/demand charts in a system that relies on exponential fiat debt expansion based on raping and pillaging all of the natural resources of the planet through imperialistic war and plunder, at the behest of the few bankster psychopaths who run the world, while us slaves are tapped out and living under this totalitarian fascist corporatocracy military industrial state which is governed by computer algorithms and bankrupt to the elite banksters!
Yea, roll out the supply and demand charts again! ROFLMAO!
I 'm surprised you haven't jumped off a cliff yet.
Maybe you can become a pycho-bankster, that would be the ticket!
Not so loud. You'll have LawsofPhysics ranting about how competition for scarce resources is going to bring the world down.
With the global liquidity pumps working overtime, it is more like the "S" word. Stagflation.
I'll repeat an old joke:
"People of the future will have very short legs, because they'll be transported everywhere by self-driving vehicles. They'll have very short arms, because all of the manual labor will be done by robots. They'll have very small stomachs, because food will consist entirely of nutritional pills. And they'll have very big heads, spending all of their time thinking how to earn enough money to afford the damn pills."
spectacular crash ahead
It is this affordability crisis that is bringing the system down. Without adequate wages, the amount of debt that can be added to the system lags as well. It becomes impossible to keep prices of commodities up at a high enough level to encourage production of these commodities.
The real problem is the market is not allowed to work. Wages are kept artificially "high" by minimum wage laws. The cost of money is "low" because central banks manipulate this number. College cost is "high" because of artificial demand - government subsidizes college. Commodities like corn and oil are/were “high” because of the free money CBs handed out.
Hmm, it seems the problem always is about someone trying to interfere with the market working as it should. 2008 and the reluctance to let the market clear out the bad debt by the standard method of bankruptcy is still with us.
You can try to defy the laws of economics, it works for a while, until it does not anymore.
sschu
Some people aren't worth $1 an hour.
ur too narrow minded. broaden your view. everyone is worth at least $1 per hour; think Venezuelan dollars.
market fundamentalism - the belief that markets are efficient and letting them run their natural course will lead to greater prosperity for all.
Its not particularly in vogue with economists nowadays, at least the ones I read, see Paul Craig Roberts, Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, and the positive money movement. It turns out free markets have their own negative tendencies, which is why mixed economies are typically the most successful historically.
Deflation will prevail.
Consumers buy cheap trinkets, when they have money.
Food unlike other commodites can't be hedged on the front end.
People HAVE to eat! Food prices are a true indicator of " DEVALUATION"...
Inflation is rampant in every product we consume. Inflation is hidden because it's not priced in $usd.
It's priced in output from foreign manufactures and service providers.(labor)
I believe that the PBTB would rather make living so expensive, that the masses die off.(no entitlements)Why crash the system?
It makes perfect sense. Every demographic group "generally" agrees. No bombs, or viruses. You just let the useless eaters die.
What better way to expedite the plan than letting 40-50 million useless eaters invade?
Tyler you're correct... We have way too much over capacity in our global production systems.
It's primarily an undersupply of credit. Oversupply of things is just a symptom.
B/B we have a massive supply glut of everything. The $usd isn't strong, it's just being used to ponzify the rest of the global banking system.
Come on man? Ground beef is $6.00 a lb. Chicken is even worse. Some ear buds for your iShit are 99centavos.
It's stagflation. Real goods are expensive, and shit to make you feel happy is cheap!
Nothing is worth Anything
Nothing...is worth...anything...illogical! Illogical!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlMegqgGORY
Exactement!
Good article until I read the part about the use of debt being one of our human advantages. We haven't always lived in debt. The extreme levels of debt we have now are relatively new on the long biological time scale the article talks about. It's the failure to develope and use new sources of evergy that will cause our demise as well as generally corrupt governments and elite.
You mean good article until I read the part about the over supply problem being due to inadequate wage growth. What was that, like the second sentence or something?
*mind asplodes*
More thoughtstopping for NotApplicable, huh?
Thorium (for Reactors) is still cheap, plentiful, non-toxic, non-weaponizeable, non-polluting, and scalable from large plants to small ones using only 8 grams to power a full sized car for 1 million miles.
A single ton of Thorium could power all of London for one year and the Earth's crust is full of the stuff. Any country could cheaply quarry their own. The Shit fucking works. This is as close to John Galt's free energy machine as we're ever going to get. The technology has been around for 50 years and the technology is way better today than it ever was. So, release the Kraken already and tell the Saudis to fuck off.
But then how would the Bush family make money and Saudis afford gold plated Mercedes? Have you no compassion for your fellow man, man??
Can't monopolize supply? No problem (you're the government, after all), just monopolize consumption (production of energy).
Saudis aren't going too far away though, cuz just like Carlin said...
"God wants plastic."
Ying and Yang, cosmic balance has got Saudis by the short hairs. They may have oil to spare, but they are out of water.
I can live without oil; water? Not so much.
They use oil to desalinate sea water. It provides plenty for drinking and watering some parks. It will run out someday no matter how efficient is used.
Ditto for Helium-3, in abundance on the Moon, along with lots of other stuff (rare earth metals, gold, zero-g for nano, drug development, other processes)....BUT NOBODY CAN OWN ANYTHING UP THERE, BECAUSE A STUPID COLD-WAR TREATY FORBIDS IT. (article 2, Outer Space Treaty of 1967)
Yes Virginia, the United Nation can prohibit the Law of Risk and Reward
Nuclear fusion is yet to be developed. Until then, Helium 3 would be useless anyway.
Theres no police on the moon. Go there and fetch yourself some helium 3, no one will stop you.
"Thorium (for Reactors) is still cheap, plentiful, non-toxic, non-weaponizeable, non-polluting, and scalable from large plants to small ones using only 8 grams to power a full sized car for 1 million miles."
I'm going to be very polite, and very restrained, and simply say that in the aftermath of Fukushima, anyone proposing nuclear power for anything other than deep-space probes has got to be out of their minds; the nuclear industry has proven itself beyond any shadow of any doubt whatsoever that they are neither trustworthy nor competent, anyone believing the claims of anyone from that industry needs their head examined. I remember claims like "energy too cheap to meter" and "they can never melt down, they have failsafes and backups, they're foolproof." I also remember the unbridled arrogance of the people making those claims, and treating those of us who had concerns about things like safety and costs and meltdowns like we were simpletons who were just too stupid to understand what they were doing.
The thing of it is, nuclear technology is no longer necessary anyways. Solar power has now become cheap enough and efficient enough to provide more than enough power, should we be willing to give solar the kind of tax breaks, incentives and protections that were ever so generously lavished upon nuclear power. It really is a proverbial "no-brainer" decision.
The only real hurdle remaining is energy storage for the hours when the plants are off-line during the night, and I humbly suggest that the resulting "spillover" of the technology developed to create better batteries and other forms of mass energy storage would be many orders of magnitude of the comparable benefit that would be gained from further development of thorium reactor technology. When you look at how much energy is being produced by Germany with solar, and then compare their solar exposure to ours, it's not even close. We get much, much more sunlight pretty much everywhere in the US, the Southwest is like our very own Ghawar field of solar energy potential, and it's limitless and non-polluting.
DOOM my friends. her name is DOOM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Probably need to start making more people to keep up with the supply of Chinese junk.
This is what I've been saying all along as given in the first chart:
R=0.99313
Which, as you all know, means that people just need to get richer. If the poor people would simply stop being poor, and get rich we wouldn't be having this problem. Fucking poor people.
Her name is Babylon.
This article brings up a lot of interesting points, but makes the common error of conflating economic "laws" with natural laws. The increasing difficulty of extracting resources is real. Population growth is real. Pollution, fresh water, etc. are real things. Our economic system is not real. Sure, it's real enough for us in day to day terms. If we don't have enough money we can''t have the other things we need to stay alive for long, in our system. But it's abstract. We could all stop believing in it and it would be gone. Not the case with our physical concerns.
The elites seem to have figured it out. We on ZH spend a lot of time looking at screwed up charts that really shouldn't look the way they do, and we recognize that the game is being manipulated and rigged. But then we still look at Technical Analysis, or examine issues of the finite physical limits of our planet and supplies of resources and relate them to the all-too-transitory "laws" of economics that we already know are being subverted and suspended.
It's hard to recognize that a lot of the things we take the most seriously are just all made up and can be changed at any time, but it's essential to do so.
Hard work getting through this Post. No mention of the shit products these corps are serving up. Like the AAA+ Suprime packaged toxic waste sold to Asia/Iceland and Other assorted MUPPETS.
1) Chocolate that now contains 10% Cocoa DOWN from 40-70% ( not forgetting 3 instead of 4 fingered choc bars )
2) Horse Meat sold as Beef coming out of the slaughter houses in Holland and France. God knows what other contaminated products. Thankfully it's a cabal matter and no one has gone to jail.s/c
3) Non absorbent Kitchen towel which can float undisturbed in a bath of water.
4) Our favourite Toilet Paper ( scarce in South America ) doesn't do the job with it's thinner sheets causing me sleepless nights worrying that my finger may pierce it.
5) Cigarette Papers for rolling tobacco with LESS GUM ( how crazy is that? ) where you are unable to visibly see the end you're supposed to lick and on finding the rolled cig falls apart.
These are a few examples and i could go on and on and on . . PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY as i'm furious at the contempt these manufacturers have for us and the BLATANT THEFT THAT'S TAKING PLACE. Sorry must dash as i have misplaced my chemicals.
Funny you would mention rollies. I used to smoke Bugler rollies because they tasted so much better than pre-rolled cigarettes, and the tobacco was moist and the thick cut lent itself to an easy roll.
I switched to smoking a pipe (pipe tobacco is better quality and MUCH cheaper for now), but I was travelling last week and didn't bring my pipes. I bought a couple of bags of Bugler and they were absolute crap. The cut was much smaller, and the tobacco was dry and didn't stick together. I thought TOP was the worst rollie tobacco ever, and paid a premium in the past for Bugler, but the current version of Bugler is absolute shit. Bad enough that if I don't have my pipe and at least some Prince Albert I'll just do without.
It sucks now how in the US the companies trying to control price don't raise the prices, but instead put out a worse product. I see it over and over again and it is just another tiny example how shitty things seem to be getting now in the States.
Affordabiltiy Crisis?
The crisis is the 3rd national bank, its monopoly, and its method of operation.
All "crisis" that follow because of this are just derivative.
"...that that which causes derivative truths to be true is most true." ~ Aristotle
Interest payments = Wages for a retiree. Increase in Wages is the ONLY way you get "inflation" in the sense that the Federal Reserve is looking for.
Does anybody get it?
The Fed knows what the word inflation really means, yet all their announcements refer only to the "rising price" AFFECT of an increasing money supply.
Its a HOAX, and Mr. Yellin is merely a garden gnome with instructions to keep her hands off the wheel.
If the Fed really wanted inflation, they would increase interest rates.
Read this again.
So raising rates would be good for Gold ?????
It depends on which version of inflation you believe in....
No. Rising wages would be good for everything, including Gold.
The problem is not a lack of debt avilability or of 'liquidity' and cannot be solved with cheaper and more readily available debt or further injections of 'liquidity'.
The problem is one of misallocation and/or distribution of product and profits from production/service/etc..
IF inflation does not flow uniformly through the system parts of the system experience deflationary illnesses: malinvestment, scarcities, and unequal distribution of productivity gains: poverty in productive classes.
This isn't a winner take all system. The socio-economic contract defining civilizations has been repeatedly broken by teh management/capital class to the detriment of the entire system.
In simple domestic terms labor has not received it share of productivity gains realized over the last 40 years or so.
Debt cannot replace unfettered compensaton. Usury allowances inoieu of compensation has been tried by the greedy capital/finance class and it has horribly destabilized the financial system as it is unsustainable to pay people with debt allowances in lieu of proper due wages for accomplish production.
The only way the bills get paid is if the wages support the bills.
The only way that debt pyramiding can be sustained is by wage pyramiding.
THAT is the inflalation that is missing. Wages. The inflation of wages is the only inflation that can preculde mass systemic debt default and systemic stagnation.
Some jobs will be lost to productivity advances...
To be replaced by more and better paying jobs and/or cheaper goods and services should be the byproducts of those same productivity advances.
The Yin and Yang of a functioning economic system.
Debt cannot be utilized as a replacement for wage/compensation distribution as interest payemtns are not created at debt origination. The debt system is fundamentally designed for booms and busts which disappropriate real goods/property.
Wealth can only be aggregated and sequestered for so long and systemic collapse ensues.
Money must FLOW. NOT counterfeit/contrived emissions of pyramided liquidity or debt.
MONEY must flow. WAGES are how it flows; at least until another form of distribution of productive output is accepted. WIC is distribution. Disability is distribution. Welfare and pensions are distribution.
The present social order does not accept distribution to the non-productive so this is not considered viable politically beyond a certain point...
The fact is that people genrerally will be productive in order to earn a share of the distribution of productivity. Competition and self respect and pecking orders do exist.
IT ALL collapses without distribution of productive gains as wages.
Evrything falls apart: govenment, social order, family structure.
...ALL OF IT.
Throx is correct:
The problem is one of misallocation and/or distribution of product and profits from production/service/etc.
Social Credit theory solves the distribution problem. It is always amazing to me to read economic articles that ignore the gap problem. Specifically, labor cannot buy their output due to the gap between wages and prices.
I'm quite sure most ZH readers have never heard of Social Credit theory, especially because things you are supposed to know are hidden from your view. This hiding, or obscuring of the truth of things, is funded by money powers. They buy the press, and they observe from their private lodges, and then they plan and maneuver. They fund hypnotism using usury profits out of banking. Us sheeple are herded according to their design.
Goods as prices shoot out of the back end of a factory, but labor does not get paid enough to buy their prices. Simply put, there is a gap between what labor earns in prices and what they can buy. The gap is due to usury on money and waste in the production process.
Social Credit uses compensated price mechanisms to offset price gap. It is a very elegant system that compensates prices so that all goods are liquidated. An off-shoot of Social Credit theory, is American Social Credit, which injects direct spend into households.
Sovereign money is a similar system where there is direct spend into households and government is forced to earn its keep through taxes, or fees it earns via service. In Sovereign money systems, government is stripped of the right to borrow money, and private banks are stripped of the right to create credit.
We don't need communism, or big government. We do need prices and money to be distribute goods and services properly, and a well designed money sytem can do that.
But, TPTB will not allow an honorable system to come into being, as they enjoy their godlike powers and ability to harvest and herd humanity. These money powers are not our betters, they are morally compromised pride defectives.
www.sovereignmoney.eu
Because zombie businesses are being supported by the governments in one form or another, capital is being consumed in producing an oversupply of things consumers do not want. Until this mismatch is allowed to undergo correction, we will continue see a "lack of demand".
We have an oversupply because of the stock market, because publicly traded corporations must continue to grow forever. They are forced to produce more and more product even if there is no one to buy it. They must build more stores to stuff more product because the accounting rules say they can book it as sold, thereby creating more revenue. This counts as growth and the stock market rewards the directors and managers with the gift of higher share prices. This can't go on without capital, so the Fed is happy to provide endless cash to keep the party going adding even more glut to the supply lines.
The bridge to nowhere is built everywhere. A mutated form of cancerous capitalism. It consumes the body of the economy and leaves a withered corpse. The cancer was diagnosed long ago, but it was ignored and is now malignant, a death sentence. The Fed is a drug that masks the symptoms and allows the patient to walk amongst the people. One day the patient will just drop dead and most people will wonder how, because they thought the patient was healthy. That is what they were told.
Never mind.
We do not have an oversupply of water. At least, not in the southwest.
Gail Tverberg tends to rely upon Hanlon’s Razor too much, and therefore, to grossly underestimate the degree to which civilization is actually controlled by the biggest bullies’ bullshit, through their ability to enforce frauds. It way too typical for people to not fully recognize the degree to which civilization has been controlled by backing up lies with violence, for generation after generation, until we have reached the point where almost everyone is taking for granted some of the most backward and absurd ideas possible.
THE PARADOXICAL SUCCESSES OF ENFORCING FRAUDS makes all of the problems correctly identified in the article above orders of magnitude worse, and way more politically impossible to resolve. Since the EXISTING human ecology and political economy were based upon the social successfulness of the maximum possible deceits and frauds, we were rushing into the walls of “limits to growth” as fast as we could go, and will bounce off of those limits over Seneca cliffs whose bottoms we can not currently see …
Everyone assumes that the present state of technology will remain the same into the future. I remember seeing essentially this same thesis in 1967 during my MBA course work. The chart used for GDP was per capita consumption of wheat (the English had statistics kept by the Church of England since the Time of Henry the Viii) versus the average use of coal during this time in England. The curve was essentially the same as the one shown above but going for 500 years or so.
Every 100 to 200 years on the chart, there was a discontinuity (a jump) where the slope changed by the addition of newer energy technologies. Oil substitute for Whale Oil etc. What's to say that we won't see another jump in the slope of the curve in the next 100 years. Already the population issue is being addressed. Look at the birth rates of countries as they gain more GDP per capita. When I started out in technology, Japan had 140 million people. I read that in the next 30 years, they estimate the population for Japan to be 80 million and falling. Same for US if you exclude new comers from various other countries.
Maybe "cold fusion" is real and the Professors in Utah were not fake. We just can't replicate the results because of some other unknown factor that is not understood. An example of this is from my own technical industry. I had the good fortune to work in the semiconductor industry from 1968 to around 2004 (when I retired the first time). When IBM was making a very critical component for the IBM 360, they could not fabricate this part in their Fishkill Semi plant unless they grew their silicon ignots from some sand (I think I remeber somewhere on the Mississippi near Memphis). Of course this was not true, but back them we did not understand the underlying physical chemistry of what made analog semiconductors work. It was the "magic" of this sand that made the parts to spec. You don't hear about that anymore in semi's since we have a good understanding of the underlying physics of the process, including quantum effects etc.
I am proposing the same thesis for energy. Everyone assumes these curves will continue to go into the future at the same slope. I am too much of an optimist to beleive that. I can tell you that there is a lot of work going on in this field, and essentially when it happens (we know it does happen since this is the process of stars - so there is an "existance" theorm), we will eventually figure this out, and probably sooner than later.
I am much more concerned about all the BS I read on line now. When we need to change the slope, we will! At least that is what has happened over the last 500 years. If this is solved in the next 50 years, the total slope of almost all negative projections will change to the better for humanity.
Well, familytrading, regarding that you are "much more concerned about all the BS on line now," the CONTINUING PROBLEMS with respect to any breakthroughs in basic science, enabling better energy technologies, which are successfully able to be radically different than those which exist now, ARE THAT there are still the same politics, of social pyramid systems, which operate their human ecology through the maximum deceits, and their political economy through the maximum frauds.
At the present time, any breakthroughs in new energy sources would end up primarily being employed so that some people could become better at being dishonest and backing that up with violence, in order to control other people. The ONLY sufficient solutions to are to develop better human evolutionary ecologies, which could be reconciled and integrated with the development of industrial and natural ecologies. However, without that, then any new sources of energy would mostly end up enabling people to build even worse weapons, to try to back up even bigger lies, so that nothing would actually be improved, but rather become overall worse!
I agree that it seems theoretically plausible that there may well be some more significant creative breakthroughs in physical science and technology. However, that would not stop us being "much more concerned about all the BS on line now!"
Of course, these days, beyond MAD Mutual Assured Destruction backing up MAD Money As Debt, we are watching the development of MUD: “The warfare ideology of ‘Multilateral Unconstrained Disruption’ (MUD). This unrestrictive warfare is meant to disrupt societal functioning; to ‘poison’ information to elevate distrust of all computer information.” Struggling through MUD on top of MADNESS, tends to be the ways that we are going to deal with the problems of running into the real global limits of being able continue to strip-mine the planet at an exponentially accelerating rate.
What I do in those regards is attempt to develop a sort of political science fiction, which endeavours towards becoming more of the harder than the softer kinds of political fantasies. From my perspective, all of Gail Tverberg’s work tends to be too sublimely abstract, because of her preferences for presuming Hanlon’s Razor regarding our problems, rather than looking at the degree to which there are malicious plans.
While I think that Tverberg is correct, on the level of abstraction that she is presenting her views, my views continue to be that things are WAY WORSE, because of the practical impossibilities of negotiating any genuinely better death control systems, rather than the runaway criminal insanities of the established systems driving their own severe psychotic breakdowns. In my view, when one is serious about applying general energy systems concepts to human systems, it becomes clear how and why human systems operate according to the principles and methods of organized crime, and follow their own path of least resistance, which in human terms is the path of least morality. I REPEAT, the progress made in physical science has nothing comparable in political science, because of the ways that governments are necessarily the biggest forms of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals. Of course, they will not admit that, therefore, there is no reasonable way for them to have realistic and reasonable negotiations. Moreover, surrounded that core of organized crime are controlled opposition groups, which promote impossible ideals.
Combined, we are rushing towards overshooting more severely than we can currently comprehend, since the exponential growth was backed by weapons of mass destruction, so that the current virtual world of finance has created so much “money” out of nothing to gamble with that that has become orders of magnitude greater than the actual physical economy, as well as the flesh and blood people living inside of that. The virtual world of electronic frauds backed by atomic bombs has become so astronomically amplified that it has left human beings behind in its dust … Possible corrections to the MADNESSES, buried deeper and deeper under MUD, have gone beyond what any individual human being can fully comprehend anymore …
In terms of Tverberg’s points regarding the paradoxical ways that limits to growth manifest first and foremost through their effects upon the financial accounting systems, I think it is VITAL to recognize that our fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems did not happen by accident, due to incompetent stupidity. SURE, the vast majority of people act like incompetent political idiots regarding the public “money” system, HOWEVER, that system itself was due to the triumphant applications of the methods of organized crime to the political processes.
I REPEAT, the only way that the ruling classes appear to have prepared for tipping past the turning points of exponential growth overshooting is that they have covertly used a series of false flag attacks to start more genocidal wars, and impose democidal martial law. The pyramidion people in our social pyramid systems have morbid psychological and political HABITS, based on the history of successfully backing up deceits with destruction, and enforcing frauds. Those HABITS are not adapted to the development of electronics and atomic energy becoming trillions of times more powerful. Furthermore, since those HABITS are based on being as dishonest about themselves as possible, and those HABITS were also matched by the HABITS of those who were ruled over being brainwashed to believe in the biggest bullies’ bullshit for generation after generation, for the human species to correct those HABITS appears to take factors beyond human control.
The banksters are currently the biggest gangsters, that are dominating the world through their frauds being enforced by governments. Being legally allowed to make the public “money” supply out of nothing as debts, which can disappear back to nothing when those debts disappear, makes any kind of “rational” integration of human, industrial and natural ecologies politically impossible. I REPEAT, in my view it is not possible to exaggerate the degree to which civilization is being “controlled” by the maximum possible deceits and frauds, which are therefore spinning more and more wildly out-of-control, because of the dilemma that being able to back up lies with violence never stops those lies from still being false.
In my view, Tverberg’s articles are attempts to encourage more people to think more rationally about the problems we face. However, she does not like to dwell upon the degree to which those problems exist because of civilization actually being controlled by the methods of organized crime. Furthermore, she also would not like to go further through that view, to recognize that is necessarily the case, because human beings and human civilization must operate as entropic pumps of energy flows.
BY DEFINITION, THE LIMITS TO GROWTH ARE GOING TO CHANGE THE DEATH CONTROL SYSTEMS. AT THE PRESENT TIME, THE ONLY WAYS THAT CAN ACTUALLY HAPPEN ARE THROUGH DEATH INSANITIES, BECAUSE IT IS NOT POLITICALLY POSSIBLE FOR PEOPLE TO AGREE UPON ANYTHING ELSE.
It all boils down to society having become terminally sick and insane, due to the runaway psychoses of being controlled by integrated systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, whose short-term successes drive greater longer term failures … potentially on such a spectacular scale that we cannot fully imagine that degree of globalized exponential growth so severely overshooting itself … (which that “overshooting” literally includes the use of weapons of mass destruction going out of control.)
For several decades, my efforts have been to try to better understand the systems of exponential growth, backed by weapons of mass destruction. However, after working on those problems, I am not able to come up with any good solutions which are realistically possible, and I am not aware of anyone else having been able to do that either. While it is relatively easy to promote bogus “solutions” based on impossible ideals, realistic solutions based on better organized crime operating better governments appear to be politically impossible (since the established systems and their controlled opposition will not admit those basic social facts), while the defaults of debt insanities driving death insanities appears to be already baked into the cake of consequences of too much exponential growth, being done with too much deliberate ignorance, since “money” made out of nothing has been “paying” for the strip-mining of the planet, so that fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting has left us stranded way, way up the creek, with barely any paddles.
In theory, we should have a monetary system which is consistent with an energy standard. However, when one thinks that through one realizes that we already DO, but in the ways that the best organized gangs of criminals are controlling civilization, through enforcing frauds, in ways which prevent them from publicly admitting what they are really doing, and therefore, that makes it politically impossible to do what they must be doing in any better ways. Therefore, as Tverberg points out, the limits to growth show up first and foremost through the paradoxical effects upon the established financial systems based upon enforced frauds, where the death controls actually back up the debt controls, but that tends to be deliberately ignored and denied.
The production of destruction controls production. However, almost everyone wants to focus only on the production, and promote ideals that there should not be any destruction, while those who actually do the destruction do so in ways which depend upon them being as dishonest about what they are really doing as possible. Hence, the Grand Canyon Chasms are opening up wider and wider, that the more that human beings understand general energy systems through physical science, the greater the contradictions that the resulting technologies get primarily applied to become better at backing up lies with violence.
The EXISTING systems are MADNESS buried more and more under MUD, since those systems ARE globalized electronic frauds, backed by the threat of atomic bombs. Since the established systems of financial frauds almost totally get away with deliberately ignoring and denying that those frauds only worked because they were enforced, but that enforcement itself is even more deceitful than those frauds, developing financial accounting systems that were not runaway criminal insanities is practically impossible. In that context, Tverberg’s approach skims across the surface of that thin ice, taking for granted the ways that civilization was controlled by backing up lies with violence, without considering the deeper reasons for how and why that was what actually happened.
It is way easier and nicer to presume Hanlon’s Razor, that our problems are merely due to incompetent stupidity. (Which is correct regarding the vast majority of people.) However, the crucial points are that the social pyramid systems actually were made and maintained through malicious planning. That is what makes resolving our real problems of approaching the limits to growth way more intractable. It is NOT enough to educate more people. One would have to develop better organized crime, operating better death controls, to back up better debt controls, as a necessary aspect of that education. However, almost all “education” now is dominated by the biggest bullies’ bullshit world view, which is why that “education sucks” as George Carlin has explained that.
As Tverberg wrote:
“Increasing education is being encouraged, whether or not there are jobs available that will make use of that education. Education that cannot be used in a productive way to produce more goods and services can be considered overhead for the economy. Educational expenses are frequently financed by debt.”
THAT IS THE “EDUCATION” TO BELIEVE IN THE BIGGEST BULLIES’ BULLSHIT.
However, it appears politically impossible that the public school systems and mass media would do anything else but double down on promoting that bullshit. After all, almost everyone is socially successful by being the best available professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, because everyone is living inside of sociopolitical systems using the public “money” supply which is based on ENFORCING FRAUDS. Even worse, the small groups of people that understand that (but do not want to personally take advantage of that), tend to continue to promote bogus “solutions” based on impossible ideals, that we should develop some kind of public money supply that was sound and honest.
The basic dilemmas are that:
MONEY IS NECESSARILY MEASUREMENT BACKED BY MURDER.
Virtually everyone wants to deliberately ignore that. Therefore, we are rushing faster and faster towards the debt slavery systems generating numbers which are debt insanities, that are going to provoke death insanities. Since the public “money” supply was made out of nothing as debts, it is NOT possible to reconcile that with natural and industrial energy systems, EXCEPT as being the result of ENFORCING FRAUDS. Since “money” made out of nothing has “paid” for strip-mining the planet, as we thereby high-graded ourselves to hell, OF COURSE, the limits to that growth manifest as paradoxical problems within the financial systems.
Since those financial systems operated by being able to be as dishonest about themselves as possible, for a long, long time, almost everyone takes those Huge Lies for granted, and barely begin to think more critically about those situations. The established systems got away with ENFORCING FRAUDS, while their controlled opposition promoted bogus “solutions” that would always backfire badly. The only genuine resolutions to the real problems would have to face what those real problems are, namely, the existing death control systems backing up the existing debt control systems. Therefore, the only better government MUST be better organized crime, and that essentially means better murder systems to back up better money systems. HOWEVER, for thousand of years, social pyramid systems developed to become most successful by operating in the most deceitful and fraudulent ways possible, while that kind of social “success” worked because it was possible to enforce that by being destructive.
Paradoxically, the only real resolutions to our problems would require developing better ways to be destructive. However, the only ways that MIGHT actually emerge is out of the context of the established systems going through series of psychotic breakdowns, provoking runaway death insanities. In that sense, natural selection will continue to be the back-up to the artificial selection systems, which will become more acutely intense as we run into the real limits of a strip-mining a finite planet!
Surprised to see this post on zero hedge. The basis of this article is another popular misconception promulgated by economist. We never have a plroblem of demand and we don't have an over supply. The reason we work, is because we have an isatiable desire to consume. As David ricardo said in 1820. "men err in their production, there is no deficiency of demand". My mises article on the subject. the problem is NOT oversupply, but a misalignment of supply and demand!
https://mises.ca/posts/articles/the-poison-eating-at-the-heart-of-macroe...
Very true.
There is no lack of demand. There is only too high of prices. The market will clear. Just let it.
Surprised to see this post on zero hedge. The basis of this article is another popular misconception promulgated by economist. We never have a plroblem of demand and we don't have an over supply. The reason we work, is because we have an isatiable desire to consume. As David ricardo said in 1820. "men err in their production, there is no deficiency of demand". My mises article on the subject. the problem is NOT oversupply, but a misalignment of supply and demand!
https://mises.ca/posts/articles/the-poison-eating-at-the-heart-of-macroe...
Looks a bit skewed. We don't have an 'oversupply' we have a crony capitalist system which has created malinvestment, destroyed competition and capital accumulation and has used the state education system to dumb down the the adult population and remove creativity.
They got what they wanted. A status quo, stagnated system propping up crony corporations and massive government. It's the same thing that happens in a big, bloated company at the end of its life. It churns out more and more products that no one wants, or no one can afford.
Humanity is supposed to be dynamic, competitive, inventive and imaginative and the elite have drowned all that in an attempt to keep themselves in control and in power. It should have been obvious where that would lead and now it's becoming clear. The funny thing is that the elite won't escape either, we are most definitely all in this together. Their fate is inextricably linked with everyone else, there will be no escape, it will just take a bit longer for them to realise their fate has been written.
Our paradigm is broken by the very people who made it go viral in supply side maniacal pump n dump hyperconsumerism imposed on a global scale by the slave labour arb mantra, that China bent knee to after Dear Henry's detente and ping-pong diplomacy.
Asymmetric wars in the third world and seductive world factory outsource made Reaganomics king of the world all based on the WS risk asset FIRE economy bean stawk and recycling of other people's revenues into the US economy and its debt slave consumerista class, the iconic construct of this mad, hyper fast n furious age.
And now its run out of derivative juice and other people's money and other people's ability to eat and defecate per capita like good ole USA does; the greatest consumer and the greatest polluter you have eva seen with your own two Apple mesmerised, Google categorised eyes, all alit on a Facebook selfie-page !
We don't have enuff oceans to pollute and lands to excavate to find our rare earths and our new Ghawars to keep this electronic, digitialized circus on the road all the while we go from suburbia to city dystopia in our gas-guzzlers!
Yes indeeeeeeeed, the day of reckoning approaches for the world's biggest scam of capitalism gone ape shit obscurantist, we are fast morphing into a civilization of new cockroaches.
Some say we need another new big bang à la Hiroshima style; but I don't buy that logic. A perverted logic that is now going viral as the sale of arms is the millstone around the necks of all emerging nations...you cannot pay your slaves and buy you expensive military toys ad nauseum. Something's gonna give!
The Saud-US alliance being the nail in THAT coffin!
Gail the actuarial analyst makes a very good point like a daughter of Cassandra!
Was that written by a first year econ student?
Lots of mundane shit tossed around as divine revelation. Cost of energy she says? Lol, money isnt even real and if one is to frame an argument in the language of physics it is clear than what matters is the total supply of energy, rather than its imaginary money cost.
So, the more energy there is, the more goods there are. Period, money isnt even a factor.
It was Chris Field, lead author of IPCC AR5 WG2 who suggested the changing human systems are much more difficult/complex to nail down than the changing climate. AR5 stands.