|
|
Musings Report 2018-42 10-20-18 Social Collapse and Deep Adaptation
You are receiving this email because you are one of the 500+ subscribers/major contributors to www.oftwominds.com.
For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Social Collapse and Deep Adaptation
Jem Bendell's concept of Deep Adaptation aligns with my work so well that I wish I'd coined the term.
The basic idea here is the usual "fixes" to ecological degradation and climate change (regardless of cause)--"fixes" that leave the status quo entirely intact via more wind farms, electric cars, etc.--are nothing more than unsubstantiated fantasies: the "reforms" are too modest in scale to enable real adaptation to an economy and environment that's fundamentally smaller in terms of resources humanity can consume.
Bendell's work is outlined in this article, New outlook on global warming: Best prepare for social collapse, and soon.
Bendell's paper is Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.
Setting aside climate change, the need for Deep Adaptation will arise as high-density transportable energy becomes increasingly scarce and expensive.
The global economy is based on two principles: energy will always become more abundant and its cost will decline or remain stable, and credit will always become more abundant and its cost will decline or remain stable.
Neither will be true going forward, hence the need for radical adaptation to a world in which energy and credit are both scarce and costly.
Needless to say, the global status quo cannot survive contact with the realities of scarce, costly energy and credit. So some sort of re-set will occur, and Bendell (along with many others) foresees social disorder and collapse as the inevitable result.
The idea of Deep Adaptation is to prepare a pathway to a social/economic order that consumes far less resources than the present status quo.
An interesting baseline is the world of the early 1900s, before the rise of liquid fossil fuels. As I asked in last week's Musings regarding the film clips of New York streets in the early 1900s: how much energy did the NYC of 1906 consume on a per capita basis? That is, how much energy did each person consume annually compared to present-day NYC?
I am guessing 10% or less, as rail, streetcars and horse-drawn carts/carriages were the dominant forms of transport. As I noted, most humans in the film were getting about on foot.
This is memorably visible in the 13-minute film A Trip Down Market Street, which was filmed just 4 days before the earthquake and fire destroyed most of San Francisco in April 1906.
Life looks pretty good for the people of 1906 San Francisco. This raises the question: if life was pretty good in an era that consumed a fraction of the resources we consume today per capita, wouldn't it be possible to scale back to that level of consumption and still have a good life?
This would require giving up much of what we take as "essential" in the status quo of super-high energy consumption--one car per adult, cheap air travel, and so on.
The problem is that such a Deep Adaptation would destroy much of the economy that's based on the endless expansion of consumption. That's where the social collapse enters the frame: if credit and energy consumption implode, then jobs implode, tax revenues implode and the structures that are dependent on cheap energy and credit and the endless expansion of consumption all implode, too.
My solution is the CLIME system--the Community Labor Integrated Money Economy I describe in my book A Radically Beneficial World.
But the difficulties in scaling back credit and consumption without triggering social collapse are significant, a point brought home by examining the aftermath of the earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco in 1906.
I'm finishing a remarkable history of the catastrophe, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906. The book illuminates the cultural, political and social milieu of the era and details the responses of authorities and the residents.
Interestingly, local military forces were mobilized without a formal declaration of martial law, and hastily organized civilian forces (authorized vigilantes) were tasked with maintaining order with force.
By all accounts, there was very little looting or disorder; people were helping others, not looting. Yet extreme force was authorized, leading to the shooting of dozens of innocent civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Roughly 200,000 people were homeless in the aftermath. Over 100,000 decamped to Oakland across the Bay, many left the region by train and others stayed with relatives or friends in nearby towns or in the few neighborhoods that had escaped destruction.
What strikes me is the wealth of transport and resources available within 20 miles of the stricken city. Within days, tens of thousands of people were transported across the bay. Others walked south where rail depots quickly amassed relief supplies.
Lumber mills in Northern California shipped millions of board feet of lumber south and the Southern Pacific Railroad transported trainloads of supplies.
The point here is social collapse was avoided due to the wealth that was readily available to support the homeless and rebuild the city.
Should the global economy lose its abundance of cheap energy and credit, the reserves (buffers) available to mitigate catastrophes will no longer be present.
Downshifting to an economy that consumes (say) 25% of the present levels of consumption is theoretically doable, but the institutions and structures of the status quo will not survive in their current form. This is the topic of my new book which I am finalizing for publication this month: Pathfinding Our Destiny.
Highlights of the Blog This Past Week
China's Next Revolution Is on the Horizon 10/19/18
Is the Greatest Bull Market Ever Finally Ending? (Hint: Follow the Money) 10/17/18
How Many Households Qualify as Middle Class? 10/15/18
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Once again my friend and marketing muse GFB, and my unpaid editors Cindy F., Constance B. and Adam T. came through for me as I struggled with titles, cover designs and descriptions of my new book.
Musings on the Economy: Will the US Catch the Flu from a Sick Global Economy?
Contrarian that I am, as soon as the mainstream embraces the risk of global contagion--the slowdown hitting China and other nations spreading to the entire global economy, including the US--I start wondering if the consensus is missing something.
On the way up, the consensus discounted the global economy's dependence on fast-expanding debt and leverage and the resulting credit-asset bubbles.
On the way down, we have to ask: what is the consensus discounting now?
I'm wondering if the consensus is discounting the relative resilience of the US economy based on two factors:
1. The US issues the reserve currency that's currently scarce (US dollar) as the Fed reduces its balance sheet and non-US debt denominated in dollars must be paid back in USD.
2. The resulting relative stability of the USD and USD-denominated assets in the US becoming attractive to risk-averse global capital.
The stock market swoon has caused many analysts to find comparisons in the bubble tops of 2000 and 2007, and these are definitely worth studying and tracking.
But every crisis and bubble burst is different from the previous downturns in significant ways, and this is what makes the analysis interesting.
In this week's blog, I noted that capital flows matter. In a rough comparison of the US and China, for example, three differences pop out:
1. Chinese household wealth is highly concentrated in real estate (roughly 3/4 of all "wealth" is in housing). The comparable figure for US households is around 25%.
2. How much global mobile capital is flowing into China to snap up empty flats in empty buildings, i.e. the predominant form of "wealth" in China? Very little, as these assets simply aren't attractive given the steady devaluation of the yuan and the rising risk of the decade-long housing bubble in China finally popping.
3. What is the global demand for yuan vs the USD? As the chart of reserve currencies shows, the yen and yuan have very marginal roles in the global demand for reserve currencies.
For these reasons, I suspect the "disease" currently spreading through the Chinese economy is not one that can infect the US economy. The question then becomes: what "financial disease" is the US economy vulnerable to?
We know it won't be a repeat of the subprime mortgage meltdown, or the dot-com bubble popping, so we'll have to keep an eye on other dynamics.
From Left Field
Global Financial Stability Report October 2018: A Decade after the Global Financial Crisis: Are We Safer?
Surveillance Capitalism: Monetizing The Smartphone User
Global Wealth Report 2017 Credit Suisse Research Institute (CSRI)
How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town: New York’s empty storefronts are a dark omen for the future of cities
Medicare-for-All versus public plan buy-in proposals (via LaserLefty)
After acceptance – some responses to anticipating collapse (Jem Bendell's blog)
'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
Howard Zinn: Don’t Despair about the Supreme Court
The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
Could Donald Trump be the Last World Emperor? States and Empires After the End of the Fossil Age
The Tragic Decline of Music Literacy (and Quality) -- two songwriters pen 80% of the "hit songs"... no wonder the nusic all sounds the same....
Overlooked No More: Yamei Kin, the Chinese Doctor Who Introduced Tofu to the West
"What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person -- somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then -- even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum."
Vincent Van Gogh (via Michael D.)
Thanks for reading--
charles |
|
|
|
|
|
