Hopefully. It’s distressing to think that my 1952 Western Electric desk telephone, which has been around longer than I have, has lasted longer than umpteen cheap plastic telephones (with worse sound quality) which would have to have been thrown away by now.
jrf29 wrote:
"Hopefully. It's distressing to think that my 1952 rotary dial desk telephone has lasted longer than umpteen plastic telephones which would have to have been thrown away by now."Gosh, isn't that the truth! I am so over planned obsolescence!
Something in this thread made me think of this and now my curiosity has gotten the better of me. I really hopes the ole USA stays in the configuration of states that is has been in for the last many generations, but if the US changes how might things go down? If the US becomes multiple countries as has been predicted by Igor Panarin what might we expect? We have already looked to the USSR beak up as an example. I’m curious how certain details worked out when the USSR broke up. What happened to their debt? Did they pay it? Was it up to the left over nation to pay it and the break away nations had no debt to pay? What decided where the military assets went? Surely the nukes went to whatever country they resided in, but what about the naval forces, aircraft, and other military assets? What became of them and how might they have been aquired by the breakaway nations?
dickey45,
To your point:
"Fast disappearing is an era when workers on assembly lines can afford to buy the vehicles they make."
To all: Sometimes, I find it easier to understand and analyze this entire thing by ignoring paper money, which today really seems to be an artifact of the 20th Century and the Big Oil era. So if you actually ignore the paper and look at the resources, sometimes it is easier to understand the direction we are heading in.
BN37: You raise some interesting questions. I think there are lessons to be learned from the Soviet Union and Dmitry Orlov has been very insightful into this, but I think the American situation will certainly be unique, even if there are some similar experiences.
As much as I stand by the ideals that formed this nation, I acknowledge that at this point, fracturing into smaller, less powerful regions might actually be very helpful for America. I greatly like our Constitution and we have many historical things to be proud of (and at least as many of which to be ashamed) but massive empires and centralized authority are "luxuries" of prosperity. The cornucopian abundance is over.
Personally, I think one unique aspect of the "American Experience" as we look forward is going to be the way we’ve set up our living situations. We have huge high density cities and also some very rural land. But the real unique part comes in the suburbs and how they are going to deal with the crisis. Unfortunately, the suburbs combine the worst aspects of cities and rural areas: they don’t quite have access to city infrastructure and proximity and at the same time, they don’t take advantage of a small bit of property the way rural areas would.
I can’t remember who, but I read a prediction that suburbs could relocalize themselves potentially with each person have a small garden and with the community becoming more self sufficient. I find this to be a little idealistic, but it is an interesting thought of an alternative viewpoint.
As far as the fracturing itself, I can almost see the big megalopolis of the mid atlantic / northeast coast becoming its own city-state. The real catch is that the population density is so high relative to the arable land and resources right on the coast. In a severe crisis, there is going to be a lot of tension between the land and farms of rural areas and the metro areas that are so far removed from them.
Mike
Mike said:
"As far as the fracturing itself, I can almost see the big megalopolis of the mid atlantic / northeast coast becoming its own city-state. The real catch is that the population density is so high relative to the arable land and resources right on the coast. In a severe crisis, there is going to be a lot of tension between the land and farms of rural areas and the metro areas that are so far removed from them."
Mike,
Do you expect that "severe crisis?" Do you think the people in that "megalopolis," who are probably mostly "service" workers who produce little or nothing of use in a a crisis scenario, expect such a crisis?
Are those the exact kind of people that Chris and You All are trying to inform?
Adjusting Chris’ graph for "effective population"; what they will be able to purchase:
The world is bigger then the US
I agree with Marko… remember Chapter 18? 70Million new people every year all wanting to live in shiny cities? They are going to buy my assets. For the US, immigration legal and illegal will also help provided they are properly acultured to the American dream. It is absolutely essential that everyone else want what I have so I can sell it to them.
CNN.Com is inviting submissions for "An Open Letter to the President Elect." I just found this and read today’s letter. Do any of the forum members want to present "The Crash Course" along with more of the Martenson view?
He may know all about it.
Scientist tell Obama he has 4 years to save the world.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama
Mike said:
"Sometimes, I find it easier to understand and analyze this entire thing by ignoring paper money, which today really seems to be an artifact of the 20th Century and the Big Oil era. So if you actually ignore the paper and look at the resources, sometimes it is easier to understand the direction we are heading in."
Mike,
Your suggestion is one that my instinct has been attempting to persuade my mathematician to do for a long time. However I don’t make much progress toward any better an understanding due to the collage of random facts below–which are constantly at war in my head:
- America just sacked the world and used that money to build a whole lot of houses (those are real resources, they are not going anywhere);
- Energy is progress and GDP;
- America has been consuming petroleum resources at a per capita rate that, when considered within the context of a quickly developing world (China, India, Your Favorite,...) is no longer sustainable, and will not be tolerated;
- There ain't no quick fix for the per-capita petroleum use adjustments that seem inevitable (barring disruptive technologies that render that use irrelevant);
- Who knows what the truth is about oil reserves?
- Who can believe anything anyone in Washington or on Wall Street says?
- If paper money (our primary resource to date) were to disappear, what are America's resources?
Just some things that keep me perpetually undecided and self-doubting…
Lee
Lee: I’m not saying paper money completely doesn’t matter today, but I am just pointing out, that on a fundamental level, it is NOT wealth.
I’m am just about to finish reading Kenneth Deffeyes’ Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak. One graph that he shows in it is that per capita petroleum consumption in America peaked a long time ago. Frankly, I kind of wish we had a per capita FRN peak sometime soon…there’s a lot of money out there, but I know middle class incomes have gone just about nowhere since the dot com bust.
It is very difficult to believe or analyze all of the statements coming from Wall Street and the politicians and the Saudis. But I’ve read the Matt Simmons’ Twilight In The Desert book and the one take home point I got from it was that Saudi oil is going to soon start getting a lot more expensive, i.e. harder to extract.
And that’s just the point. The pain will start, not necessarily as oil production starts to decline, but absolutely anytime oil becomes more difficult to extract. If we have to use more and more resources to just barely increase our production (and temporarily avoid the dread peak point) we will basically be devoting more of the economy to energy and a lot less of it to Big Macs and Britney Spears.
Again on a fundamental note: Paper FRNs only matter to the real economy if you burn them as fuel, right? And word has it that they are less energy dense than hydrocarbons, and oh, by the way they are filled with Arsenic and other toxins that make soot and CO2 look healthy.
Mike
Mike said:
"Lee: I’m not saying paper money completely doesn’t matter today, but I am just pointing out, that on a fundamental level, it is NOT wealth."
Yeah, I understand you there. What I think I’m proposing is that, the U.S. dollar, for whatever of the Usual Suspect reasons, has acted as a de facto resource even though we conjur them from thin air. When I say "if paper money were to disappear," what I mean is if it were generally recognized that it has been the primary resource of the U.S. for quite some time and that it really has no value, what then? What are our real resources? Would they sustain us?
Yeah, you raise a good point and touch on the fact that the dollar has basically been a political resource for many of our "leaders" over the years. It certainly is an important tool we use to maintain our empire overseas.
The de facto nature of it as a resource reminds us that we have a faith based currency. The father of a friend of mine is a Ghanian economist working for the World Bank. My friend has challenged him about the bailouts and apparently the father says that our system "runs on euphoria" (i.e. faith). And he points out that we must keep the euphoria going at all costs and that is why we are bailing out.
Sound familiar? Sound like the status quo? Who thinks the new election "at this defining moment in history" (blah blah blah) is going to bring any real change?
Change will only come when the People make it impossible for our lawmakers to keep the status quo. We’re not there yet, unfortunately.
Hi there, sorry to hijack the thread but the issues discussed here seem in line with the questions I asked in the General Questions forum, but have yet to receive a satisfactory answer for.
I stated in that forum that world population is predicted to begin falling by 2050, and the population of the devloped world to begin falling well before that. From this, we can take it as read that growth rates are already falling sharply.
Falling growth rate implies an aging population, for the rest of the century, at least. For at least part of this century, it also implies a falling population.
Regarding the boomer asset issues outlined above, it seems to me that this means we’ll be in a state of permanent wealth overhang as descibed above for many, many decades - this is not a transitory phenomenon.What does this mean for long term asset price expectations, especially once it becomes common knowledge?
And even more fundamentally,what is long term ageing, following by sustained population contraction in the developed world going to do to interst rates? My current understanding is that a long term -ve population growth will see a negative return on capital. Even a long term static population is likely to result in zero, or very very low return on capital. Extrapolating from this, one can say that capitalism requires a return on capital, otherwise it will cease to exist and give way to some other world system. So is capitalism doomed?
Am I being naive or missing some kind of crucial variable here?
I’ll throw a monkey wrench in all this -
I thought the housing decline started when King Geo stopped immigrants from crossing the border. . . which was offseting the "negative growth factor" caused by birth control.
California got hit first - and the hardest… . butnot the home state of Tx.
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing about illegal border crossing increasing our population. Some are deciding to go back so we could see (possibly) a huge US population decrease. I mean how did we go from 250M to 350M in, what, 20-30 years. That is entirely huge.
I think many countries currently relying on immigrants to make up the numbers could be in for major contraction if they start leaving and going home.Particularly the US, UK and germany.
Longer term, bad economic times will lead to lowered birth rates, which will simply hasten the point at which overall populations begin declining.
My thanks goes to Congress Circa 1960s for the loophole they signed into law. I don’t recall where that is on the video, or where the legal immigration numbers out number the illigal, but I do recall the nine minute mark of the video got my attention.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4094926727128068265