Category Societal Collapse
IF PROOF WERE EVER NEEDED
In one of my recent posts (‘Energy and the Dismal Science’) I said that “our complex society … doesn’t work – it just doesn’t work – unless the economy grows consistently and reliably at around 3% per year … without economic growth the system starts to implode, and pretty quickly at that; honest.” If proof were […]
ENERGY AND THE DISMAL SCIENCE
The man on the Clapham omnibus is unlikely to have heard of Tullett Prebon. Tullett Prebon is an inter-dealer broker in the wholesale financial markets; Tullett Prebon acts as a link between firms to enable them to trade with each other anonymously; its brokers are the fast-talking middlemen who match buyers and sellers of complex […]
THE LONG DESCENT INTO POTHOLES
Potholes are in the news at the moment (see for example the link below). One of the themes that I shall cover in the essays (letter) to my children will be the ‘crisis of capital’ that comes with the end of mankind’s era of industrial-age rates of economic growth. Economic stagnation or, worse, economic contraction […]
SOMETHING STRANGE IS HAPPENING – PART I
Essay # 1 It’s the second decade of the 21st century and something strange is happening to our society; strange and potentially threatening. Incidentally, don’t get hung up on that word “threatening”; we’ll end this essay on a comforting note. If I’m right to declare this then I want you, my children, to have some […]
TO COLLAPSE, OR NOT TO COLLAPSE
In 2005 I read James Kunstler’s ‘The Long Emergency’. Since then I have studied in some detail (dare I say enormous detail) the likely trajectory of our society in the coming decade or two. I’ve tended to follow Chris Martenson’s ‘Crash Course’ framework of viewing the world thro’ the tri-focal lens of energy, the economy […]
Moraymint Chatter 