From:
kunstler.com/blog/2012/05/dancing-shoes.html
"At some point, the easy energy runs out and people realize that the new model is to do more with less, and scale back, not go chasing down dreams like phantom returns on dubious Facebook stocks.
All this is leading toward an adjustment in the future, when there is no more means of coping and adjustment to changing circumstances. We don’t build or plan for these changing circumstances, only get more desperate to preserve our current models. All this means is that when we can no longer sustain them at well, we will collapse, because there is no other model to follow, and this will be the new Dark Age."
The problem is that there is no “New Model”. Who says the problems rotate around “Resource Scarcity myths” like Peak Oil or Peak Wealth ? Who can be so sure ? I have often declared that the problem is the exact opposite: we have way too much Money, Wealth, Technology to know what to do with it, we are way too rich compared to what we know what to do with it and compared to what our model of living has always been up until a few decades ago, until the Technological Economy did away with scarcities once and for all and we cannot adjust to living without the need for working (the constraints of limits mankind has always had to deal with, but today these limits are no longer present, they are mostly psychological, political and cultural) since the economy generates wealth automatically, system wide, technologically wide, etc.
The “changing circumstances” are both provoked, invented, created culturally and occurring automatically simultaneously without no one knowing who or what is changing the circumstances and how. No one is in control, no one is deciding anything, it is all automatic, the “events are in the driver’s seat at this point” and at the same time we are all creating the circumstances by describing and interpreting reality according to an arbitrary cultural model (the economy must grow, profits must be made, unemployment must drop (and who is to say why ? does this system really need more workers to operate or is the more workers needed only as a wealth distribution mechanism, since money can’t simply be given out for free without some kind of excuse to justify it ? especially since this economy is all about consumption and spending and not at all about production and work, nay, the production and work part of it is the easy part, the hard part is to keep people constantly spending and consuming, consumption is way more important than production and labor, bar none)), in other words it becomes intractable, it cannot be followed anymore or it could be followed in any way you want, and hence all of the different opinions, ideas, “interpretations” and “theoretical explanations”, macro economic and sociological explanations and such, all the contradicting political choices and movements like the Tea Party opposing the Occupy Wall Street party and such.
So the current model may be coming to an end, but there is no other possible model to substitute it, the only possible model would be Free Salaries to All, Cheap Rents, Huge Public Private projects like Trillions of Skyscrapers, and Trillions of Rockets to Mars and such.
Or any future model is completely arbitrary, is an aesthetical choice, is a random choice of what the majority of the people will want, there is no determinism operating, no necessity for any given model to prevail there is no law of economics that imposes any model and in fact any possible model will do, even no model at all and random chaotic forces going anywhere and ending up anywhere (and then never end up anywhere because they just set the stage for another sequence of events and so forth forever).
THE APE MAN, JOBSTER LOBSTER, NO DICE, NO DICE JOB, APESTER, JOBSTER LOBSTER, NO DICE, SHPAK A LAK, SHLAK A LAK
