Slow Motion Implosion
The present Western economy is slowly imploding. All the subsystyems that were taken for granted in the last few decades are falling apart. There is a simple reason for this: past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Now lets take a look at some of these major subsystems:
- Labor - Work - Professional occupation. Now in the last few decades there has been a steady stream of various jobs both old and new and many associated with every new technology that came sequentially online. There was economic growth in terms of a relatively young population coming out of a world war and setting up families, optimism, technology was providing new toys every year, new cars, homes cost WAY LESS either to buy or rent than today, etc. So there was this immaginary pattern of a “technological society”, a “post industrial society” capable of constantly inventing new toys, new markets, and with them new jobs, well paid jobs to manipulate and design and engineer all these new toys. But nobody suspected that this was a ONE TIME QUIRK. That this occured in a window of time within a given evolution of technology, a given era, a given configuration that can never be repeated again. So those jobs that were supposed to keep on coming, now don’t seem to be coming much anymore, if they do come some are not as well paid as expected, others are being done in “developing countries”, etc. So there is already one very important and major subsystem in the West that is slowly imploding and that is jobs. Computers and automation were invented exactly to automate alot of jobs, and they are actually doing a great “job” at this. What jobs do you think there will be in the future ? How many ? Millions ? and at what pay level ? 2,000 dollars a month or 3,000 and where ? in the US, EU and JAPAN ? Do you really think that past performance in this respect is a guarantee of future perfomance ?
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Health Care. Healthcare is an odd American subsystem that is kind of out of control, that is a paradox, that no one understands anymore. The only thing that is clear is that the cost of health MUST always rise every year, that doctors and hospitals and health insurance companies have every right to hike up their salaries, their incomes to anything they want. That is nice, it is a shame that it is totally outside of reality. Because there will be fewer and fewer people or companies that can support these prices always going up and up for no clear apparent reason. This is another system that is impoding.
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Education - College. This is another American subsystem that follows the laws of constantly increasing costs, without any clear reason behind it. Another system imploding especially since the “return on investment” in education is not guaranteed so much anymore, just look at point 1. above. Why pay top dollars in the hope that the “future” job will pay well ? Are you sure ? what job ? engineer ? doctor ? past performance is no guarantee of future perfomance.
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Pensions. As one poster wrote:
"Retirement is actually a very recent concept. It didn’t exist until the middle of last century. It was only possible at all because the working population, for a time, grew larger than the retired population. Once that is no longer true, you can’t support social security, private pensions, or pretty much any other retirement income stream. Instead you just have a ponzi scheme, which is what we are running into now. It’s basic math, not some imaginary ruling class or government plot.
Retirement is still an unthinkable concept for the vast majority of people in the world. You work til you drop, and then hopefully your family takes care of you in your last couple of years. But Americans feel entitled to complain long and loud if we are not provided an easy, breezy path toward doing nothing but playing or sitting on our rears for the last 25-30 years of our lives. That says a lot about how amazingly good our standard of living still is.
There will be people in this country who cannot afford that luxury of doing nothing for decades. Heck, I may be one of them. Guess what? That’s life. And those who want that lifestyle badly enough may need to make some sacrifices to finance it themselves. That’s life too."
I think this guy hit the nail on the head. The point is that this is what is happening with all the subsystems that we took for granted in the last decades. The economy is slowly imploding. There will be growth in third world and second world countries, they will improve their standard of living, but the USA, EU, and JAPAN, along with some others like SOUTH KOREA, CANADA , etc. have hit the wall, it is over, the future is in constantly increasing poverty. Get over it, the 20th century is over.