The pessimist:
The Ghost Of Christmas Future. Chris Martenson, PeakProsperity.com. Dec. 28, 018.
Here in the brief period between Christmas and New year’s, as a writer I am obligated to say happy, wishful things. I have to confess, I’m just not feeling it this year, so I’ll just do the minimum here and return to being a curmudgeon, because that’s what the times call for.
So, happy new year. I hope everything works out well for you in 2019.
There, with that behind us we can now return our attention to the true state of the world, which is deteriorating and getting worse.
For most people things will be decidedly worse, not better, as things progress along their current trajectories. The only planet we’ve got to live on is being killed by human activity and gross inattention, while economically the greatest and most ill-advised credit bubble in all of human history flirts with the sort of sudden disaster that follows shortly after the failure of one’s reserve parachute.
As I've often repeated, I truly wish this weren’t the case. I don't have a “bummer gene” that relishes bad news nor do I enjoy being "that guy” who says what no one wants to hear.
Many of you reading this know exactly what I'm talking about. You, too, had to keep your lips zipped over the holidays lest the strained family small talk and opening of cheaply-made forgettable gifts be ruined by any talk of 'reality'. Sure, everyone can inwardly wince at uncle Jack’s sixth bourbon and tolerate the buffoonery and social awkwardness sure to follow because “it’s only once a year.”
But collapsing insect populations, species loss, shrinking aquifers, and the utter betrayal of the younger generations by the “olders” running the fiscal and monetary policies of the world are not as easily dismissed. There’s no relief at the end of the day when the problem drives itself home.
Instead, these many predicaments lurk and fester, as stubbornly as a rotted beam in the basement. An adult with a problem beam in the basement deals with it. But the immature person pretends the problem doesn’t exist, and then scolds and shames anyone who brings it up.
Well, for those of us in the mature reality-based camp, we can point out not one but many dozens of rotten beams in the basement, and the walls, and the roof. So, holidays are quite often more a burden to us than a comfort. “Why, yes, Aunt Karen, that is a nice set of coasters you gave to John” as you think to yourself “I wonder if those are made from pressed microplastics or virgin rainforest?”
To be completely clear, I deplore the decisions that got us to this point in history. But here we are.
I wish the Federal Reserve, the ECB and the rest of the world's major central banks had not printed up $16 trillion of thin-air money and caused the greatest collection of asset price bubbles in all of history. I wish that the US had heeded Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s and developed a workable long-term energy strategy that made sense. I wish that disappearing insect population were not relegated to the back pages of major newspapers, and instead were front and center each and every day until responsible actions were undertaken. I wish that savers, pensioners and the young hadn't been sacrificed upon the altar of bank profits so that the obscenely wealthy could become even more so.
But, that’s not how things turned out. So now we’ve just got to make the best of it individually, whatever may come.
Two Questions
Back in November of 2018, I participated in a superb evening event put on by modern Poet-Historian Stephen Jenkinson where he posed the following to the audience, which mostly consisted of people with grey hair. He said that every older person needs to be ready for the day when a younger person walks up to them and asks them two questions:
- When did you know, and
- What did you do about it?
When did you know about the many problems and predicaments facing our world today? When did you find out about species loss, and peak oil, the generationally destructive policies of your peers, and the unsustainability of our entire economic model?
And what did you do about any of it? Did you make any changes at all to your behavior, or did you close your eyes and slip into a strategy of false hope? Hope that ‘somebody’ would do 'something'? Did you fight at all for the things in which you once believed?
These aren't easy questions to face, because they cut right to the heart of the matter. They put our integrity into question and threaten to expose whether we have any at all.
Not easy stuff, to be sure.
So, by way of preparation for what's coming, let me act as a stand-in for that future young person and be the one to ask you:
When did you know?
And what did you do about it?
Psychological Projection
Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.
In the US, the older generation, the Baby Boomers, have a lot to answer for. I'm among them, so I'm pointing my accusing fingers right back at myself, too. It's incumbent on every group to be its own best critic (a credo the FBI, many police departments, large corporations, and political parties seem to be woefully ignorant of).
Instead of being appropriately self-critical, 2018 was the year the entire mainstream establishment decided to engage in a mass act of psychological projection instead. With Millennials as the hapless targets.
In the US, after spending $trillions on unnecessary wars and neglecting to invest for the future (adequately funding pensions, maintaining vital infrastructure, etc), the establishment decided 2018 would be a good year to wag its collective finger at the Millennial generation, going so far as to blame its low home ownership rate on eating too much avocado toast.
But it didn’t stop there. The establishment went on an absolute tear of a blaming spree. It accused Millennials of so many vices that long lists had to be created. As those lists became exhaustively long, Millennials were branded “mass murderers”.
The reason that so many Millennials are turning away from the blindly-consumptive patterns of their parents is because they got locked out of that game long enough to peer back in. As they did, many decided that their parents' material pursuits and life choices weren't worth repeating.
A lifetime of paying off mortgage and other debts to bankers or…spending their money instead on valued experiences while still young and vigorous? Hmmmm. Not exactly a tough choice, is it?
The Boomers and their journalistic lackeys decry Millennials' opting-out as “killing” valued institutions like for-profit colleges and the housing market, but the reality is if you give people a bit of breathing room to assess their options, few will willingly choose a lifetime of debt servitude. Most prefer financial freedom and a life well-lived.
I know that my own children (all young adults now) have opted not go into debt. Or overspend on college. Or purchase cars until absolutely forced to (and even then they bought beaters).
I like to think that they got some of that frugality from me but, truthfully, after about the age of 13 parents’ influence on their children hovers between 0 and -3. From the age of 13 on their peers shape their outlook. And many of my children’s peers are making similar purchasing and life decisions, so that sets the direction of their age cohort.
For the journalists making a show out of struggling to understand why the Millennials are making different choices than the Boomers did, I offer up this quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." ~ Upton Sinclair
It’s important to note that the mainstream press has a couple of important jobs: keeping everyone firmly seated in the consumer mind-rut, and deflecting any criticism away from the wealthy and their corporate masters (should any distinction between those groups exist).
If I sound harsh on the mainstream press, that’s because far too many in that profession have settled into being little more than scribes for the powerful; doing little more than repeating scripted talking points, inaccurate “facts,” and overt corporate and political propaganda.
In other words: the criticism is entirely deserved. Especially when one asks, “When did you know? And what did you do about it?”
2019: The Beginning Of The End
2018 has been the year that things began to unravel, as the accumulated mistakes of the prior decades finally settled in.
2019 will see the repercussions of that unraveling. It's going to be a very hard year as reality starts to settle in.
As far as the financial markets go, which are the preferred self-enrichment and public signaling devices of the powers that be, our operating model is contained in the phrase: Until and unless.
Until and unless the world’s central banks reverse course and once again undertake more Quantitative Easing, or “QE,” financial asset prices will continue to fall throughout 2019. Stocks, bonds, real estate. You name it.
For all the investors out there now habituated to ever-rising asset prices, this will be a very unpleasant and painful period.
But beyond just our portfolios, the imbalances facing us are extraordinary and they're spread all across the world’s stage -- economically, politically, ecologically, demographically -- and there simply are not sufficient resources to ever again return to the reliable and fast pace of economic growth experienced in the 20th century.
It’s time for each of us to focus on preparing financially, emotionally, and physically. Things are changing, quickly, and pretending that they aren't isn’t a winning strategy.
Few are ready to hear these messages. More will be ready over the coming year, but still the numbers will be surprisingly small.
This makes it even more important that we stick together and offer each other support and encouragement as we navigate increasingly difficult waters over the coming months and years.
...
Look, I wish I could join the untold millions in looking past all of these predicaments and cheerily wish everyone a Happy New Year and leave it at that. But I cannot. We don't pick the times in which we live, But we can control how we respond, as well as how we decide to meet the challenges we face.
Vs the optimist...
Across the world, things are better than we think. Alex Standish, spiked. Dec. 6, 2018.Hans Rosling, who died last year, was a remarkable man. As a doctor, he practised and lectured in his home country of Sweden, and also worked in Mozambique, Tanzania, the Congo, Mexico, Cuba and India. His commitment to the medical cause was such that, in 2014, when the ebola epidemic broke out in West Africa, he headed to Liberia to help contain it.
At the same time, Rosling was also engaged in another long-term project, aimed at reducing the gap between how people in the West perceive the rest of the world and its reality. Factfulness, written with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rönnlund, is part of this project (alongside the online resource Gapminder). Its aim is to enlighten those with a ‘completely outdated idea about the rest of the world’.
Factfulness is a rare thing today – a book about social, economic and environmental progress. It explores the ways in which the developing world has changed for the better in recent decades, from advances in the treatment of disease and the decline of infant-mortality rates to the increase in income and widened access to education.
Many people in the West still view the world in binary terms of rich and poor. This is, Rosling argues, a misleading way to look at things today. Take life expectancy and fertility rates, for example. In the 1960s, developed countries had high life-expectancy and low fertility rates, and developing countries had lower life-expectancy and higher fertility rates. But today, many developing countries have caught up. Even countries in sub-Saharan Africa have made progress.
Rosling recommends making layered distinctions between countries based on levels of average income. While no single measure can capture what it means for a country to develop, he argues that people’s income is the single biggest factor in determining their quality of life. Rosling delineates four categories of income, from level one, where people live on less than $2 a day, to level four, where people live on over $32 dollars a day. Most countries are in the middle, with people living on between $2 and $8 a day, or between $8 and $32 a day.
Rosling also documents the movement of countries from lower to higher income levels over time. This is where you start to get a sense of the progress humanity has made in a short period of time. Between 1990 – when the fall of the Berlin Wall kickstarted globalisation – and 2015, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty fell from 41.7 per cent to 11.6 per cent.
Factfulness makes for a refreshingly positive take on change and modernisation. And alongside the stats and data, Rosling also uses personal anecdotes to make his case for the importance of development. He recalls the day his family brought their first washing machine in 1960s Sweden: his grandmother so mesmerised by it that she pulled up a chair to watch the entire wash cycle. His mother told him, ‘The machine will do the work. So now we can go to the library.’
This book takes issue with those who think developing nations should not aspire to Western levels of consumption because of fears about global warming. Rosling once stood up to environmentalist and former US vice president Al Gore about this, when they met backstage at a TED conference in Los Angeles: Gore urged Rosling to use his statistical models to show a worst-case global-warming scenario, ‘to create fear’. But Rosling refused, saying that spreading fear tends to generate reactionary and ill-considered responses, and erodes trust in those who spread such fear.
He never dismissed the idea of global warming. Indeed, he identified it as one of five potential global problems we all should be worried about (the others being poverty, war, financial collapse and a global pandemic). But where environmentalists argue that the answer to climate change is to slow development, he said the opposite: ‘We must put our efforts into inventing new technologies that will enable 11 billion people to live the life that we should expect all of them to strive for.’
Why, then, is there such a gap between people’s perception of the world and the gradually improving reality? Rosling argues that people are predisposed to fear, negativity, a sense of destiny, and so forth. But this is more than some unshakeable human quirk: there is a growing number of academics and thinkers who argue explicitly against the sort of development that was, not too long ago, entirely uncontroversial.
In Development Theory (2010), an introductory text on the subject, Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues that ‘modernisation is no longer an obvious ambition’ in view of ‘ecological problems’ and ‘the consequences of technological change’. He should spend more time talking to people in developing countries.
Rather than talk about the transformative potential of technology and production, too many in the field of development today prefer to focus on ‘ethical consumption’ – fairtrade, recycling, using fewer plastics, and so on. People do still talk about development, but ‘sustainable development’, focused on reducing resource-use and cutting carbon emissions.
Through the narrative of sustainable development we have narrowed our minds as to what is possible. As Rosling points out, humanity has managed radically to raise living standards while taking care of the planet at the same time. Clearly, it is our imagination and political will that is the limiting factor here, not the natural resources of the Earth.
If there is one major shortcoming of Factfulness, it is that it expects too much of facts. Worldviews will not be changed by the presentation of facts. But Rosling seemed to be aware of this. As he writes here, ‘Some of the most valued and important aspects of human development cannot be measured in numbers at all’. The end goal of economic growth, he concludes, is ‘individual freedom and culture’.
Indeed, we need more than an accurate picture of the world – we need to understand what it means for a society to make progress. We need to re-inject some vision into the development debate, and stop imposing our sense of limits on other people’s aspirations for a better life. And we need development organisations, teachers and academics who will be willing to follow Rosling’s lead in educating people about global change, rather than trying to export Western pessimism to the rest of the world.
As Rosling notes, ultimately, it is the people who build their own nation. We need to allow people in the developing world to do precisely that.
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