Newfie wrote:Lucky,
I am a bit perplexed over your take on social obligations. ... when you say “China” you really mean the government, damn the people. Sorta takes the “social” out of “Socialisim.”
I kinda like the idea of a country where there is a web of support. But, as always, none of us really have a clue about the future in any detail, we just all agree it looks kinds bleak, at best.
Thanks to the many energy slaves (first real humans, now machines powered by fossil fuels) the use of complex technologies became democratic the first time during human history. Everyone who worked hard enough could’ve bought a car and a house. Food was cheap and widely available. People had a similar access to goods and thus felt they deserve equal rights. This process gave rise to human rights movements, democracies and individual freedom. For a while at least things were allowed to go in a self-organizing manner.
Given the fact that both human nature and our resource use are driven by the maximum power principle, however, western civilization fell into the same old civilizational trap as its many predecessors, repeating the same old pattern all over again. It started with discovering a new resource (fertile land, coal, oil, uranium etc.) and mining it to exhaustion. Then it went on by pretending that depletion is not a problem at all, while kicking the can down the road ever more desperately.
As resources and energy started to stagnate (and soon decline) so will technology use become ever more limited to an ever smaller, ever more privileged elite class. Again. Since the maintenance of such technologies will still require massive hierarchies, democratic self organization will be no longer enough. First resource extraction then manufacturing will become more autocratic, then outright dictatorial. Say goodby to worker rights, adequate pay, and a social safety net. Those who have the keys to the grain store, the access to oil fields, lithium or copper deposits, or those who can decide which neighborhood gets electricity by flipping a switch, will have the power and control over the population. Just like any other time before.
Not that it could’ve happened any other way. Beyond a certain point every civilization becomes wholly unsustainable, due to the fact that they always use up an accumulated resource wealth much faster than it could regenerate. Our industrial capitalist civilization is no exception. Its history follows the same arc as all of its predecessors. And just like in ancient times instead of looking for an “exit strategy” by attempting to dismantle what is wholly unsustainable in an effort to soften the blow somewhat, we will get more fairy tales of how the next bout of prosperity is just around the corner, or how we just need to elect the right leader promising to bring back the ‘good old days’...
yellowcanoe wrote:People seem to think that technology will save us. It's actually the other way around - technology has enabled us to use resources at an ever increasing rate and thus hasten the day when we hit a wall.
Do you remember how we imagined what “degrowth” would be? A world of small communities practicing social equality and sustainability. Sorts of Hobbit villages, but with some technology included, just to make sure that you can still connect to the Web. In Italy, we even refer to it as “Happy Degrowth.”
But, as time goes on, we see that degrowth has a different and darker face. The face of the newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, with his antics and tirades against the enemies of the people. It comes with the promise to dismantle everything we thought was granted in our world, all in the name of defending the people from the evils of socialism and communism while at the same time restarting economic growth. No such silly things as “degrowth” are involved, and climate change is a socialist lie.
Milei is just the most vocal and extreme example of an upcoming wave of extreme right politicians, whom we usually call “populists.” He claims to be an economist, but his proposals are based mainly on a mix of slogans, platitudes, and legends. Just as an example, in a recent interview, he launched himself into a tirade against the Club of Rome, accusing it of having predicted with their “Limits to Growth” study that fossil fuels would have run out by the year 2000 and that by now we should all have been dead. And, instead, we are two billion people more than when the prediction was made, in 1972. Didn’t you notice that, you silly communists who pretend to be ecologists?
The story of the “wrong predictions” of the Club of Rome is one of the many legends that surround the Limits to Growth study. But it is among the most resilient ones, so much that some 50 years after it appeared, it is still widely believed. It was useless that some poor guy (your humble author, U.B.) wrote an entire book, “The Limits to Growth Revisited” debunking it. It was also useless that several other quantitative evaluations (e.g. by Graham Turner, Gaya Herrington, and Nebel et al) confirmed the correctness of the basic scenarios of the study. What can mere scientific studies do against slogans spoken with absolute certainty on TV? Unfortunately, Mr. Milei is a typical politician whose primary instinct leads him to search for a culprit for all problems. If that leads him to re-propose old and debunked legends, well, that’s the way to be elected president of Argentina, apparently.
If collapse is an unavoidable destiny for these systems, it doesn’t mean people can’t try to do something to avoid it, but they usually worsen the situation. It was noted long ago, and it is called “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.” An example: everyone is noticing that the quality of the public health-care system of most Western States is getting worse and worse. It is a consequence of having fewer resources available and also of bureaucracy having accumulated well above the levels that the system can sustain. If left to itself, the system will nicely go through the Seneca cycle and vanish into thin air. But governments may think of doing something to avoid that.
The political Left will typically try to maintain the system output by making it more efficient and eliminating such things as corruption and incompetence. That implies more regulations, laws, guidelines, assessments, and the like...
The political Right will typically slash down the input of financial resources into the health system and let it decline or collapse, probably faster than it would do if left to itself. This is called “optimization”...
The difference between these two options is not large. Most governments will do both: they will increase bureaucracy AND slash down services, all in the name of doing a favor to the people. They don’t have a choice: shuffling the remaining resources from one subsystem to the other changes nothing. The whole system is desperately short of resources and has to shrink. And shrink it will, no matter what populist or socialist governments proclaim. (The collapse of our health care system is simply degrowth)
So, Javier Milei is acting as a “slave of history,” as Tolstoy termed kings and rulers. He is pushing Argentina in the direction where the country is slated to go: down the cliff. It won’t solve any problem; on the contrary, it will generate much worse ones than those Argentina already has. But, to give Milei his due, at least he clearly stated what he wanted to do and those who voted for him can’t complain for whatever is going to hit them as a consequence. It is also a good thing that Milei doesn’t seem to plan military attacks against other countries. That doesn’t mean he won’t transform Argentina into a police state, as is typical of populist dictators. But that will make little difference to a future that doesn’t look good.
Milei is showing us the ugly face of degrowth. His aggressive style and substance seem to be as far as possible from the gentle attitude of the typical supporters of degrowth. But they all make the same mistake: they neglect the fact that a complex system is a beast that needs energy, and if you starve it, it will die. Before it dies, it has plenty of chances to become nasty. Very nasty. Milei is an initial manifestation of this nastiness. Things could considerably worsen in the future. Degrowth will definitely not be happy...
theluckycountry wrote:Milei is an initial manifestation of this nastiness.
theluckycountry wrote:The Dark Face of Degrowth: Argentine's President, Javier Milei
yellowcanoe wrote:The large influx of immigrants, temporary foreign workers and international students seems to be having the effect of reducing gdp per capita as well as overwhelming our medical system and driving up the cost of housing.
mousepad wrote:yellowcanoe wrote:The large influx of immigrants, temporary foreign workers and international students seems to be having the effect of reducing gdp per capita as well as overwhelming our medical system and driving up the cost of housing.
You forgot to add that they also irreversibly alter the identity of the nation, destroy tradition and social cohesion, increase anxiety and require a more and more strongarm state to keep the peace. You add in the woke identity politics, which turbo charges all those issues and you truly have to wonder what people are thinking when opening the floodgates.
Maybe a small consolation is that people get what they vote for and therefore get what they deserve.
yellowcanoe wrote:theluckycountry wrote:The Dark Face of Degrowth: Argentine's President, Javier Milei
What's interesting about Argentina is that perhaps 100 years ago, there was a belief that both Canada and Argentina had a bright future ahead of them. Some thought that Argentina would actually do better than Canada!
https://www.gao.gov/blog/are-we-really- ... challengesThe U.S. spends billions of dollars to train and equip foreign security forces in order to address global threats such as terrorism and narcotics trafficking. But is this assistance working?
theluckycountry wrote:yellowcanoe wrote:theluckycountry wrote:The Dark Face of Degrowth: Argentine's President, Javier Milei
What's interesting about Argentina is that perhaps 100 years ago, there was a belief that both Canada and Argentina had a bright future ahead of them. Some thought that Argentina would actually do better than Canada!
And it probably would have had it been in the "Club". But it wasn't part of the British Empire, it's function was to provide raw materials to the Empires, not benefit from them. It doesn't even have to be direct exchange of stuff either, Economic policies, Currency valuations, these are the tools used to exploit nations in the modern world. Get them indebted to your currency and then devalue theirs. All you have to do is pay off the right officials in the host nation.
yellowcanoe wrote:Argentina acquired independence from Spain in 1816 so they have been free from the impact of colonization far longer than Canada and Australia have. Alas, it didn't seem to help them.
Holding political power for decades, Venezuela's traditional political parties up to the 1998 election were dyed-in the-wool “crony capitalists,” with politicians growing rich in deals with the nation's "private" oil companies. As they grew rich, much of the population struggled in semi-poverty.
theluckycountry wrote:yellowcanoe wrote:Argentina acquired independence from Spain in 1816 so they have been free from the impact of colonization far longer than Canada and Australia have. Alas, it didn't seem to help them.
So the population was poor before Hugo, semi-poor, but still had abundant food. The modern imperialist system isn't cruel, it's just greedy. Those “crony capitalists” were connected, they did ok. But after Hugo Chavez decided to break from the imperialists (America now) and keep all the profits at home the place was marginalized by the West and collapsed into abject poverty. You could blame hugo chavez's socialism but Australia is just as socialist, the Government here doles out vast amounts of social welfare and provides all the roads and rail and much of the hospital care. Doctor's visits are heavily subsidized and so are key medicines.
No it's not socialism that destroyed Venezuela, or the greed of the new leader Maduro. It's simply the fact that they wanted to control their own destiny and that's not allowed.
yellowcanoe wrote: My step-daughter's motherinlaw was surprised to find that she could not buy milk on a trip back to Venezuela even though she was in the part of the country where the dairy industry had been centered. The problem is that what farmers had to sell their milk for didn't cover their production costs. Petro wealth can be very destructive to a country. One oil producing country that managed to avoid that fate is Norway. They have been able to benefit enormously from their oil wealth without destroying the rest of their economy. They were able to do that by having a robust democracy, good rule of law and a very low level of corruption before their oil/gas wealth was discovered.
The term Dutch disease was coined by The Economist magazine in 1977 when the publication analyzed a crisis that occurred in The Netherlands after the discovery of vast natural gas deposits in the North Sea in 1959. The newfound wealth and massive exports of oil caused the value of the Dutch guilder to rise sharply, making Dutch exports of all non-oil products less competitive on the world market. Unemployment rose from 1.1% to 5.1%, and capital investment in the country dropped.
ralfy wrote:"If everyone lived in an ‘ecovillage’, the Earth would still be in trouble"
https://theconversation.com/if-everyone ... uble-43905
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