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When nobody cares that systems have broken down and there is no will or interest in fixing essential systems, there is no happy ending. Who fixes systems when they break down? The answer appears to be: nobody. Here are three everyday examples from my own life, breakdowns which may be random and rare but which the odds suggest are systemic.

Only those societies which still have a functional public interest / common good will survive; those ruled by the tyranny of self-interest discussed the moral rot consuming the American Project in blog posts and my books. This moral rot–perhaps better described as civic decay–is so pervasive and ubiquitous that we are forgiven for assuming “this is the way it’s always been.”

Thank you very much for considering this beggar’s banquet. OK, I get it: money’s tight. A great many bets and certainties have turned to dust. 401K accounts have been decimated and the level of uncertainty about the future is pegged to 11.

The sooner we start preparing for degrowth, the better off we’ll be. A Chinese proverb captures this succinctly: By the time you’re thirsty, it’s too late to dig a well. Let’s consider livelihood options in an unsustainable economy of extremes that are unraveling, an economy that is being forced to transition to Degrowth.

The realization that we’re not actually being represented at the federal level has eroded the consent of the governed for the national government. The foundation of any government is the consent of the governed. Democracies and republics are founded on the consent of the governed earned via representational or direct democracy: those who have a say and a stake in the system will give their consent to the government, even if an opposing view is in the majority because their opinion is part of the governance structure.

Our economy is not resilient or antifragile, it’s a fragile sand castle of debt and denial. What could go off the cliff that hasn’t already gone off the cliff?

The right of free speech should not be confused with an obligation for privately owned enterprises to allow spamming and spoofing under the guise of free speech. The problem of bots on Twitter is in the news. This is of course a problem in all social media: fake accounts, spamming accounts, spoofing (expropriating your identity) accounts, and so on, all courtesy of anonymous account creation.

Burnout makes everyone uncomfortable, so it’s largely a silent epidemic. Epidemics are not just biological in origin. A strong case can be made that a silent epidemic has been sweeping the nation for years, an epidemic few acknowledge: burnout.

The decline phase of S-Curves can be gradual or a cliff-dive. Way back in 2007 I charted five long-wave cycles that I reckoned consequential: 1. Public debt (accumulating federal deficits) 2. Inflation 3. Oil (energy) 4. Interest rates 5. Speculative fever

All these curveballs will further fragment the housing market. Oh for the good old days of a nice, clean housing bubble and bust as in 2004-2011: subprime lending expanded the pool of buyers, liar loans and loose credit created speculative leverage, the Federal Reserve provided excessive liquidity and the watchdogs of the industry were either induced (ahem) to look away or dozed off in a haze of gross incompetence.

The casino has become complex and there are no easy answers or predictable paths. The Wall Street herd had it easy from 2009 to 2021. Life was simple and life was good: markets were easy to predict. As long as the Federal Reserve kept interest rates near-zero and increased its balance sheet to buy Treasury bonds, the stock market rose.

I’m simply pointing out “money” isn’t simple, and “backing money with X” leads to questions about the nature of “money,” collateral and the fluidity and complexity of the social construct we call “money.” The problem with money is it isn’t just one thing. We think it’s one thing because we use it to buy things, but it’s actually a bunch of different things. This is why I often refer to it as “money:”

Those glancing at the appearances will be assured all is well and it will all sort itself out. Those who look behind the screen will move away as fast as they can. When finances tighten, there are two choices: cut expenses or increase revenues.

What if all the new consensus memes are as wrong as the ones they replaced? I have the Contrarian Curse, and I have it bad. The Contrarian Curse is: as soon as the herd adopts your previously contrarian view, you start questioning the new consensus, just as you questioned the previous consensus.

We are all prone to believing the recent past is a reliable guide to the future. But in times of dynamic reversals, the past is an anchor thwarting our progress, not a forecast. Are we heading into another real estate bubble / crash? Those who say “no” see the housing shortage as real, while those who say “yes” see the demand as a reflection of the Federal Reserve’s artificial goosing of the housing market via its unprecedented purchases of mortgage-backed securities and “easy money” financial conditions.

All of these similarities and differences are setting up a sea-change revaluation of capital, resources and labor that will be on the same scale as the extraordinary transitions of the 1920s and 1970s. The awakening of inflation after decades of slumber has triggered a flurry of comparisons to the 1970s accompanied by a chorus of projections for 1970s-type stagflation, defined as inflation plus economic stagnation– limited or negative growth and high unemployment.

If we can’t discern the difference between doom-porn and investing in self-reliance, then solutions will continue to be out of reach. I’m often accused of calling 783 of the last two bubble pops (or was it 789? Forgive the imprecision).

This may be one of many revaluations of capital vis a vis labor and resources and core vis a vis periphery. You’ve heard the expression “cash is king.” Very true. But it’s equally true that “crash is king:” when speculative excesses collapse under their own extremes, the crash crushes all other narratives and becomes the dominant dynamic.

So sorry, but “you’ll own nothing and be miserable–oops, we mean happy, yes, deliriously happy” doesn’t count as a solution. The global economy is perched on the edge of an abyss, and averting our gaze doesn’t actually lessen the risk, it increases it because problems which aren’t faced directly and addressed directly fester and rot the system from within.