Revenge of the Real World
The status quo response would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so dire.
Rather than stare at empty shelves, you have two options for distraction: you can don a virtual-reality headset and cavort with dolphins in the metaverse, or you can trade various forms of phantom wealth that always go up (happy happy!) because the Fed.
Neither distraction actually solves any real-world problems, a reality we can call the Revenge of the Real World We’ve entered a peculiar phase in American history in which illusions of wealth and control are the favored distractions from the unraveling of the real world economy and social order.
Printing trillions of currency units can’t restore the global supply chain or social cohesion, Rather, jacking phantom wealth to the moon is only accelerating the collapse of the social order and the economy even as it accomplishes absolutely nothing in terms of solving real-world problems.
Let’s start with the core economic realities of the 21st century:
1. The number of high-consumption (“middle class”) people doubled from 1 billion to 2 billion. The human populace has expanded to 7.9 billion individuals, but poor people who don’t have enough money to consume large quantities of energy, goods and services delivered by the global supply chain don’t have much of an impact on global consumption of energy and resources. It’s the number of people jetting around the world playing their part in the landfill economy (toss the old one, buy a new one) who drive “growth” (i.e. waste is growth).
Strangely enough, there are actual physical limits to resources being transformed into junk being dumped in the landfills. Humanity’s rapacious appetite for stuff has extracted all the cheap-to-extract resources and now all that’s left are the increasingly expensive-to-extract resources.
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