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Beyond the clash of empires

February 25, 2022

Beyond the clash of empires

A world of living places

Empire’s law – The unbridled pursuit of power

I’ve seen this movie before.

A large and powerful nation attacks a small and weaker nation. Fiery explosions light up the night. Their thunder roars across the landscape while armored columns roll over the border. Shock and awe. Kyiv 2022. Bagdad 2003. It all looks much the same.

Empires press against each other. People are caught in the middle. In Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, to name a few of the recent battlegrounds. Roadkill in the imperial struggle for power. Leave aside the justifications and charges each side will throw against one another. The problem is as old as civilization itself. The problem is empire.

Empire has one law, one imperative. It is the unbridled pursuit of power and expansion, always ruled by an imperial class that concentrates power in its own hands. The nature of empire is to centralize as much power as possible until it sucks the life out of its vassals, its conquests, its lands, its slaves. Empires are parasites.

Empires knows no limits. Until they find them. In barbarian tribes. In other empires. In their own internal decay. They exhaust their own resources until they crumble under challenges they can no longer handle. It’s a story as old as the Akkadian empire, history’s first, beginning around 4,300 years ago, continuing through successor empires, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, and many others down to the present day.

That is what is happening in our time. Only the stakes are unprecedently high. Mesopotamian empires could fall and pass on a legacy of deserts, their formerly fertile soils salted by irrigation works. Rome could collapse and leave a time of breakdown and urban collapse in its wake. But yesterday’s empires were of limited scope…

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The American infrastructure, ancient Rome and ‘Limits to Growth’

May 23, 2021

The American infrastructure, ancient Rome and ‘Limits to Growth’

Infrastructure is the talk of the town in Washington, D.C. where I now live and with good reason. The infrastructure upon which the livelihoods and lives of all Americans depends is in sorry shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers 2021 infrastructure report card gives the United States an overall grade of C minus.

Everyone in Washington, yes, everyone, believes some sort of major investment needs to be made in our transportation, water, and sewer systems which have been sorely neglected. There are other concerns as well about our energy infrastructure and our communications infrastructure—both of which are largely in private hands. The wrangling over how much will be spent and on what is likely to go on for months.

What won’t be talked about is that the cost of maintaining our infrastructure is rising for one key reason: There’s more it every day. We keep expanding all these systems so that when they degrade and require maintenance and replacement, the cost keeps growing.

There is a lesson on this from ancient Rome. Few modern people understand that the Romans financed their expansion and government operations using the booty taken from vanquished territories. That worked until it didn’t. When Rome reached its maximum expanse, when it no longer conquered new territories, the booty stopped coming. With the borders of Rome the longest the empire had ever had to defend, it now relied primarily on taxes to finance a large army and administrative presence across the empire in order to maintain control.
Our modern-day version of booty has been cheap energy, much of it supplied by the oil, natural gas and coal fields of America and later its uranium mines…

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The Gathering Storm

July 6, 2018

The Gathering Storm

The gathering storm cannot be dissipated with propaganda and bribes.

July 4th is an appropriate day to borrow Winston Churchill’s the gathering storm to describe the existential crisis that will envelope America within the next decade. There is no single cause of the gathering storm; in complex systems, dynamics feed back into one another, and the sum of destabilizing disorder is greater than a simple sum of its parts.

Causal factors can be roughly broken into two categories: systemic and social/economic. The central illusion of those who focus solely on social, political and economic issues as the sources of destabilization is that tweaking the parameters of the status quo is all that’s needed to right the ship: if only Trump were impeached, if only GDP hits 4% annual growth rate, if only the Federal Reserve started controlling the price of bat guano, etc., etc., etc.

The unwelcome reality is the systemic issues cannot be reversed with policy tweaks or shuffling those at the top of a crumbling centralized order. The systemic problems arise from the structures of centralization and monopoly capital, theinstitutionalization of perverse incentives and the depletion of natural capital: soil, water, fossil fuels, etc.

We can create “money” out of thin air but we can’t print fresh water, productive soil or affordable energy out of thin air.

Regardless of their ideological labels, centralized socio-economic systems follow an S-Curve of rapid expansion during a “boost phase,” a period of stable expansion (maturity) and then a period of stagnation and decline as the system’s participants do more of what’s failed, as they cannot accept that what worked so well in the past no longer works.

A successful model traps those within it; escape becomes impossible. That’s the lesson of the S-Curve:

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Here’s Why the Status Quo Is Doomed

September 17, 2015

Here’s Why the Status Quo Is Doomed

The problem is the Status Quo only works in a world with plenty of room to expand.

The central illusion of this era is that the Status Quo can be reformed or saved.All we need to do is (or so we’re told):

1. Get money out of politics

2. Re-impose the Glass-Steagall Act on banking

3. Close the tax loopholes exploited by corporations and the wealthy

4. Overturn the Supreme Court decision giving corporations personhood

5. Restrict the Imperial War Powers of the president

6. Restore the civil liberties stripped by post-9/11 legislation

and so on. All good-governance, all prudent, all necessary.

But none of these reforms–or any of the other good-governance tweaks habitually promoted by left, right, center and Libertarian–can save the Status Quo. For what’s wrong with the Status Quo is systemic: tweaking rules and limiting excesses may make us feel like we’ve accomplished something useful, but that sense of accomplishment is illusory.

The problem is the Status Quo only works in a world with plenty of room to expand–a world of virgin resources ripe for exploitation (oops, I mean development), easy-to-extract abundant energy, and an expanding population with rising productivity and little debt.

In this world, there’s plenty of room for everything to expand: resource extraction, energy consumption, population, productivity, income and debt.

This is a world optimized for growth: there is so much material and labor capital available, enormous quantities can be squandered on wars, mal-investment, elite excesses and plain old waste.

The world optimized for growth begins with little or no debt. Debt, as we know, is a way to consume future earnings today. If $1 in income can be leveraged into $10 of debt, the worker earning the $1 can consume $10 of goods and services today, or buy $10 of assets.

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The Fifth Wave (Part Two)

May 19, 2015

The Fifth Wave (Part Two)

The Third Wave

The next wave of conservation, which stirred after World War II, had two principal components: an emphasis on science and a focus on private land. This was no accident—these components represented important shortcomings of the previous two waves. Federalism, by definition, focused on public lands, which meant that one-half of the American West—its privately owned land—had been largely neglected by the conservation movement. This became a pressing concern after the war as the suburban and exurban development of private land sped up considerably. Meanwhile, the rise of ecology and other environmental disciplines meant that data and scientific study could now complement, and sometimes supplant, the emotional and romantic nature of environmentalism. An illustrative example is the rise and growth of the Nature Conservancy, a landmark nonprofit organization that is now one of the largest conservation groups in the world.

In 1946, a small group of scientists in New England formed an organization called the Ecologists Union with the goal of saving threatened natural areas on private land, especially biological hot spots that contained important native plant and animal species. The protection of biologically significant parcels of land had traditionally been the job of the federal government, state wildlife agencies, or private hunting and fishing groups. Parks, forests, refuges, wilderness areas, and game preserves were the dominant means by which protection was provided to critical areas in the years leading up to World War II. But a growing number of scientists believed this strategy wasn’t sufficient any longer because it largely overlooked privately owned property—land that was rapidly being paved over in the postwar boom.

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Oil And The Global Slowdown | Peak Prosperity

December 5, 2014

Oil And The Global Slowdown | Peak Prosperity.

The world economy is slowing down and the authorities are fretting.

Japan, Italy, and Greece are all in recession. China is slowing down according to official statistics, and even more according to whispered accounts.

Germany, France and the Netherlands are all at stall speed.

According to the BLS, the United States is doing just great at nearly 4% growth for two straight quarters, but you wouldn’t know that either from the quality of the few jobs being created (which is low) or from consumer spending (also low).

The worry, as always, has nothing to do with the central banks’ concern for you, your job, your children, the actual prices you pay, wealth equality, or the future, and everything to do with the simple fact that the stability of the banking system absolutely depends on a steady stream of new loans.

The problem, as always, is that we have a monetary system that is either expanding or collapsing. It has no steady state.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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