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Future Shock and the Greening of America

June 19, 2015

Future Shock and the Greening of America

What I find fascinating is our limited ability to make sense of trends unfolding in real time.

During our recent breakfast meeting in Berkeley, author/blogger Jim Kunstler suggested that the coherence of eras waxed and waned, and the present era was incoherent. By this he meant the narratives being propagated by the status quo no longer align with reality, and often conflict with one another, resulting in incoherence.

There is a time lag of many years between fast-changing events and our ability to make sense of them, i.e. construct a coherent account or narrative of what we collectively experienced.

Each era has its Big Events and trends, but the last era with truly ground-shifting changes that affected virtually everyone in the nation in one way or another was the 1960s. 9/11 increased airport security but other than that, the changes wrought by the Global War on Terror (GWOT) only heavily impact narrow slices of the state and populace–the armed forces and security agencies.

The same can be said of the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09: the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) destroyed the yield on savings, but the daily-life effects on most people have been relatively restrained compared to far more disruptive eras; some have seen their portfolios skyrocket in value, but most households have seen their real net worth decline. Social welfare did its job of providing a safety net for those who lost their jobs in the recession.

The 1960s visibly changed society in a few short years, and less visibly, the economy. Two books published in 1970, at the end of the tumultuous 1960s, attempted to weave a coherent narrative of what everyone was experiencing: Future Shock and The Greening of America.

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