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What Optimism and Pessimism Are in the 21st Century, a Reflection on “Are We Doomed?,” And Two Narratives of the Human Journey

April 16, 2024

What Optimism and Pessimism Are in the 21st Century, a Reflection on “Are We Doomed?,” And Two Narratives of the Human Journey

Quick Links and Fresh Thinking

‘Things I’m ashamed to admit’: TikTok trend driving new level of oversharing (The Guardian)
How the Ray-Ban Wayfarer became the accessory of choice for the men-children of the world (El Pais)
Why We’re All Still Waiting for the EV Future (Inc)
US will push China to change a policy threatening American jobs, Treasury Secretary Yellen says (AP News)
Assessing the health burden from air pollution (Science)

Hi! How’s everyone? Thank you for joining me, and welcome new readers.

Today we’re going to discuss… “are we doomed?!” That’s the kind of dismal, reductive framing that’s emerged around an issue that deserves better—decline, degeneration, the rise of a number of troubling trends, all at once.

Let’s reflect on this sort of question together, beginning with…

Exhibit One In: “Are We Doomed?”

Did that make you shudder a little bit? If you don’t quite get the point, let me spell it out.

Right about now, climate scientists are a little horrified, bewildered, and perplexed. We’re in “uncharted territory,” and warming’s outpacing models, sometimes by a very long way. It was recently 40 degrees Centigrade in…Antarctica.

Meanwhile, the average person is less and less likely to believe that this is real, aka, there’s such a thing as human-made climate change. In the last few years alone, the number’s grown significantly, and over a quarter now believe that climate change is due to “natural causes, up from just 14%. That’s not an absolutely high number in itself, but the trend is striking, disturbing, and sort of mega-troubling: increasing numbers of people are climate deniers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are We in the Early Stages of Civilizational Collapse? Plus, the Future of the Economy, and Why the World is Going Crazy

March 24, 2024

Are We in the Early Stages of Civilizational Collapse? Plus, the Future of the Economy, and Why the World is Going Crazy

The other day, as I was doing my daily reading, I came across climate scientists, debating whether or not we faced civilizational collapse. It was interesting, and I want to take a sec to give you my perspective, which is that of an economist slash top 50 thinkers guy, guru, whatever you want to call it etcetera.

Collapse. Think of a top spinning. How does it stop? It destabilizes. That’s the same model we should apply to us. So what destabilizes our human organizations, the largest of which is a civilization—leading to the loss of momentum, the breakdown, that ends in collapse?

And here, collapse isn’t a sci-fi film. Tomorrow, it’s the End of the World. The Roman Empire took centuries to fully collapse. The Soviet Union took decades to become what Russia is today. And so on. We’re talking about a process, that takes from decades to centuries, then, not a sudden sort of blockbuster film overnight melodrama. The tragedy of collapse is written across generations.

So. Destabilization. Long-term. What causes it?

The Future of the Economy

The economy. It’s the very first thing we should look at to think about this question.

And the economic picture before us is as clear as it is dire. What were we just discussing yesterday? How inflation is the primary destabilizer of modern polities. So what’s the future of the economy?

We’re in for a lost decade, plus. The global economy’s projected to stagnate for the next decade, but even beyond that, there are no real sources of easy growth left. We’ve made war on each other, pillaged the world, and destroyed the planet…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Next Ten Years and the Fate of Civilization, Why We’re at a Crossroads in History, Plus, What Broken Ages End In

March 16, 2024

The Next Ten Years and the Fate of Civilization, Why We’re at a Crossroads in History, Plus, What Broken Ages End In

(Why) We’re at a Crossroads in History

It’s hard to believe, but we’re almost halfway through the 2020s. It’s the year 2024, and…how would you say things are going? For us, whether as societies, the world, a civilization, human beings?

I often say that we’re at a turning point or crossroads in human history. I think that sometimes people imagine I mean this metaphorically. But I don’t. I mean it literally. It’s almost halfway through the 2020s, and we’re at a turning point in human history, right now.

This year, the next one, the rest of this decade. They’ll determine the trajectory we’re all on, collectively, for decades to come, and perhaps longer. Think of the next year, two, five, as a hinge, that’ll determine whether history swings up—or down.

Today we’re going to talk about just how—and why—a little bit.

This year is a crucial one for democracy, if you haven’t heard already. An unusually large number of elections are taking place. But it’s hardly just that. In a very specific context, and not a sunny one. Democracy’s barely hanging on by its fingernails, at just 20% of the world fully so, and dropping like a rock. Meanwhile, these elections are also, therefore, unusually crucial. Like America’s choice in November, between Trump’s overt authoritarianism, and Biden’s nascent path towards, perhaps, modernizing a decrepit America. The EU will vote for its parliament, too, in June, and we’ll see if its rightwards drift continues. And many more.

What does all that mean, though? The central questions are: will history repeat itself? Will growing fissures of collapse become jagged cracks, fragmenting our civilization itself? Are we going to choose implosion or reinvention?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Alarm Bells of Civilizational Collapse Are Ringing — But Are We Listening?

October 4, 2022

The Alarm Bells of Civilizational Collapse Are Ringing — But Are We Listening?

If Our Civilization Is Going to Survive, It’s Going to Have to Change Like This — Fast

Right about now, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. With all the chaos out there. This is the Age of Too Much Chaos. Every day brings a new catastrophe, it seems, and with it, an ever-mounting sense of dread, urgency, anger, and helplessness — the weird, upsetting feelings of now. End Times Vibes.

How to make sense of all this? I bet you’re struggling, and that’s OK, because me and a friend are here to help.

My friend? He just gave the most important speech of the 21st century, containing the most crucial idea of the 21st century — only nobody was listening.

I know, I know. You doubt me. Don’t worry, by the end of this, I guarantee — you won’t. Instead, your mind will be blown.

Here’s what he has to say.

We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.

The international community is not ready or willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age. These crises threaten the very future of humanity and the fate of our planet.

Got that? Let’s keep going.

Let’s have no illusions. We are in rough seas. A winter of global discontent is on the horizon. A cost-of-living crisis is raging. Trust is crumbling. Inequalities are exploding. Our planet is burning. People are hurting — with the most vulnerable suffering the most.

Hey, he sounds like a lot like…you, Umair, I bet you’re thinking. So who is my friend? Well, he’s not really my friend. He’s the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Those are his opening remarks to the General Assembly, this year. Lol, and you think you have bad mornings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Winter, Collapse Is Coming to Britain

September 5, 2022

This Winter, Collapse Is Coming to Britain

Britain Is Standing at the Edge of Social Collapse’s Abyss — And It’s About to Jump

These days, my British friends ask me the same question, with the same faint tinge of terror in their voices. “So. How bad is it going to be?” What they mean is…well, let me try to explain why they’re asking.

Right about now, Britain’s setting records. Not good ones. It’s the rich world’s worst performing country in a stunning multitude of regards — falling incomes, crashing economy, skyrocketing inflation, dwindling confidence and optimism. Twice as many people died in Britain this summer of Covid than they did last summer. They were mostly elderly people, and that’s a parable for what modern Britain’s become: a stunningly cruel, indifferent, embittered society, inured to the grim reality of its own collapse.

Britain is the world’s preeminent bellwether of social collapse at this point in history. No nation in the rich world — and barely any in the poor one, really — come close. The rest of the world is dusting itself off after a rough few years, and restarting the engines of progress. But in Britain? Well, the engines of regress are pumping. Literally — sewage into the rivers. What kind of country wants to cover itself in its own — never mind.

For some reason that the world can’t quite fathom, Britain has decided to turn itself a kind of Neo Victorian dystopia, by way of American style ultra libertarianism. Think about how baffling and strange this really is for a moment. The nation that was renowned for its NHS and BBC, which invented the idea of the public park and the modern public library and museum. Now? It’s the kind of place with would make Dickens entire cast of villains, from Uriah Heep to Fagin, cackle in morbid glee.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Things Feel Bleak Because This Way of Life is Coming to an End

November 8, 2021

Things Feel Bleak Because This Way of Life is Coming to an End

The Lesson of 2021 is Either We Change — or Things Collapse Around Us

Here’s a tiny question. What is the lesson Covid is trying to teach us? As we settle in to a new normal, where Covid is going permanent, and there’s not much anyone can do about it except the billionaires who could vaccinate the world, but won’t — what should we be learning?

I think of Covid as a message backwards, from the future. And it says something like this. Life as you knew it is now over. The future is now going to become a bitter and bruising battle for the basics. The basics. Air, water, food, medicine, energy. Things that many of us once took for granted, and assumed would simply be around, as if by magic.

That age is now coming to an end. Did you ever think that breathable air would be in short supply? Where you have to wear a mask, because the air could infect you with a respiratory virus? That is what the future looks like, except for all the basics.

Another way to say that is that a certain way of life is now coming to an end.

To make that point, let me ask the question: why have Eastern countries done better on Covid than Western ones? What does that teach us about the future? Well, the first thing it teaches us that money and power and history are no guarantee of success in this battle for basics that the future is now about. Maybe the rich can buy clean air — but a whole society? Forget it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Future of the World Economy is Perma-Crisis

October 17, 2021

The Future of the World Economy is Perma-Crisis

These Aren’t Shortages — They’re the Beginning of the Longest, Hardest Economic Collapse in History

Sshh, don’t tell anyone. In my other life, I’m a musician. I’m lucky enough to be working with a vocalist who many of you’ve probably heard of. Her voice is magic. It’ll give you goosebumps and chills when she sings. After a few songs together, I scratched my head. Nothing I could do in the computer, in the studio, could improve that magical voice. So we thought: what we should do was buy a really good microphone and amplifiers that suited this set of songs especially. Off I went — and little did I know.

I looked, and looked, and looked. Sold out — everywhere. Not one to be found. They hadn’t made any for three months, six months. ETA? Nobody could say. I scratched my head again. Now what? Meanwhile, outside her house, in London, people were “brawling” — that’s polite British-speak for “rioting” — over gas.

That’s a tiny slice of life right about now. What’s it made of? Shortages. Here are just a few of the things — simple things — I’ve tried to buy. Sorry, no luck. A desk — lumber’s in short supply. Electronics — chips are famously in shortage. A car — good luck with that. Some basic studio stuff — an amplifier. Who knows when they’re even going to resume production?

It’s not just me, because it can’t be. Shortages are so widespread now that, like I said, they’re “brawling” in London over gas. Meanwhile, they can’t get milk, vials for blood tests. There’s talk of energy shortages this winter. In America, it’s cars and gadgets and computers.

Suddenly, things have changed. It’s not the same anymore. Welcome to the End of the Age of Cheap Stuff.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Everything is Suddenly Getting More Expensive — And Why It Won’t Stop

October 7, 2021

Why Everything is Suddenly Getting More Expensive — And Why It Won’t Stop

Welcome to the Great Inflation — Or, Why We Have to Pay for the Hidden Costs of the Industrial Age

It’s not just me. It’s probably you, too. Have you noticed that it’s starting to be hard to just…get stuff? If you’ve tried buying a car lately, you might have observed that even used car prices have climbed to relatively astronomical levels. The same is beginning to hold true for good after good — from electronics to energy. What’s going on here?

I have some bad news, and I have some…well…worse news. We’re at the beginning of of an era in economic history that’ll probably come to be known as the Great Inflation.

Prices are going to rise, probably exponentially, over the course of the next few decades. The reason for that’s simple: everything, more or less, has been artificially cheap. The costs of everything from carbon to fascism to ecological collapse to social fracture haven’t been factored in — ever, from the beginning of the industrial age. But that age is now coming to a sudden, climactic, explosive end. The problem is that, well, we’re standing in the way.

Let me explain, with an example. I was looking for a microphone for a singer I’m working with. I was shocked to read that a well-know German microphone company had just…stopped making them. And furloughed all its workers. It didn’t say why — but it didn’t need to. The reason’s obvious. Steel prices are rising, and they’re going to to keep rising, because energy prices are rising. Then there’s the by now infamous “chip shortage,” chips they probably rely on, too. Add all that up, and bang — you’ve got an historic company suddenly imploding.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This is How a Civilization Collapses

June 29, 2021

This is How a Civilization Collapses

What Does a Civilization That’s Beginning to Collapse Look Like? This, Here, Now

“You don’t seriously think…civilization…is going to…collapse? Do you? LOL! Dude!! Here, have a beer!” It’s a question I get asked these days, sometimes angrily, sometimes mockingly, sometimes like I’m crazy — rarely seriously. My answer — said as gently as I can — tends to go something like this.

What exactly do you imagine “civilizational collapse” is? This strange, sci-fi term you might be hearing more and more, by overly concerned and earnest people like…well…me? Maybe you think, having watched too many Hollywood movies, and enjoyed them, like me, that it’s 2012 meets the Purge by way of Noah. Hold on — but isn’t reality far outpacing fiction these days?

What does a “civilizational collapse” look like? It looks like this. Here and now. It’s staring you right in the face. What a civilizational collapse looks like is beginning to happen already. America, China, India, Australia, Britain — it’s happening everywhere, in every way, too, economic, political, social, cultural, and ecological. Life as you and I think of it will never go back to anything that we still wrongly consider “normal.” And yet most of us go on as if…it will.

The last couple of years. That’s civilizational collapse. At least the beginnings of it. A global pandemic made worse by our nationalism, selfishness, and incompetence. A fascist political movement in America that shows no signs of slowing down. A working class that seems to be rejecting democracy, almost worldwide. China with a million — or maybe three, who really knows? — in concentration camps. Billionaires getting richer during a pandemic — who could easily pay to vaccinate the world, but don’t lift a finger. Need I go on? …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Price of Empire

January 19, 2019

The Price of Empire

Why America and Britain Are Self-Destructing (And What the World Can Learn From it)

It’s a striking fact of today’s world that the two rich societies in shocking, swift, sharp decline are America and Britain. Nowhere else in the world, for example, are real income, life expectancy, happiness, and trust all plummeting, apart from maybe Venezuela (No, “but at least we’re not Venezuela!” is not the bar to aim for, my friends.) Their downfall is, of course, a self-inflicted catastrophe. But the interesting question is: why? And what does it tell us about what it takes to prosper and thrive in the 21st century, which is something that America and Britain clearly aren’t doing, and maybe aren’t capable of doing?

Here’s an equally curious observation. America and Britain aren’t just any countries. They are the former hegemons of the world’s most powerful empires. Britain, until the first half of the 20th century, and America, picking up where Britain left off. Is this just a strange cosmic coincidence — that it is the two greatest empires of the most recent past who are the ones seemingly most incapable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century? There aren’t coincidences that great, my friends. Such tides of history always whisper lessons to be learned. What is this one trying to urgently teach us?

That there is a price to empire. A grave and ruinous one. And that price has grown over the centuries — so high that now, it is not worth paying anymore.Let me explain what I mean — because it is not just about spending too much money and grasping too high. Not at all. It is about the kind of a place and people such a country ends up limited to being — and perhaps can then never really easily outgrow.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Societies Collapse: Or, The Eerie Parallels Between Rome, Nazi Germany, and America

February 28, 2018

How Societies Collapse: Or, The Eerie Parallels Between Rome, Nazi Germany, and America

A little reflection occurs to me every time I write about American collapse.

Societies collapse in much the same way — there is something like a universal way of collapse. Yet the whole problem begins with the fact that human beings, having needy egos, find their own downfall difficult to accept.

Perhaps you yourself will object — you are a mighty citizen of a proud society. Ah. Do you think the Incas, Mayas, Romans, or Nazis ever thought they obeyed the laws of history? Of course not. Becoming a powerful society makes us vulnerable to collapse because it leaves us puffed up with hubris. “We shall never fall!”, we cry, “our thousand-year reign has barely begun!”

To think one is above history is precisely where collapse begins — people who don’t understand how societies fall can’t do a whole lot to stop it. We begin the story of how a society falls thus: there is an almost hysterical atmosphere of denial that it ever could.

Step one. The economy stagnates. Life becomes harder and meaner. An atmosphere of cruelty permeates. But elites must deny stagnation— otherwise, they have admitted that they have failed: in this way, a social contract never gets repaired.

Step two. Neighbour turns on neighbour for a constant share of a dwindling pie. They must compete more and more viciously to maintain the living standards of their parents and grandparents. Social bonds blow apart. Norms begin to disintegrate.

Step three. Growing ever more anxious and desperate, seeking a truce in what has become an unwinnable battle for survival, people turn to strongmen, glorified thugs, revelling in indecency, thus flaunting their power over broken norms and failed social contract.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

January 25, 2018

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Economics Failed the Economy

November 11, 2017

How Economics Failed the Economy

The Difficult Art of Reckoning With the Human Good

When, in the 1930s, the great economist Simon Kuznets created GDP, he deliberately left two industries out of this then novel, revolutionary idea of a “national income”: finance and advertising. Don’t worry, this essay isn’t going to be a jeremiad against them, that would be too easy, and too shallow, but that is where the story of how modern economics failed the economy — and how to understand how to undo it — should begin. Kuznets’ logic was simple, and it was not mere opinion, but analytical fact: finance and advertising don’t create new value, they only allocate, or distribute existing value — in the same way that a loan to buy a television isn’t the television, or an ad for healthcare isn’t healthcare. They are only means to goods, not goods themselves.

Now we come to two tragedies of history. What happened next is that Congress laughed, as Congresses do, ignored Kuznets, and included advertising and finance anyways for political reasons — after all, bigger, to the politicians’ mind, has always been better, and therefore, a bigger national income must have been better. Right? Let’s think about it.

Today, something very curious has taken place. If we do what Kuznets originally suggested, and subtract finance and advertising from GDP, what does that picture — a picture of the economy as it actually is — reveal? Well, since the lion’s share of growth, more than 50% every year, comes from finance and advertising — whether via Facebook or Google or Wall St and hedge funds and so on — we would immediately see that the economic “growth” that the US has chased so desperately, so furiously, never actually existed at all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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If Our Civilization Is Going to Survive, It’s Going to Have to Change Like This — Fast

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