{"id":1165,"date":"2014-11-06T10:58:45","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T15:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1165"},"modified":"2014-11-10T12:49:58","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T17:49:58","slug":"the-archdruid-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1165","title":{"rendered":"The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2014\/11\/dark-age-america-end-of-market-economy.html\">The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\">One of the factors that makes it difficult to think through the economic consequences of the end of the industrial age is that we\u2019ve all grown up in a world where every form of economic activity has been channeled through certain familiar forms for so long that very few people remember that things could be any other way. Another of the factors that make the same effort of thinking difficult is that the conventional economic thought of our time has invested immense effort and oceans of verbiage into obscuring the fact that things could be any other way.<\/div>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"color: #063e3f; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\">Those are formidable obstacles. We\u2019re going to have to confront them, though, because one of the core features of the decline and fall of civilizations is that most of the habits of everyday life that are standard practice when civilizations are at zenith get chucked promptly into the recycle bin as decline picks up speed. That\u2019s true across the whole spectrum of cultural phenomena, and it\u2019s especially true of economics, for a reason discussed in\u00a0<a style=\"color: #447755;\" href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com\/2014\/10\/dark-age-america-involuntary-simplicity.html\">last week\u2019s post<\/a>: the economic institutions and habits of a civilization in full flower are too complex for the same civilization to support once it\u2019s gone to seed.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\">The institutions and habits that contemporary industrial civilization uses to structure its economic life comprise that tangled realm of supposedly voluntary exchanges we call \u201cthe market.\u201d Back when the United States was still contending with the Soviet Union for global hegemony, that almost always got rephrased as \u201cthe free market;\u201d the adjective still gets some use among ideologues, but by and large it\u2019s dropped out of use elsewhere. This is a good thing, at least from the perspective of honest speaking, because the \u201cfree\u201d market is of course nothing of the kind. It\u2019s unfree in at least two crucial senses: first, in that it\u2019s compulsory; second, in that it\u2019s expensive.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy One of the factors that makes it difficult to think through the economic consequences of the end of the industrial age is that we\u2019ve all grown up in a world where every form of economic activity has been channeled through certain familiar forms [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[150,236,423],"class_list":["post-1165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-collapse","tag-economic-collapse","tag-industrial-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1165"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1369,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions\/1369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}