{"id":11681,"date":"2015-08-31T20:26:57","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T01:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11681"},"modified":"2015-08-31T20:26:57","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T01:26:57","slug":"say-goodbye-to-normal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11681","title":{"rendered":"Say Goodbye to Normal"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"title-media-block\">\n<div class=\"post-title-wrap\">\n<h3 class=\"title\"><a title=\"Say Goodbye to Normal\" href=\"http:\/\/kunstler.com\/clusterfuck-nation\/say-goodbye-to-normal\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Say Goodbye to Normal<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fix\"><span class=\"dropcap\">T<\/span>he tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis \u2014 regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic\u00a0<em>more<\/em>\u00a0of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly \u201cnormal\u201d cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in particular, the business cycle of the standard economics textbooks. Those cycle are dying.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"entry\">\n<div class=\"column column-01\">\n<p>They\u2019re dying because there really are\u00a0<em>Limits to Growth<\/em>\u00a0and we are now solidly in grips of those limits. Only we can\u2019t recognize the way it is expressing itself, especially in political terms. What\u2019s afoot is a not \u201crecession\u201d but a permanent contraction of what has been normal for a little over two hundred years. There is not going to be more of everything, especially profits, and the stock buyback orgy that has animated the corporate executive suites will be recognized shortly for what it is: an assest-stripping operation.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s happening now is a permanent contraction. Well, of course, nothing lasts forever, and the contraction is one phase of a greater transition. The cornucopians and techno-narcissists would like to think that we are transitioning into an even more lavish era of techno-wonderama \u2014 life in a padded recliner tapping on a tablet for\u00a0<em>everything<\/em>! I don\u2019t think so. Rather, we\u2019re going medieval, and we\u2019re doing it the hard way because there\u2019s just not enough to go around and the swollen populations of the world are going to be fighting over what\u2019s left.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">Actually, we\u2019ll be lucky if we can go medieval, because there\u2019s no guarantee that the contraction has to stop there, especially if we behave really badly about it \u2014 and based on the way we\u2019re acting now, it\u2019s hard to be optimistic about our behavior improving.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Say Goodbye to Normal The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis \u2014 regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic\u00a0more\u00a0of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly \u201cnormal\u201d cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[2,7],"tags":[8596,1752,449,485,8595,1264,8597],"class_list":["post-11681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-survival-2","tag-cornucopians","tag-economic-contraction","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-limits-to-growth","tag-medieval","tag-recession","tag-techno-narcissists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11681","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=11681"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11682,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11681\/revisions\/11682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}