{"id":22855,"date":"2017-02-20T13:40:31","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T18:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22855"},"modified":"2017-02-20T13:40:54","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T18:40:54","slug":"fumbling-towards-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22855","title":{"rendered":"Fumbling Towards Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fumbling Towards Collapse<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In all the smoke and fog emitted by Trump and his adversaries, it must be hard to make out the actual issues dogging this society, and even when you can, to find a coherent position on them. This was nicely illustrated in Paul Krugman\u2019s fatuous column in Monday\u2019s\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, \u201cOn Economic Arrogance<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the title describes Krugman\u2019s own attitude to a T.<\/p>\n

In it, Krugman attempts to account for the no-growth economy by marshaling the stock-in-trade legerdemain of academic economics: productivity, demographics, and labor metrics. Krugman actually knows zip about what afflicts us in the present disposition of things, namely the falling energy-return-on-energy-investment in the oil industry, which is approaching the point where the immense activity of getting oil out of the ground won\u2019t be worth the cost and trouble of doing it. And since most of the things we do and produce in this economy are based on cheap oil \u2014 with no reality-based prospect of replacing it with so-called \u201crenewables\u201d or as yet undiscovered energy rescue remedies \u2014 we can\u2019t generate enough wealth to maintain anything close to our assumed standard of living. We can\u2019t even generate enough wealth to pay the interest on the debt we\u2019ve racked up in order to hide our growing energy predicament. And that, in a nutshell, is what will blow up the financial system. And when that department of the economy goes, the rest will follow.<\/p>\n

So, the real issue hidden in plain sight is how America \u2014 indeed all the so-called \u201cdeveloped\u201d nations \u2014 are going to navigate to a stepped-down mode of living, without slip-sliding all the way into a dark age, or something worse. By the way, the Ole Maestro, Alan Greenspan, also chimed in on the \u201cproductivity\u201d question last week to equally specious effect in\u00a0this Business Insider article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fumbling Towards Collapse In all the smoke and fog emitted by Trump and his adversaries, it must be hard to make out the actual issues dogging this society, and even when you can, to find a coherent position on them. This was nicely illustrated in Paul Krugman\u2019s fatuous column in Monday\u2019s\u00a0New York Times, \u201cOn Economic […]<\/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":[2,3,7],"tags":[2678,150,195,7844,449,588,614,674],"class_list":["post-22855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-survival-2","tag-cheap-oil","tag-collapse","tag-debt","tag-donald-trump","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-oil","tag-paul-krugman","tag-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22855","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=22855"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22857,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22855\/revisions\/22857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}