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Catalyst for economic collapse

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Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Sun 23 Oct 2016, 13:44:49
by vtsnowedin
It occurs to me that Malthus was wrong about human populations because he did not foresee the advent of first coal and then oil powered industry and agriculture or the advances in science and chemistry which allow us to grow crops in a weed free environment so our crops do not have to compete with the weeds for water, sunlight or nutrients. Let us run short of oil and coal or the herbicides and pesticides and fertilizers we derive from oil and Malthus may soon have his day.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Sun 23 Oct 2016, 19:25:21
by Hawkcreek
evilgenius wrote: Malthus said basically the same thing, and he was never right concerning people. His theory does describe animal populations pretty well, but people do things that the constraints don't address. I like how you seem to recognize this, but then suggest that doom will still come - at a much slower pace. I guess you think the pressures are still on, regardless of what's done to address the problems in the near term? What kinds of pressures persist like that, economic, societal or environmental? I guess all of those, but not all with the same veracity. I don't know, I still think that people have a way of using creativity that will surprise you vis a vis collapse, fast or slow.


Yes, I do think the pressure is still on, mainly because I think human nature is animal nature. I've always thought that we could eventually control our numbers, but so far the best impetus for that seems to be societal depression. Like Russia after the USSR breakup, or Japan now. But as soon as things get good again, breeding starts anew.

So far it looks like our creativity is being used to enrich the privileged few, with very little chance of a new steamboat ever being built.
I think Malthus was right on, about all of us animals.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Sun 23 Oct 2016, 19:31:48
by onlooker
I too agree that we face natural limitations. No matter what we do or how we try to circumvent natural limitations, they will manifest themselves regardless. It is instrumental to recognize that the very methods we have used to circumvent limitations have themselves created other kinds of limitations. The perfect example being the climate system and the use of fossil fuels. The Earth is a closed system and subject thus to limits. Whatever cleverness cannot circumvent the finite limited nature of our existence on this planet. We have extended our ability to grow and subsist on this planet but that was never going to go on forever. All we have really done is extended the degree into which we are in overshoot as witnessed now by limitations being reached in both renewable and non renewable resources

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 03:23:13
by KaiserJeep
Based on recent TV viewing, I believe that the automation of Middle Class jobs is likely the main catalyst for collapse, and that the process has begun already. Based on income alone, the Middle Class has shrunk by 20% in the last decade. This was a combination of globalization and automation, but the globalization has stopped and even reversed slightly. However, automation has picked up the pace, for example with advances in self-driving vehicles, the 3.6 million truck drivers in the USA are going away soon, and they won't be replaced. Not to mention, the loan on the average heavy truck takes more than a decade to pay off for an independent trucker, the implications are many and will ripple through everything from truck stop hotels to the banking industry.

Artificial Intelligence is enabling some astonishing automation - how many conversations have you had with a computer over the telephone recently? Authors are using text generation to write novels that humans read. My local bakery and coffee shop has gone from three cashiers to one who is still taking cash, while the number of people filling customer orders remains the same, and people swipe credit cards and pay by cell phone.

The estimates are grim, within the next decade 60 million jobs will disappear due to automation. That is about half the existing jobs, and even at the peak of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was 25%. In 10 years, it will be 50%, and this will mean that there simply won't be enough consumers with incomes to keep the economy ticking along. There also won't be enough government revenues to care for twice the number of unemployed people we had in the Great Depression. They will go into debt further, it is predictable, but in a few decades, the debt will be unsustainable. Currency will spin into hyperinflation, is the almost certain implication.

I find this all too credible, the MidWest is full of people who ended up retiring in poverty while they were waiting for their jobs in the automobile industry to return as the economy recovered, and those jobs never did come back, the assembly line robots do them now.

This grim future was related in a 30-minute program called Forward Thinking on the Bloomberg TV channel. The episode was entitled "March of the Machines: The A.I. Revolution".

The other disquieting trend is that these machines are converging on and may soon exceed human intelligence. A few years ago, the IBM "Watson" program bested the two human champions on the game show Jeopardy. Existing A.I. code generators are writing new A.I. programs - and there is no theoretical reason why the A.I.'s cannot eventually be smarter than humans, perhaps even 100X as smart. Perhaps they will decide they don't need people for anything anymore.
Image

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 04:41:50
by radon1
KaiserJeep wrote:...
The estimates are grim, within the next decade 60 million jobs will disappear due to automation. That is about half the existing jobs, and even at the peak of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was 25%. In 10 years, it will be 50%, and this will mean that there simply won't be enough consumers with incomes to keep the economy ticking along.
...


You sound very marxist.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 06:18:15
by SeaGypsy
KJ will be long gone by the time the trucking fleet is automated. I work in the sector & technology uptake is ridiculously slow. Also of about 10 truck driver jobs I have had, none was just driving the trucks, most had processes involved which would be either difficult or impossible to automate.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 10:49:38
by KaiserJeep
Radon1, I'm not a Marxist, I'm a Peak Oil Doomie. I'm not expecting a Marxist revolution either, most of these people who have already lost their jobs and whom stand to lose their government retirement benefits are of or past retirement age. These old folks (like me, actually) are hardly revolutionaries. I'm personally planning a comfortable rural existence with a large vegetable garden and a few chickens and energy independance.

SG, I believe that you have made similar statements before about truck drivers. Understand that technology uptake is not slow in the USA, and I have already seen prototype self-driving and electric powered heavy trucks here in Silicon Valley. Yes, I expect that there will be other job shuffling when the present driver role is automated. I think that the Bloomberg TV program I just watched was unduly pessimistic and that you might be unduly optimistic - at least when it comes to the USA. Most new cars here either have standard "driver assist" features (lane keeping, automatic braking, etc.) or have these as options. Some brands like Tesla have the hardware for full automation, and are tweaking the A.I. programming. Here in the USA, I speculate that driving will be automated in a period I personally set at 10 to 20 years, and manual driving will be outlawed (on highways and other main roads at least) in a period I speculate will be 20 to 30 years.

So it probably doesn't mean anything for you, other than you should encourage your kids to find a different profession. For me, I own one 1967 Jeep and one 2003 Jeep, and I'm looking forward to teaching my Grandkids to drive places where I think manual driving will never be automated.

Image
...such as the trail to Rubicon Springs.

The above diversion is not really off topic for this thread, but to generalize, I expect that automation will replace half the Middle Class jobs that exist today, within say 20 years. Then we will have even larger numbers of people on the dole, fewer consumers with disposable income, and fewer tax payers feeding revenues to a government which is already deep into debt and borrowing more every year. All of which means that there is some finite chance of economic collapse before we even run out of oil.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 11:56:30
by dohboi
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... isher-says
Climate change could spark the world’s next financial crisis, according to Paul Fisher, who retired this year as deputy head of the Bank of England body which supervises the country’s banks.

“It is potentially a systemic risk,” Fisher said Monday in an interview in Sydney. A sudden repricing of assets as a result of climate change “could be the trigger for the next financial crisis,” he added.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 12:12:58
by KaiserJeep
I think it would be useful to distinguish between "crisis" and "collapse". To a financial wienie, a "crisis" is when their investment returns underperform their expectations. A financial "collapse" has never happened before - even the Great Depression was not a collapse. I chose to regard the scenario I described - 50% unemployment, 50% curtailment of tax revenues, and explosive amounts of government debt which would cause rapid hyperinflation of the currency - as a "collapse". Certainly there are other definitions of "collapse" as well.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 12:20:55
by evilgenius
Hawkcreek wrote:
evilgenius wrote: Malthus said basically the same thing, and he was never right concerning people. His theory does describe animal populations pretty well, but people do things that the constraints don't address. I like how you seem to recognize this, but then suggest that doom will still come - at a much slower pace. I guess you think the pressures are still on, regardless of what's done to address the problems in the near term? What kinds of pressures persist like that, economic, societal or environmental? I guess all of those, but not all with the same veracity. I don't know, I still think that people have a way of using creativity that will surprise you vis a vis collapse, fast or slow.


Yes, I do think the pressure is still on, mainly because I think human nature is animal nature. I've always thought that we could eventually control our numbers, but so far the best impetus for that seems to be societal depression. Like Russia after the USSR breakup, or Japan now. But as soon as things get good again, breeding starts anew.

So far it looks like our creativity is being used to enrich the privileged few, with very little chance of a new steamboat ever being built.
I think Malthus was right on, about all of us animals.


I can't argue with where you are coming from, we are animals. I think you are right that there will always be danger of collapse. I see it as more of a local danger over a world wide one, though. Globally, things like empowering women, so that they can say no to endless children as their only reason to exist, and micro loans may actually curb population expansion. The biggest dangers I see are not out there in the villages, where women will be finding those measures helpful, but in cities and across nations as seen economically as a whole. At that level the right decisions must be made in order to keep up with growth. Too much corruption, either overtly or ideologically, and those necessary measures can be delayed so long that they become impossible. Then you have only got the collective's reaction to the shit they are in to counter balance the paucity of properly planned effort. People involved in that don't go forward with a plan. They just do what works for them. A lot of the time it works, and solves the general crisis too. Sometimes, however, what people do to get their own can set up such horrible inequalities that many who didn't grow up living the experience would say that death was favorable.

For example, in one of the debates both Clinton and Trump were asked if they were willing to engage in the kind of suggested measures necessary to fix Social Security and Medicare. Neither of them gave what any impartial observer would call a credible answer. That is a looming economic crisis, seen at the level of the economy as a whole, that ought to be addressed while there is time. Already there is too much corruption in the system as a whole for that to happen. People will just have to deal with that shit when it happens, I guess.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 12:27:11
by GHung
I would say that a crisis is a reset or contraction that can be recovered from. Economic growth will eventually return and exceed previous levels. A collapse is the same, except that economic growth will never recover to previous levels due to resource depletion, climate change, and other permanent limits to growth; the "Seneca Cliff" scenario.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 12:57:41
by evilgenius
KaiserJeep wrote:Based on recent TV viewing, I believe that the automation of Middle Class jobs is likely the main catalyst for collapse, and that the process has begun already. Based on income alone, the Middle Class has shrunk by 20% in the last decade. This was a combination of globalization and automation, but the globalization has stopped and even reversed slightly. However, automation has picked up the pace, for example with advances in self-driving vehicles, the 3.6 million truck drivers in the USA are going away soon, and they won't be replaced. Not to mention, the loan on the average heavy truck takes more than a decade to pay off for an independent trucker, the implications are many and will ripple through everything from truck stop hotels to the banking industry.

I find this all too credible, the MidWest is full of people who ended up retiring in poverty while they were waiting for their jobs in the automobile industry to return as the economy recovered, and those jobs never did come back, the assembly line robots do them now.



I've been thinking about this for years. I think the only way it can be addressed is with a change to the way corporations are owned. I won't go into what I've suggested in the past, mostly because it only elicits blank stares, but suffice it to say that money, the system of money doesn't need workers. It tolerates them now, and is always trying to marginalize them. The thing is, while the system of money doesn't need workers it still needs demand. Without workers making paychecks where is that demand going to come from? Under a different way of corporate ownership a whole class of stock can exist that is about the same share that the 99%, or 90%, depending, have now. If it is unattractive enough to the 1%, or 10%, as well, then it can serve to generate demand, from the revenue it receives because of its ownership status. The rich would still be rich, and the poor would still stay poor, but in a way that keeps the ball rolling.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 13:16:25
by vtsnowedin
evilgenius wrote:
KaiserJeep wrote:Based on recent TV viewing, I believe that the automation of Middle Class jobs is likely the main catalyst for collapse, and that the process has begun already. Based on income alone, the Middle Class has shrunk by 20% in the last decade. This was a combination of globalization and automation, but the globalization has stopped and even reversed slightly. However, automation has picked up the pace, for example with advances in self-driving vehicles, the 3.6 million truck drivers in the USA are going away soon, and they won't be replaced. Not to mention, the loan on the average heavy truck takes more than a decade to pay off for an independent trucker, the implications are many and will ripple through everything from truck stop hotels to the banking industry.

I find this all too credible, the MidWest is full of people who ended up retiring in poverty while they were waiting for their jobs in the automobile industry to return as the economy recovered, and those jobs never did come back, the assembly line robots do them now.



I've been thinking about this for years. I think the only way it can be addressed is with a change to the way corporations are owned. I won't go into what I've suggested in the past, mostly because it only elicits blank stares, but suffice it to say that money, the system of money doesn't need workers. It tolerates them now, and is always trying to marginalize them. The thing is, while the system of money doesn't need workers it still needs demand. Without workers making paychecks where is that demand going to come from? Under a different way of corporate ownership a whole class of stock can exist that is about the same share that the 99%, or 90%, depending, have now. If it is unattractive enough to the 1%, or 10%, as well, then it can serve to generate demand, from the revenue it receives because of its ownership status. The rich would still be rich, and the poor would still stay poor, but in a way that keeps the ball rolling.

To add to your point. The assembly line workers each used to pay income taxes etc. on their wages regardless of whether the corporation was making a profit or not. The robots on the other hand do not pay taxes and the corporation only pays taxes on the after expenses profits, so the robot and the electricity to run it is a tax right off.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 16:45:55
by KaiserJeep
I believe that is what I said. When employment has fallen to 50% or less, there are not enough wage-earning consumers to buy enough products to keep the factory open. Then when tax revenues have fallen off by half, there are not enough funds to support the greatly expanded numbers of people dependant upon government disbursements. Then as debt expands and currency inflates, money is useless anyway, and we are back to barter - a sophisticated barter system suitable to a networked society. But corporate farms won't be producing food any longer, if they are unwilling to trade it for currency.

Big problems. Not easy to fix. Try to envision an economy without workers, or at least with only a small fraction of the workers employed. Then imagine a bankrupt government without the ability to borrow money, or even print currency good for anything more than toilet paper. All the cities are uninhabitable and virtually all the city dwellers are dead. Subsistence farming remains, those people are the only left alive.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 20:21:00
by Newfie
Informed by reading Taste of War my ideas have shifted a bit. That we will have economic collapse seems to me inevitable. On the other hand what does that really mean? We are all working with fiat currencies, wealth is just an idea, just faith in an abstract and arbitrary unit of value. Given that, and sufficient manipulation almost any calamity is survivable.

That is as long as the financial puppet masters have faith in one another. With faith they can work cooperatively to shore up the system. Once they loose faith then things get diecy. Without open cooperation each party retreats to doing what serves him exclusively. Tradgedy of the Commons on a grand scale.

When this lack of cooperation is applied to the shipment of food things become really bleak very quickly. If the moguls can keep worldwide food shipments moving things will be relatively stable. If the few large food producers start to hoard food, then there will be massive die offs. That, IMHO, is the danger to a financial collapse. Loss in faith which causes serious disruption to the food distribution system.

I worry less about all out nuclear war. I read up on that a little. All out war is simply not survivable. The ensuing nuclear winter will decrease temps. By 20-30°C over the temperate food growing regions creating almost universal starvation. They few who do survive, if any, will have a devestated ecosystem to deal with trying to grow crops, and almost 0 wildlife.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 20:30:42
by Newfie
Random thought...if we have a financial collapse and get away from fiat currency maybe we will end up with the "busses of corn" backed agro dollar.

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2016, 20:41:14
by Newfie
http://www.indexmundi.com/blog/index.ph ... worldwide/

Some countries are net exporters of food (their food exports are larger than their food imports) while others are net importers of food (their food imports are larger than their food exports).

Among the net exporters of food we find the majority of South American countries, with the exception of Venezuela and Suriname, the United States, Canada, Mauritania, Indonesia, Australia, and a few African countries such as Mauritania, Ivory Coast and Ghana. The largest net exporter of food, by far, is Argentina with $23.42 of food exports per every $1.00 of food imports. Argentina is followed by Brazil, New Zealand, Paraguay and Iceland.

Among the net importers of food we find countries such as Russia, Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sudan, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Japan, etc. The largest net food importer is Eritrea, with $0.01 of food exports per every $1.00 of food imports. Eritrea is closely followed by Venezuela, Turkmenistan, and Algeria.

Data for for both agricultural exports and imports are for 2010.

Source: Slate.com: Maps: Agriculture in the U.S. and Around the World

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Thu 27 Oct 2016, 09:38:56
by dohboi
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/201 ... oom-defla/

China capital flight flashes warning as authorities forced to prick property bubble

Re: Catalyst for economic collapse

Unread postPosted: Wed 02 Nov 2016, 12:28:19
by evilgenius
Getting back to automation: the other day I was reading something on CNBC about a Chinese manufacturer who was complaining that his margins were so thin that the only response he could come up with was to attempt to raise his prices. CNBC touted this as a sign that inflationary pressure could be on its way from China. I was wondering to myself how this could be the case when that manufacturer obviously faced reduced barriers to entry into his business. If he raised prices as it stood, he would be undersold by a bevy of other Chinese companies as well as competitors in the region outside of China. He'd already cut as many jobs as he could, in favor of automation. There was no other way for him to go, he said.

It occurred to me that he didn't actually face only one choice. Not unlike the fully integrated oil model with service stations owned by the same company that pumped the oil out of the ground, he could integrate his operation into a much more elaborate marketing scheme. He wouldn't have to sell out, or seek to control the apparatus either. He could seek partnerships.

I was thinking about this the other day, when researching a means to make crown caps for beer bottles. I don't want to make crown caps myself. Neither do I want to store any inventory. I wanted to have them made with my designs on them. I don't want to pay the small run prices, which cost nearly as much as the beer making ingredients do for a small batch. I was thinking about how to set up a system where I could sell caps to other beer makers at a cost that wasn't prohibitive for them either. What you really need is the model I've heard works pretty well for t-shirts, where they get printed out from a design as and when a person orders them, or shipped from inventory at a cheap staging area, at a cost that is competitive with what you might pay for a shirt at a shop. This process works by including several manufacturers and marketers at various levels into a cooperative scheme that benefits everybody, and doesn't necessarily come with inflationary pressures built into it. There are reasons for inflation, like currency fluctuations, to deal with, but over time those costs can be accepted because they don't permanently rule. It's more about making it easy to get a tool into the hands of an entrepreneur, allowing them to set up a t-shirt business. The same model could work for crown caps or whatever else the Chinese make and want to sell to markets where entrepreneurial endeavor is highly developed and the marketplace sufficiently capitalized towards services.

Automation isn't necessarily a death knell. It can be part of a much more cooperative solution. "Can" is the operative word here. It won't do that on its own.
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