Orlov provides a survivor’s toolkit

Author Dmitry Orlov says that if financial, commercial, and political collapse are met with appropriate responses, the more extreme aspects of social and cultural collapse could be prevented 

The City of Detroit’s bankruptcy filing made big headlines, but the city’s decline has been underway for decades. The Associated Press observed that the “Arsenal of Democracy” that supplied the Allied victory of World War II and evolved into the “Motor City” had fallen into a six-decade downward spiral of job losses, shrinking population and a plummeting tax base.

The Globe and Mail reporter Michael Babad writes that the circumstances around Detroit’s bankruptcy might be unique to that city—but that it’s not the only big U.S. city in trouble. Babad quotes chief economist David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff + Associates:

“And Detroit is only the opening act even if its problems are unique to a city in secular decline and dilapidation (35 per cent of its residents are on food stamps, the population is down some 2/3 since the city’s peak as an industrial powerhouse in 1960),” Mr. Rosenberg said in a report today. “Chicago is the next culprit, underlined by its huge credit rating downgrade last week (three notches to A3 due to, surprise, surprise, ‘very large and growing pension liabilities’). Not to mention various municipalities in California.”

Whether Detroit’s bankruptcy can proceed is in question, as retirees are in court to claim their pensions are protected by the state constitution. Detroit’s pension shortfall accounts for about $3.5 billion of the $18 billion in debts that led the city to file for bankruptcy last week, according to The New York Times. And underfunded pensions are a big problem across the U.S. The Pew Center for the States, in Washington, estimated states’ public pension plans across the U.S. were “underfunded by a whopping $1.4 trillion in 2010.”

It seems likely that American political debate about the problems faced by the country’s big (and some smaller) cities will follow very predictable, dueling explanations:

NBC commentator Ed Schulz said: “Make no mistake. Detroit is exactly what the Republicans want. They outsourced manufacturing jobs, attack unions, cut public services, and this is the result. Now they can wipe the slate clean because now they can start privatizing city assets.”

Investors Business Daily editorialized that the collapse of Detroit stems from union demands driving away jobs: “Detroit, however, is dead, and unions and government killed it. Michigan recently became a right-to-work state, but it was too late to save a city that had become beholden to unions. As the United Auto Workers helped destroy the auto industry in and around Detroit, it’s no accident that Mercedes-Benz decided to build its flagship SUV in a shiny new facility in Vance, Ala.”

Michigan state governor Rick Snyder said in a letter that the bankruptcy decision comes after 60 years of decline for Detroit, “a period in which reality was often ignored.” He acknowledged the difficulties Detroit faces in providing services to its citizens:

Detroit has roughly 78,000 abandoned structures — a public safety hazard that “reduces the quality of life” in the city, the governor said. Streetlights were another issue, with roughly 40 per cent of them found to be not functioning in the first quarter of this year.

Police, fire and ambulance fleets are in disrepair and police response times lag the national average by a large margin, Snyder said, noting that a resident of Detroit waits an average of 58 minutes for police to respond to a call, while the national average is just 11 minutes.  [Source: CBC]

The CBC’s Don Pittis, in an article called Detroit bankruptcy: Is it a warning sign of things to come?, provides a more direct assessment of basic services available in the city: “Police and fire services are abysmal. Parks are closed. The murder rate is surging.”

Collapse in the larger context

In the face of political impotence, looming resource depletion, and catastrophic climate change, many of us have become reconciled to an uncertain future. However, popular perception of how this future might actually unfold varies wildly from “a severe and prolonged recession,” to James Howard Kunstler’s “Long Emergency“, to the complete breakdown of civilization.

In The Five Stages of Collapse, Dmitry Orlov posits a taxonomy of collapse, offering a surprisingly optimistic perspective on surviving the sweeping changes of the day “with health and sanity intact.” Each of Orlov’s five stages of collapse are tied to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo. Financial collapse (stage 1) is followed by commercial collapse (stage 2) and political collapse (stage 3). If the ongoing collapse is not halted at this point, then social collapse (stage 4) and cultural collapse (stage 5) will follow. The stages don’t necessarily happen in discrete and separate steps; they can be underway simultaneously.

Dmitry Orlov was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse, Hold Your Applause! and Absolutely Positive. Orlov publishes weekly at the immensely popular blog ClubOrlov.com.

Charlie Smith, at Straight.com, writes in a book review:

Some will be tempted to write off what’s described in The Five Stages of Collapse as an utterly implausible scenario in a country as rich and peaceful as Canada. Even so, it’s still a highly entertaining and enlightening examination of the entrails of what happens when societies are driven into the abyss by greedy, hard-hearted elites and corrupt and incompetent politicians.

We speak with Dmitry Orlov.

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