For most of the fourteen years I’ve been blogging, it’s been a habit of mine on the last post of the old year (or, now and then, the first post of the new one) to offer predictions for the year ahead. I won’t be doing that this year. I think it’s quite possible to predict some of what we can expect next year. Just now, though, it seems more important to me to focus on the things we can’t know yet, because some of them will play a crucial role in the future taking shape before us.
It’s an unsettling thing, this journey we make into an unknown future. Scientists craft equations, politicians demand answers from supposedly qualified experts, advertisers convene focus groups, mystics seek visions, astrologers chart the heavens, conspiracy theorists convince themselves that the world really is under somebody’s control: these are all attempts to extract the future from the grip of the unknown and unknowable. That grip becomes particularly uncomfortable when some of the things that are unknowable ended up that way because of human action of one kind or another—and of course that’s very much the case just now.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of these riddles as we brace ourselves for tomorrow night’s plunge into the unknown territory of 2021.
The first one that comes to mind is the gaggle of vaccines against the Covid-19 coronavirus now being injected into long lines of recipients in countries around the world. The corporate media here in the US, at least, has been insisting at the top of its electronic lungs that “the vaccine” (there are of course several of them) is safe and effective. The stark truth is that nobody knows. It takes one to two years of repeated tests and long-term assessments to figure out if a vaccine is safe and effective, and the Pfizer vaccine—the first one approved in the US and Britain—got a total of eight weeks of hurried testing before it was approved for sale. It’s quite common for problems with pharmaceuticals—even horrific problems—to take months or years to surface, and the Pfizer and Moderna products belong to a type of vaccine—mRNA vaccines—that have never before been successfully used on human subjects, so no one anywhere knows what will happen when millions of people take them.
One thing that interests me is the shrill tone of the claims being made by the media about the supposed safety and efficacy of the vaccines. For some years now, the comfortable classes in today’s America have lost track of the fact that control over the public narrative does not equal control over the facts underlying the narrative. For what it’s worth, I suspect that the positive-thinking pandemic Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled ably in her book Bright-Sided plays a large role in setting the stage for this situation. Convince yourself that something is true, and the universe has to play along: that’s the mentality of a frighteningly large share of the privileged in America these days.
As the song has it, though, it ain’t necessarily so. Tens of thousands of people who plunged into flipping houses in the runup to the 2008 crash, convinced that the Law of Attraction guaranteed them wealth they didn’t earn, had to declare bankruptcy when their dreams ran face first into the laws of economics. Quite a few of them got shrill, too, when the housing crash pointed out the problems in their ideology, and the strident tone of media pronouncements about the vaccines reminds me rather forcefully of that earlier collision with reality.
We don’t know yet if a similar fate awaits the pundits and politicians who are loudly insisting that coronavirus vaccines must be safe, when neither they nor anyone else knows if this is true or not. The vaccines might all be safe; in that case, well and good. One or more of them might have the kind of nasty side effects that have caused hundreds of pharmaceuticals that were approved by the authorities to be pulled from the market in a hurry. One or more of them might be one of the great pharmaceutical disasters of our time, up there with thalidomide and Fen-Phen. We simply don’t know, and since the social-media barons have made it clear that they plan on censoring any discussion of the vaccines that doesn’t toe the pharmaceutical industry party line, we may not know for months or years.
The political implications of all this deserve attention, however. The corporate media and the scientific establishment in general have nailed what little remains of their fraying credibility to these vaccines. A great many people no longer believe anything that the authorities say about health care, and they have good reason for their disbelief—do I really have to remind anyone of the way that Barack Obama insisted that the ACA would make health insurance prices go down, and of course you’ll be able to keep your doctor and your existing plan? If one of the current crop of coronavirus vaccines turns out to have harmful or fatal side effects, the massive crisis of confidence in establishment science and medicine that has been building for decades now may just go kinetic—metaphorically or otherwise. But we simply don’t know.
One thing that interests me is the shrill tone of the claims being made by the media about the supposed safety and efficacy of the vaccines. For some years now, the comfortable classes in today’s America have lost track of the fact that control over the public narrative does not equal control over the facts underlying the narrative. For what it’s worth, I suspect that the positive-thinking pandemic Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled ably in her book Bright-Sided plays a large role in setting the stage for this situation. Convince yourself that something is true, and the universe has to play along: that’s the mentality of a frighteningly large share of the privileged in America these days.
As the song has it, though, it ain’t necessarily so. Tens of thousands of people who plunged into flipping houses in the runup to the 2008 crash, convinced that the Law of Attraction guaranteed them wealth they didn’t earn, had to declare bankruptcy when their dreams ran face first into the laws of economics. Quite a few of them got shrill, too, when the housing crash pointed out the problems in their ideology, and the strident tone of media pronouncements about the vaccines reminds me rather forcefully of that earlier collision with reality.
We don’t know yet if a similar fate awaits the pundits and politicians who are loudly insisting that coronavirus vaccines must be safe, when neither they nor anyone else knows if this is true or not. The vaccines might all be safe; in that case, well and good. One or more of them might have the kind of nasty side effects that have caused hundreds of pharmaceuticals that were approved by the authorities to be pulled from the market in a hurry. One or more of them might be one of the great pharmaceutical disasters of our time, up there with thalidomide and Fen-Phen. We simply don’t know, and since the social-media barons have made it clear that they plan on censoring any discussion of the vaccines that doesn’t toe the pharmaceutical industry party line, we may not know for months or years.
The political implications of all this deserve attention, however. The corporate media and the scientific establishment in general have nailed what little remains of their fraying credibility to these vaccines. A great many people no longer believe anything that the authorities say about health care, and they have good reason for their disbelief—do I really have to remind anyone of the way that Barack Obama insisted that the ACA would make health insurance prices go down, and of course you’ll be able to keep your doctor and your existing plan? If one of the current crop of coronavirus vaccines turns out to have harmful or fatal side effects, the massive crisis of confidence in establishment science and medicine that has been building for decades now may just go kinetic—metaphorically or otherwise. But we simply don’t know.
Let’s move on. Another thing we don’t know about 2021 is exactly what policies the incoming Biden administration will pursue once Biden takes office in January. I assumed during the election campaign that if Biden won, he would lead a headlong flight back to the disastrous mix of neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy that the younger Bush set in motion and Obama copied with such clueless enthusiasm: that is to say, the policies that made Donald Trump inevitable. It’s quite possible that Biden (or rather, his handlers) will still do this, but there are several curious details that suggest an alternative view.
One of the signature elements of his environmental platform, for example, is a program to fund energy-conservation retrofits on American buildings, providing a great many working-class jobs in the process. I admit I was rather startled to see that on Biden’s platform, as it’s something I pushed fairly hard back when I was writing extensively on energy issues. It seems improbable that anyone on Biden’s team would stray far enough from the airtight bubble of approved thinking to reach the fringes where archdruids lurk, so I’m assuming that this is a coincidence. At the same time, the fact that Biden’s flacks have even noticed that working class Americans might be concerned about jobs suggests a degree of attention to the hard realities of life in today’s America that’s become vanishingly rare among our clueless elites.
One of the lessons that the Democratic Party spent the last four years desperately trying not to learn is that what working class Americans want is plenty of full time jobs at decent pay. That’s all they want, and it’s the only thing they’ll accept; give them that and they’re happy, don’t give them that and it doesn’t matter what else you offer them. It’s because the bipartisan consensus welded into place before Trump ignored that enduring reality of American politics that so many people in the upper midwest who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 decided to take a chance on Trump in 2016.
Biden, it bears remembering, will face a tremendously difficult situation when he starts his term in a little less than a month. He won election with paper-thin majorities in the battleground states, with even more than the usual evidence of election irregularities; his party lost more than half its majority in the House; he doesn’t have the faintest ghost of a mandate, and he’s facing heat from both sides—on the one hand, the ranting ideologues on the leftward end of his party, who hate him nearly as much as they hate Trump; on the other, a furious Republican Party that considers his presidency illegitimate and has a long list of grudges from the last four years of Democratic antics, which they will take out on him at the first opportunity. (You know as well as I do, for example, that the moment the GOP regains control of the House, Biden will face impeachment—unless they do the smart thing, that is, and target Harris first.)
Very nearly the only thing Biden and his handlers can do that might get him through this mess is to move toward the center the moment the inauguration ceremony is over. That will require him to throw the left wing of his party to the wolves and make common cause with moderates on both sides of the aisle—basically, the same thing Bill Clinton did, and Barack Obama did too, once the 2010 midterms taught him that catering to the far left was a recipe for political disaster. One thing that could strengthen Biden’s position in a big way is doing something to address the needs of working Americans—not, please note, telling them what they ought to want and then trying to browbeat them into accepting it (the usual behavior of the privileged left), but listening to them and then giving them at least some of what they ask for.
If he does that, he might be able to build enough of a coalition of moderates from both parties to fix some of the serious issues that beset this country just now, find common ground among the issues that so many ordinary Americans want to see addressed, and end up with a successful presidency despite the odds. I have no idea whether that will happen, and neither does anyone else outside the inner circle of Biden’s handlers. I’m open to the possibility that Biden will exceed my expectations—it’s quite literally impossible for him to fall below them—but we’ll simply have to wait and see.
One of the signature elements of his environmental platform, for example, is a program to fund energy-conservation retrofits on American buildings, providing a great many working-class jobs in the process. I admit I was rather startled to see that on Biden’s platform, as it’s something I pushed fairly hard back when I was writing extensively on energy issues. It seems improbable that anyone on Biden’s team would stray far enough from the airtight bubble of approved thinking to reach the fringes where archdruids lurk, so I’m assuming that this is a coincidence. At the same time, the fact that Biden’s flacks have even noticed that working class Americans might be concerned about jobs suggests a degree of attention to the hard realities of life in today’s America that’s become vanishingly rare among our clueless elites.
One of the lessons that the Democratic Party spent the last four years desperately trying not to learn is that what working class Americans want is plenty of full time jobs at decent pay. That’s all they want, and it’s the only thing they’ll accept; give them that and they’re happy, don’t give them that and it doesn’t matter what else you offer them. It’s because the bipartisan consensus welded into place before Trump ignored that enduring reality of American politics that so many people in the upper midwest who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 decided to take a chance on Trump in 2016.
Biden, it bears remembering, will face a tremendously difficult situation when he starts his term in a little less than a month. He won election with paper-thin majorities in the battleground states, with even more than the usual evidence of election irregularities; his party lost more than half its majority in the House; he doesn’t have the faintest ghost of a mandate, and he’s facing heat from both sides—on the one hand, the ranting ideologues on the leftward end of his party, who hate him nearly as much as they hate Trump; on the other, a furious Republican Party that considers his presidency illegitimate and has a long list of grudges from the last four years of Democratic antics, which they will take out on him at the first opportunity. (You know as well as I do, for example, that the moment the GOP regains control of the House, Biden will face impeachment—unless they do the smart thing, that is, and target Harris first.)
Very nearly the only thing Biden and his handlers can do that might get him through this mess is to move toward the center the moment the inauguration ceremony is over. That will require him to throw the left wing of his party to the wolves and make common cause with moderates on both sides of the aisle—basically, the same thing Bill Clinton did, and Barack Obama did too, once the 2010 midterms taught him that catering to the far left was a recipe for political disaster. One thing that could strengthen Biden’s position in a big way is doing something to address the needs of working Americans—not, please note, telling them what they ought to want and then trying to browbeat them into accepting it (the usual behavior of the privileged left), but listening to them and then giving them at least some of what they ask for.
If he does that, he might be able to build enough of a coalition of moderates from both parties to fix some of the serious issues that beset this country just now, find common ground among the issues that so many ordinary Americans want to see addressed, and end up with a successful presidency despite the odds. I have no idea whether that will happen, and neither does anyone else outside the inner circle of Biden’s handlers. I’m open to the possibility that Biden will exceed my expectations—it’s quite literally impossible for him to fall below them—but we’ll simply have to wait and see.
Let’s move on. Another unknown, an important one, surfaced the other day on that charmless soapbox of the Anglo-American elite, the BBC news website. I’m not easily surprised by the babblings of the mass media these days, but this article had me staring open-mouthed, because the BBC—and even more to the point, the collection of UN environmental flacks their reporter was quoting—actually admitted in public that if the world is going to do anything significant to curb anthropogenic climate change, the well-to-do are going to have to change their lifestyles so that they produce only a fraction of the carbon dioxide pollution they currently emit.
You have to be aware of the recent history of climate change activism to understand just how astounding this utterance is. For the last few decades, celebrity activists have been busy giving new relevance to the word “hypocrite” by loudly insisting that we all have to do something about climate change, while continuing to lead the kind of personal lifestyle that dumps more CO2 into the atmosphere each year than the entire population of a midsized African city. The hypocrisy reached fever pitch as celebrity environmentalists flew in their private jets to high-profile meetings on climate change, where they waxed rhetorical about how the world had to use less carbon, while demonstrating their utter unwillingness to use less carbon themselves.
Where celebrities led, inevitably, the comfortable classes followed. Back when I was a speaker on the peak oil circuit, I noted with wry amusement how many of the upper middle class people who loved to talk about how awful climate change would be if we all didn’t pitch in and change their ways would backpedal frantically if you suggested that maybe they should lead the way by decreasing their own bigger-than-average carbon footprints. Their idea of changing the world always amounted to pushing off as many costs as possible on the working classes and the global poor, while treating their own lifestyles as sacrosanct. Notice, as one example out of many, how often climate change activists fixated on banning coal mining, which provides jobs for millions of working class people worldwide, while never mentioning the equally gargantuan pollution generated by nonessential air travel. It was fine to make coal miners lose their jobs, but heaven help you if you suggested that the well-to-do give up vacationing in Mazatlan or Bali!
Once the raw hypocrisy became so blatant that it started attracting critical attention, I predicted here and elsewhere that the comfortable classes would doubtless dump climate change as a fashionable issue and find some other issue that they could use to play virtue-signaling games and load more costs onto working people. (That duly happened—have you noticed that office fauna have been able to work from home during the current epidemic, thus continuing to draw their salaries, while people who work in factories, shops, and other lower-class venues have been laid off instead? Once again, the middle classes get coddled and the working classes get screwed.) Yet here we are, and the BBC is busy announcing that the well-to-do are going to have to do the unthinkable and rein in their absurdly extravagant lifestyles for the sake of the planet.
I suppose it’s just possible that after years of hard work analyzing the ecology of our planet and the sources of the carbon pollution that’s messing up its climate, it suddenly occurred to the experts consulted by the United Nations that it’s going to be hard to cut carbon emissions unless the people who produce a disproportionate share of those emissions do something to change that. I confess, though, that I find this hard to believe. My guess is that the political blowback against the pet policies of the clueless well-to-do has reached a high enough pitch that the organs of the establishment have been forced to notice it, and have realized that it will no longer work to insist that “shared sacrifice” means that the working poor are loaded with all the costs and the middle and upper classes get all the benefits.
That’s an issue, of course, because it’s not just environmental policy that’s been twisted out of shape along those lines. For decades now, across the board, nearly every policy that’s been pushed by the establishment here in the US and in most other industrial nations has benefited the middle classes at the expense of the working classes. That’s why we’ve gone from the situation in 1960, when one working class income could support a family comfortably, to the situation in 2020, when one working class income won’t keep a family off the street. Those changes weren’t accidental, nor were they inevitable; they were the results of readily identifiable policies pushed by a bipartisan consensus, and defended by government, corporate, and media flacks with a disingenuousness that borders on the pathological.
The difficulty we’re in now, of course, is that a very large number of people are aware of this, and they’re far from happy about it. Here in the United States, a vast number of citizens—quite probably a majority—believe that they live under a senile kleptocracy propped up by rigged elections and breathtakingly dishonest media, in which their votes do not count and their needs will not be addressed by those in power. What’s more, they have more than a little evidence to support these beliefs, and strange to say, another round of patronizing putdowns by the mouthpieces of the well-to-do is unlikely to change their minds. The resulting crisis of legitimacy has become a political fact of immense importance.
A few years back, my fellow blogger and more than occasional debating partner Dmitry Orlov wrote a series of essays (later collected into his book Reinventing Collapse) pointing out that the United States is vulnerable to the same sort of sudden political implosion that overtook the Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991. His point has lost none of its sharpness since then. When political theorists of an earlier generation noted that governments exist by the consent of the governed, they were stating a simple fact, not proposing an ideal; a government, any government, survives solely because most of the people it rules play along, obeying its laws and edicts no matter how absurd those happen to be. If they withdraw that consent, the existing order of things comes tumbling down.
As we saw some thirty years ago, the most effective way to get people to withdraw their consent from the government that claims to rule them is to show them, over and over again, that their needs and concerns are of no interest to a self-aggrandizing elite, and that they have nothing to hope for from the continuation of the present system and nothing to lose if it falls. A very substantial share of Americans, and a significant number of people in other Western industrial countries, have already had that experience and come to those conclusions—and the enthusiasm displayed by the comfortable classes for shoving off the costs of change on the impoverished majority while seizing the benefits for themselves has played a huge role in that state of affairs.
As a result, it’s entirely possible that at some point in the near future, when next the United States faces a serious crisis, most Americans will shrug and let it fall, as most Soviet citizens did when the Soviet Union hit its final crisis in 1991. Keep in mind that the vast majority of active duty US police and military personnel—the final bulwark of any regime in crisis—voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and might not be in any hurry to come to the rescue of a system that treats them with the same casual contempt it turns on everyone outside the circles of privilege. It’s entirely possible, in other words, that ten years from now people will talk about the former United States the way they talk about the former Soviet Union.
Will that happen in 2021? It’s impossible to say, and one of the reasons it’s impossible to say is that it depends, among other things, on the other unknowns discussed already in this essay. If the Covid-19 vaccines turn out to be safe and effective; if the Biden administration moves to occupy the abandoned center of American politics and gives working Americans some reason to think that their concerns have some chance of being addressed by those who claim the right to rule them; if the privileged classes in the United States and elsewhere finally notice that policies like those they favor reliably end with some equivalent of tumbrils and guillotines, or at least the irrevocable collapse of the system that provides them with their comfortable lifestyles—why, then, things could swerve in a different direction entirely.
On the other hand, if one of those inadequately tested vaccines turns out to have bad outcomes for a significant share of the millions of people lining up to receive them, or if Biden’s talk about providing jobs for working Americans turns out to be just as dishonest as Obama’s promises about his health care legislation, or if the clueless elites keep on believing that they can pursue their pet policies at the expense of everyone whose labor keeps the system going—or, gods help us, all of these at once—then we may just find ourselves plunging into a chaotic future for which very few of us are prepared. For the moment, though, we just don’t know.
With that in mind, I’d like to encourage my readers to stay watchful, stay nimble, keep your pantries well stocked with necessities, and remember that all those yammering faces on glass screens are there to sell you something you don’t want to buy. I’ll be taking January off blogging, as usual, so we’ll resume this conversation on the first Wednesday in February. Until then, be safe, and may the powers that guide your destiny bring you good things.
You have to be aware of the recent history of climate change activism to understand just how astounding this utterance is. For the last few decades, celebrity activists have been busy giving new relevance to the word “hypocrite” by loudly insisting that we all have to do something about climate change, while continuing to lead the kind of personal lifestyle that dumps more CO2 into the atmosphere each year than the entire population of a midsized African city. The hypocrisy reached fever pitch as celebrity environmentalists flew in their private jets to high-profile meetings on climate change, where they waxed rhetorical about how the world had to use less carbon, while demonstrating their utter unwillingness to use less carbon themselves.
Where celebrities led, inevitably, the comfortable classes followed. Back when I was a speaker on the peak oil circuit, I noted with wry amusement how many of the upper middle class people who loved to talk about how awful climate change would be if we all didn’t pitch in and change their ways would backpedal frantically if you suggested that maybe they should lead the way by decreasing their own bigger-than-average carbon footprints. Their idea of changing the world always amounted to pushing off as many costs as possible on the working classes and the global poor, while treating their own lifestyles as sacrosanct. Notice, as one example out of many, how often climate change activists fixated on banning coal mining, which provides jobs for millions of working class people worldwide, while never mentioning the equally gargantuan pollution generated by nonessential air travel. It was fine to make coal miners lose their jobs, but heaven help you if you suggested that the well-to-do give up vacationing in Mazatlan or Bali!
Once the raw hypocrisy became so blatant that it started attracting critical attention, I predicted here and elsewhere that the comfortable classes would doubtless dump climate change as a fashionable issue and find some other issue that they could use to play virtue-signaling games and load more costs onto working people. (That duly happened—have you noticed that office fauna have been able to work from home during the current epidemic, thus continuing to draw their salaries, while people who work in factories, shops, and other lower-class venues have been laid off instead? Once again, the middle classes get coddled and the working classes get screwed.) Yet here we are, and the BBC is busy announcing that the well-to-do are going to have to do the unthinkable and rein in their absurdly extravagant lifestyles for the sake of the planet.
I suppose it’s just possible that after years of hard work analyzing the ecology of our planet and the sources of the carbon pollution that’s messing up its climate, it suddenly occurred to the experts consulted by the United Nations that it’s going to be hard to cut carbon emissions unless the people who produce a disproportionate share of those emissions do something to change that. I confess, though, that I find this hard to believe. My guess is that the political blowback against the pet policies of the clueless well-to-do has reached a high enough pitch that the organs of the establishment have been forced to notice it, and have realized that it will no longer work to insist that “shared sacrifice” means that the working poor are loaded with all the costs and the middle and upper classes get all the benefits.
That’s an issue, of course, because it’s not just environmental policy that’s been twisted out of shape along those lines. For decades now, across the board, nearly every policy that’s been pushed by the establishment here in the US and in most other industrial nations has benefited the middle classes at the expense of the working classes. That’s why we’ve gone from the situation in 1960, when one working class income could support a family comfortably, to the situation in 2020, when one working class income won’t keep a family off the street. Those changes weren’t accidental, nor were they inevitable; they were the results of readily identifiable policies pushed by a bipartisan consensus, and defended by government, corporate, and media flacks with a disingenuousness that borders on the pathological.
The difficulty we’re in now, of course, is that a very large number of people are aware of this, and they’re far from happy about it. Here in the United States, a vast number of citizens—quite probably a majority—believe that they live under a senile kleptocracy propped up by rigged elections and breathtakingly dishonest media, in which their votes do not count and their needs will not be addressed by those in power. What’s more, they have more than a little evidence to support these beliefs, and strange to say, another round of patronizing putdowns by the mouthpieces of the well-to-do is unlikely to change their minds. The resulting crisis of legitimacy has become a political fact of immense importance.
A few years back, my fellow blogger and more than occasional debating partner Dmitry Orlov wrote a series of essays (later collected into his book Reinventing Collapse) pointing out that the United States is vulnerable to the same sort of sudden political implosion that overtook the Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991. His point has lost none of its sharpness since then. When political theorists of an earlier generation noted that governments exist by the consent of the governed, they were stating a simple fact, not proposing an ideal; a government, any government, survives solely because most of the people it rules play along, obeying its laws and edicts no matter how absurd those happen to be. If they withdraw that consent, the existing order of things comes tumbling down.
As we saw some thirty years ago, the most effective way to get people to withdraw their consent from the government that claims to rule them is to show them, over and over again, that their needs and concerns are of no interest to a self-aggrandizing elite, and that they have nothing to hope for from the continuation of the present system and nothing to lose if it falls. A very substantial share of Americans, and a significant number of people in other Western industrial countries, have already had that experience and come to those conclusions—and the enthusiasm displayed by the comfortable classes for shoving off the costs of change on the impoverished majority while seizing the benefits for themselves has played a huge role in that state of affairs.
As a result, it’s entirely possible that at some point in the near future, when next the United States faces a serious crisis, most Americans will shrug and let it fall, as most Soviet citizens did when the Soviet Union hit its final crisis in 1991. Keep in mind that the vast majority of active duty US police and military personnel—the final bulwark of any regime in crisis—voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and might not be in any hurry to come to the rescue of a system that treats them with the same casual contempt it turns on everyone outside the circles of privilege. It’s entirely possible, in other words, that ten years from now people will talk about the former United States the way they talk about the former Soviet Union.
Will that happen in 2021? It’s impossible to say, and one of the reasons it’s impossible to say is that it depends, among other things, on the other unknowns discussed already in this essay. If the Covid-19 vaccines turn out to be safe and effective; if the Biden administration moves to occupy the abandoned center of American politics and gives working Americans some reason to think that their concerns have some chance of being addressed by those who claim the right to rule them; if the privileged classes in the United States and elsewhere finally notice that policies like those they favor reliably end with some equivalent of tumbrils and guillotines, or at least the irrevocable collapse of the system that provides them with their comfortable lifestyles—why, then, things could swerve in a different direction entirely.
On the other hand, if one of those inadequately tested vaccines turns out to have bad outcomes for a significant share of the millions of people lining up to receive them, or if Biden’s talk about providing jobs for working Americans turns out to be just as dishonest as Obama’s promises about his health care legislation, or if the clueless elites keep on believing that they can pursue their pet policies at the expense of everyone whose labor keeps the system going—or, gods help us, all of these at once—then we may just find ourselves plunging into a chaotic future for which very few of us are prepared. For the moment, though, we just don’t know.
With that in mind, I’d like to encourage my readers to stay watchful, stay nimble, keep your pantries well stocked with necessities, and remember that all those yammering faces on glass screens are there to sell you something you don’t want to buy. I’ll be taking January off blogging, as usual, so we’ll resume this conversation on the first Wednesday in February. Until then, be safe, and may the powers that guide your destiny bring you good things.
A 2020 Retrospective: Looking Back in Foresight. Prof Steve Keen. Dec. 30, 2020.
I made the macabre joke at the end of my post on losing David Graeber, that “Now we know why we speak of 20:20 vision, and 20:20 hindsight. We thought it was an ophthalmologist’s crazy numbering system. In fact, it was a warning from a time traveler.” That year is about to pass, and we’ll soon look back on 2020 in hindsight—as we once did on 1920, when the Spanish Flu ended.
Will we be any the wiser? I unfortunately expect that the wish to see this year in the rear vision mirror will translate into a wish to “return to normal”, where normal is defined as “what was happening before 2020”. However, that pre-2020 normal itself was based on so many unsustainable trends—most significantly of all, the unsustainable trend of human exploitation of the biosphere. 2020 will probably be looked back upon as the year in which the unsustainability of those trends was first made apparent by Covid-19. But we humans are likely not to learn that lesson, given our desire to escape the pain this year has caused.
Some Twitter correspondents have wondered whether The Roaring Twenties were a similar response, after the privations forced upon America by the Spanish Flu. I think there’s wisdom in that thought, and I do expect we’ll attempt likewise. But we will be bereft of the low levels of private debt, and low relative levels of the stock market, that made that euphoria possible in 1920.
This will mainly be a personal reflection on 2020, but I can’t not post the following chart, showing the level of margin debt and the stock market valuation over the last century. When the Spanish Flu ended, the stock market was at almost its lowest level in history (it hit that level just six months later) and margin debt was comparable to today’s levels, which are six times the post-WWII median of about 0.5% of GDP, but exploded during the 1920s to 13% of GDP (after adjusting pre-WWII data slightly to match post-WWII records).
Especially when combined with the historically high levels of private debt, I simply can’t see the 2020s being anything like the 1920s. Instead, I think it will be the decade where our foolishness in trusting economists on climate change comes back to bite the economy big-time.
For me, 2020 has been a year of enormous change, all driven by Covid-19. I began the year in Amsterdam, where I had bought a flat with my partner Nisa. I’ve ended it in Bangkok, where we fled in March to escape the Netherlands, which has been as much of a shit-show on Covid-19 as the UK or Sweden—and we formalized our relationship by getting married yesterday.
We’ll now look to buy a place here, for both personal and climate-change related reasons. One reason I bought in Amsterdam was that, on some metrics, it was better placed than any other country in Europe to cope well with climate change. The Dutch are the best in the world at managing water, both in terms of keeping it out with dykes, and in managing it in agriculture; and as by far the world’s leading exporter of food in per capita output terms, they were likely to cope better with the climate-change-driven breakdown of agriculture.
Then they made a complete fist of Covid-19, I expect by falling for the same “herd immunity” nonsense as did Sweden, though not as explicitly. This country of 17 million has as bad a record on Covid-19 as the UK.
I was lucky to have the option of moving to Thailand, given Nisa’s nationality: though she has lived in The Netherlands for over 25 years, she is still a Thai citizen, and moving here was straightforward for her. I made the move initially thinking that it would slow down how quickly I would get the virus, thus giving more time for a vaccine to be developed. Until the recent huge outbreak in a Burmese-migrant-worker enclave on the outskirts of Bangkok, it looked like I had instead drawn the Ace of Hearts from the pack, by choosing somewhere that had eliminated the virus completely.
Even with the recent outbreak—which also illustrates the weakness, in our “spaceship Earth” world, of treating any subgroup as something we can just exploit without consequences—I think Thailand will succeed in eradicating its second wave, as The Netherlands blunders into its third.
There are family reasons for having a home here as well—we live in the same suburb as Nisa’s eldest son, and several sisters—but for me it’s also another climate change hedge. Though Thailand is likely to suffer from higher heat thanks to global warming, it isn’t projected to suffer from the “35°C wet bulb” crisis that will hit the Indian subcontinent.
It is also a net food exporter, and the food supply chain is a lot shorter, even in Bangkok, than for any Western city—including Amsterdam. So that implies relative safety, if food supplies are challenged—and prices rise dramatically as a result.
Places like the UK, which imports about 30% of its food, are likely to be severely challenged when food exporters are hit by climate change breakdowns of major weather systems.
My main reason for wanting hedges against climate change, apart from the merely selfish motivation, is that it seems I’m the person who is best placed to expose the fraud that has underpinned the sanguine forecasts of the economic impact of climate change made by Neoclassical economists like Nordhaus. I want to pursue that all the way from academic articles like “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change” to being an expert witness if, as I hope, they are eventually prosecuted under the developing laws against ecocide.
Looking forward(?) to 2021, I’ll be developing more research to support that critique of Nordhaus and friends, as well as working on monetary policies to address climate change. I have been invited to write a review paper on economic analysis of climate change Proceedings of the Royal Society A, which I’ll start as soon as I finish the first draft of The New Economics: A Manifesto for Polity Press.
I had hoped to finish that book before the end of the year—that is, in less than two days’ time! I’m close, but I won’t make it. However, I think I’ll have it done by the end of the first week of January, and I’ll post that first draft here (for patrons only).
Next cab off the rank—probably simultaneously with Royal Society paper—will be a policy paper on carbon rationing. Having read the drivel on carbon pricing by economists like Nordhaus, I’m convinced that carbon pricing is far too little, far too late, and rationing of carbon (with tradeable Universal Carbon Credits) is the only feasible monetary means to slow down climate change. ....
After months of repeated errors and deceptions, experts and institutions are more powerful than ever
David B. Collum, Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology - Cornell University
"David Collum is willfully ignorant."~ Mountain Man (@Pjas77)
Introduction
Imagine, if you will, a man wakes up from a year-long induced coma—a long hauler of a higher order—to a world gone mad. During his slumber, the President of the United States was impeached for colluding with the Russians using a dossier prepared by his political opponents, themselves colluding with the FBI, intelligence agencies, and the Russians. A pandemic that may have emanated from a Chinese virology laboratory swept the globe killing millions and is still on the loose. A controlled demolition of the global economy forced hundreds of millions into unemployment in a matter of weeks. Metropolitan hotels plummeted to 10% occupancy. The 10% of the global economy corresponding to hospitality and tourism had been smashed on the shoals and was foundering. The Federal Reserve has been buying junk corporate bonds in total desperation. A social movement of monumental proportions swept the US and the world, triggering months of rioting and looting while mayors, frozen in the headlights, were unable to fathom an appropriate response. The rise of neo-Marxism on college campuses and beyond had become palpable. The most contentious election in US history pitted the undeniably polarizing and irascible Donald Trump against the DNC A-Team including a 76-year-old showing early signs of dementia paired with a sassy neo-Marxist grifter with an undetectable moral compass. Many have lost faith in the fairness of the election as challenges hit the courts. Peering through the virus-induced brain fog the man sees CNBC playing on the TV with the scrolling Chiron stating, “S&P up 12% year to date. Nasdaq soars 36%.” The man has entered The Twilight Zone.
A nutty Chem prof from CornellHas interesting stories to tellThe year 2020Had crazy-a-plentyT’was a year that was crafted in hell~ @TheLimerickKing
Putting ideas on paper is the best way to organize them in one place, and getting everything in one place is essential to understanding ideas as more than the gut reactions they often hide as.~ Morgan Housel (@morganhousel), columnist on why we write
Every year I ponder not writing a review. One of the voices in my head was pleading with me, “Don’t write it. There is nothing to be gained.” A much louder voice that chimes in seconds before every major decision that I make, however, was saying, “Fuck it. Let’s do it.” Someday I may drop the mic but not yet. I personally benefit because my life’s experiences and observations—those wild moments and funny-assed one-liners—don’t get shoved down (or up) the memory hole. I get boluses of serotonin. Mike “Mish” Shedlock referred to 2019’s version as “Satirical, Comedic, Insulting…” as part of a thorough Collumoscopy. ref 1 To the guy who keeps emailing me urging me to clean it up so his daughters can read it, save your breath. They are either too young, which means they should be reading the Harry Potter series written by that transgender-bashing cis white billionaire, or probably have long since rounded the bases and are getting kinky with their boyfriends in ways that would curdle your blood. I also write this for Gerry (and his kids)…
Collum is a whiny moron…You would interview someone like that, a Trump-supporting climate denier…he’s a total idiot who needs to FOAD [fuck off and die]. He simply refuses to acknowledge facts…~ Gerry Muller, my most audacious hate mailer, responding to Jim Kunstler for his audacity.
The title is a takeoff on the website entitled, “WTF Happened in 1971”, which uses 50 graphics to document that the world changed abruptly in 1971. ref 2 (The gold bugs know why.) It is undeniable that 2020 will be a year of abrupt change as well—a phase change so to speak—but to what future is unclear. We all squandered inordinate kilos of ATP trying to understand events in ways that would not make us happier people and for which an answer key eventually would be forthcoming.
We have to be very careful about how we spend our time…be very careful about not being manipulated into narrative after narrative….The Eye of Sauron is focused on climate, covid, and race. I’m not going to get caught up in it…Everything we get distracted onto we don’t make better.~ Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray), author of The Madness of Crowds
This year posed challenges writing the damned thing, some common and others unique. Of course, I don’t have the luxury of casually surveying a year. Ya can’t be Toobin’ all day and patch it together in your spare time. Ya gotta Stephen-King the mother. Why not write it quarterly? Simple: it takes my beautiful mind that long to spot patterns in random noise and deconvolute the chorus of voices in my head. Also, nobody—and I mean nobody—in their right mind wants to rehash the events of 2020. The annual YIR is always about human folly, but how much folly is there when we’re all living in our basements (Joe)?
I tease Dave about his “Technical Analysis Wizardry,” because I want him to write a children’s book on charting. Still, I can’t deny that he often captures the market zeitgeist in one tweet.~ Tony Greer (@TGMacro), TGMacro
Keeping it light was a Herculean task. I kept getting pulled by Lord Vader toward a revenge mindset, which I have curbed with only partial success. Epithet-rich allusions to baseball bats kept getting smuggled into the prose stemming from undiagnosed coprolalia, the acute swearing component of Tourette’s Syndrome. Some commenter after a podcast said (paraphrased), “This guy sure wants to put a hurt on a lot of people.” Indeed. The sense of frontier justice runs deep in the entire Collum clan. Horse thieves beware. I don’t need anger management; I need people to stop pissing me off. Ad hominem attacks are reserved for the total douche bags.
Writers are desperate people, and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.~ Charles Bukowski, American Poet
I was inadvertently ready for the pandemic in some odd ways. I love medieval history, had just finished a book on the Black Death in the fall of 2019, and was pondering immunology when Covid-19 struck. Ah, the first contention: I refuse to capitalize the whole thing because COVID-19 makes no sense linguistically—it’s not correct for an acronym or proper name—and using all caps is shouting and distracts from other attempts at emphasis. SHOULD I TYPE LIKE THIS? I don’t care what everybody else on the planet does. They are wrong. Screw ‘em. I appear to have gotten Covid-19 at birth; I have been tasteless and urged by friends and family to social distance since childhood. Obviously I should wax philosophically about the Covid-19, right? But what do you say to 350 million basement-dwelling bunker monkeys who are now expert epidemiologists and virologists with rock-solid opinions of what parts of the pandemic sucked the saltiest balls? I dedicate far less page space to the pandemic or the elections than you might expect.
It is so much better to tell the truth than to just shut up.~ Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray), author of The Madness of Crowds
The YIR poses risk—possibly considerable risk—every year, but this year is special. No guff no glory I guess. There are a ton of social justice crazies (SJCs) out there. In the 65th year of my personal sitcom, the writers keep hurling absurdities to keep the series running, but I got canceled anyway. No, not by Covid-19 (unless this is The Sixth Sense) but by the diversity-industrial complex otherwise known as the Klan of the Kancel Kulture (KKK), virtuously broadcasting to the world that I am a seriously twisted bastard. It is hard to argue with that. However, if people in visible positions feel they cannot speak up right now, when will they speak up? On their deathbeds? If a 65-year-old tenured professor can’t express unpopular ideas, who can? A 9-to-5-er who could be fired in a heartbeat has no voice. I will keep spewing drivel because somebody has to do it.
Factoid: You cannot breathe with your tongue sticking out of your mouth.
Stuff your tongues back in your mouths you idiots. Of course you can. I have become increasingly aware that we are all looking through our own lens with an emerging plotline that is self-consistent with our own unique narrative. As described in The Social Dilemma, the narrative is shaped nefariously by ideologically dubious weasels in Silicon Valley running their MK-Ultra experiments on us through mass and social media. As I jam more pixelated pseudo-factoids into my noggin, doubts about their veracities are debilitating. How is it that smart blokes can peer at the same data and draw diametrically opposite conclusions? If I offered you $1000 to convince just one person—one person—that they were wrong about Russia collusion, the Biden laptop, election fraud, or the merits of sheltering, could you do it? Didn’t think so. Some of us must be, as Gerry would say, whiny morons who should simply FOAD, but we all have our truths that we will defend, Goddammit! This annual tome is, necessarily, the World According to Dave. At times it will sound narcissistic, but it’s not. [Editor’s note: yes it is.] It wanders through a range of topics in no way statistically weighted to their global importance but presented in a Michael-Lewis way sniffing out the story beneath the story. What my four regular readers would tell you is that I try to write about what others are not pondering. I don’t always find the rotting corpse, but I am attracted to foul odors.
Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap
The Year in Review (YIR) is broken into two parts with individual sections hot-linked in the contents below. The whole beast can be downloaded as a single PDF here.
Contents
Part 1
Introduction
Contents
My Personal Year
Conspiracy Theories
Decade in Review
Investing
Gold
Wealth Creation
Valuations
Broken Markets
Bailouts
Healthcare
Link in Part 1
Part 2
Epilogue–Epstein
Epilogue-Climate Change
Rise of the Cancel Culture
The Tweet and Cancel
The Buffalo Shove: The Real Story
College Life
Political Correctness—Adult Division
Group Statements and Identity Science
Anatomy of the Riots
The Death of George Floyd
Covid-19: Just Opinions
Where to from Here?
Acknowledgments
Books
Links in Part 2
No comments:
Post a Comment