The Lesser Dystopia
(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized βnaturalβ disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...
Rent, Debt, and Power
In 2009 Rolling Stone published an article by Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs. Taibbi writes: βThe worldβs most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.β The statement is rather unfair to vampire squids, but aside from that detail the characterization is quite appropriate and, moreover, equally applicable to the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector as a whole. In Killing the Host, Michael Hudson describes the FIRE sector as parasitic. He writes that βinstead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with...