Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Guest]

Given the longstanding nature of the decline in per capita energy use in the developed economies against the rise of Asia, I don't think it will be possible to reverse this trend completely and "Make America Great Again." Though I do think it would be possible to at least slow the trend.

What happens if Biden wins?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94KcI0gLq1A

this happens.

[Higgenbotham]

World per capita energy use has been stagnant for several years. If the developed economies were getting huge gains in efficiency to offset the decline in their per capita energy use, that would be one thing but they aren't. Instead, the FIRE economy is filling in the gaps to keep GDP floating higher. Given the longstanding nature of the decline in per capita energy use in the developed economies against the rise of Asia, I don't think it will be possible to reverse this trend completely and "Make America Great Again." Though I do think it would be possible to at least slow the trend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFrxgMFbN8c

The transcript of the first 15 minutes of this video is copied below. The parts that seem to best correspond to the above are underlined.

It's pretty much true, though, that any position can be corroborated online if someone looks hard enough. I just happened on it, though, because someone linked to it in a blog I regularly read.

welcome my name is Glenn dies and I'm joined by Alexander mccurtis and Professor Michael Hudson and uh yeah welcome to the both of you and today uh yeah we I really wanted to discuss the decoupling or fragmentation of the international economy and also now the alternative economic architecture emerging I would say primarily in the East but also in other parts of the world so I thought we can start off by yeah discussing the defining economic challenges of our time uh for those of us who were studying economics in the '90s and 2000s uh the big talk was always economic interdependence this was supposed to be the recipe for prosperity and peace uh but these days the rhetoric obviously has changed now uh the main talk in town will be the yeah the a new international division of power so while in the early 2000 the idea was you know the United States would invent the iPhone and the Chinese could assemble it this was the distribution of labor but now of course China has climbed up this Global value chains and it can effectively do both uh the invention of it and the assembly meanwhile Biden recently argued that if something is invented in the US it should also be produced there so it's a dismantling or repatriation of the supply chains going on and uh we also see economic dependence being weaponized I would say uh hijacking of Iranian uh oil tankers uh seizing the Russian Central Bank assets or simply trying to cut off or yeah China's access to technology so I guess my my first question would what does all of this mean this what what are the main Trends and what does it mean not just for the United States and China but also the wider World well countries such as Germany which was very much tied into this uh very liberal economic system be crushed under the new political economy or what uh what what do you see coming the United States was always for free trade after World War II as long as it was the most efficient and strongest industrial producer but uh now that it's not the strongest anymore it's gone back to the protectionism uh that in the 19th century built up its uh uh industry uh to begin with uh the problem is at this time even though the United States and other countries uh are going protectionist uh the United States can't reindustrialize like it could then because it's already uh overloaded its economy uh with financialization uh corporate debt personal debt uh and uh privatized Medical Care privatized education the the economic overhead of getting a job here and the uh the pay that workers have to get uh not simply uh to eat and uh get clothed but for medical insurance for Debt Service uh is prices America out of the market so it really has no alternative but to be uh uh autarchic but it can't be aaric because it's it nobody can see how it can reindustrialize so there's a kind of uh rage going on here among economists and just today the treasury secretary Janet yelen uh is going to China and said well we can't uh uh import uh uh the the the anti the solar uh panels
anymore because China's government supports them as if the US government also doesn't support them and other countries don't support them it's a you're you're getting a travesty almost of the public statements of why uh America has to uh avoid imports from China impos sanctions on Russia uh but the the result is there are going to be shortages uh all throughout economies that are following this withdrawal from uh international trade that it's very that is very interesting when you said that there's going to be shortages um will these s shortages eventually become self-correcting because I I was reading actually again there's been a very interesting in statement by the governor of the Russian Central Bank nabul who um is by the way somebody who I think personally emotionally was very wedded to the neoliberal open market unregulated economic model she's absolutely astonished at what the effect the actual effect of the push to kind of enforced protectionism in Russia has been and in this statement she says that what's actually happening and she says I can't explain it this is astonishing to me is that investment is rising consumer spending is rising wages are rising and in conditions of an inv investment boom production is expanding she says you know I don't quite believe this I worry that the economy a Russian economy is growing faster than capacity that it's going to burn itself out in some way I mean it's it's a very strange statement both confidence in some respects panicky in others this can't be true I mean but is that actually what is going to happen because um this system of everybody link being linked up in a single economic system actually has been I think a relatively recent thing in terms of you know post British Empire time um will in fact the fragmentation actually in the end lead to a more diverse economic landscape and a more balanced one I'm just just wondering because nebulin is now perhaps I think starting to her own astonishment wonder whether that might happen in Russia itself well economists love to use the word self-correcting because if economies are self-correcting you don't need a government you can just have the private sector running the economy and in practice that means Wall Street but there's no way that the American economy can be self-correcting uh with without a few Decades of uh new investment you'd have to reinvent the educational system you would have to take uh public Health into he uh healthare into the public domain so that you could lower the cost of living so that employers wouldn't have to pay such high wages uh you'd have to provide uh Freer education so that workers don't uh graduate uh into the labor force with so much debt uh that they uh need high enough wages to pay the debt uh and even so can't afford to buy houses the the America and also I think uh Western Europe has painted itself into a corner that is now systemic the whole trend from 1945 to today uh all all of these uh uh uh these 70 uh years have uh built up uh such rigidities uh that there's no way that you can break them down and the idea that somehow there's a government policy that can fix things won't work either unless it's so radical a policy uh that it be the current economy anymore and nobody's talking about the need for structural change they just uh uh avoid talking about the debt problem uh talking about uh what makes America high cost and then of course there's the war spending well you you mentioned um uh the the rent seeking as something that makes America very uncompetitive obviously extracting having all this uh well not necessarily oligarchs but people extracting money through um yeah through the way the economy has been financialized intellectual property uh land rights Technologies this obviously is a burden for the productivity and competitiveness of the United States but but there's also a sense of a um rent seeking internationally uh through this monopolistic positions so again when you have a monopoly in certain areas uh obviously this has economic influence well Economic Consequences in terms of the high Prof profitability but you also have the the ability to extract political influence when there's a position of economic Monopoly uh but I but uh um yeah because I remember back in 2009 I think the Putin called the the the dollar um they call it a leech or something along those lines which was also uh suggesting that there was a similar uh way of uh extracting wealth so in other words the rent seeking not just in America but for the entire International Community and I was wondering if this goes into what Alexander was mentioning because uh for for countries around the world well then especially countries who have Alternatives uh uh be it Russia if they're not through intellectual property rights or American Tech platforms or debt Banks the use of the US dollar uh if if they don't use all of this would it be would it result in less efficiency or or would it be essentially say saving themselves or Liber liberating themselves from uh rent seeking from the United States would this have anything to do with it you think you put your finger on it the O official US position it recognized that it can't be uh an industrial exporter anymore though though how is it going to balance the international payments to support the Dollar's exchange rate the solution is rent seeking that's why the United States says well what's the main new rent seeking uh opportunity in World Trade well it's information technology and computer technology that's why the United States is uh fighting China and uh so much and why president Biden has said again and again that China is the number one enemy uh it's trying uh it moved first against Huawei uh for the 5G uh uh Communications and now it's trying to get uh Europe and American uh and Taiwanese exporters not to export uh uh computer chip to China not for the Dutch to export uh uh chip engraving Machinery to China the there's a belief that somehow the United States can if it can prevent other countries from producing high technology inter uh intellectual property rents uh then uh other countries will be dependent and rent seeking really means dependency of other countries that they don't have a choice to pay uh you much uh more uh money than the actual cost of reduction that's uh rent price overv value well uh the United States uh since it can't uh uh compete on value because of the high cost of of living and labor here it can only monopolize rent well China has uh not been deterred uh China's a lead frog over the United States and is producing its own etching Machinery its own uh computer chips and uh uh the question is what is rest of the world going to do well uh the rest of the world means on the one hand the global majority Eurasia the the bricks plus and on the other hand Western Europe Western Europe has bought right in the middle of all this is it really going to foro the uh much less expensive uh Chinese uh exports at Cost uh and including normal profit or is it going to be uh uh let itself be locked in to American rent extracting technology not only for computer chips but for Military Arms uh I know that France SWS to use uh uh the fighting uh in uh uh against Russia uh in Ukraine is an opportunity to say well let's build rebuild the European arms industry but uh the Germans are not particularly in favor of this and the Americans uh certainly said no no when we say you have to spend uh two to three% of your GDP in arms that means by American Arms integrated Army so it's all about rent seeking it's also presumably the reason why we have never succeeded in creating our own uh um social media type infrastructure in Europe we have no European equivalence to Google or TikTok which we're hearing so much about the Chinese Tik Tok or Facebook or anything like that we entirely rely upon the Americans to provide these things for us and whenever there's any attempt to produce anything like that in Europe it it always fails partly because the Americans object to it now I I mean I know all about this because uh my brother I should say worked for a time at the European Parliament and he saw the American lobbying systems that operated within the European Parliament and the European levels in action and extremely effective they were but this isn't a mechanism for economic for technological progress at least this is how it looks to me it's a formula for ultimate stagnation because you're locked in to a system which isn't even as far as I could see focused on development it's focused on rent which is which is which is a completely different thing so um you mentioned that the Chinese you know you use the word leap...

Some long term themes:

Giant sucking sound of the US dollar system
US economy is too inefficient
The cost structure of the US is too high
Utilities such as education, health care and financial services that should be used to support productive parts of the economy have been turned into extractive businesses and have become most of the economy itself

[Guest]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFrxgMFbN8c

The transcript of the first 15 minutes of this video is copied below.

Some long term themes:

Giant sucking sound of the US dollar system
US economy is too inefficient
The cost structure of the US is too high
Utilities such as education, health care and financial services that should be used to support productive parts of the economy have been turned into extractive businesses and have become most of the economy itself

I listened to the whole show. They are all pro-Russian and Pro-Chinese shills. They blame America for "starting" a new cold war with Russia and China and place all of the blame on America.

Michael Hudson said that Ukraine started the war by attacking Russian speakers in the Donbas...un, yeah, right...

The only way that Europe can be "independent" is to become dependent on Russia and China....

This is the road to to slavery. These "experts" are ridiculous.

I'll stay on the American/Japanese/Western European side of the cold war.

[Higgenbotham]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFrxgMFbN8c

The transcript of the first 15 minutes of this video is copied below.

Some long term themes:

Giant sucking sound of the US dollar system
US economy is too inefficient
The cost structure of the US is too high
Utilities such as education, health care and financial services that should be used to support productive parts of the economy have been turned into extractive businesses and have become most of the economy itself

I listened to the whole show. They are all pro-Russian and Pro-Chinese shills. They blame America for "starting" a new cold war with Russia and China and place all of the blame on America.

Michael Hudson said that Ukraine started the war by attacking Russian speakers in the Donbas...un, yeah, right...

The only way that Europe can be "independent" is to become dependent on Russia and China....

This is the road to to slavery. These "experts" are ridiculous.

I'll stay on the American/Japanese/Western European side of the cold war.

Problem is, if there is an opinion out there that tends to corroborate statements of the following type:

Nowadays things out on the periphery aren't very good due to the huge sucking sound coming from Washington. All of the resources are being sucked into the center of the system. Once Washington collapses and the vacuum is shut down, things will be pretty good out there, relatively speaking.

Once the giant sucking sound from printed US dollars is silenced forever, it will not be a slow decline for the US or the man on the street in the US.

probably the source is going to have an anti-American bias. Rarely do I see anybody who is neutral or pro-America express the opinion that mismanagement of the world reserve currency is a problem. Long back, my Congressman (now retired) did admit to me that this mismanagement would destroy supply chains (not his exact words). Which is one reason why I copied the entire first 15 minutes of the transcript and underlined the pieces that are in agreement, which I think those underlined parts are pretty objective. Their bias is scattered throughout the parts that aren't underlined too.

For example, he says, "The United States can't reindustrialize like it could..." He didn't say flat out, "The United States can't reindustrialize.", which would not be a true statement. But it is certainly true that the United States can't reindustrialize like it could and then he goes on to state the correct reasons for that. For those who are pro-America, that's a real problem, particularly for those who think the main event will be a new world war.

[Higgenbotham]

The basic reasons why Europeans became dominant were summed up in Jared Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel. With these, they were able to implement colonial imperialism and thus gain advantage over other cultures. It is not due to superior culture, religion or genes. (He also wrote a book called Collapse, which may be of interest to the occupants of a certain Hovel.).

It's been said that Jared Diamond is a polymath. If someone is a polymath and in demand, that's a difficult role in today's world. Perhaps it could be said that he's written a few too many books on too wide a range of subjects and fractured his time just a little too much.

For example, in the book, he made several references to the rich being able to insulate themselves from environmental contaminants by drinking bottled water. That was back in 2005, but he should have known better even then.

A further conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the
interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the
rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the conse-
quences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves,
regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else. Such clashes, fla-
grantly personified by the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and
the governing elite in Haiti, are becoming increasingly frequent in the mod-
ern U.S., where rich people tend to live within their gated compounds
(Plate 36) and to drink bottled water.

Another view that is widespread among affluent First World people, but
which they will rarely express openly, is that they themselves are managing
just fine at carrying on with their lifestyles despite all those environmental
problems, which really don't concern them because the problems fall
mainly on Third World people (though it is not politically correct to be so
blunt). Actually, the rich are not immune to environmental problems. CEOs
of big First World companies eat food, drink water, breathe air, and have (or
try to conceive) children, like the rest of us. While they can usually avoid
problems of water quality by drinking bottled water...

That acknowledged interdependence of all segments of Dutch society
contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people in-
creasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to cre-
ate their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services
for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those
amenities as public services to everyone else. Those private amenities in-
clude living inside gated walled communities (Plate 36), relying on private
security guards rather than on the police, sending one's children to well-
funded private schools with small classes rather than to the underfunded
crowded public schools, purchasing private health insurance or medical
care, drinking bottled water...

He lists 12 environmental problems that contribute to collapse. The book is probably worth reading for that. His discussions of corruption and the 50 year timeline (from 2005) for environmental issues to become critical...without going into the details (some of which are scattered around in here), I don't agree.

[Higgenbotham]

It's been said that Jared Diamond is a polymath. If someone is a polymath and in demand, that's a difficult role in today's world.

The last days of the polymath – The Economist

Edward Carr | Autumn 2009

Mindful of that sort of promiscuity, I asked my colleagues to suggest living polymaths of the polygamous sort—doers, not dabblers. One test I imposed was breadth. A scientist who composes operas and writes novels is more of a polymath than a novelist who can turn out a play or a painter who can sculpt. For Djerassi, influence is essential too. “It means that your polymath activities have passed a certain quality control that is exerted within each field by the competition. If they accept you at their level, then I think you have reached that state rather than just dabbling.” They mentioned a score of names—Djerassi was prominent among them. Others included Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Brian Eno, Michael Frayn and Oliver Sacks.

It is an impressive list, by anyone’s standards. You can find scientists, writers, actors, artists—the whole range of human creativity. Even so, what struck me most strongly was how poorly today’s polymaths compare with the polymaths of the past.

In the first half of 1802 a physician and scientist called Thomas Young gave a series of 50 lectures at London’s new Royal Institution, arranged into subjects like “Mechanics” and “Hydro­dynamics”. By the end, says Young’s biographer Andrew Robinson, he had pretty much laid out the sum of scientific knowledge. Robinson called his book “The Last Man Who Knew Everything”.

Young’s achievements are staggering. He smashed Newtonian orthodoxy by showing that light is a wave, not just a particle; he described how the eye can vary its focus; and he proposed the three-colour theory of vision. In materials science, engineers dealing with elasticity still talk about Young’s modulus; in linguistics, Young studied the grammar and voc­abulary of 400 or so languages and coined the term “Indo-European”; in Egyptology, Jean-François Champollion drew on his work to decode the Rosetta stone. Young even tinkered around with life insurance.

When Young was alive the world contained about a billion people. Few of them were literate and fewer still had the chance to experiment on the nature of light or to examine the Rosetta stone. Today the planet teems with 6.7 billion minds. Never have so many been taught to read and write and think, and then been free to choose what they would do with their lives. The electronic age has broken the shackles of knowledge. Never has it been easier to find something out, or to get someone to explain it to you.

Yet as human learning has flowered, the man or woman who does great things in many fields has become a rare species. Young was hardly Aristotle, but his capacity to do important work in such a range of fields startled his contemporaries and today seems quite bewildering. The dead cast a large shadow but, even allowing for that, the 21st century has no one to match Michelangelo, who was a poet as well as a sculptor, an architect and a painter. It has no Alexander von Humboldt, who towered over early-19th-century geography and science. And no Leibniz, who invented calculus at the same time as Newton and also wrote on technology, philosophy, biology, politics and just about everything else.

Although you may be able to think of a few living polymaths who rival the breadth of Young’s knowledge, not one of them beg­ins to rival the breadth of his achievements. Over the past 200 years the nature of intellectual endeavour has changed profoundly. The polymaths of old were one-brain universities. These days you count as a polymath if you excel at one thing and go on to write a decent book about another.

Young was just 29 when he gave his lectures at the Royal Institution. Back in the early 19th century you could grasp a field with a little reading and a ready wit. But the distinction between the dabbling and doing is more demanding these days, because breaking new ground is so much harder. There is so much further to trek through other researchers’ territory before you can find a patch of unploughed earth of your own.

Even the best scientists have to make that journey. Benjamin Jones, of the Kellogg School of Management near Chicago, looked at the careers of Nobel laureates. Slightly under half of them did their path-breaking work in their 30s, a smattering in their 20s—Einstein, at 26, was unusually precocious. Yet when the laureates of 1998 did their seminal research, they were typically six years older than the laureates of 1873 had been. It was the same with great inventors.

Once you have reached the vanguard, you have to work harder to stay there, especially in the sciences. So many scientists are publishing research in each specialism that merely to keep up with the reading is a full-time job. “The frontier of knowledge is getting longer,” says Professor Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, where Young was a leading light for over three decades. “It is impossible now for anyone to focus on more than one part at a time.”

Specialisation is hard on polymaths. Every moment devoted to one area is a moment less to give over to something else. Researchers are focused on narrower areas of work. In the sciences this means that you often need to put together a team to do anything useful. Most scientific papers have more than one author; papers in some disciplines have 20 or 30. Only a fool sets out to cure cancer, Rees says. You need to concentrate on some detail—while remembering the big question you are ultimately trying to answer. “These days”, he says, “no scientist makes a unique contribution.”

It is not only the explosion of knowledge that puts polymaths at a disadvantage, but also the vast increase in the number of specialists and experts in every field. This is because the learning that creates would-be polymaths creates monomaths too and in overwhelming numbers. If you have a multitude who give their lives to a specialism, their combined knowledge will drown out even a gifted generalist. And while the polymath tries to take possession of a second expertise in some distant discipline, his or her first expertise is being colonised by someone else.

The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical.

“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field. I can make mistakes. On the other hand for me to be criticising someone whose whole career is committed to a particular outlook and method and so on, that is very painful.”

For a polymath, the charge of dabbling never lies far below the surface. “With the amount of information that’s around, if you really want to understand your topic thoroughly then, yes, you have to specialise,” says Chris Leek, the chairman of British Mensa, a club for people who score well on IQ tests. “And if you want to speak with authority, then it’s important to be seen to specialise.”

That is why modern institutions tend to exclude polymaths, he says. “It’s very hard to show yourself as a polymath in the current academic climate. If you’ve got someone interested in going across departments, spending part of the time in physics and part of the time elsewhere, their colleagues are going to kick them out. They’re not contributing fully to any single department. OK, every so often you’re going to get a huge benefit, but from day to day, where the universities are making appointments, they want the focus in one field.”

https://the-polymath.com/the-last-days- ... economist/

[Higgenbotham]

As a successful physics professor at a top institution in academia, Tom Murphy broke ranks in one of the hardest possible ways at the peak of his career.

One reason this is so difficult, and it came to mind when writing this, is he knows he can only credibly discuss collapse in physics terms to certain audiences, his social group in particular. If, for example, he tries to discuss it in economic terms his colleagues and many others are going to think, "What does Tom really know about economics? He should just stick to physics." That makes a holistic discussion about collapse difficult and unlikely to be tackled or discussed much in today's environment.

[aeden]

Encirclement doesn’t require kinetic. The structural inflation is the feature produced.
They will not comprehend building inside out as many of the supply chains are moving anyways to just survive the current polo-tics.
Looting derivatives is all they are now up as quality can be noted as slow at first then all at once as
capital will vanish and move. The ratio of 17 to 1 scaling will increase to Mexico as Ford was adulterated on levels ignored also.

The warnings are unheeded.

For the few we watched the oxygen deprivation zones in the carbon sink you call the Oceans and the effects of Quality ignored
later to the project as they exported concentrated levels of contaminants labeled organic.
Locally they devastated the soil with the pollutants as we noted from reports still willfully ignored.
The testing showed PFOS levels of 1.84 to 3.41 parts per billion in hay and dry grasses fed to cattle.
Ours is not contaminated and they want to destroy all not in their cult appears rather clear for the thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2QYcl1CKuQ
Anyways the alleged retards in charge are just simply clueless by intent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avi9iBC8opU
5. punish the innocent
6. rewarding of the non-participants <-------------------
7. see step one

At some point working will not be worthwhile as the barter economy must be born not to mention rampant crime from these swamp lunatics
in simple plain view.

[Higgenbotham]

Several Michigan Democrats Fail To Condemn ‘Death To America’ Chants

HENRY RODGERS AND ZACK BRAVE
CONTRIBUTOR
April 10, 2024

A number of Democratic elected officials in Michigan failed to condemn “Death to America” chants made at an Al Quds Day Rally in Dearborn, Michigan, late last week.

An activist named Tarek Bazzi spoke to the crowd at the rally calling for “all of” the crowd’s chants and shouts to be directed at America. The protesters can be heard chanting, “Death to America” in a video posted on social media.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/10/mich ... en-whitmer

Dearborn, Michigan is a Muslim stronghold.

[Higgenbotham]

This is a list of the types of specialists who might think about collapse.

1. Archaeologists - Done enough digging to realize that much of what they are digging up resulted from the collapse of civilizations
2. Historians - Looked at enough history to conclude that there are patterns of rise and fall that civilizations follow
3. Systems Thinkers - Look at the world as a complex system that is inherently unstable and will break down as limits are hit
4. Theologians - Study religious prophecy and compare to current events to conclude that end times prophecy is being fulfilled
5. Ecologists - Look at population dynamics of other species and conclude that humans are on an unsustainable population trajectory
6. Environmentalists - Look at enough environmental measures (resources, health, climate, etc.) to think collapse is on the near term horizon
7. Whistleblowers - Believe that things are morally and ethically much worse than people realize based on perception of their personal experience
8. Traders - Have studied market collapses and believe these types of collapses are applicable harbingers and models of civilizational collapse
9. Dabblers - Often former professionals and retirees who are widely read and concerned about the future based on personal experience and study

It would take several lifetimes to cover all this ground even if one individual were constitutionally capable of doing it all.

One of the more interesting people who comes to mind is a retired Boeing engineer who was writing about collapse 15-20 years ago. I wonder if the seed that began to form his opinion was based on what he saw inside the company, the results of which are perhaps many years later being seen in the headlines.