Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

I wasn't aware of those 3% / 30% figures. Since I'm estimating a
30% kill, I guess I'd have to agree with your Dark Age theory.

John

Personally, I suspect the last century will be referred to as "the crazy years" after the phrase coined by Heinlein in his future history series. The development of computer AI and various resources of that nature are already having an effect, as this economy would have collapsed totally years ago without the real time data gathering the various institutions are using. The social adjustment to easy communications and real AI has barely begun, and will take time. But I do expect the AI's to force us to act in a sane fashion, though this may be very subtle and many people may not even be aware of it. Of course if it is overt, then everyone will find out about it almost immediately.

During a war, resources needed for the war effort are protected ruthlessly, even more so than the civilian population. I don't believe the world is going to let the primary military need today, VLSI chips, to go out of production.

As for human population numbers, I expect lower human population overall (on earth) by 2100, very likely less than 3 billion. Wait 90 years and we'll know.

Just got an insight from my youngest daughter. She said the problem isn't greed, she says that most people just never grew up because times have been easy and many people just don't have to grow up. She also had words about so many "only child" people now.

The end result was the financial/debt/monetary bubble that burst spectacularly in 2008 - and is still bursting, since the shadow-banking bubble machine has not been shut down.
http://suddendebt.blogspot.com/
Taxpayers are the moral hazzard since they reap what they sow.
I myself see no solution since the wolves are many, the sheep
abundant until total implosion. Mindfull only of themselves
the Central planning to arrogated view's, as the people
consider the obvious futility since they fear there own Governments
wisdom. Ignore a survey, since they are the Central planning of Commerce
and you will be fined into submission as trillion upon trillion of unfunded liabilty matter not.
Judgement will happen. It is not in our hands.

"The Three Unlucky Omens" [c.1946___ chinese wit & humor by george kao]

"Prince Ching went hunting and encountered a tiger in the mountains and a snake in the swamps. Upon his return he summoned Yentze and asked him, saying, 'today in the hunt we went up the mountain and saw a tiger, then we descended to the swamps and what did we find there but a snake! Are those not what you would call unlucky omens?'
'There are three unlucky omens in the land,' Yentze answered, 'but these are not among them. The first unlucky omen is when you have good men and you do not know them. The second unlucky omen is when you know that there are good men and do not use them. The third unlucky omen is when you use them and do not trust them. These are the so-called unlucky omens for a country. As to finding a tiger in the mountains, you ought to know that it is the tiger's natural abode. When you go down to the swamps and find a snake, that's the snake's own home. What's so unlucky about the tiger's being in his natural abode and the snake's being in his own home?"
the moral of this,... 'choose your own instincts wisely upon first encounter'

Questions as to whether there are conflicts of interests relating to Gensler's former employment have been raised, as has been the case in any number of former Goldman employees that go on to hold pivotal positions in the US Treasury, Federal Reserve, or as regulators. Gensler has the reputation in the market[who?] though as a politically ambitious man who is more likely to squash than accommodate speculation.
Rentiers were warned here sternly. These people will stop at nothing for there vision. MF was a operation given the effect to who was marked.

Higgenbotham wrote:So how could a scale of population reduction that is 10 times that of the prior saeculum occur? My thesis is that a Dark Age scale population reduction can only come about through large scale individual moral and institutional failure.

In Rome one of the main institutional failures was money. As they put less and less silver in the coins the money became worthless. This caused taxes based on money to fail. So government started confiscating wealth, which meant trade mostly ceased (moving wealth is too easy a target for government confiscation). Small more self sufficient closed systems developed with their own food production and defense. But if all food needs to be grown near the people who eat it, the population will have to be far smaller. Also, a local crop failure can lead to starvation.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html

It is also interesting that Rome was giving many citizens free grain and/or bread. When this becomes unsustainable and the government fails there will be hungry people. Rome also tried the death penalty for violating price controls and they still did not work.

It looks to me like money around the world is setup for failure. Like Rome, the governments are making too much new money with no intrinsic value. Eventually this will fail. If paper money fails now we will see huge disruptions in economic activity. We have already seen periods when Russia blocked the exportation of wheat or other countries blocked the exportation of rice. Imagine when prices really go crazy how much the trade in food will be blocked.

With taxes going up everywhere it is a good time to hide some wealth. Anguilla used to have no income tax, sales tax, or value added tax. Our government got most of its money from customs taxes on imports (since nearly everything is imported to the island) and hotel taxes on rich tourists. We recently got an income tax and a VAT tax has been passed and will start next month. Gold is a good device for hiding wealth.

When someone talks about Rome and the Dark Ages, the question I always ask is "which Rome and which Dark Ages?". The western empire fell apart for diverse reasons including the use of lead (hardened with antimony) as cooking vessels (available only to the wealthy), excessive use of slaves and raids meant to capture same which led to the free bread as a citizen could not compete with slave labor, tight concentration of wealth and property in fewer and fewer hands which was the proximate cause of the debasement of the coinage as circulation of money dried up - plus a host of other things. The eastern empire held together and maintained itself until the mid 1400's when the Ottoman Turks finally put an end to Rome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empi ... .931453.29

Much of the world went along quite well without Rome, its a mistake to call central Europe "the world". China and Japan went along as usual, empires were built and fell in southeast Asia, the far North planted colonies in Greenland and America, Russia did whatever Russia was doing, and for that matter Europe was not in disarray, it was simply not actively expanding or trading much in SPICES with the rest of the world. Had this "Dark Ages" name not caught on, the era would be regarded quite differently. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =122734153

There seems to be a misconception that the black plague spread quickly and then died out. There were several plague years, starting in 1335-mid 1350's (ended the Dark Ages), 1665-1679 (coincides with development of first automatic machinery) and 1855-1889 (India and China hardest hit). http://www.twoop.com/medicine/archives/ ... lague.html

The first plague ended the Middle Ages because it destroyed the serf system. Labor became very scarce and could and did demand wages rather than servile obedience. If you did not or could not pay up, the labor walked away and worked for someone else. The feudal lands were broken up and fell apart, and eventually became either national forests or were "colonized" by small farmers in later years.

Labor becoming short during the second plague outbreak certainly pushed development of automatic machinery. By 1731 there were about 450 wind powered sawmills in the Netherlands. Other machinery including steam powered was developed rapidly during this period.

Now, another historical point. I am not aware of any true recovery in modern times that was not preceded by the wide scale destruction of the accumulated wealth of the previous era. The Russians destroyed the Romanovs, the US saw bankers jumping out skyscraper windows, Europe burned her money in a massive potlatch, China killed the emperors, the Civil War utterly destroyed the plantations, and so on ad infinitum. Does anyone know of a counter example, a successful economic turning where the previous accumulation was not broken up, redistributed, seized or otherwise eliminated? It seems to me to be very nearly a law, that the old wealth must be largely eliminated to make room at the top for new wealth and the new means of doing things the new wealth brings with it.

OLD1953 wrote: Now, another historical point. I am not aware of any true recovery in modern times that was not preceded by the wide scale destruction of the accumulated wealth of the previous era.

There is now trillions of dollars of wealth in government bonds. It would be very easy for this wealth to be destroyed. It could be from sovereign defaults, interest rates going up, or paper money becoming worthless.

OLD1953 wrote:Much of the world went along quite well without Rome, its a mistake to call central Europe "the world". China and Japan went along as usual, empires were built and fell in southeast Asia, the far North planted colonies in Greenland and America, Russia did whatever Russia was doing, and for that matter Europe was not in disarray, it was simply not actively expanding or trading much in SPICES with the rest of the world. Had this "Dark Ages" name not caught on, the era would be regarded quite differently. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =122734153

DAVIDSON: For centuries, we had so little information about the economy of the Dark Ages. We had almost no spices. There were so few texts having anything to do with economics. Right, Mike?

Prof. McCORMICK: Very few texts.

JOFFE-WALT: And so, all the big historians, the text books I read in college...

DAVIDSON: Yeah, same for me.

JOFFE-WALT: Yeah, they all assumed, hey, they had no spices, they weren't writing about trade. They must have been broke, isolated, sad little economies.

It appears to me that the Harvard professor is trying to justify his existence. He claims to have JUST discovered that trade occurred during the Dark Ages. The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, published in 1992, shows maps of the trade routes in the Dark Ages, as well as what was traded along those routes. It also shows population maps and discusses the population decline of the Dark Ages, which was matched only by the population decline of the 14th Century, though thought to have occurred by different mechanisms. The mechanisms that took the population down during the Dark Ages were probably more fundamental in nature, longer lasting, and more indicative that life was more difficult to sustain.

I would strongly recommend this outstanding reference. It's concise, cheap and packed with useful information. There is a similar reference that covers ancient history.

http://books.google.com/books/about/The ... FYXMDe7D8C

The new Penguin atlas of medieval history
Colin McEvedy
5 Reviews
Penguin, 1992 - History - 112 pages
The period from the reign of Constantine to the great voyages of discovery-or from the fourth to the fifteenth century-was once seen merely as the long, slow decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Yet, for Europeans, it is also a "supreme story of defeat turned into victory."Colin McEvedy's pioneering atlas, revised and expanded for this new edition, treats as one unit the Mediterranean, Europe and the nomads' steppeland to the East (the habitat of Huns, Turks and Mongols). Illuminating maps and lively commentaries present the towns and trade routes, the changing population patterns, the boundaries of Christendom (and later Islam) and the ever-shifting political units. The result is a wonderfully eloquent picture, as Dr. McEvedy puts it, "of how old empires fell and new ones rose, and how, in Europe, a new society emerged which had the energy to break free from the geographical, intellectual and technical limitations that defined the medieval world.

There's a second reason why the NPR piece is a bit bizarre. The Dark Ages were called dark for the reason, one reason anyway, that very few records exist. The absence of recordkeeping is, I would think, solid evidence that things weren't going swimmingly well.

JOFFE-WALT: So a rat is born in, say, Alexandria, Egypt, rides a trading ship to Italy, dies. And 1,500 years later, some archaeology grad student digs up its tiny little bones, and suddenly we know, someone in Egypt was trading with someone in Italy.

DAVIDSON: For centuries, we had so little information about the economy of the Dark Ages. We had almost no spices. There were so few texts having anything to do with economics. Right, Mike?

They don't explicitly state this, but if it's been discovered that the shipping routes from Alexandria, Egypt to Italy were maintained in some reduced form all through the Dark Ages, that might be new information, though the map below doesn't seem to indicate that.

Here's a map of the known trade routes in 737 AD (the approximate nadir of the Dark Ages) from the Penguin Atlas:

http://www.learn.columbia.edu/medmil/pa ... npg43.html

http://www.learn.columbia.edu/medmil/pa ... nguin.html

European population trajectory over the course of the previous two millenia (McEvedy):

http://history.wisc.edu/archdeacon/404tja/popex.html

World population trajectory over the course of the previous two millenia (McEvedy). Click for larger image:

http://probaway.wordpress.com/2010/05/3 ... ro-growth/

Higgs,

Well, that was the first reference to trade in that era that turned up, and perhaps not the best. Still, it made the point that there was trading going on during that time. There is always trade going on, from the early beaker traders to the silk road. I've found Indian artifacts myself that came from stone hundreds of miles away, and it is highly unlikely those people travelled that far, they probably traded for the rare material. Everywhere, there is something Joe wants that Jake has, and vice versa, and that's the basis of all trade.

I have suspected for a long time that a good deal of trade during the Middle Ages was carried on outside the law, by smugglers and bandits. With Europe totally broken down into small areas where everyone wanted a toll, anyone engaging in trade had to smuggle or they simply could not make a profit. So the smugglers moved the goods, the bandits provided protection, and trade went on, obviously without records because that would be providing evidence against yourself. Any records would probably be kept in whatever country you were trading with, and thus if I had the money I'd be searching for records of trade in the Middle Ages in the countries where those items originated. But there are certainly plenty of stories about robbers/bandits/smugglers in that era, and I think many of them were most likely traders avoiding tolls and taxes.

And here an analyst admits he was wrong! Bit of a shock, that. Illustrates a lot of why I wouldn't invest in China.
http://www.fool.com/investing/internati ... china.aspx

OLD1953 wrote:Much of the world went along quite well without Rome.

This goes back to a point I've been harping on (and the population graphs above seem to verify), which is once the giant sucking sound from Washington DC is put to rest forever, things will be relatively prosperous out on the periphery. Specifically, we can see that while the population of Europe fell by about 1/3 during the Dark Ages and the 14th Century, world population did not. But that also tells us that the upcoming Dark Age, crisis, or whatever we want to call it will be exceptionally severe and unprecedented on a worldwide scale if John and I are right about the worldwide kill rate.

I wish I could bring up some of McEvedy's population maps. In 737 AD, he shows that Constantinople had the largest population in the area his maps cover, in the 50-125,000 range, whereas the largest city in Europe, Toledo, was in the 15-22,000 range. There are no other cities in Europe over 15,000 population. Some of the other major cities outside of Europe did see some reduced population from the fall of the Roman Empire (Western) to the nadir of the Dark Ages but these cities didn't disappear like the ones in Europe did.

There would be very little trade in heavy or bulky items that couldn't be hid - grain, pottery, cloth, timber, etc. Only things easily hidden and/or moved quickly along devious routes, with high enough values to justify the effort. Even then, you need a customer, and no-one had any money. There was very little copper or silver coinage for a long time - the currency needed for trade in everyday necessities.

Gold coinage was plentiful, but that's no use for everyday transactions, only for paying tribute, raising armies, etc. So you might have customers for silk, pearls, custom weapons, etc., and that trade would need and receive protection.

Story from Gregory of Tours - when Chilperic, King of the Franks, sent his daughter Riguntha to Spain to be married to the King of the Visigoths, she left Paris with 50 wagonloads of treasure and a huge retinue of servants. They pitched their first camp at the eighth milestone from the city. 'Fifty men rose in the night and took a hundred of the best horses with golden bridles and two great chains and fled to king Childebert. [A rival king.] Moreover along the whole way when any one could escape, he fled, taking whatever he could lay his hands on. ... And as the king was suspicous that his brother or nephew would prepare some ambush against the girl on the way, he directed she should be guarded by an army. Great warriors were with her ... and also about four thousand common soldiers. ... And on this journey such spoils and booty were taken as can scarcely be described. For they robbed the huts of the poor, wasted the vineyards, cutting off the vines and carrying them away grapes and all, taking domestic animals and whatever they could come upon and leaving nothing along their road.' When Riguntha reached Toulouse, her party rested to repair their worn-out clothing and equipment, and news arrived that Chilperic had died. A duke then imprisoned Riguntha and seized all the remaining treasure.

And that was the King's daughter, on her way to be married to another king. Imagine what it would be like trying to move a barge-load of wine fifty miles.