[Pops]

I haven't read Greer in a while. He got to be long on words and short on plot, kind of the Steven King of doom.

Serial potboilers on boiling frogs, LOL

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', '.')..Obama ... How happy I'll be when he's out of office

[AgentR11]

Plant, all of which is why I said "*NOW* is normal, and is the normal as it has been since WWII".

My "read" on all of the caveats you noted...... the real number now, for EMRATIO is equivalent to what it was in 1950-1955. Which is *NORMAL*.
Regardless of the gender of the breadwinner, per sea, that one+a little per adult pair is about what employment for wages SHOULD be. The artificial rise in the 80s due to extra women... its just that guys who were incompetent managed to keep their jobs because of... BUBBLE. It didn't reflect new, worthwhile, productive, profit making jobs; just an excess of cash and general acceptance that a lot of times its easier or more efficient to idle the idiot, as opposed to try and fire him; at least as long as the revenue is churning.

So again, what we have now is the normal economy, chugging along, somewhat more female in the professional class than it was in the 50s; but same real math. There exists a certain number of profitable, value creating jobs; and they are appropriately filled at the moment. And I'll be harsh here, sorry if someone has friends that this applies to; those folks who are unemployed right now, who were making big bucks in the BUBBLE.... were *never* worth those big bucks. They are $60k/yr people thinking they deserve $200k/yr jobs. Absent a bubble, the economy can't pick up $200k/yr clerks and paper shufflers. Sorry.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', 'P')lant, all of which is why I said "*NOW* is normal, and is the normal as it has been since WWII".

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', 't')hose folks who are unemployed right now, who were making big bucks in the BUBBLE.... were *never* worth those big bucks. They are $60k/yr people thinking they deserve $200k/yr jobs. Absent a bubble, the economy can't pick up $200k/yr clerks and paper shufflers. Sorry.

[radon1]

Growth is generally an abberation, over the historical timescale.

[dissident]

Comparison with the decline of Rome with the current looming collapse are nonsensical. Rome was a slave-based agrarian society and it decayed into feudal agrarian societies (based on local ethnic groups). In other words, there was no fundamental transition in both social order and in resource use and supply. I guess the lead water pipe business disappeared....

Today we have urbanized societies where 99% of the population is dependent on stores for its food and is not about to transition into sustenance agriculture. The farmland has been paved over and the rest requires industrial farming to produce sufficient supply. Throwing hundreds of millions of people onto this land will lead to famine and mass die off. Take 408 million acres and throw 300 million people on them. That is about 1.3 acres per head with a three member family getting about 4 acres or less than 10% of a typical pioneer farm. I am ignoring land quality variations and assuming all the agricultural land in the US is the same. This is obviously wrong and the 4 acres is too high a figure.

No, the only "long decline" will require intact industrial farming even when there is insufficient oil for the tractors and natural gas for the fertilizer. But then, we have the show stopper called AGW. By 2050 it will be doing serious damage to all the prime agricultural zones on the planet. Humanity is headed for a bottleneck worse than the Toba eruption around 70,000 years ago. Some small percentage of the original population will survive in pockets here and there, but there is no decline of Rome style transition in our future.

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('radon1', 'G')rowth is generally an abberation, over the historical timescale.

[ennui2]

BTW, for the record, Greer's 50 year prediction is closer to my sense of the future than his 200-300 year descent. Just because I'm sounding like a corny lately doesn't mean I think this period will last forever.

[ralfy]

If ecological footprint can be lowered from 4-10 global hectares to less than 2 (to be lowered further given increasing population and fallout from environmental damage coupled with global warming), then a controlled decline is possible. But given a global capitalist economy essentially controlled by a financial elite, incredible levels of arms production and deployment, and most insisting on BAU, probably not.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('radon1', 'G')rowth is generally an abberation, over the historical timescale.

[radon1]

Absence of expressed economic growth has generally been normal over the history of humanity. No surprise the natural trend may be towards a longer term normal state.

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'Y')ou have those numbers all confused. 4 acres is more than enough to feed a family of four as per USDA numbers. Way way more with permaculture techniques and recycling of your own wastes through composting. And a slight bit of petroleum coal etc.

[Newfie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('radon1', 'G')rowth is generally an abberation, over the historical timescale.

[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', 'P')lant, all of which is why I said "*NOW* is normal, and is the normal as it has been since WWII".

My "read" on all of the caveats you noted...... the real number now, for EMRATIO is equivalent to what it was in 1950-1955. Which is *NORMAL*.
Regardless of the gender of the breadwinner, per sea, that one+a little per adult pair is about what employment for wages SHOULD be. The artificial rise in the 80s due to extra women... its just that guys who were incompetent managed to keep their jobs because of... BUBBLE. It didn't reflect new, worthwhile, productive, profit making jobs; just an excess of cash and general acceptance that a lot of times its easier or more efficient to idle the idiot, as opposed to try and fire him; at least as long as the revenue is churning.

So again, what we have now is the normal economy, chugging along, somewhat more female in the professional class than it was in the 50s; but same real math. There exists a certain number of profitable, value creating jobs; and they are appropriately filled at the moment. And I'll be harsh here, sorry if someone has friends that this applies to; those folks who are unemployed right now, who were making big bucks in the BUBBLE.... were *never* worth those big bucks. They are $60k/yr people thinking they deserve $200k/yr jobs. Absent a bubble, the economy can't pick up $200k/yr clerks and paper shufflers. Sorry.

[Revi]

His time scale is pretty realistic. Look at what's happening already. California is drying up, the midwest is pumping down the oglalla aquifer, fracking is done, and we are in a huge financial crisis. We'll be lucky if we aren't the ones without electricity and running water in a couple of years.

[ennui2]

I don't think fracking is 'done'. The wells aren't tapped out. They've been capped because we simply don't need that much right now. We'll go back and get the rest later. It's still a backstop.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', 'I') don't think fracking is 'done'. The wells aren't tapped out. They've been capped because we simply don't need that much right now. We'll go back and get the rest later. It's still a backstop.

[h2]

greer is adjusting his analysis, with new data based on the present. It appears that some people like to look for truth and salvation from people, and are bummed out when this quest proves futile. I personally look for good solid historical foundations, adjustments based on changes. Since examining our own culture is very difficult, because it's what forms our fundamental world view, and thus of course colors anything we see, examining cultures is very difficult. So far greer is the best at this game of anyone I've seen writing on these issues. He does the actual research, he delves into primary source material, which is actually very hard work. He also frequently makes mistakes, fairly classic ones, but these are mistakes pretty much everyone makes who tries to delve into human cultures. The main one is to go from what he knows well to what he does not know so well. I don't actually mind this that much as long as it doesn't go on too long, for example, last week he posted on the internet, and while his overall view of a probable outcome of its future wasn't bad, his actual understanding of the physical structure of the internet was fairly poor, which doesn't really matter hugely, but it is a weakness he is prone to.

I agree re his agreeing / disagreeing with his comment posters, but honestly I don't generally read his responses, nor do I comment, I read him for what he does better than most, not for what he isn't that good at, I don't have any particular interest in reading his non green wizard books for example, so I've never been disappointed that he failed to be the prophet some apparently really want to find, and are bummed when they realize they aren't, prophets that is.

But the overall analysis he delivers week in and out is generally in my opinion very good, though I can see why doomers etc won't like it, because he nails the entire doomer mindset, and actually takes the time to research it itself, which must be irksome to people who are repeating thousand year old mental patterns.

It's completely obvious that large readjustments are going to be happening globally as the factors greer looks at frequently start to develop and play out, some are basically impossible to predict because they have never happened before, and all you can do is watch and collect data. For example, I seriously doubt many would have predicted how overpopulation and resource / food shortages would start to play out now in the mideast, yet there they are, playing out.

What I particularly like about greer's latest writing and thinking is that he is re-examining things that I noticed he had definite mental blocks against a few years back, and re-evaluating his positions based on more information, which I think is often really the best one can do when studying human cultures and development, particularly during times of great, but too slow to satisfy some, changes. Since one of the great unknowns of resource limits to growth and overpopulation has been what exactly it will look like when these limits start getting hard, not flexible.

There's some real advantages to doing real history study, like greer, but almost nobody here, oddly, seems to do, one of which is you recognize patterns that have appeared before. For example, a while back, 8 months? can't remember, he saw a pattern that only someone fairly well read would have spotted, it happened before the crash of the great depression, when media started attacking those who, on the fringes, ie, actually truly irrelevant to the greater system, were pointing out the nature of the bubble. The historical repetition of this pattern was someone from I think they nyt attacking greer by name, prior to the fracking bubble's collapse. So he started to speculate, going, ok, we saw this in the pre collapse of the depression, some months prior, major media attacking fringe nay sayers, and considering that I'm basically a nobody in the greater scheme of things, this looks like a similar pattern. And he was right, it was, and lo, the bubble popped.

While I do tend to agree that short term greer is a bit too attached to his views, that's particular an issue when he's talking about things where he has not actually done the heavy duty research that he's done in the areas he's solid on (but that's not unusual, Kant, Hegel did this too, and they were probably among the smartest europeans that ever lived. Hegel's long diversion into Phrenology in his 'Phenomenology of Spirit' continues to be a fairly embarrassing example of this mental glitch among thinkers for example, though not nearly as bad as the general web tendency to talk about things one has no idea of at all, or a merely wikipedia passing familiarity with.)

But since I'm not looking for a prophet, just someone willing to do a lot of work in history and other areas like that, I find greer's work for the most part pretty good, he adjusts his views, he alters analysis based on deepening understanding, and, most impressive to me lately, he drops things he was saying that were just plain wrong or underinformed, not easily, but I see it happen year over year. He may not admit this openly, but he's doing it. The global warming, corporate stuff, I see for example, not as grounds to criticize, but to show that he's mentally flexible enough to move from errors to more solid reasoning. Always hard to know where to draw the intellectual lines when examining human culture, and hard to know when one passes the limits of understanding and research and enter into the realm of opinion and belief, but in my opinion, he does a better job than most mainstream people, particularly academics, who are fairly hopelessly attached to the teat of the culture that pays them.

One thing I definitely have always admired greer for is being one of the only people out there in the peak human scene to actually live his reality, ie, he doesn't own a car, doesn't fly unless he absolutely can't help it, and lives very simply. Ie, he's not subject to the al gore type criticism, and he's one of the VERY few out there who aren't, at least people who write and are known.

I can't tell you how many threads I've read here where the opinions were so poorly informed, and often, as the web will do, greer was covering just those areas that week or the last or the next, and covering it much better, with far greater work, more research, far more historical background, than anyone here.

If I were to criticize greer, I think it would be on the arch druid side of things, I've never once gotten a sense of genuine spiritual development on his part, in fact, quite the opposite, in general, if there's a chance to show a lack of that, he does it. Particularly when it comes to nature. But honestly, I don't care, he's good at the stuff he's good at, and I think he's better at it than almost everyone out there, so he's not great at some stuff you'd think he's good at, nobody is good at everything. He does a yeoman's work at this point of human history, provides a useful service, and seems able to get by doing it, which is not very easy in today's winner take all economic system, so hats off to him. I wish I could do half as well to be honest.