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xssve -> RE: The myth of endless economic growth (3/26/2012 12:10:29 AM)
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Nah, Malthus was right - Malthusian corrections are happening all the it's just not across the board because humans are not a single population - we're myriad subpopulations largely confined to specific geographic areas: Malthus is alive and dwell in the Sudan, the Argentinian slums, and a thousand other places.
Clearly MM is all about the stock market now, which he thinks is stable based on past performance, but all the rules have changed, hell I have about 60K in stocks and bonds I'm going to have to figure out what to do with - they're only worth what the Chinese are willing to pay for them, in the future, and they don't call them inscrutable for nothing, they have us by the fucking balls, and from Kravis to Bush, we've handed those to 'em in the name of short term stock returns.
How is 'ol Kravis doing these days anyway? Lol.
Reagan did the same with the Japanese, and it turned out they couldn't hang - god luck for us, but then they need us for military protection from... the Chinese! The Chinese aren't the Japanese, whole different ballgame.
And it's that same short term thinking for the sake of stock returns that sold all our manufacturing capacity to China in the first place, that overplants every available arable acre to the edge of exhaustion, and keeps it marginally fertile only with intensive application of chemical fertilizers, at enormous cost in fossil fuels, and nitrogen runoff into our equally over harvested fisheries.
And even with the Fed, the IMF and the WTO hamstringing every other emerging agricultural economy in the world, the current accounts deficit slides deeper into the Red every minute.
Anyway, growth. I'm actually a good example, I can tread water here indefinitely, but I'm up against the margin - all I can do is maintain what I've got and at least I won't starve - I could double my income, but I'd have to triple my debt to do it, and it's double or nothing - if I gamble and win, I double my income, if I lose, miss one payment, I lose it all.
And in this case it all sort of depends on what happens in the macroeconomy - if the economy goes back into recession, I don't have the cash reserves to wait it out another five years - the smart thing to do is sit tight.
But to return to that, it's all a fucking gamble, anybody says different is full of shit - the only difference is that there are calculated risks and uncalculated ones, but an a calculated risk is still a gamble, you cannot control all the variables - a big oil shock right now could change all the underlying assumptions overnight - as it is, I could weather that.
I'm just not felling lucky at the moment, and the complete lack of any consensus on economic policies for which there is ample history and predictable outcomes, is highly disturbing to me, there really ought to be no debate on this - the details maybe, not the basics.
I think I'll just keep on in the lack of style to which I've become accustomed, I got other irons in the fire, plans B thorough ZZ, lol.
And back to Malthus, it's always about the margins: Malthus just got the margins wrong, there is a finite quantity of arable land, a population point below which a population of organisms (aquatic or otherwise) cannot recover - the underlying assumptions are basic biology - if you hunt you see it all the time: wet year, the deer multiply - and so do the predators, get long cold winter following, and all that extra population is "magically" gone come spring.
It's gods will, no? Lol.
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