The number of jobs available to job-seekers has been a problem for quite a long tine now—since 2000 in the United States, and longer than that in Europe. If we look at the percentage of the US population who are employed, it is now back to 1984 or 1985 levels.
Figure 1. Total number of individuals employed in non-farm labor, and reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, divided by US resident population, as reported by the US Census Bureau.
I have run into a number of clues about what is happening. In this post, I’d like to discuss what I am seeing. Part of the problem is that high oil costs squeeze the economy, reducing employment. Part of the problem is growing trade with Asia. It is even possible that the Kyoto protocol (which the US did not sign) has something to do with what we are seeing. Let me start by explaining a fairly strange relationship.
A Strange Relationship – A Close Tie Between the Amount of Energy Consumed and the Number of People Employed
Since 1982, the number of people employed in the United States has tended to move in a similar pattern to the amount of energy consumed. When one increases (or decreases), the other tends to increase (or decrease). In numerical terms, R2 = .98.
Figure 2. Employment is the total number employed at non-farm labor as reported by the US Census Bureau. Energy consumption is the total amount of energy of all types consumed (oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, etc.), in British Thermal Units (Btus), as reported by the US Energy Information Administration.
I have written recently about the close long-term relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. We know that economic growth is tied to job creation, so it stands to reason that energy consumption would be tied to job growth1. But I will have to admit that I was surprised by the closeness of the relationship for the period shown.
This close relationship is concerning, because if it holds in the future, it suggests that it will be very difficult to reduce energy consumption without a lot of unemployment. It also would seem to suggest that a shortage of energy supplies (as reflected by high prices) can lead to unemployment.
Why Rising Energy Cost (Particularly Oil) Leads to Lower Employment and Less Energy Consumption
Suppose oil prices rise2. The critical issue is that consumers’ incomes do not rise at the same time. Consumers’ budgets get squeezed, and they cut back on discretionary spending. For example, they may go out to restaurants less, make fewer long-distance vacation trips, put off buying a new car, or contribute less to their favorite charities. Workers in discretionary sectors of the economy tend to get laid off, as a result. We have come to know this as part of recession.
(The impact of an oil price rise will be worse if other fuel prices, such as natural gas, rise as well. It will be mitigated, if natural gas prices are low, as they are in 2012 in the United States. Europe has much higher natural gas prices than the United States. This is big part of the reason why recessionary impacts are now worse in Europe than the United States.)
In the case of high oil prices and lay-offs, less energy of all types–not just oil–is used. Laid-off workers may move in with relatives, and thus reduce their living expenses. Each laid-off worker would have used oil to get to their job, and this will no longer be required. The jobs experiencing layoffs themselves may have required fuel use of various types, such as heat for buildings, fuel for airplanes, or electricity used in making new cars, and this is reduced as well.
There is also likely to be a link to housing prices. Moving up to a more expensive home is a discretionary expenditure. If people’s incomes are squeezed by high oil prices, and some are being laid off, there will be less demand for homes as well. This lower demand can be expected to reduce housing prices, especially in areas where commuting distances are longest (and thus, oil use for commuting greatest). There are also likely to be layoffs in the construction industry, as there is less demand for new homes and new buildings of all sorts.
As I have mentioned previously, James Hamilton (2011) has shown that 10 out of 11 recessions in the United States since World War II were associated with oil price spikes.
High Energy Costs in One Area Tend to Lead to Substitution to Places Where Energy Costs Are Lower
If there is a possibility of international trade, manufacturing and some types of services will tend to move to areas where costs are lowest. Part of these costs are energy costs. A manufacturer with cheap electricity costs will have an advantage over one with higher electricity costs. As energy costs rise (as they have in recent years), they get to be more important in determining where manufacturing will be done.
Besides direct energy costs, wages are another part of the difference in costs from one part of the world to another. Wages tend to be lower in the warmer areas of the world. In part, this is because energy from the sun provides much of the needed energy for heating homes, so there is less need for supplemental energy. This means that wages do not need to be as high for a comparable standard of living.
If we look at recent world energy consumption, we see rapid growth in energy consumption. This pattern is quite different from the US pattern we saw in Figure 2, which was much flatter.
Figure 3. World Energy Consumption based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy
Figure 4 below shows that there has been a striking difference in how energy consumption has grown in various parts of the world.
Figure 4. Energy Consumption divided among three parts of the world: (1) The combination of the European Union-27, USA, and Japan, (2) The Former Soviet Union, and (3) The Rest of the World, based on data from BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Energy consumption has been quite flat in the grouping of industrialized countries I show first (European Union-27, USA, and Japan). The Former Soviet Union (FSU) collapsed in 1991, and the consumption for those countries has never recovered. Energy consumption for the “Rest of the World” has been increasing amazingly rapidly since 2002. The rest of the world includes China, India, Bangladesh, and many small countries, plus oil exporters, such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico. Although I don’t break it out separately on Figure 4, the increase in energy consumption since 2002 has been especially marked in Asia.
The “bend” in the line for “Rest of the World” energy consumption took place immediately after China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. If we look at China’s fuel consumption by itself, we see that its huge rise in energy consumption (Figure 5, below) came mostly from increased coal consumption starting at that time. Oil consumption also increased. Nuclear and renewables are too small to be visible on the chart.
Figure 5. China’s energy consumption by source, based on BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy data.
Other countries, especially Asian countries like India, also ramped up their energy consumption at a similar time. India also uses coal as its primary fuel, with 53% of its energy consumption in 2011 coming from coal (based on BP 2012 data).
While I don’t have employment data for Figure 4 groupings, I do have economic growth data (Real GDP is Gross Domestic Product, adjusted to remove effects of inflation), shown in Figure 6, below.
Figure 6. Three-year average real GDP growth for (1) EU-27, USA, and Japan, (2) Former Soviet Union, and (3) Rest of the World, based on data by Angus Maddison through 2008, and USDA since then.
Figure 6 indicates that the economy of the “Rest of World” has been growing much faster than the EU, USA, and Japan grouping since 2001. In fact the Rest of the World’s growth has been much faster for nearly the entire period shown on the graph. Based on the steeper rise in energy consumption of the “Rest of World,” in Figure 4 compared to the old industrialized countries grouping, this might be the predicted result.
One point that many people miss is that the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was to a significant extent a phenomenon of the older industrialized countries. EU, USA, and Japan all were hit very hard, while the “Rest of the World” almost sailed along. This can be seen in the energy consumption data on Figure 4, and the economic growth data on Figure 6. The Rest of the World slowed down a bit, but even during that period, its growth rate exceeded the best growth rate of the EU, USA, and Japan grouping during the 1984-2011 period (based on Figure 6).
Is it Possible to Change the Relationship between Energy Consumption and Number Employed?
The answer is pretty clearly, yes, but lower wages may be part of the mix.
Let’s look at how the United States changed its energy consumption, per number of people employed, over time. If we go back to the 1949 to 1972 time period, we also see a close relationship ( R2 = 99%) between US energy consumption and employment, but it is a different close relationship than since 1982, (shown in Figure 2, near the top of this post).
Figure 7. Graph of amounts similar to Figure 2, but for the period 1949 to 1972.
During the 1949 to 1972 period, energy consumption was consistently rising faster than the number of people employed. Oil was cheap, as were other energy sources, so not too much thought was given to how efficiently it was used. Also, as we will see in Figure 9, wages for workers were rising much more quickly (in inflation-adjusted terms) than they have been in more recent times.
About 1972, we discovered we had a big problem:
Figure 8. US crude oil production based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Oil had been our largest source of energy, and our own domestic production was dropping quite rapidly. By 1973, the Arabs had discovered our vulnerability, and the 1973 Oil Embargo began, leading to a sharp rise in gasoline prices. The US Federal Government regulated oil prices from 1973 to 1981. At the same time, a major effort was made to switch oil use to another fuel whenever possible. Electricity generation was switched to include more coal and nuclear (based on EIA data), and to remove production using oil. There was great demand for more fuel-efficient cars, leading to the import of cars from Japan (a country that had been making smaller cars for years), and the down-sizing of US cars.
Figure 9. Employment and Energy Consumption using data similar to that used in Figure 2 and 7, but for the 1972-1982 time period.
As a result, the period 1972-1982 was a time when energy consumption was relatively flat, but employment rose. A big part of this rise reflected the addition of women who had not previously worked outside of the home to the work force. With the higher price of oil, salaries did not go as far, so having another family member working was helpful. According to Toosi, the percentage of women who were part of the workforce rose from 43.3% in 1970 to 51.1% 1980. Wages of women were lower than those of men (Figure 10, below), helping to hold down the average wage.
Figure 10. US Median Wages, separately for males and females, in 2010$. Based on Census Historical Income Tables: People, Table P5 – Regions by Median Income and Sex.
Also, the wages of lower-paid men stopped rising in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. (The wages shown are Figure 5 are median wages–50% of wage-earners earn more than that amount and 50% year earn less.) Wages of high-paid workers, such as business executives and physicians (not shown on the chart), were still rising.
It is hard to tell what the relative impacts were of the many changes that took place in the 1972 to 1982 time period. Clearly, lower average wages (with more women in the work force) and flatter wages were a big part of the change. But there were other changes as well, including more imported manufactured goods, changes to fuels other than oil, and more efficient use of oil, all contributing to the differences we see between Figure 2 and Figure 7. The US became a net importer during this period as well, and thus began running up external debt (based on US Bureau of Economic Analysis data).
Comparing energy-employment patterns in Figure 2 and Figure 7 may be confusing for some. I show the change in the relationship in another way in Figure 11. Here I show (energy consumption/number of people employed). It shows that energy consumption per employed person was rising prior to 1972, came down for a variety of reasons in the 1972-1982 period, and is now pretty close to flat (decreasing slightly).
Figure 11. Total US energy consumption divided by number employed. Energy consumption from US EIA, number of non-farm workers from US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On a positive note, one factor that has helped keep quality of life up is increased efficiency in using energy. Homes are better insulated now. Home heating and cooling units are more efficient. Businesses have worked hard to keep energy use down, because energy is a major factor in their cost structure. For example, we read about airlines retiring their less fuel-efficient jets. Thus, even though energy consumption divided by number of workers is flat or trending slightly downward, our standard of living has risen considerably since 1970 or 1980.
Another thing that has helped improve living standards is the amount of manufactured goods we are now importing from China and other countries around the world, especially Asian countries. The amount of debt we need to keep amassing to buy all of the goods we buy abroad is a problem, however, because we are not earning enough to pay the full amount of these goods. If we could count on economic growth forever, perhaps we could simply “grow” out of this debt, but this seems increasingly unlikely, for reasons I will discuss in later posts.
The United States Hit Peak Percentage Employed in 2000
If we look at the percentage of the US population who have jobs outside the home (or self-employed farm workers), the trend is quite alarming (Figure 12):
Figure 12. US Number Employed / Population, where US Number Employed is Total Non_Farm Workers from Current Employment Statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Population is US Resident Population from the US Census. (This includes children and others not usually in the labor force.) 2012 is a partial year estimate.
While the percentage of people with jobs was rising between 1960 and 2000, in recent years it has dropped. The recent drop seems to be at least in part related to the shift in energy consumption growth (and jobs) to the “Rest of the World,” which includes China, India, and many other developing countries and oil exporting countries. Jobs that the United States would have had, seem to have been shifted elsewhere.
The percentage of US population employed outside the home or farm has grown for a very long time. The increase started in the 1800s, as the use of coal allowed a reduction to the number of workers needed in farming, because it allowed more use of metals, enabled the use of electricity, and helped make farmers more efficient. See my post The Long-Term Tie Between Energy Supply, Population, and the Economy. See also Smil, (1994) and Lebergott (1966). Later, women increasingly joined the work force, especially after World War II.
The combination of rising energy costs (especially oil) and increased international trade gave China and other Far Eastern countries an opportunity to ramp up their manufacturing and service industries (call centers in India, for example). Jobs migrated to China and to other countries with low energy costs (thanks to lots of coal in the mix) and low costs of living, thanks in part to better solar heating.
There had always been some foreign trade, but the amount of trade increased in the late 1970s, when we started importing smaller cars from Japan, as well as more oil. It increased again later, especially after China entered the World Trade Organization in late 2001. US imports of goods and services increased from $54 billion in 1970, to $291 billion in 1980, to $616 billion in 1990, to $1.4 trillion in 2000, and to $2.7 trillion in 2011 (US Bureau of Economic Analysis).
Other Observations
Role of World Trade. Figure 4 suggests that world trade makes a huge difference in the amount of energy consumed. If we truly wanted to reduce our energy consumption (which I doubt world leaders are really interested in), we could reduce world trade through taxes on imports, or some other mechanism. The number of people employed would likely drop as well, although perhaps part of the difference could be made up by greater efficiency and by lower wages for individual workers.
The important role of world trade also brings up another issue. If world trade were, for some reason, interrupted or seriously scaled back, this would likely significantly reduce energy consumption (and employment) around the world.
Energy Consumption vs Number of Jobs Patterns by Country will Vary. I have shown US data. Patterns in other countries are likely to vary, in part because of the different specializations (amount of services compared to manufacturing, for example) of different countries, and different wage levels in different countries.
Good Intentions Aren’t Always Helpful. The Kyoto Protocol with respect to Climate Change was adopted in 1997. Figure 4 and Figure 5 suggest that adding China to the World Trade Organization had far more impact, and in the opposite direction. In fact, additional carbon taxes on goods that require high energy input may have encouraged competition in countries without such controls. Furthermore, reduced oil consumption through, say, higher taxes on gasoline, left more oil on the world market, to be used by developing countries. (This is related to “inelastic supply” of oil. Reducing demand in one area leaves more supply for other areas.)
Figure 13. Actual world carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, as shown in BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy. Fitted line is expected trend in emissions, based on actual trend in emissions from 1987-1997, equal to about 1.0% per year.
Figure 13 shows that while Kyoto Protocol may have helped reduce emissions in some countries, world carbon dioxide emissions have grown more than what would have been expected, based on the 1987-1997 trend in emissions. If the Kyoto Protocol influenced China’s and the rest of Asia’s decision to ramp up exports, this decision would have indirectly affected job availability in the United States, even if the US was not a signer of the Protocol.
The “Smaller Batch” Issue. If there is not enough energy to go around at prices people can afford to pay, recession seems to be nature’s way of fixing the situation. I compare the situation to a chemical formula, or to a cake recipe. If one necessary ingredient is in short supply, the economy behaves as if it is making a “smaller batch”. It contracts in a way that leaves out those who were most marginal to begin with–such as employees of discretionary industries, and borrowers who could only barely make payments on loans (subprime borrowers), and countries with the highest energy costs. Employment is reduced, and unemployed people tend to move in with friends or their family, to cut expenses. This reduces energy consumption.
Increased Wage Dispersion May Reflect Another of Nature’s Coping Mechanisms. In the animal kingdom, any “K-selected species,” such as a dog or cats or primates, (probably including humans), has an inborn instinct toward hierarchical behavior. The manifestation of this instinct tends to be greater as there is greater crowding, and greater competition for resources (Dilworth, 2009). The intent in the animal kingdom is survival of the fittest, with those at the bottom of the hierarchy being starved out, if there is not enough to go around.
It is striking to me that since the mid-1970s, we have seen what could perhaps be interpreted as increased hierarchical behavior in humans and corporations. Wage dispersion has tended to become greater since the mid-1970s, when we started encountering energy supply problems. We have also seen the growth of international businesses. These large businesses have been increasingly favorably taxed, because they can choose tax havens around the world to incorporate. All of these changes tend to concentrate wealth at the top, in large companies and in the wealth of high paid workers. Perhaps all of this is a coincidence, but the timing is striking.
Increased use of part-time and contract jobs might be considered a trend in this direction as well. Job sharing has been proposed as a way of dealing with having an inadequate number of jobs in the older industrialized countries, but this tends to act in the same way (pushes the wages of lower-paid workers down, while leaving the top wages untouched).
Economic Models. Economic models seem not to take into account the very substantial shift in percentage of the population employed. Part of economic growth on the “way up” was growth in the percentage of people employed. If economists miss this change, as well as the fact that the percentage now seems to be headed down, their models will be wrong. Expected economic growth may disappear.
The World War II baby boom generation is now reaching retirement age. This change will tend to push the percentage of population employed down further, all other things being equal.
Impact on Governments. If fewer people are employed, this is a problem for governments around the world. Governments in Europe are particularly affected now, partly because of the generous benefits they offer. The US budget deficit is very much related to this issue as well. I will write more about debt and government funding in another post.
Notes:
[1] The idea of looking at employment in relationship to the economy after reading Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi’s book, The Biofuel Delusion: The Fallacy of Large-Scale Agro-Biofuel Production, Earthscan, 2009.
[2] While total energy costs are important, individual energy costs, such as gasoline cost, are important as well, because there is little short-term substitutability across sectors. For example, coal is not an option for running today’s gasoline-powered cars, and public transport is not an option in most of the US. If there is a long enough lead-time and citizens can afford the transition, substitutions might be made, but it is not something we can count very much in the short term.
Other References
Hamilton, J. D. Historical oil shocks. NBER working paper No. 16790. Feb 2011. Available from http://www.nber.org/papers/w16790.pdf
Toosi, M. A Century of Change; the US Labor Force 1950 to 2050, in Monthly Labor Review, Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2002. Available from http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf
Smil, Vaclav, Energy in World History, Westview Press, 1994.
Lebergott, S. Labor Force and Employment 1800 to 1960, in Brady, D. S., Editor, Output, Employment and Productivity in the United States after 1800, National Bureau of Economic Research. (1966) Available at http://www.nber.org/chapters/c1567.pdf
Dilworth, C. Too Smart for Our Own Good, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Let’s engage in a little thought experiment relative to employment and the cost of energy.
Begin with China at the time Frank King visited very early in the 20th century and wrote Farmers of Forty Centuries. In terms of the efficient utilization of natural energy (water, wind, the sun, the soil food web which sequestered and made available the nutrients plants require to be healthy and to grow, mineral energy, gravity, and atomic forces), the Chinese reached a degree of sophistication which has never been equalled. Even Biosphere in Arizona was not, I think, their equal.
The Chinese population at the time was perhaps 250 million, of whom perhaps 25 million were underemployed. Thus, when a train arrived at the station, a large number of porters would descend on the travelers offering to carry luggage and transport the traveler in human powered conveyances. If the population had been 225 million, then probably very few, and better paid, porters would have appeared.
The trains were powered by coal, but train travel was expensive beyond the reach of most Chinese. (Lest we look down on them. In my early childhood a popular song by Doris Day celebrated a ‘sentimental journey home’, wherein our heroine has ‘spent each dime I could afford’ to buy her ticket.)
Now, suppose that energy at today’s prices had suddenly become available to those Chinese. Don’t you think that an industrial sector would promptly have arisen? And that sector would have employed all those people who were employable. And then would have begun to suck in the agricultural laborers who could make more money in the more lucrative industrial world.
Of course, time rolls along and populations increase (as we know from biology and Malthus) and technological advances reduce the death rate and mute the force of natural selection. By the 21st century, declining net industrial energy per capita plus the much larger population plus the loss of the highly efficient ancient methods of harvesting natural energy plus the degradation of the environment will all conspire to create underemployment again.
In theory, it is possible for China to get back to 225 million people employed in an economy which is living on natural energy. I do not think that there have been any significant technological advances in the use of natural energy (although Permaculture people might dispute that). If we grant the Chinese a gradually declining net industrial energy, then a gradual employment and population decline back to 225 million is possible. All kinds of frictions in the social and economic spheres can be imagined which would make a collapse more likely than an orderly decline.
Don Stewart
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On a conceptual level, you might also want to look at the work done by JM Jancovici, on the same principle as the Kaya equation, but with Energy instead of CO2 :
http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/transition_energy.html
in pdf :
http://www.manicore.com/fichiers/energy_transition.pdf
Basically it consists in writing (in the context of a country or the world):
GDP=GDP
So :
GDP=(GDP/ENY)*ENY (ENY being the whole energy consumed)
So above GDP/ENY can be caracterized as the amount of GDP created by energy unit, or the energy efficiency, so that increasing GDP means either increasing energy efficiency or the overall energy input.
You can also write :
GDP/Population = (GDP/ENY)*(ENY/Population)
So that the income per capita is a factor of the golbal energy efficiency times the energy input per capita.
Associated graphs and timelines on JM Jancovici pages
Otherwise about :
“and the 1973 Oil Embargo began, leading to a sharp rise in gasoline prices.”
Isn’t it really time to get out of this myth or group lie (first oil shock=oil or Arab embargo) a bit ?!!!
– The embargo lasted 3 months, it was only towards a few countries (holland in Europe) and NOT EVEN EFFECTIVE from KSA to the US
– The first oil shock was about :
– The US oil production peak in 71 (and some fuel shortages started at that time)
– Due to above, the need for the majors of a higher barrel price to start more expensive plays (Alaska, GOM, North Sea)
– Don’t forget that above ability to develop more expensive oil plays meant higher market share for the majors outside OPEC, or if you prefer “less dependency on
FOREIGN OIL” (does that ring a bell ?)
– in parallel and before the will of producing countries to get a higher share of each barrel revenues
– US Diplomacy (in accordance with oil majors interests) **PUSHED FOR** higher oil prices especially through Akins and Kissinger
These are esaily and documented verifiable facts, no “conspiracy theories” there, but maybe you also don’t believe that operation Ajax happened in 53 ? that Madeleine Albright didn’t recognise/apologised for it ?
Shouldn’t a web site finite ressources issues and especially oil and peak oil, try to have a minimal honesty with respect to the associated geopolitics ?
Don’t you think things would be a bit different if more than 1% or so of Americans knew the US passed its oil production peak in 71 ? Would candidate promise 20 millions barrel in that case ? (after having written very clearly about peak oil).
Using “arab embargo” as a label, a name for the first oil shock (or “oil embargo” to make it softer), might be practical (it for sure has been), but it remains A COMPLETE JOKE.
And by the way it was also “practical” for Saudi Arabia, allowing them to show the “Arab street” that they were “doing something” for the palestinian. And the Saudis for sure would have been highly pissed if it had been known that tankers kept on going during the embargo to the US (Army in vietnam in particular). Some republican senators started to raise “strong voices” about the embargo, Akins asked the permission to tell them what was going on, he did, they shat up, there was never any leaks, as reported by himself in interviews below (part 2) :
http://parolesdesjours.free.fr/petrole.htm
(documentary “la face cachée du pétrole”, only available in French and German to my knowledge, adapted from the book by the same title by Eric Laurent)
Thanks for reminding me about those relationships. Number of jobs is related, but not quite the same thing.
I was thinking when I talked about the US oil peaking that I was pointing out that that was the real problem. There were other follow-on problems, but they would not have possibly have happened, with the decline in US oil supply.
Gail,
Yes indeed above is basically mixing the work(as in jobs) part and energy part in the economy output. Some people are looking at these respective parts (and basically at the fact that looking at the input energy only from a “cost share” perspective is most probably not the right way to look at it). For instance I got a few papers from Reiner Kümmel, but didn’t find the time to look at them yet. A presentation from him at ASPO 2012 below :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYir4MxrgA
Otherwise regarding the first oil shock, I still think the “tragic” thing in this story is that “oil embargo” or “arab embargo” has simply become a *name* or label for it, making it truly difficult to look at the actual historical and geopolitical/economical facts around it, facts that remain highly unknown or covered up by this label (even if in the end it doesn’t change much regarding current situation).
Certainly, excess consumerism has to be retrenched in a world of limited resources. The entire advertising and marketing industry is criminally stupid as it is geared to tempt people to further over-consume at the very time we are hitting the limits.
Blogging on sites like this can give one a false sense of what the public are thinking. If you watch a bit a television (punishment I know) you see the public are being beguiled with ludicruous escapist entertainment which is often about magic and magical powers or it is the low common denominator voyeurism of “reality” television shows. In between, there are endless ads for cars, clothes, make-up, junk food and junk drinks.
People are into massive double-think. They are vaguely aware of climate change and peak oil as these issues sometimes appear on the news. Then they go back to their diet of consumer ads and consumer goods and I suspect few sit back and think, “Well, this is very contradictory.”
In my country, Australia, the government and most of the people are into total double-think about coal-mining. On the one hand, an ineffectively low carbon tax is introduced and people mouth platitudes about saving the planet. On the other hand politicians and business people are boasting about the big new mutli-billion dollar coal mines being opened and how these will continue our economic boom by bringing in billions of dollars of revenue.
I guess I keep coming back to on of my themes which is that (unfortunately) a series of salutary disasters will have to occur before people take global warming and sea level rise seriously as well the more imminent fresh water crisis and food shortage crisis. The crisis will first take the form of food shortages in the poorest parts of the world. Countries on the brink include (but are not limited to) many countries in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) plus Pakistan, Bangladesh and possibly even India and China.
Consumerism is indeed a problem. I don’t watch TV–I am just not tuned into this kind of thing. I rented a car yesterday, and had the person behind the counter give me a hard time because I wanted the cheapest car with no optional upgrades. He kept telling me how much more comfortable I would be in a big car.
I am not sure we really know how this will all play out. I agree that the poor are very vulnerable, but others could be affected as well. Broken supply chains will be a problem in many places, I would expect.
supply ‘chain’ implies some degree you inherent strength
What we are in fact relying on is a house of cards
Gail
See further evidence of the fuel-unemployment link at:
Petroleum And Gasoline Usage Charts for June, July, August; Unemployment vs. Gasoline Usage Analysis
Based on gasoline usage, the economy has stalled or there is some other force in play, not related to improved gas mileage.
and at:
Petroleum Numbers Hint at Recession
James Beck (of EIA) privately observes:
Thanks for the links. I agree that low US oil consumption does not make it look like the US is recovery. It seems like recently, we are hearing more and more about layoffs.
http://www.11alive.com/news/article/253530/3/More-layoffs-at-Lockheed-Martin-looming
H-P Says It Plans 2,000 More Layoffs
These don’t yet seem to have hit Bureau of Labor Statistics, though. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/mmls.nr0.htm
“In short the paradigm shift is simply expressed: post modern civilisation, if run efficiently, by a few skilled people, can more afford to pay the unemployed than pay the extra cost of employing them. We should embrace structural deep unemployment. Its the way to get rid of useless unnecessary activity in society. By all means reward workers who are needful with very high salaries indeed. But accept that the useless will always be with us. And that whilst consumerism isn’t quite dead, it surely has that smell about it.”
Leo, bravo! Well said.
From a net energy and exergetic perspective, the US does not have a problem of “unemployment” or the economist’s euphemism, underutilization of labor, we have an “overemployment” problem contributing to COLOSSAL waste of energy and other resources in which a growing majority of “jobs” are simply paid employment in order to allow one to afford to secure and maintain paid employment, irrespective of the utility, value add, or ecological sustainability.
With increasing automation and offshoring of employment, and falling net energy per capita, the US economy is no long creating net new private sector living-wage employment, which means the economy is no longer capable of increasing private purchasing power per capita.
Again, we have a problem of “overemployment”, waste, and lack of income and purchasing power given the scale of debt and waste per capita. We should be accelerating private sector automation across industries and elimination of “jobs”, unserviceable debts, and regressive taxes on labor and production. Instead, we need to gut the tax code, end debt-money and fractional reserve banking, and create a medium of exchange of net energy credits per capita at the lowest possible socially acceptable level of sustainable exergetic equilibrium and at the highest level possible of capital deepening per capita.
If we were to reduce dramatically, or eliminate in some cases, the per-capita energy waste of auto commuting, for example, and the embedded costs of perpetual debt service/income, war, and compounding financialized returns to the insurance industry from wasteful “health care” expenditures, the US economy could be much smaller, more energy efficient, and more ecologically sustainable, and we could do so while maintaining a socially acceptable level of standard of material consumption and well-being.
Ultimately, this is not about idealism, utopianism, or political ideology; rather, it’s about the application of the science of biophysics in such a way as to achieve what no doubt a significant majority of Americans would want were they given the choice over today’s system.
People need to feel that they are doing something significant to contribute to society (or to contribute to their own upkeep). I think this is one aspect you are missing. While in theory it would work, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy would be marginalized, and suffer much poorer health. Somehow, there must be an alternate path that is at least equally acceptable, and has very high rewards. In fact, people’s need to compete must somehow be met in this alternate path as well.
The Edwardian privately funded gentry had no need to feel they were contributing to society at all. Bertie Wooster may have been a caricature, but the prototypes existed.
Besides there is nothing stopping anyone who is sitting around from doing anything they feel like doing to help the nation improve.
The needful paradigm shift is to break the old protestant work ethic and show it for what it was – applicable to an agrarian pre-industrial society, and totally irrelevant in a post modern context.
This perceptual shift can then look at society holistically, assigning rewards and resources to the necessary parts of it, and paying a dividend to the stakeholders on the profits of it.
And I say the easier way to achieve that is to create a universal state pension that applies to every single person who has a valid national identity card and was born in the country. (Immigrants don’t get it) Taxation on luxury consumption funds it. Those who make and save, don’t pay tax. Those who spend, do. There is no tax on work, on profit, on savings, only on consumption. The state pension won’t be enough to more than not starve on BUT guess what, with no income tax or paperwork associated with employment, you can earn anything you want, doing whatever you can do, for whoever is willing to pay you, and with no minimum wage (that IS the state pension) the opportunity cost of employment is very low, and with no employee protection rights, so is the cost of laying off. So you have a subsided (by the state pension) utterly flexible labour force that can be deployed into any area. And by virtue of this implicit subsidy, can compete with foreign workers too, since the sale of their luxury goods is essentially taxed to pay the local workforce. Then let free market forces do their thing.
That’s the socially acceptable way to do it. The other way is to push all your unemployed and unemployables into prison, projects, ghettoes and trailer parks, and set fire to them.
Perhaps its because I am an engineer, that the equations of society as a physical and economic entity seem so simple. Its basic systems analysis.
What happens is that industrial civilisation representsa feedback system, and for the last 500 years that feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The more stuff we dug up and burned, the more we could build things to dig up stuff and burn it. And a lot of other useful stuff on top. Like houses , better agricultural production and medical care etc etc. And more people per unit land area. Even if the vast proportion of them were not actually taking part in economic production. In short what you get is consumerism and bureaucracy as ways to engage people not in production, but in consumption of over-abundant production.
If you now introduce a limit, (effectively negative feedback) in the shape of falling EROI on the overall system, what you get is and overshoot and fall back in basic production per capita. In short people get (materially) poorer. They cannot consume so much. And the whole socio economic system of consumerism start to collapses. You can make them richer in financial terms by printing money, but that simply leads to galloping inflation in energy prices and things that rely on energy to produce. In short whilst I-phones are cheap, food is not. Neither is a house.
The classic shape of a positive feedback system with time delay running into overall negative feedback with also a time delay is exponential growth followed by overshoot and fall back, and possibly oscillatory behaviour post the peak as the time delays in positive and negative feedback elements fight it out.
Now examining this in more detail shows where the actual loss of economic activity will bite first. In a consumer society that will always be discretionary spending. The little toys and luxuries . And that reflects into employment in those sectors as well, especially at the lower levels. Managers will fire all their staff before they fire themselves. So the first to feel pain will be the marginal contributors in the service sector. The high street shop selling inessential tat. Society will in the end divest itself (where it is allowed a free market choice) of all except that which its constituent members – that’s you and me – feel they will not give up, until they are forced to. In areas where governments, de facto monopolies and bureaucracies rule, they will not let go until they are forced to by economic necessity. Turkeys/Xmas/vote.
This brings those de facto monopolies, governments and bureaucracies in conflict with their ‘customer base’. The electorate may not want a taxation regime that forces a service delivered with a huge bureaucratic overhead down their throats, but unless there is a party of credibility dedicated to eradication it, they will still get it. They may not want expensive unreliable ‘renewable’ energy forced down their throats either, but they will still get it. They may not want banks to use their cash flow surpluses to play at the casino, and then hit them with the losses either, but they are not given the choice.
Not until the very institutions that coerce this wealth out of them collapse because there is no wealth left to coerce..
For sure this will led to ‘unemployment’ or rather, paraphrasing the man who said ‘the crash isn’t where you lose money, its where you realise how much money you lost years ago when you invested in worthless entities’ it will lead to people realising just how much employment is in fact totally worthless. And how little most people – ourselves included – contribute to producing anything of real value at all.
The paradigm shift I am convinced we have to undergo, is to realise that wealth production and economic activity has in a post modern post industrial society, very little to do with employment and so called labour at all.
You can see this in trivial examples. Say that a man has a job to – say – put parking tickets on cars. He gets up, drives his won car to work, collects his kit from an office that is heated, lit and so on, and spends a day wearing out shoe leather, irritating people who are parked where some other bureaucrat in a similar office has decreed they should not park, for often seemingly arbitrary reasons. Those two employees, in addition to being fed. housed. and receiving medical care, are also using up office space and burning valuable energy in the pursuit of their duties.
You can appreciate that if they stayed at home watching TV, the nation as a whole would probably benefit in real terms. And if they glanced out of their windows from time to time, they would make an efficient ‘net curtain’ police surveillance unit, this making beat officers redundant as well…
And less vehicles ON the streets leads to less need for parking restrictions too. And less need to repair roads. And less need for childcare centres to take care of the children two now non working parents are capable of bringing up unaided.
Likewise the non working couple now cook at home, rendering the huge amounts of employment in food processing and fast food outlets unnecessary, as well.
THIS is Tainter style collapse back to a lower complexity that is FUNCTIONAL, not dysfunctional.
In short, consumer society is actually a lot of people rushing around doing nothing of any societal value whatsoever, that couldn’t be done at a far lower level of energy burn in a society that had need to do it.
Its not that rising energy prices and falling consumption will make people redundant, it just reveals how redundant they always were.. 🙂
We need a political philosophy that encompasses this principle – I tried to write one actually – that says ‘these things are inevitable: we don’t have choices about whether they will happen, only choices about how we meet the challenge of their inevitability.’
We managed to hold employment up as we de-industrialised by creating Post war consumerism. People were not ready for a leisure society. They still wanted employment and work – god knows why, I have never enjoyed working for money. Give me a private income any day – but now we can no longer maintain the fiction that most people in the service and public sectors are doing anything useful at all. When push comes to shove, the man who empties my trash can is more important than the advertising executive who persuades me to fill it.The man rearing beef cattle in the next village is more important to me than the council official telling me whether I can paint my windows fluorescent purple or not. Or the government official with a mind to the urban streets he lives in, decreeing that a dog that defecates anywhere but in a plastic bag is an affront to civilisation, whilst 50,000 foxes are crapping all over the shires every day. And are protected from being chased by dogs.
Pay people to do what’s needful in society and pay people who cant do anything needful to shut the *** up and stay at home and watch Jerry Springer. Or go out and put dog excrement in plastic bags themselves, if they feel so strongly about it.
In short the paradigm shift is simply expressed: post modern civilisation, if run efficiently, by a few skilled people, can more afford to pay the unemployed than pay the extra cost of employing them. We should embrace structural deep unemployment. Its the way to get rid of useless unnecessary activity in society. By all means reward workers who are needful with very high salaries indeed. But accept that the useless will always be with us. And that whilst consumerism isn’t quite dead, it surely has that smell about it..
Thanks for your thoughts. I like your statement,
You may like the statement Gail, but from my perspective I think it is rather short-sighted. O.K. it might be true to say that many have always been in a sense ‘redundant,’ but at least while they carried out their tasks they were also paid and could thus feed and house their families. If we move to the world Leo seems to prefer, we cast these people on the scrap heap without the ability to feed and house their families. That is a very different situation and if ever the expression that ‘there is strength in numbers’ were true, it would be true then, because there would be a lot of them.
Where I think Leo does get it right is his statement: “We should embrace structural deep unemployment.” But how? One thing I don’t think we can continue with is the enormous disparity in pay scales, with directors racing ahead of the pack. Having spent many years dealing with mainboard directors and senior managers, I am not convinced that they are worth the extra a lot of the time. Perhaps we need to re-evaluate the tasks people perfom as their contribution to our society and reward them accordingly.
By way of example, in my training many moons ago I had to work on a production line for a short period. It was only the knowledge that the period was short that enabled me to get through it. Why? Because I am not equipped to do that kind of work, I am too intelligent. (That is not to boast, it is just a simple fact that I have had to live with.) I know that someone who can work for years doing some repetitive or menial task requiring little or no mental agility can do work that I cannot do – so much for intellect. Is this important? Well, it puts into perspective the relative pay rates. A company would find it difficult to survive if it had a main board with little intellectual strength. But it would also find it difficult to survive if the toilet cleaners, security personnel etc. were all highly intelligent and thus could not perfom their allotted tasks for long without screaming some expletive and walking out, which I am sure I would have done if my stint on the production line had been much longer. (Did I learn form it? You bet! I fully understand why a strike, even with its attendant loss of pay, is a blessed diversion from urging the damn clock to move round to clocking off time every damn day of the damn working week. I also learned that a person who enjoys their work will work better and be healthier all round.)
So when we follow Leo’s exhortation to embrace structural deep unemployment, we should do it with a better way of evaluating people’s contribution to our society. And especially take into account the qualities demanded by every position of employment. In short it is not as simple as saying that there is a hierachy of jobs matched by a hierachy of intellect – in the fullest sense of the word. And while we are at it, we need to take into account the spread of robotics and automation that is replacing so many human operatives because they too will add to the ‘strength in numbers’ that I referred to above.
If we are not careful, the very real danger exists that we develop a society that only employs people to do meaningful work and in the process create a mob that is underhoused and underfed. I can think of no better ingredients for riots to erupt. In that circumstance we will get the society that remains after the rioting has subsided and it will probably be far from ideal and contain little in the way of trust.
Correction to my earlier post: “it is not as simple as saying that there is a hierachy of jobs matched by a hierachy of intellect,” should read “it is not as simple as saying that there is a hierachy of jobs matched by a hierachy of intellect and that the pay for doing a certain job should also follow that hierarchy.”
Sorry, it was late and I am not the world’s most tallented proof reader.
I think you missed the point.
Your post is full of the usual socialist rhetoric about people and their value etc etc. The harsh truth is the (current) socio-economic industrial model doesn’t need those people and it doesn’t need ‘work;’ in the conventional sense.
If you like socialism has priced humans out of the labour market all together. Machines are better, more reliable, more powerful and don’t need pay rises.
I am merely saying that has to be faced up to.
What people do, has to be separated from the concept of ‘paid employment’ by ‘an employer’.
Which makes 90% of socialist ideology totally irrelevant.
I suggest that the preferable alternative to corralling those people up and tucking them away, is to utterly liberate the workplace from all restrictions bar ones of basic safety, subsidise the whole population, and let things happen as they will.. That means stopping taxing individuals and start taxing the cash flows associated with anti-social activities. Of which doing something for reward, is simply not one.
You have utterly failed to appreciate that at this point its is simply not possible to actually know who is ’employed’ and who is not. No one is ’employed’. Everyone is a free trader exchanging whatever goods services and skills they have for whatever anyone is prepared to pay in whatever form that payment may take..
And since we are entering a resource short but people full world, I say that what should be taxed is resource consumption, and the less plentiful that resource is, the more it probably needs taxing.
In the end its a Tainteresque paradigm shift. Society at the intensely organised and structured level it is now, collapses back to a far less structured and more flexible way of mutual organisation. At a net gain in overall wealth, simply because less is being wasted on ’employment’ and its trappings, and more goes on needful wealth creation.
.
And dare I say that you, too, have missed the point. I do not care particularly what specific structure of society becomes the norm as long as it is equitable, something on which we probably differ. What concerns me is that the world’s finances are in a mess and employment is in short supply. By your own admission you “I have enjoyed every minute of overpowered cars, air flights to exotic locations, and having slightly more money than I realistically knew what to do with. ..” So I imagine that trying to put yourself in a position where, under your free-for-all, unregulated work environment, someone facing redundancy (unpaid) is as a direct result also facing losing their home, their family and a large amount of self-respect would be difficult for you.
As far as I can see, the promised land you seek is on the opposite bank of a river infested with crocodiles that come in the form of public unrest created by the changes you need to make en route, exacerbated by inflation from quantitative easing and food shortages from climate change (another bone of contention). Please map out for us just how you see the transition from where we are now to where you would see us being when your changes have come into effect. Spell out for us whether in this brave new world that you envision, people will have protection from unscrupulous employers. (I have personally seen a contract of employment from a major retail employer at Heathrow airport that stated that joining a trade union was disallowed, something that is illegal. I also personally know of another company, not so big, but not small by any means, that continued to deliberately underpay employees for their holiday pay despite their settling out of court when an employee took them to a tribunal. And finally I know someone who worked for a chain of retail shops in London that consistently employs foreign students at less than the minimum wage secure in the knowledge that they are so desperate for work they will just accept it. And that is just my limited experience. Scale them up and the place must be teeming with unscrupulous employers even with regulation. Heaven knows what it would be like in your unregulated world. And heaven knows how long the public would tolerate it.)
Yes, Lou, I do have socialist leanings. Hardly surprising considering that my parents were working class and I grew up at a time when there were so few universities that if anyone in my street went to university, it was the talk of the street. Not just because they had managed to gain an education up to the task, but because the lucky person’s parents could afford the loss of income that their child could reasonably be expected to bring in on leaving school. My life has not be one of “I have enjoyed every minute of overpowered cars, air flights to exotic locations, and having slightly more money than I realistically knew what to do with. ..” It has been more one of hardship and seeing grownups in tears of despair. Sadly Lou, I suspect that there are far more like me than like you, but that is progress for you. I don’t begrudge you your life. I just wish you were not so typically right-wing with all the stereotype knee-jerk positions (e.g. fox hunting, climate change etc. etc.).
I managed to drag myself up by my boot straps, but have never forgotten my roots. I know what it is like to face redundancy and the subsequent prospect of homelessness, only avoided by fast footwork on the job front (think the turmoil of the British motor industry from the mid sixties onwards). I rather think that given my background you would not be so high-minded about the working class and certainly take more care when suggesting dramatic changes to our society without apparently taking into account just what they could mean on a personal level to those whom it is likely to affect most.
I didn’t mention working in a scrapyard for $5 a day, and being alone in a country with no social security at all, and less than $10 to my name and the clothes that I stood up in either.
You have NO idea where my life came from.
A long winded way of saying that energy burning creates jobs. Or put it another way, no energy used=no jobs.
Our infrastructure is a dynamic of energy input. Or to be more specific, a dynamic of energy surplus because all forms of energy are essentially the same thing.
10,000 years ago the first farmers grew enough food (energy) to support themselves, as their farming skills improved they found they had a little left over which might have paid for someone to guard it, or a holy man to pray over it. How the excess was used is irrelevant, it was surplus energy and became a trading medium for exchange of skills and creation of employment; using it for other than food meant that energy could be tokenised. The soldier needed weapons, the holy man needed a house of worship, neither could be paid for unless there was a surplus of food-energy to do so. In basic terms, the churchbuilder and the weapon maker had jobs. Their wages were paid by surplus energy.
Tokenising energy converted it into money, which is still used to trade skills, and pay wages.
By doing so we created an ‘economy’, but we could only sustain the value of money by constantly producing more energy, and by the same token more jobs. Builders need lots of ancilliary trades, as do armies; in no time at all castles and cities appeared, employing everyone from kings to garbage collectors.
No matter what the rank or social standing, every job depends on surplus energy somewhere back down the line.
Now fast forward 10,000 years, and we’re still locked into that same trading system, but now it’s on steroids. 250 years ago we learned how to extract the energy from 200 million years worth of fossilised sunlight. We invented the steam engine, and dug coal oil and gas out of the ground as fast as we could, congratulating ourselves on our ingenuity. The more we dug up, the more ‘wealth’ we had, the faster we burned it, so our growth increased. Cheap fossil fuel energy drove our machines, vastly increased our food-energy supplies and boosted our population by an extra 6 billion who wouldn’t otherwise be here.
We could only keep those billions employed by digging up more and more hydrocarbon fuel, burning it in bigger faster machines, and mortage our future to pay the wages of those employed in tending those machines. they cannot be employed. In order to sustain employment, we must burn fuel.
But we have been burning a finite energy source. Just the same as taking out a bank loan and convincing ourselves we are rich. We are not. We are living on borrowed time and money.
If we don’t maintain energy input, our economic system will collapse.
Which is where we’re at right now: employment is on a downturn because we built our jobs/energy infrastructure on cheap hydrocarbon energy, we are trying to maintain full employment on expensive energy.
That is a good way of putting it.
I know I am not original in pointing out this connection. I mentioned Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi’s book, The Biofuel Delusion: The Fallacy of Large-Scale Agro-Biofuel Production, as talking about some of these issues. I expect there are other books and articles as well.
Compliments on showing that close association.
Jean Laherrere showed that US unemployment closely followed the log of oil prices with a one year lag. See: Peak oil and other peaks,Presentation at the CERN meeting on 3 Oct. 2005 Fig. 66 p 35
http://energycrisis.biz/laherrere/CERN200510.pdf
Robert L. Hirsch expects about a 1:1 decline in GDP with geologically driven declines in available transport energy. See: The Impending World Oil Shortage: Learning from the Past , The Impending World Energy Mess
May I recommend exploring the magnitude of the LAGs of increases in unemployment with declines in energy availability.
Thanks for the links and the suggestions.
I think that quite a bit of the energy consumed is consumed by the person employed, so it won’t follow lags too well. In the graph I posted in response to another comment for 1982-2011, it does look a little like the employment lags energy changes.
Gail, regarding the r^2 figure, is this result from a regression using the first difference rate of change? If not, it would be instructive to see what the correlation is for the change rates of the two data series, as I suspect the figure is similarly high and thus statistically significant.
BTW, US mfg. employment since the mid-’80s (when US crude oil production fell from the peak and plateau from ’70) has fallen 35-40%, whereas reported mfg. labor productivity has risen since then by a proportional amount to the decline in mfg. employment. Not coincidentally, during the period to date, US crude oil production per capita has fallen 50%, and some 60% since ’70.
BC
The r^2 is just using the figures shown. The numbers are too unstable to look at 1 year percent changes. If I look at three year percent changes, these are the graphs:
The R^2 of the 1982-2011 is .68, the R^2 of 1950-1972 is .58
Thanks for taking the time to perform the additional calculations, Gail! The correlations are well within the range of highly statistically significant.
Thanks! I will have to admit that my work has not been enough in this area to know how much is statistically significant.
In insurance, we are dealing with “samples” of claim activity, that we are given by nature. We have to set rates, regardless of statistical significance. Also, as a practical matter, we tend to use different techniques.
Turner Classic Movies showed Gabriel Over The White House last night. The movie was made in 1933 at the depths of the depression and reflects the chaotic state of public opinion and political programs at the time. You can easily find reviews and clips from the film with an internet search.
The plot, briefly, is that a political hack who represents a party we can easily identify as Republican is elected president. The emphasis is on control by ‘our party’, squashing demonstrations by the unemployed, etc. But the President also has a penchant for driving the presidential automobile very fast and he crashes it. Waking up from a one day coma, he has become a different person. He hides out for two weeks, and then emerges with a radically different program. It includes such radical notions as full employment and world peace and martial law to get rid of the obstructionist Congress and to try in a military court and swiftly execute the gangsters who are financed by Prohibition (and he promptly ends Prohibition, without recourse to the Constitutional niceties).
This is an interesting movie to watch now because many of these same themes are being played out today. We have not yet reached the point of the March on Washington (which was suppressed by MacArthur), but all the same tensions are there. And, today, our resource and pollution problems are very much more severe.
The movie was pretty popular for a time, but then Hitler took power in Germany and eventually the movie was withdrawn. We in the US have forgotten a lot of what happened during that period. For example, in the 1970s I was skiing at an idyllic spot in Colorado: The Scandanavian Lodge in Steamboat Springs. They had a very nice library. I was looking at a very pretty children’s book from Norway which was aimed at the expatriate colony in the US–it was an English translation of the Norwegian original. The book was an homage to Hitler. Hitler had taken power, had brooked no interference, had got the labor unions under control, had put the country back to work, and restored public morale. (Very similar to the scenario in Gabriel.) We forget that in the early 1940s a quite significant number of Norwegians welcomed the German invasion.
When I was a very young child, it was quite common to hear my older relatives express opinions which can be found in Gabriel. As for Hitler, the consensus was that he and the US had made a terrible mistake fighting each other–we should have ganged up on Russia. But the consensus was that Hitler had gotten a dispirited, disorganized, economically bankrupt country back on its feet. And these attitudes were still around during and immediately after WWII. This isn’t, of course, what you hear in most official histories.
So I think the movie gives us a lot to ponder. The role of accidents in tipping history one way or the other. The struggle between the establishment and the dispossessed. The notion that the military could do what is needed. Cutting out the red tape, aka procedural safeguards. The idea of the Man On The Horse saving us all.
As Gail makes the points about unemployment and energy and Peak Finance and employment and Peak Everything and employment and wages and debt servitude and so forth and so on, it may be worth your while to study this mostly forgotten movie.
Don Stewart
Thanks for your movie summary. I have always had a hard time believing that Hitler could have been viewed as overwhelmingly negatively in that day as books now seem to suggest.
Gail
Yesterday PM I was reading Resistance, Revolution, and Liberation by Charles Hugh Smith. He observes that presidential candidates now need to spend truly enormous amounts of money.
Today, Tom Whipple observes:
While looking across the global landscape, it is easy to conclude that the situation in 1979 was only a shadow of what we face today. The world’s economy is stuck in a slump which shows every sign of continuing indefinitely or getting worse; our climate is spinning out of control and some are seriously talking about the end of life on earth; public debts are skyrocketing and governments around the world have turned on their printing presses to “stimulate” (read inflate) their way out of current economic troubles; the internet has spread so much information to so many that much of the world is inflamed over real or imagined slights; mobs are running through the streets and bombs are going off faster than can be counted.
I once worked for a company whose industry was dominated by three companies. The products of the three companies were very nearly identical, and few people could tell them apart in blind tastings. So the three companies spent enormous sums of money trying to create ‘brand perceptions’ out of thin air.
It seems to me that in the US, we have two parties and two candidates who are both wedded to the status quo–slightly different sections of the status quo, but in the final analysis, the preservation of existing power structures. But, as Tom observes, the world is crumbling.
If either party or candidate had any real solutions, do you think they would have to spend so much money running for office? In the Gabriel movie, the plot is driven by the notion that once someone starts to do the right thing, the public will recognize it and accept that person’s leadership. I wonder if that is a good assumption, or if, as someone observed in this thread, people are so addled from junk TV that they couldn’t recognize solutions if they saw them? Or maybe there are no solutions?
Don Stewart
It is hard to see that there are very good solutions. At best there are partial solutions, or ways of somewhat delaying the outcome.
I am doubtful that most people would recognize a solution if they saw them.
If I might recap a couple of things, Gail has said at various times that;
(a) employment and economic activity are tied to energy use and ultimately limited by energy use; and
(b) employment and economic activity are tied to and limited to the availability of financial resources (investment etc.)
Both statements are true but (b) comes with a number of important caveats. The biggest difference is that energy and energy limits (like all physical quantities) are real but finances and financial limits are notional or representational rather than real. Let me deal with the second point first. Money is not a value. Money is a representation of value. Strictly speaking, money is not a commodity, it is merely an accounting referent.
The essential limits to dealing with our energy and resource poblems are (a) real physical limits, (b) intellectual and technology limits and (c) false limits imposed by mistaken ideology, legacy thinking and ossified convention. Point (c), the false limits, may be the zone where our greatest danger lies.
In discussing these false limits, we must first discuss the notion that lack of finances must necessarily limit solutions. This is not true. In the final analysis, only lack of real resources and lack of intellectual and technological innovations can limit solutions. Lack of finances will only limit solutions so long as we fetishise our accounting referent system and allow it to automatically make decisions which we should be making directly, either technocratically or democratically as appropriate.
People refer to the “free market system” when more correctly they should refer to the “regulated free market system”. A “regulated free system” is a system that allows freedoms within limits and this is the quintessential paradigm of all our social and financial systems. We have freedoms and rights within delimiting parameters which put boundaries on our freedoms, define our rights and lay out our obligations. Indeed, the notion of an entirely “free system” ie. a lawless, chaotic or anarchic system, either socially or physically, is a contradiction in terms. A system requires connections, regularities and laws of relation to exist as a system. (This is, in some essentials, a conservative not a radical stance, therefore I think I should not be defined as a radical.)
In some ways, the appropriate metaphor for a regulated free market system is not the “guiding hand” (which implies a single agency or intelligence guiding the hand) but rather an autopilot system. For sure, the collective intelligence of all agents (producers and consumers) does guide the market system but it does so within parameters already set by law, convention, custom, ideology, religion, science, technology and the current state of knowledge. The parameters of the regulated free market system will always be inherently conservative even to the point (in a rapidly changing and advancing society) of being archaic, obsolete and anachronistic in parts. In other words, to use a computer systems analogy, our current regulated free market system is a legacy system.
This legacy system is now having trouble dealing with a radically new situation. Previously and historically, it was not necessary to account for many negative externalities, nor for the depletion of natural capital. In economics, a negative externality is a cost not transmitted through prices and is typically incurred by a party who was not involved as either a buyer or seller of the goods or services causing the negative externality. Global warming and climate change are negative externality problems writ large.
Natural capital is the extension of the economic notion of capital goods to goods and services relating to the natural environment. A forest is natural capital and it provides various goods and services indefinitely if sustainably managed. It can provide a sustainable yield of timber as well as air scrubbing (scrubbing CO2), natural water cycle management, pharmacologically active plant materials and so on.
The regulated free market system, as it stood, possessed no way of automatically responding when global negative externalities and global depletion of natural capital became significant problems. It also possessed no way of re-programming itself from within itself. It was very much like a simple autopilot system (with no radar feedbacks) programmed to cruise at 15,000 feet over a flat continent. When transposed to a country with peaks and ranges over 15,000 feet this system will fail by flying the plane into mountains. When the topography of reality changes, a legacy system can fail to deal with it.
There are conditions where a regulated free market system cannot effectively re-program itself. The new data has to be collected and assessed by societal and governmental mechanisms outside the market processes and then reprogramming of the regulated free market system must occur via democratic decision making and regulation. Significant and effective governance apparatus is necessary outside of and above and beyond the regulated free market system. This is a salutary point to remember particularly for all those who are foolishly calling for small government.
This brings us full circle to consider the issue of finances. If the market fails to invest in technologies that are clearly required (renewable energy) and fails to disinvest in technologies and resources which are now clearly deleterious to global survival (cars, oil and coal), then dirigist action (direct government action) is called for. Markets can also be redesigned by re-regulation but this is a slower process. Direct government response is required in the interim when action is most urgent.
The most pragmatic nation in the world is currently growing the fastest of the large nations. This is China. (Admittedly, it is growing from a low base.) China uses central (government) control where that is appropriate and market mechanisms where they are most effective. China is not rusted on to the extremes of ideology which say either the central government must do everything or the market must do everything. China is being practical and pragmatic and using what works on a case by case basis.
I suppose my problem is that we have today a system which consists of a large number of players, which self-organized itself around a particular set of resource availabilities and regulations. If things go down hill, there are likely to be breaks in this system, through bankruptcy, or governments being overthrown, or through electrical power lines not being repaired after storms, and a lot of other things.
Perhaps after these breaks in the current system, everything can regroup in a new way. Certain parts certainly can.
But the question becomes whether the critical parts to maintain energy extraction and delivery can stay in place, or be quickly repaired. We will see a very big change, if we find ourselves without fuel for vehicles, or without electricity. We discovered after the Fukushima earthquake that certain auto paint colors came from that area. The floods in Thailand disrupted manufacturing flows in other ways. If we have a much bigger disruption that is international in scope, I would expect more disruption, and quite likely lower total production even quite some time after the disruption.
You talk about the big role of government, but I see that as being one of the big things that may change, if we encounter severe financial problems. Governments come and go. With the Former Soviet Union, we saw a central government break down. It could happen here, or funding for regulation could be cut to 10% of today’s funding. We really don’t know quite what is ahead.
Adam Smith once said ironically; “… there is a great deal of ruin in nation.” He was replying to someone who was suggesting that Britain’s reverses at that time had it on the way to ruin. Essentially Smith was saying it takes a lot more than you might think to ruin a nation or (in our case) to ruin a global economy.
In the past, human societies have shown extraordinary resiliance and ability to recover from major disasters or keep things going in the middle of seemingly overwhelming disaster. However, in the past natural resources were still plentiful and this bounteous natural capital was always there to “bankroll” recoveries.
This time it IS different. I will admit that. Much of this bounteous natural capital has already been wasted on extravagent consumerism. What we have to hope is that the reamining natural capital is sufficient to take us through the necessary transition protocols to a stable, renewable economy. We have to plan and act in that hope. If we get too defeatist about it, we might well give up now.
I don’t see solid, stable polities as being in too much danger yet. Major nations which could win WW2 (e.g. Russia, China, Great Britain and USA in order of casualties) and remain stable polities should be able to meet the great challenge of our next existential threat.
The thing is, we have to treat this coming global emergency like the existential threat it is and fully mobilise our societies to win the global war on fossil fuel use, non-renweables depletion and climate change.
the USA was built, expanded and sustained on the assumption of permanent, expanding and unlimited energy availability.
As energy goes into inevitable decline, the resulting contraction along geographic theocratic and ethnic lines is certain
the fissures are already in place, the nation will hold together only so long as there is a promise of future prosperity. when the realisation dawns that the future is going nowhere, collapse will be swift painful and bloody, and like the Soviet Union, a breakdown into say, 5 autonomous regions?
“If there is a possibility of international trade, manufacturing and some types of services will tend to move to areas where costs are lowest. Part of these costs are energy costs. A manufacturer with cheap electricity costs will have an advantage over one with higher electricity costs. As energy costs rise (as they have in recent years), they get to be more important in determining where manufacturing will be done.”
This will make the US and Canada the manufacturing destination of choice, as we have the lowest industrial energy (i.e. natural gas) prices in the world, by a long shot. Our coal is pretty cheap too.
I assume this observation was elided so as not to conflict with your “US in decline” theme.
Pete, the US is indeed in relative decline currently compared to China. The IMF has predicted that China’s economy will surpass the US economy in 2016. Of course, there are several ways to compare economies. The IMF study uses market exchange measures. However, it is arguable that PPP (purchasing power parity) estimates are a better comparison and on that measure, taking into account related currency valuation issues, China already surpassed the U.S. in 2010!
China’s main credit rating agency – Dagong – argues that the U.S. economy is actually much closer to $5 trillion than $15 trillion:
“In the components of the U.S. GDP in 2009, the financial services sector accounted for 21.4% while the real economy sector accounted for 65%. The total output value of the U.S. financial services industry is composed of two major parts: one is the transferred production value, most of which comes from value distribution of participating in international production. Another part is the inflated value originated from credit innovation, which belongs to bubble value. In addition, due to the high economic financialization, more than half of the profits in the real economy come from the returns of financial activities. If we exclude the factor of virtual economy, the U.S. actual GDP is about 5 trillion U.S. dollars in 2009, per capita GDP about $ 15,000. Meanwhile, the total domestic consumption was 10.0 trillion U.S. dollars and government expenditure was 4.5 trillion U.S. dollars. The production capacity of real value in the national economy is the material base to arrange social distribution and consumption. As the U.S. government arranges its budget according to the GDP including the virtual value, its revenue must fall short of its expenditure, so the socialization and normalization of debts will exacerbate the environment of economic development. It is predicted that the average real GDP per year of the United States will not reach 6 trillion U.S. dollar and per capita GDP will be less than 20,000 in the coming 3-5 years.”
The US government and US populace are now (mostly) delusional about the issue of US supremacy. The delusion is that the US will remain supreme indefinitely or at least for many decades and perhaps even centuries. The fact is that US economic supremacy will be (or has been) ceded to China in about 2015 plus or minus 5 years and depending on exactly how you measure it. US military supremacy will persist for considerably longer than that. This is precisely because the US will be declining (relatively) from a very large base, militarily speaking.
However, US military power must inevitably decline relatively if its economic power declines relatively. The economy supports the military, there is no esacaping that. The military is an unproductive overhead at least in that component which goes beyond pure domestic homeland defence and is used for imperial and strategic over-reach.
Having said all of the above, the USA will remain a major power for a very long time (presuming global civilization continues). The USA must trim its sails to reality just as Russia must do now. They face futures as major powers in a multipolar world again; not futures as superpowers in a unipolar or bipolar world. Also, it seems unlikely that China will evever become a sole, unipolar superpower. There is both too much countervailing economic and military force elsewhere (US, EU, Russia, India) and too many domestic problems which China itself must face. China certainly faces continuing and probably escalating fresh water supply and food security issues.
China may face a future where it slumps back again in the decades to come due to the above and other issues. Nothing is certain, and China’s number one economic position might be relatively short lived. Nevertheless, it looks clear that we are transitioning into a mulitpolar world with at least four major powers (US, EU, Russia, India) or three if you discount the EU, whose unification (even monetary) looks dubious currently.
Of course, in the very long term things will change completely. When climate change and global warming have fully played out, the world’s major power will likely be the future temperate zone nation (if unified) of Antarctica! There may be a time when the most powerful nation in the world is again the USA, as in the United States of Antarctica.
Correction: the mulitpolar world includes China of course as in China, US, EU, Russia, India.
Ikonoclast,
I would agree with a fair amount of what you say to Pete. Countries that have reasonably complete production lines in their own countries seem to be the ones most likely to last.
In terms of total cost levels (energy and wages), China is lowest, the US is above China, and Europe is generally above the US. Energy cost differences explain why the US is doing better than Europe, and China has been doing better than the US.
The US and Canada still won’t be manufacturing destinations (except for perhaps some specialized manufacturing, where the other choice would be Europe), as long as our salaries are so much higher than China’s. We are using so much energy for building and heating and cooling our homes, we need higher salaries than China.
On a pure electricity cost basis, the US may very well be comparable to China.
Energy is cheaper in the US than China, and large companies are spending billions of dollars bring chemical plants to the US as a result. This is a simple fact, why are you denying it?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-10/cheap-shale-gas-means-record-u-s-chemical-industry-expansion.html
China has a much larger population than the US and they are growing from a much smaller base, so of course their economic growth will be faster. China’s growth is actually great for US companies, as we can trade with China and sell goods (like iPhones and cars) to their growing middle class. This lets us be less dependent on stagnating Europe.
You can’t have it both ways – you can’t say foreign economic growth (i.e. Indo-Chineese emerging from poverty) is bad and also foreign economic stagnation (the Euro-zone) is bad. Simply saying “everything that is happening is bad” doesn’t really build credibility. Nor does denying the massive trend for re-industrialization based around cheap natural gas.
I don’t think cheap shale gas will continue. It is more expensive for companies to extract than the price they are getting paid for it. Chesapeake Energy’s problems are related to this.
China is starting from farther back on the percentage of workers in non-farm employment. As their use of fossil fuels, it increases the number who can be employed in non-farm work. So in that way, I agree with you. This is part of what enables their growth, at US expense. But the important part is that China can manufacture things more cheaply that USA, Europe, and Russia can.
China has reached “middle-income trap” threshold of $7,000 per capita, which the US achieved right before the “Third Great Depression” (after the 1830s-40s and 1880s-90s) and Japan reached in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It took China 50 years to achieve the milestone that took the US 120 years.
But China’s “miracle” is a result of cheap oil imports (until ’04-’05) and a couple of trillion dollars of US and Japanese investment since the ’80s, leaving China’s economy dangerously dependent upon US and Japanese credit, investment, and technology transfer, which in turn has a high multiplier to fixed investment and exports.
China has now succeeded in creating the largest credit and fixed investment bubble in history as a share of GDP, surpassing the US in the 1920s and Japan in the ’80s by a wide margin. Australia and Canada’s economic growth is derivative of US investment in China and China’s demand for resources.
Most don’t realize that China’s boom is over. China will soon experience a “giant sucking sound” of capital leaving the country, including surpranational US firms repatriating US$’s via the PBOC, int’l banks, and the Fed.
Given the multiplier of FDI to fixed investment, production, and exports in China, and the reliance on exports, an outflow of investment capital as little as 1% of GDP risks a 1930s-like contraction in China’s economy.
China is a four-letter word: SELL!!!
Gail:
At the beginning of the 20th Century, the majority of people worked as farmers, miners and domestic servants and there was no unemployment. As our fossil fuel energy inheritance declines and with it the work that it does (energy = work), isn’t is possible that there might be a shortage of people to do all the work that all that nearly free energy did? It seems reasonable to me that most people will again work as farmers, salvagers and household help and there will be little unemployment. Of course this will happen after the die-off since most of the free FF energy went into increasing our numbers along with the concomitant consumption of resources.
You are right. It is not clear to me exactly how many each area can support, but before fossil fuel, there was never an unemployment problem. Nearly all of the labor could be absorbed into farming, or carrying water from wells or steams, and attempting to gather firewood for cooking and heating water. There was never a problem of being overweight either. We can today add new jobs of scavenging. The question is how we get from here to there.
Before fossil fuel there was no unemployment.?
Oh, but there was! But only for a short while before you died.
Before fossil fuel, there were a whole lot of people working in agriculture, and very few in the rest of society (soldiers, tradespeople, manufacturing, clergy, teachers). There were not a lot of social safety nets, so I would expect that people would have to find jobs if they wanted food. There may have been “transitional unemployment”, as there always is. But I would think it would be more a situation that nearly everyone age 10 and over was doing something useful, if they expected to eat. Some of the people may have been thieves or prostitutes, but they needed a way to make a living.
I will have to keep my eyes open, and see if I see any references that have real information on the subject, not just my conjecture.
Gail:
I doubt that the journey will be orderly but it will probably be short lived.
the ‘no unemployment before fossil fuels’ is naive in the extreme Gail,
to quote from Henry V: “would that we had ten thousand of those men in England now abed who do no work today.”
Pre-industrial revolution, common labourers were hired by the day, you had ‘hiring fairs’, and a wealth differential between rich and poor far greater than today (though we are slipping back in that direction I think) You worked as long as you were fit to do so, after that you hung on as long as your family could support you, or you conveniently died.
essentially the working classes were the labour-saving devices of the upper classes. by and large they were treated much as we treat our labour saving devices, use and discard when worn out, though to be fair, servants were treated worst by those who could barely afford to hire them. The aristos (at least in England) generally had more social responsibility. They were replaced by all our gadgets and gizmos that we think of as vital to our way of life, as the ‘servant class’ went to work in the factories that manufactured all the stuff that had replaced them. (an interesting twist on social engineering?) As energy becomes unavailable, I get the impression that the serving classes will once again be hired to provide muscle power to the rich, particularly if one class owns the food producing land and the rest need to eat. Which is why I think we are headed for a ‘Medieval Future’; remove hydrocarbon energy and that’s all you are left with, 90% of the population will have to work the land to support the remaining 10%.
It’s easy to forget that land is the ultimate source of energy, and thus wealth, so you can only have non-food producers if the land is delivering enough food-energy to support them
As in previous times, this balanced out the population problem but it will only work for the original pre-industrial population of 1 billion or so
Serfdom anyone?
I agree. There certainly were day laborers in Bible times.
I think people who did not work had very short life expectancies. If their families would support them, OK. Otherwise, they would starve to death. Widows were in a very bad situation, unless a brother of their husband would take them in.
The more energy we have, the easier it is to provide for a group of non-working individuals.
Regarding unemployment in pre-fossil fuel times. There are letters from the US founding fathers back to Europe pointing out that there is plenty of work in the New World, while there is a surplus of people in the Old World. The rich and the State found it profitable to encourage immigration, and the immigrants mostly found it profitable to emigrate (although significant numbers returned to the old country).
I am not sure about my logic here–but I think the explanation is the access to energy. Enormous energy in the form of carbon and other nutrients which make fertile topsoil were available in the US. All it took was for farmers to tap those energy sources and abundance flowed. (Unfortunately, the abundance flowed about like a fracked gas well–which led to rapid movement West in search of virgin territory.)
A business or a farm is about using energy to turn some resource into a product which is immediately useful–food or widgets or haircuts. The cheaper the energy, the more easily the business or farm can figure out how to do its job. The more expensive the energy, the more careful thought and innovation are required. In terms of farming, the more expensive the energy, the more human labor is required to recycle and build energy (as opposed to the mining which our ancestors did). But since roughly the same amount of food is produced with the additional labor and intelligence on the farm, the lower the human productivity in terms of the marketplace. From an ecological standpoint, we are undoubtedly better off, but since the old system externalized the costs, it appears that the labor intensive farm is less productive.
A somewhat comparable scenario plays out in Charles Hugh Smith’s book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation. Consumerism (in his language) extracts a terrible toll on humans, but the costs are externalized. If we were to return to, an inevitably more human intensive, system, it might be true that human flourishing would actually increase, but it would appear that human productivity had declined.
So jobs increase as farms and businesses have access to cheap energy. But human flourishing does not increase comparably–so we see the worldwide epidemics of depression, chronic disease, family dysfunction, debt servitude, and the like.
As I think about it, the biggest obstacle to any reform of the system is the crushing debt load. It is not important to increase jobs for human flourishing. It is important to increase jobs so that people can pay their debts–and continue with depression, chronic disease, family dysfunction, and debt servitude.
Don Stewart
In the old world, a person sometimes hears about having several children, to have more hands on the farm. But the inability to leave a farm to more than one child (oldest son) would tend to leave other children with the need for employment elsewhere–soldiers, clergy, merchants, etc. This would leave room for a lot of unemployment, and (when the time was right), pressure to migrate to America.
A person can tell about the unemployment figures, in some sense, by when the migration took place. Spanish migration to Mexico took place far earlier than the Irish and German immigration to the United States. This would suggest that Spain had unemployment/rising population issues earlier than some of the Northern countries.
Gail
Just as a fringe matter, families also tended to produce a spare female to take care of the parents in their old age. The girl was expected never to marry and produce children of her own. My mother upset societal expectations in 1940 by running away and marrying my father one night. Her own mother never criticized her for it, but there was a social stigma.
As we think about social safety nets and your current post, we might benefit from looking at the ways families dealt with them when times were tough.
Don Stewart
My husband’s maiden aunt lived with our family for a few years before she died. (She was deaf and refused to go to an assisted living facility.) She was one who had never married, and who had taken care of her parents. Her parents had left a reasonable size inheritance to her. When she died, I was surprised to find out that she left us a substantial amount–she had been thrifty with the money she had been left.
Super article. I particularly liked the part about k-selected species.
The correlation results from the tie between the automotive industry and the dollar’s status as a proxy for oil consumption. As the automobile dies, so dies the economy based on it. You can read more about it in The Great Race at the Finish Line on the Doomstead Diner.
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/09/08/the-great-race-at-the-finish-line/
RE
Very good point.
Thanks Leo. Did you read The Great Race at the Finish Line?
RE
http://www.flickr.com/photos/travoc/64416135/
As usual, a tour de force!.
One thing does strike me however, and that is that while I can directly see an inescapable relationship between energy,. standard of material living, and populations DENSITY, I cant see that employment per se is linked. It is after all quite possible to employ someone for nothing or next to nothing, to dig a hole and fill it in. In other words employment is in theory, at least) easily created, or dispensed with, in a world in which very very few people are indispensable and machines do most of the work.
Most of Eurosocialist policy ism in the limit based on this principle – that providing you are generating enough real wealth using a few highly skilled people and a lot of capital investment in plant, you can ‘create employment’ by setting up a Ministry of Silly Walks (or equivalent), and staffing it with innumerable no-hopers who will solemnly declare its deeply important etc. etc.
Jobs then become not adjuncts to production of wealth, but politically acceptable ways to redistribute such wealth as is being created. Until of course the actual production is completely strangled by the redistribution and real incomes depressed so far that there is nothing left to redistribute at all. See the current state of the EU …
I mention this because it suggests a new attitude towards unemployment. That in fact its a good and necessary thing, because an unemployed person is actually consuming less resources than one who is in a ‘make work’ job. Even if generously funded by the state to be that way. And that policies that attempt to drive forward economic growth by funding state sponsored employment through taxation are a WORSE alternative than the unemployment itself.
There are also interesting implications in terms of tax regimes. I have long held the view that taxation is useful not only in raising money to administer society, but also in terms of tilting the playing field towards the type of economic activity that is socially preferable. So why then do we TAX WORKING and – in Europe especially – REWARD IDLENESS?? When we want investment why do we tax capital and profit? Why when we want savers do we depress interest rates to encourage borrowing? Why in a world where we are short of stuff, but not labour, do we tax labour, and not stuff?
Its is very interesting to look at the implications of a shift towards taxing resources and consumption and away from taxing labour and capital gains and profits.
But not her, not now. My point was to show that although you have demonstrated a clear correlation between employment and energy use, Its not an intrinsic coupling: It relates to ‘the way we do things at the moment’ and could be sundered.
THe relationship between energy and jobs could be sundered, but I think it would be through people acting as farmers without fossil fuel, and growing food for themselves and a small number of others. Then we have people going back to farming and working in the home, and more or less a reverse of what we had in the past. We would need to start counting “farm and home employment” in the total, to make sense of what is happening. Then I would agree with you.
Europe has admittedly tried all kinds of social policies that are in the direction of digging trenches and filling them back up, but with a payment to the individuals involved. I think that is part of the reason it is in such poor financial condition now. As the world becomes increasingly competitive, this approach puts too much costs into government “overhead,” so a country is not competitive with the rest of the world.
It seems to me that making a change to the energy-job relationship is harder than a person might think, because wealth and energy are so closely related. Hierarchical behavior keeps relativities in place.
Regarding changing what we are taxing, if we want fewer children, we should tax having children, rather than giving them tax deductions.
Regarding changing what we are taxing, if we want fewer children, we should tax having children, rather than giving them tax deductions.-Gail
If we have fewer children, who pays the Social Security to fund the Old Folks? Fewer people coming into the workforce results in demographic shifts such a occurring in Japan which makes funding an aging population impossible.
RE
http://doomsteaddiner.org
Who indeed?
And I think Japan is really the world leader in having to face up to this problem.
BUT again I have to point out that you equate the finances with a large workforce paying taxes.
IF you have a massive robotised society doing most of the production – and the Japanese are closer to that that anyone – the few people that are left can look after us old folks, and all that lovely exportable product buys all the resources they need to do it.
The problem comes from regarding the traditional, and extant, systems as being the only systems possible.
There’s a Safe Place for your Money. Chinese Banks. LOL.
The Chinese are TOAST.
RE
Doomstead Diner
I agree. Having fewer children makes funding Social Security impossible. In China, what I have read is that people with only one child are putting a great deal of the income they receive in banks, hoping it will allow them to fund their retirement, since it will be hard to depend on their children. The existence of the large amount of saving has helped along the program of huge government investment. The question is what will really be there when they retire (and when we retire).
I think that what I see happening is that the relationship between ‘labour’ and ‘income’ simply diverges. Employment-as-we-know-it ceases to exist as a concept. Its up the road a ways but I can see that the equations balance better if it happens.
In a sense its part of a post industrial transformation. I don’t think we should look backwards to ‘how things worked in the past’ but forwards to ‘how things might work in the future’.
When we look at wealth, energy and material resources in a post industrial context, they are not exactly as related as you seem to think: For example the actual energy and materials in an I-phone – or any bit of I-bling – is rather low. Neither is it possible for a single human to CONSUME more than a certain amount of food, or energy to heat their houses etc etc. Of course they CAN consume more energy sitting in a commuting snarl up in a gas guzzling car on their way to a make believe job in a fully lit and airconditioned office, that benefits no one.
What you see really is that consumerism, planned obsolescence, fashion, and overuse of energy – and the USA is the world leader – is a joyous riotous total waste of plentiful resources and a marvellous way to redistribute wealth in a society and have fun.
That has to stop. Sadly 🙂 I have enjoyed every minute of overpowered cars, air flights to exotic locations, and having slightly more money than I realistically knew what to do with. ..
If you look at consumerism as a political tool to essentially deliver societies wealth to its constituent individuals, then there are better ways to do that than make-work or consumerism. Rising material and energy prices destroy consumerism, and totally changes the balance between capital, labour, and materials and energy costs when it comes to making product.
When you look at the total cost of ownership of a product, scarce resource and high energy leads directly towards the antithesis of consumerism and the throwaway society. If labour is (relatively) cheap, and parts are expensive, the best option is to make money not out of selling a short lived product, but manufacturing extremely long lived high quality products that can be repaired and upgraded. In my own life I used to buy ‘high street’ boots at £60 a pair that lasted 6 months. In et last 20 years I have bought boots at £100-£150 a pair from specialised places, that have been repaired many times and have lasted literally years – getting on for 20 years! Bad for the high street but good for the cobbler.
The point being that a cobbler serving a local market and living on the premises is a lot more efficient way to deliver shoe leather to customers than a High St. chain, in a mall, backed up my massive national advertising, high overheads and a huge corporate structure.
When you look at the transformation in activity in this example, what you get is less salesmen in plastic suits, less huge malls, less advertising executives and brand promotion specialists, far less use of actual leather, and energy, and a LOT more cobblers!
All because leather and energy got more expensive.
In essence in terms of product delivery high energy and material cost drives localisation and service rather than globalisation and manufacturing, for basic necessities.
So whilst I accept that TRADITIONAL employment will fall along with energy consumption, I think that other ways of doing things will – if governments do NOT stand in the way, come along to take their place. When I can cook up a hamburger that is ten times better than McDonald’s at half the price or less (and I can already) one has to say that’s what I will do. When I can buy meat at half supermarket prices from the guy who rears the cattle, and he still gets a living wage, that’s what I will do.
We are looking at less centralisation, more localisation, less consumerism, more personal investment to actually deliver the necessities of life more efficiently and at lower cost than the corporate methodology can. Whether or not me cooking a burger to eat myself counts as employment or not, is down to definition.
I remember driving across the Mojave desert and seeing trailer parks with massive air-conditioning units strapped on the sides, and thinking ‘why on earth don’t they do what is far better, build massive concrete and masonry structures that equalise the temperature day to night, and insulate them to keep the heat out?’ And- I realised that its cheaper to make a tacky trailer and strap a tacky aircon on it, and if energy is cheap, so what? Total cost of ownership is lower.
I suppose my real disquiet arises out of the fact that I see one of the things standing in the way of a new social economic order, as clinging to traditional ideas about ’employment’ and financial reward. And Left and Right are both wedded to the same idea, that this consumer society must be restarted at all costs, so that large corporates, unionised workforces and ultimately political and economic power will still reside in the same sets of hands.
Whereas I see salvation in ditching consumerism, shrinking corporates down to manageable sizes where appropriate and allowing ‘mom and pop’ service industries to flourish again, in tune with local markets and conditions.
Dunno if it will happen tho.
There are a number of different “lower” ways of doing things that we could realistically transition to, for some period of time. Any transition would necessarily be very slow–typically thirty years, because there is so much sunk costs in what we are doing now, and not much capital available for new investment.
The problem would be getting any reasonable group of people to agree to such a transition. There really aren’t enough resources to continue what we are doing now and make a transition at the same time. This (plus the quite likely lower number of people the new way would support) creates a huge problem. Of course, a few people can work in groups on their own attempts at transition. The question is whether they will work.
The ones that work will be copied: the ones that don’t, won’t!
The thing that has to happen first, is for the people to realise that government has not got the solution. Its part of the problem!
If you happen to trade your skills for a sack of potatoes, the government can’t tax that transaction – it appears on no books.
Leo’s final proposition: Collapse of some or all banks and some or all governments does not imply collapse of civilisation. 🙂
“why on earth don’t they do what is far better, build massive concrete and masonry structures that equalise the temperature day to night, and insulate them to keep the heat out”
There is also the possibility of underground dwellings in arid areas if costs and rock stability permit. Underground dwellings give many micro climate control advantages.
http://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com/coober-pedy-underground-homes.html
(I haven’t forgotten our disagreements Leo. However, you clearly have a good brain so you might be reclaimable.)