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CATASTROPHIC SHORT TERMISM Umair Haque: How Much Worse Are the 2020s Going to Get? Why the 2020s Are the Worst Decade in Modern History 
No, that’s not Photoshop. That’s what a derecho did to the sky in South Dakota — turned it green ... Image Credit: NBC News Screenshot Original article: https://eand.co/how-much-worse-are-the-2020s-going-to-get-ba549377a9aa Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Umair Haque seems to have a good grasp on how the world works, and I enjoy reading what he writes. The challenge that I want to address is how the people who lead the world ... who run the world ... can be held to account so that the world becomes a better place. People have engaged with these matters throughout history ... but the issues are perhaps more 'out-of-control' now than any time in the past in large part because of amazingly powerful technology that can be used for 'bad' as readily as it can be used for 'good'. This is very scary! Peter Burgess | ||
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How Much Worse Are the 2020s Going to Get?
Why the 2020s Are the Worst Decade in Modern History Written by Umair Haque Published in Eudaimonia and Co July 12th 2022 A heatwave broiling much of the world. Record temperatures. Energy grids stressed. Temperature rising. Prices soaring. Interest rates climbing. Real incomes falling. Fanaticism surging. Democracy breaking. Wait, is that yet another wave of the pandemic arriving? You might be wondering to yourself these days, justifiably: how much worse can the 20s get? See how much worse things are now than just three years ago? Go ahead. Imagine 2025. This is the worst decade, by a very long way, in modern history. The worst since the 1930s by a wide margin. Sure, there’s a certain kind of guy who’ll dispute that, but he’s writing columns for the New York Times, in which he’s been wrong since, oh, our whole adult lives. To any sane, observant person, the world is going off the rails, like a crazy train to dystopian theocracy on a dead planet, whatever you even call that form of winning the devil’s lottery. Why, though, is it the worst decade? And — the crucial thing — how much worse will things get? When I look at the state of our civilization, I see three megaproblems. They’re not the existential threats of climate change and mass extinction and fanaticism and so forth — but the trends, the failures, which underlie and produce them. Three megaproblems. Warning, they’re going to sound boring. And yet they’re anything but.
If he goes out to try and raise money for his big idea — a necessary evil — then the way our economies are structured, he has seven years, maximum, or thereabout, probably more realistically five, to begin making money for his investors. Good luck saving the planet with that. It’s going to take more than five to seven year time horizons. To, I don’t know, invent everything from fully clean energy to loop manufacturing to the biggies of carbon free raw materials for everything from fertilizer to glass to cement. It just can’t be done. And so it isn’t being done. What time horizon would we need investment to take place in at this point, as a civilization? We need ultra long scale time horizons. We need to build systems that last centuries, at least. Preferably millennia. As a civilization, we can’t rely on systems anymore that peter out after a few decades, or even a century or so — water systems, energy grids, raw materials, distribution, manufacturing. We need to build our systems for permanence now. But you can’t build a system of any kind to last a millennium…in five years. And so the net result of this problem — our economic time horizons are incredibly narrow is a second one, an even more lethal one. Underinvestment. Have you noticed how everything appears to be, well, falling apart? The problem’s especially acute in America and Britain, where, well, nothing much works. Not healthcare, finance, not money itself, not education or housing…anything. That problem is true globally as well. As a civilization, we’ve underinvested in everything, and I mean everything. Underinvested in it fatally. Take the example of Covid, because it’s a really, really good one to prove this point. It would’ve taken — and this is the IMF estimating, not me — a few tens of billions to vaccinate the world. The money couldn’t be raised. And so here we all are, facing YACW — Yet Another Covid Wave. A few tens of billions. Sound like a lot? It isn’t. Any number of egomaniacal cheeseball billionaires could handle it, and still be billionaires. And yet they didn’t. To Bezos, Musk, Zuck, ten bill isn’t even money. It’s pocket change. And yet as a civilization, we can’t even mobilize capital on that scale to fix our most pressing problems. Think about what a fatal problem that is for a civilization to have. Imagine one, a prehistoric one. It faced a drought. The lake it bordered dried up. It needed to dig wells. But all the shovels were in the hands of a handful of ultra wealthy, who shrugged, hoarded them, gilded them, and kept them on display just to taunt everyone. That’s the situation we’re in, too. It’s crazy. Nonsensical. The reason that billionaires have the money our civilization as a whole needs to begin to fix its very real problems is short time horizons. If it’s not profitable almost overnight, our civilization doesn’t do it. What does it do? Stuff that is profitable almost overnight. And so capital, way too much of it, ends up in the hands of obvious grifters and hucksters who could give a damn what they destroy — democracy, trust, information, sociality itself. When you have a civilization that can only invest in the ultra short term — five years or less — then who gets rich? Not anyone looking to do something enduring, that lasts, that stands the test of time. And that leaves, unfortunately, the con artists, mostly. We are now in the Age of Extinction. And the reason we are there is that this economy and its way of thinking is left over from the industrial age. Back then is when this norm — five to seven years by the time it’s profitable, or else it’s not worth doing — was established. It didn’t make sense even then, but you can see why it took hold when the age’s big challenges were figuring out how to mass produce cars or canned goods or market them on television. But for this age? The Age of Extinction? Five to seven year time horizons are totally, utterly inadequate. This isn’t just some kind of abstract issue, underinvestment. It’s tangible in so, so many respects. Young people these days have few to no prospects, precisely because they live in a world of underinvestment. Underinvestment means that tomorrow’s industries never get created — and neither do the stable jobs and careers that come with them. Where’s the job of, I don’t know, “Ecosystems Protection Architect”? It’s not there, because “Reversing Extinction” isn’t a sector of the economy yet. “People who learn how to revivify dying ecoystems” isn’t a job we have a word for, because it’s one that doesn’t exist, because we don’t have an economy in which that’s an “industry,” an endeavor. And so young people’s lives are simply falling apart. Yesterday’s industrial era jobs aren’t there. All that’s left is, at the top, a tiny pool of info tech jobs, where people make the algorithms which turn life into a grey mushy goo of banal sameness. And a huge, huge number, at the bottom, of “low wage service jobs” — all those PhDs working at Starbucks, or doing “gigs.” Young people don’t have futures precisely because underinvestment has left them without careers, jobs, aspirations, opportunities, not to mention incomes, savings, capital, even to the point of moving out of their parent’s homes. But it’s hardly even just there that the problem of underinvestment ends. What else does it do? It leaves things to decrepitude. It sucks the life out of towns and cities and communities, and they wither away and die, as jobs evaporate, and take people’s lives, dreams, and fortunes with them. What does all that do? Underinvestment spells the end of the middle and working class as we once knew them. Take a hard look at America and Britain. Now, they “vote” against democracy itself, in enough numbers to have caused both those nations to shudder and convulse and begin collapsing. When middle and working classes die, they take democracy with them. That is because modern democracy is founded on a bargain of their lives being stable, if not improving. But when societies become places of downward mobility — watch out. Demagogues arise, who point at scapegoats for the woes of the working man, and fascism erupts. Underinvestment, in other words, is intimately linked to the problem of collective action. Why is that as a world, we can’t get our act together? Why can’t we just throw off the yoke of the billionaires and try to save the planet or what have you? Because a very, very large number of us are now standing there, menacingly, with the equivalent of crowbars in hands, just itching to start a fight. Take me back to the Middle Ages! Theocracy over democracy! Dominion! Eliminate the subhumans!! Make Us Great Again! They don’t want to go forwards in history. They want to go backwards. Out of sheer despair, terror, fright, numbness. It’s all become too much for this group — the instability, the insecurity, the constant anxiety, the inequality. They just want order. They want the safety of the herd, and the hierarchy of the primate pack. They want a pecking order, in which everyone knows their place, and at least they have one. They want a meal, someone to worship, someone to obey, and someone to hate. And that’s about all they want. You can hardly build a civilization going anywhere on that. Hence, collective action has become more or less impossible. In America, this social group — regressive, conservatives, lunatics, fanatics, call them what you like — literally just sits there, grinning smugly, when they’re not shouting in rage, and blocks everything. Nothing is possible to accomplish anymore. No form of political compromise or bargain can be struck with them. They just want to burn it all down, stop it all in its tracks, be the wrench in the machine — be the bullet in the gun aimed at democracy’s head. The same, sadly, is true in Britain. Nothing is possible anymore. Except more regress. Look at how fast America’s regressing. It’s going back decades every year now. How much time does a society like that have? But how much time does a civilization fighting for air on a dying planet have? These three problems are absolutely wrecking our future. Laying total and abject waste to it. Underinvestment really means: the average person lives and dies in debt, and can barely afford anything anymore. Collective action — or a lack thereof — means that the average person, even if they want a decent, modern, functioning society, finds themselves blocked by the 30% of lunatics who want to burn it all down, and take everyone back to the Stone Age, by way of a religious war, a coup, a civil war, the Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451. And a limited time horizon means that the middle and working class are dying, because nothing is made to last anymore, including them, and as they die, they take a torch to what’s left of democracy, shuddering in rage and senseless pain. How much worse will the 20s get? They are going to keep on getting worse, fast, until these three problems are fixed. Until there’s even an attempt or two to fix these problems. See how much worse things are now than just three years ago? Go ahead. Imagine 2025. Umair July 2022
| The text being discussed is available at | https://eand.co/how-much-worse-are-the-2020s-going-to-get-ba549377a9aa and |