https://www.medialens.org/2023/climate-collapse-the-grim-silence-of-our-leaders/
Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders
None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. Canadian wildfires the size of Austria, a Hawaiian town incinerated by a hurricane-fuelled firestorm, a Greek island devastated by three years of rainfall in a single day, a Libyan town washed into the sea after 40cm of rain fell in twenty-four hours leaving 20,000 dead, killer hurricanes fuelled by oceans overheated by climate change. And then there were the extraordinary heatwaves in Italy, Spain, France, Japan, China; the floods in Madrid, Barcelona, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Beijing, Manila, on and on, with temperature, wind and rainfall records shattered the world over.
Almost as astonishing has been the indifference of our leaders. The silence has been deafening. Where are they? Why is no-one joining the dots and demanding some kind of serious response?
Jeremy Corbyn, a rare exception, commented of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week:
‘Not one mention of the catastrophic flooding in Libya at PMQs. Where is the concern for the victims of fires in Europe or the droughts across Africa? Where is the outrage at fossil fuel giants destroying our planet? Where is the hope for future generations? Wake up!’
Broadcaster and author Stephen Fry said on the BBC:
‘Extraordinary that you can have a conversation with an economics minister in Labour who didn’t even mention the climate catastrophe coming, that there’s a tsunami coming towards us… yet everyone is talking about just doing the same thing only better. It’s catastrophic.’
When asked about the Maui fire death toll in Hawaii, US President Joe Biden replied:
‘No comment.’
Compare this silence with the prediction made this morning on Twitter/X by Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London:
‘I hope I am wrong and others may see things differently, but I am expecting effective societal collapse by mid-century, and planning – for my partner and I and our kids – accordingly.’
Or compare with NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus, previously arrested for defending the Earth:
‘Dear journalists of the world: We are at risk of losing basically everything. This – what we’re experiencing now – is how that process unfolds. The more fossil fuels we burn, the further in that process we go.
‘You MUST begin to tell 5 critical truths. Civilization depends on it.’
The Limits Of Propaganda
Despite the overwhelming evidence that climate catastrophe is not just a looming threat, it is here; despite the desperate pleading for help from climate scientists; and despite the surreal silence and indifference of Western political leaders, a stubborn rump of opinion continues to insist that the climate crisis is a cynical scam promoted by vested interests.
We know from our own interactions with all kinds of people in all walks of life that many still hold this view. Indeed, it is a grim irony that our work has been used to bolster these claims. Because we have spent two decades emphasising how state-corporate media distort and omit the truth, critics regularly write to us along these lines:
‘The BBC and the Guardian are a propaganda system serving elite power. They are focusing so intensively on climate change because doing so serves an elite agenda of increased taxation and control. How can you, of all people, not see this?’
But we have never argued that everything that appears in state-corporate media is an elite-serving lie. These media are indeed part of a propaganda system, and they do work hard to further the interests of power. But they are communicating to an audience of thinking people in a world where reality has a habit of interfering with even the most fanatical propagandist’s best-laid plans.
If no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, if the powers that be are either unable or disinclined to fake the evidence, then the media has to tell at least some of the truth. Why? Because they have to report undeniable, propaganda-unfriendly facts to avoid being exposed as completely brazen propagandists – a revelation that would undermine their ability to manipulate public opinion.
Does anyone think that, last week, UK ‘mainstream’ outlets – media that have propagandised so hard on Ukraine – were eager to report news that the first ‘game-changing’, British Challenger 2 tank had been destroyed by Russian forces in Ukraine? The video evidence was overwhelming and readily available on social media; it couldn’t be suppressed. So, this propaganda-unfriendly news had to be reported. Does this mean UK journalists and editors are secretly supporting Russia, are funded by Russia, are pursuing ends serving Russian elites? No, it means that even highly sophisticated propaganda systems have their limits.
Of course, ‘mainstream’ media tried to soften the blow – the tank was ‘hit’, rather than destroyed; the crew had ‘probably’ survived. And the tank – a burned out shell, with the turret blown off its turret ring by the force of the internal explosion – ‘can probably be repaired’.
When corporate media report on Canadian wildfires and a Libyan town washed into the sea with thousands dead, this does not prove journalists are enthusiastically covering climate change in pursuit of some malign agenda.
People who think it does often have enough commitment to read a few articles on the internet, but not enough to seriously research the topic, or reach out to credible sources with serious questions. When fierce media critics like us disagree, we are dismissed as ‘shills’, as ‘bourgeois’ compromisers who have shown our ‘true colours’, or ‘dropped the ball’. As former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented on the response to his warnings on climate collapse:
‘The BBC thinks there is a climate crisis. Ergo, I am no better than a state-corporate stenographer, if not actually working for MI5.’
It is crucial to look deeper because the reality becomes clear when we ask even the simplest of rational questions:
How does the coverage afforded to climate collapse compare to coverage afforded to other comparable threats?
How much of this coverage recognises the true severity of the threat, its true corporate causes and the business-unfriendly revolution in priorities required if it is to be addressed?
On the first question, imagine the level of coverage if massive terrorist attacks killing large numbers of people had recently devastated Canada, Hawaii, Greece, Italy, Spain, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Libya, and so on.
We all remember the global media response when terrorists killed 2,977 people on 11 September 2001. What would the reaction be if terrorists killed more than 100,000 people every year, with the toll rising to literally millions of dead over decades? Based on analysis of hundreds of scientific studies, Damian Carrington writes in the Guardian:
‘In the worst-affected cities, hundreds of people a year on average are already dying from this extra heat, including in São Paulo (239 deaths), Athens (189), Madrid (177), Tokyo (156), Bangkok (146) and New York (141) … It is tricky to extrapolate these findings to a global figure, but a rough estimate given by the scientists is more than 100,000 deaths a year. Over decades, that implies a toll of millions of lives.’
Readers might respond: ‘Rubbish. I think I would have heard about millions of deaths from higher temperatures, if those figures were real.’
But that is exactly our point – you would have heard it, if terrorists had been responsible, because ‘mainstream’ politics and media love to discuss the terror threat and the supposed need for multi-billion-dollar military responses to it. You haven’t heard about these climate deaths for the same reason you haven’t heard the truth about the Iraqi civilian death toll after the 2003 invasion: terror threats serve state-corporate interests; Iraqi civilian deaths and climate deaths do not.
One hundred thousand deaths per year from terror attacks would not merely generate occasional reports on the latest disaster; journalists and politicians would be screaming ‘WORLD WAR THREE!’ from every screen, newspaper and magazine, 24/7, without a pause. It would be massive news on the scale of 9/11 and WW2. This is obvious and indisputable.
Is this what we’re getting on climate change? Absolutely not. As recently as April 2019, even after the start of the mass climate protests a year earlier, Columbia Journalism Review reported:
‘Yet at a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media. Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news… Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. Last October, the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse-gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report.’
As we have documented for a quarter of century, this is very much the long-term trend. Last year, for example, Media Matters published a report titled: ‘National TV news networks barely mention climate change as record-breaking heat dome cooks the west.’
In April 2022, Carbon Brief did report that the number of editorials calling for more action to tackle climate change had quadrupled in the space of three years. But this rise reflected greater interest following major global protests and an increase in climate-related disasters.
Corporate media are not making this the World War Three-style crisis it clearly is. Indeed, the deepest causes and solutions of the crisis are rarely even mentioned. The irony is that climate deniers are convinced the ‘mainstream’ is giving climate collapse heavy coverage precisely because the ‘mainstream’ has obscured the true scale of a crisis that actually merits vastly more coverage.
Journalists reporting on the latest disasters tend to merely include an anodyne mention of climate change at the end of the article, as in this recent example from the BBC:
‘Climate change has increased the intensity and frequency of tropical storms, leading to an increase in flash flooding and greater damage.’
A single sentence, added to a piece after Hong Kong had been hit by the biggest rainstorm since records began 140 years ago, 158.1 millimetres per hour; and after weeks of similar climate-related disasters striking countries all around the world. Again, we need only imagine the response if these had been a series of global terror attacks – the deeper cause, ‘the global terror threat’, would not be mentioned in passing; it would be front and centre.
If global elites were bent on using environmental breakdown as an excuse for manipulating public opinion, they would be loudly warning about other environmental crises like the dangerous loss of insects and of species diversity as a way of pressing for change. In reality, these issues are barely mentioned.
Unfortunately, some leftists are as prone to this desire-driven rational collapse as less politically-engaged mortals. For centuries, leftists have had an argument, not with the illusory wealth created by industrial fake ‘progress’, but with the unjust distribution of the spoils. For the left, utopia is industrial production managed by workers’ councils and syndicates; it’s a government run by authentic socialists representing the interests of the working class. The point is, despite the evidence increasingly staring them in the face, they do still believe in industrial ‘progress’.
In August, former MP George Galloway – someone we have defended in media alerts and who has retweeted us many times and repeatedly invited us on his TV shows – blocked us on Twitter for daring to challenge his support for further fossil fuel extraction. Galloway had tweeted:
‘In contrast to the #NetZero parties we [Workers Party GB] support the re-energising of Britain. Full exploitation of Britain’s oil and gas fields…’
Not Just Journalists – Ambition Distorts Perception
Why is climate denial and indifference still so widespread?
The media bias we continually expose is ultimately rooted in a fundamental flaw in human cognition: ambition distorts perception. Journalists are not alone – the truth is that we all have a tendency to believe what suits our perceived self-interest. Nietzsche offered one tragicomic example:
‘Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.’
Upton Sinclair supplied another:
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ (Upton Sinclair, Oakland Tribune, 11 December 1934)
In other words, evidence says, ‘This is true.’ Ambition replies, ‘It cannot be true.’ Eventually, evidence yields.
Thus, while it is, of course, true that our world is currently awash with corporate propaganda downplaying the reality of climate collapse, the disturbing truth is that these deceptions often find a receptive audience. Why? Because many people don’t want to consume less or less cheaply; they don’t want to drive or fly less or less cheaply; they don’t want to be denied ever-expanding consumption.
Freedom in modern society is already drastically limited – we have to submit to wage and salary slavery to pay taxes, rent, mortgage, bills, to stay off the street and out of jail. We’re already fundamentally unfree; any further restriction on our freedom to spend feels like a further attack on our basic level of happiness.
And so, even the most baseless claims about climate change are being lapped up by millions of people who know little about the science but who know a lot about soul-crushing work and consumption-as-consolation. They reflexively applaud anyone who tells them there’s no problem – we can go on earning, spending, consuming, because everything we’re being told about climate change is an ugly scam perpetrated by precisely the same people who are benefiting so richly from our lack of freedom in the first place. In fact, they are laughing at us!
Thus, ‘they’ changed the colours on the temperature maps to make them look scarier. ‘They’ took the temperature readings from dodgy sensors, or from the ground rather than the cooler air, and so on. The climate crisis is therefore, ‘Fake! Fake! Fake!’ based on counter-evidence that, in fact, is ‘Fake! Fake! Fake!’ The underlying, preposterous implication is that countless thousands of independent scientists all over the world are somehow falsifying measurements as part of an elite conspiracy.
The great claim of deniers is that the ‘mainstream’ focus on climate change is a strategy for limiting personal freedom. Jonathan Cook writes:
‘Many on the left similarly don’t like a climate crisis because it poses major challenges to current Western ideas of individualism.’
The concern is reasonable enough – serious action to limit climate change clearly must involve a reduction in some freedoms. But Cook makes a key point in response:
‘We are about to set the evolutionary clock back by many tens of millions of years. If you understand Earth as a complex, living entity where humans have emerged as the pinnacle of consciousness after billions of years of evolution – the only place in the universe where we know for sure that has happened – continuing to trash the planet because doing something to stop it might infringe on our “personal liberty” seems short-sighted, to put it mildly.’
And, of course, current inaction annually infringes on the personal liberty of 100,000 people to continue breathing – the ultimate loss of freedom. If we don’t change, we will all be prevented from driving, flying, from consuming at all, because our social and economic systems will collapse. This would be obvious to everyone, if so many of us weren’t determined to believe what suits our (misperceived) self-interest.
When industrial capitalism tries to impose infinite economic growth on a finite planet, loss of freedom is the inevitable ultimate result. At this point, we have a painful choice between losing some personal freedoms and losing literally everything.
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https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2023/09/18/261-the-post-truth-economy/
The post-truth economy
The untenable suspension of belief
There’s a plausible case to be made that we’re living in a “post-truth” age, and have been doing so since well before that term was “word of the year” for 2016 in the Oxford English Dictionary.
This is certainly true of the economy. The consensus narrative – propounded by decision-makers in government and business, supported by the economic orthodoxy, seldom questioned by the mainstream media and seemingly accepted by a majority of the general public – is that we can rely on an infinite continuity of economic growth.
Today’s economic problems, we are told, stem from the simple bad luck of a pandemic and a war in Eastern Europe. There is, then, no connection to a quarter-century of economic deceleration which we have tried to counter with ever more reckless financial policies.
It’s important to note that, whilst increasing numbers of people question the fairness, and indeed the honesty, with which the proceeds of growth are distributed, few seem to doubt the supposed underlying reality of economic growth itself.
This ‘consensus narrative’ is based on four propositions, each of which is false. The first of these ‘props’ is the assurance of the economic orthodoxy that sustained (as opposed to temporary) economic contraction not only isn’t happening, but can’t happen. The second prop, backing up the first, is the assertion that, aside from temporary interruptions, we’ve been experiencing near-continuous growth for as long as anyone can remember, and are still enjoying this same growth today.
The third prop is that renewable energy will carry on getting cheaper almost indefinitely, enabling us to transition away from climate-harming fossil fuels without any impairment to economic prosperity. Much of this assurance rests on the fourth prop, which is unbounded faith in the limitless potential of technology.
Kicking out the props, #1 – orthodox economics and ‘infinite expansion’
It is, as regular visitors to this site will know, far from difficult to demolish all four of these props. Let’s start with the economic orthodoxy, which, on the false premise that control of money gives us control of the economy, dismisses the very concept of material limits, and promises infinite economic expansion. This is a proposition with which only “an economist or a madman” would concur.
For what it’s worth – which isn’t very much – conventional economics insists that the economy can be explained in terms of money alone, a presumption which over-rates the capabilities of money almost as much as it under-rates the importance of the material. Any shortage, it asserts, can be overcome by higher prices, which incentivise suppliers to increase their deliveries to the market. Higher prices encourage substitution – expensive coffee might prompt consumers to buy tea instead – and act as a spur to technological innovation.
At the macroeconomic level, all of this, of course, is nonsense. No rise in prices can deliver something that does not exist in nature. The banking system can’t lend low-cost energy into existence, and neither can central bankers conjure it, ex nihilo, out of the ether. If money had unlimited powers, we could ‘fix’ climatic and ecological problems by sending money to the environment.
Rather like the cynic as defined by Oscar Wilde, orthodox economics assumes that price and value are the same thing. If one industry generates sales of $1bn, whilst another achieves only $500m, the former is twice as important as the latter. On this basis, agriculture – accounting for “only” 6.7% of the global economy – isn’t very important at all, and its complete loss could be offset, statistically, by a modest increase in the supply of services.
As regular readers will know, any reliance on an entirely monetary explanation of the economy is completely fallacious. There is a conceptual necessity, known here as the “two economies”, the purpose of which is to connect the monetary with the material. One of these two economies is the “real economy” of physical products and services, and the other is the parallel “financial economy” of money and credit.
The material economy is determined by energy, because nothing that has any economic value at all can be supplied without it.
Money, meanwhile, has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as an exercisable ‘claim’ on the products and services made available by the material economy of energy. This why no amount of money – be it fiat currency, precious metals, crypto or, for that matter, cowrie shells – would be of any use at all to someone cast adrift in a lifeboat, or stranded on a desert island.
Kicking out the props, #2 – credit and the fabrication of “growth”
The claim that we have been enjoying continuous (and largely consistent) economic growth over an extended period amounts to sleight-of-hand.
To be sure, reported global real GDP slightly more than doubled between 2002 ($81 trillion PPP, at constant 2022 values) and 2022 ($164tn). This “growth” (of $83tn), though, was far exceeded by a $266tn real-terms increase in debt between those same years. Put another way, $3.20 was borrowed for each $1 of reported “growth”. Even these numbers exclude rapid expansion in other financial commitments, and in the “gaps” in the adequacy of pension provision.
We need to be quite clear that GDP doesn’t measure economic output, but is simply an aggregation of financial transactions, which is a very different concept. It is perfectly possible, indeed commonplace, for transactions to take place with no economic value being added.
At the same time, financialization – the monetization of activities hitherto undertaken without charge, and hence outside the ‘production boundary’ – has proceeded relentlessly.
The expansion in credit creates an increase in transactions in a way that artificially inflates reported GDP. If we back out this credit effect, we can calculate underlying or ‘clean’ economic output, known in SEEDS terminology as C-GDP. Globally, this increased by only 36%, rather than 103%, between 2002 and 2022. Within reported “growth” of $83tn between those years, fully $56tn, or 67% of the total, was a purely cosmetic effect of credit expansion.
This trajectory is, of necessity, unsustainable. As the stock of credit is continuously ratcheted up to boost the supposed flow of transactional activity, a point is reached at which it becomes apparent that debts cannot ever be honoured for value.
Kicking out the props, #3 – ever-cheaper energy
Earlier this month, it emerged that there had been no bidders at all in Britain’s latest round of licensing for offshore wind-power projects. The reason for this was that the contract prices on offer had not been increased from the previous licensing round by a government wedded to the notion that the costs of renewables can only ever decline.
A more competent government would have seen this coming. In July, energy company Vattenfall called a halt to the Norfolk Boreas wind-farm project, and wrote off the SEK 5.5bn (£415m) invested in it. This resulted from a 40% increase in costs over the year since the licence was awarded, which rendered the project non-viable. The primary driver of this dramatic increase in costs was the rising price of natural gas, which made manufacturing and procurement more expensive. This effect was compounded by higher costs of capital.
Both of these factors are instructive. Renewables expansion makes huge demands on energy and raw materials for manufacturing, and we have reached the end of a long period in which the prices of fossil fuels have been low. That same period was characterised by unsustainably depressed interest rates. These conditions, which have boosted the development of renewables, cannot be expected to return.
The likelihood of cost increases might well have informed the thinking that resulted in the huge renewable energy subsidies contained in the Biden administration’s oddly-named Inflation Reduction Act. This largesse is likely to attract to America investment that might otherwise have gone elsewhere, but there may also be an implicit recognition that the expansion of renewables is likely to require subsidy.
Comparing this with what has happened in Britain is interesting. As costs rise, either the taxpayer or the consumer must pay more. If, as in the UK, neither is required to do so, development doesn’t happen.
The reasons why the costs of renewables must rise have long been obvious. Transition to renewables is going to be hugely expensive, and the price-tag of USD 115 trillion put on this process might now require substantial upwards revision.
The point about such costings is that they represent vast quantities of everything from steel and concrete to copper, cobalt, lithium and a host of other required raw material inputs. Creating (“printing”) the money to pay for this would do no more than trigger rapid inflation in the prices of all of these necessary inputs.
Accessing these materials, and processing them into everything from wind turbines and solar panels to supply grids and storage systems, requires a correspondingly enormous amount of energy, which can only come from the legacy source of fossil fuels.
No decision has yet been made – or is even likely to be made – about which other uses of fossil fuel energy are going to be scaled-back or relinquished to free up this energy for transition. If we need energy to extract and process, say, large amounts of copper, are we going to drive less, or fly less, to make this possible? Or, put another way, what other uses of copper are going to be cut back to make copper available for transition?
Kicking out the props, #4 – the magic of technology
The standard answer to legitimate questions about the resource costs of energy transition is that these will be reduced, pretty much ad infinitum, by technological progress. This shows a remarkably inaccurate perception of technological possibility where real-world, material factors are involved.
There can be no quantum leap in the efficiency of wind and solar energy. The maximum potential efficiency of wind power is determined by Betz’ Law, with the Shockley-Quiesser Limit doing the same for solar. In both cases, current best practice is already close to these theoretical limits.
If efficiency gains are constrained, the only way to expand the supply of renewable power is the scaling up of the industry, which brings in the vast need for both raw materials and energy mentioned above. It’s one thing to increase the data capacity of a chip, or to bombard the public with yet more advertising, but quite another to overturn efficiency limits determined by the laws of physics.
Ultimately, the economy needs to be understood in the material terms of a two-part process. On the one hand, energy is used to access raw materials and convert them into products. On the other, this activity converts energy from a dense to a diffuse format. Because the vast majority of the products thus created are destined for disposal, this can be termed the dissipative-landfill economic model.
These linked processes are inseparable, so we cannot have the production process without the parallel process of thermal dissipation. If we replace the energy inputs used now with lower-density alternatives, the effect is to truncate the productive-dissipative process, which means less output and a smaller economy. Renewables are less dense than oil, gas and coal, meaning that an economy based on wind and solar power, though feasible, will be smaller than an economy powered by high-density fossil fuels.
Suspension of disbelief
Most of the foregoing is surely self-evident and is, it should be stressed, non-partisan.
Accordingly, one of the interesting questions about the tenacity of the “post-reality” narrative of infinite economic growth is that of why so many people believe it. After all, the very idea of infinite economic expansion on a finite planet is illogical. This can’t be entirely a matter of propaganda, because comparatively few people take on trust much of what they’re told by the authorities.
The explanation for mass acquiescence in the implausible seems to reside in a phenomenon known to novelists as “the willing suspension of disbelief”.
The accomplished writer of fiction achieves this suspension of disbelief in his or her readers, who accept the improbable as part of their engagement with the author. For example, generations of crime novel afficionados have swallowed plots in which murders are solved by little old ladies, eccentric peers and university dons – there was even a blind detective, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados – despite knowing all along that, in reality, crimes are solved, not by eccentric members of the public, but by police officers.
Of course, this suspension of disbelief is temporary. If a reader’s enjoyment of a Golden Age crime novel was rudely interrupted by the advent of a real burglar, he or she wouldn’t try to contact a blind detective or an eccentric old lady, but would call the police.
As well as being temporary, this suspension of disbelief is willing. The reader allows his or her awareness of reality to be over-ruled in order to enjoy a work of fiction, and doesn’t apply the same critical eye with which he or she would – or at least should – view a story purporting to be ‘true’.
This suspension of disbelief shouldn’t happen in real world affairs, but it routinely does so, certainly where economics is concerned. The fact of the matter is that most people want to believe in the possibility of infinite economic growth. Being open-minded about the alternative is simply far too uncomfortable.
We need to be clear that this “willing suspension of disbelief” applies, not just to the general public, but to decision-makers and ‘the elites’ as well. If this were not so, then, at the moment at which the wealthiest and most influential investors became aware of the inevitability of economic inflexion, the markets would have collapsed. Being wealthy or influential doesn’t eliminate – indeed, it may strengthen – the desire to believe what one wants to believe.
The inevitability of real
“Post-real” economics is, of necessity, a time-limited phenomenon. Eventually, in a direct analogy to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about The Emperor’s New Clothes, reality will rudely interrupt the comforting fiction of infinite growth on a finite planet. A point must come at which the excuses run out, and the reality of a contracting economy becomes undeniable.
We cannot know when this moment of shocked recognition will happen – we only know that it will.
Analysis of the material and the financial economies points in two directions. At the material level, managed contraction is feasible, at least in theory. The trends which are driving prosperity downwards – and which, through rises in the real costs of energy-intensive necessities, are simultaneously undermining the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services – are developing in ways which, though relentless, are comparatively gradual.
The financial system, on the other hand, is incapable of gradual contraction, because it is entirely predicated on the presumption of growth in perpetuity. The moment at which we realise that infinite growth is mythical is the same moment at which we recognise that our gargantuan financial commitments can never be honoured.
We can only hope that this moment – one at which defaults cascade through the system, and asset prices crash – won’t occur until we’ve arrived at two decisions. One of these is a political and social arrangement which can manage economic contraction. The other is the development of a financial system which does not depend for its viability on the myth of infinite economic growth.
At the top-down level, collectivism failed in the Soviet Union, whilst market capitalism has been suspended because its essential predicates – real returns on capital, and unfettered price discovery by the markets – no longer apply. Those who propose replacing the top-down with the bottom-up may have a valid case.
All that the individual can really do is to develop an understanding, informed by material realities and backed up by statistical analysis, of why and how “post-truth” economics is destined to succumb to reality.
Comment to article:
" There is lots of research suggesting that humans are not really very interested in the truth, and never have been. Our brains are wired to simplify, to align with the thinking of others (so that we can get along with those we need to get along with to survive), to condition each other to think alike, and to believe what we want to believe is true, rather than what is actually true.
Any information or statement that doesn’t conform to our existing way of thinking and our belief system is simply ignored, not even considered. The search for the real truth is often and increasingly incompatible with our capacity to be functional and sane. There is no “solution” for that; it is our fundamental nature, the result of a million years of ‘successful’ (so far but not for much longer) evolution. "