TITTL prediction

[UndercoverElephant]

Futurology might be for mugs, but I have a theory/prediction about what is going to happen that I'd like some feedback on. TITTL stands for "take it to the limit" and it involves humanity doing what Biff wants them to because they are forced to, but not doing what UE wants them to because they haven't been forced, until it really does all go bang.

I think we are at the beginning of a stage in the collapse where even though the population is still rising, and economic growth still pursued as the holy grail, living standards are falling. All over the world people are being forced, by economic circumstances to eat less meat, cut out unnecessary car journeys and foreign holidays, heat their home more efficiently, start growing their own vegetables, etc... It will also involve a redistribution of wealth away from the west and towards some (not all) other places. This is indeed what Biff wants, right? The trouble is it's all being forced rather than voluntary, and there is no acknowledgement of the underlying problems.

The above process makes civilisation more efficient, and allows the population to continue rising, but it is just as unsustainable as ever. Instead of leading us towards sustainability it takes us to the limit of the number of people our sort of civilisation can support. It removes most of the slack from the system. Once everybody has stopped eating meat, the process has to stop. Once they've cut out all the unnecessary journeys, or got rid of their car, that process has to stop too.

There's only one way such a scenario can end. With no slack left in the system, all it needs is one natural disaster, or a couple of bad years for harvests, or a major war or revolution in the wrong place, and the die-off will start in earnest, and in multiple places at about the same time. I think this will be the start of a one-off transition. It will be the point where the majority in the developed world, as well as the BRICs, will realise that the good times are not coming back and instead start worrying how bad the dieoff is going to be - how long it will continue for and how many people are going to survive. This will be the point where the whole of civilisation will be forced (that word again) to start thinking the unthinkable - right out of the box - ANYTHING to offer some sort of hope, including things that might get you locked away if you said them today.

Anyway, it may be pointless futurology, but I'd bet my house something like the above is going to happen (if I had one.) The only question is how long it takes before we arrive at the limit and see what will be a turbo-charged start to the dieoff.

All criticisms, comments or possible extensions to theory would be most welcome.

UE

[biffvernon]

it involves humanity doing what Biff wants them to

Chance 'd be a fine thing but if humanity did what I want everybody would be planting flowers and making sweet music.

The whole Transition Town thing is about increasing slack and thus resilience to unexpected shocks. David Fleming went into this in some depth in Lean Logic.

SLACK
It is a truth universally acknowledged that competitiveness is a good thing. It is a life-saver, in that it enables an economy to pay its way. It is a provider of equity, in that it enables people to achieve wealth and status on their own merits. And it is the only way in which a price-based market economy will work. But it comes at a cost.
A competitive market economy must, by definition, be “taut”. The price charged by Fred for his goods will hold only so long as the price charged by Dan for the same goods, in the same place, is no lower. If it is, Fred will need to reduce his prices, or else to go out of business. Prices for goods therefore tend to converge to the same level. And that level requires all the producers in the market to be efficient – to work full-time, to use the methods that cost least, and to sell as much as they can. Producers know what they need to do – there is little choice in the matter; what distinguishes them is how good they are at doing it. There is a requirement to innovate, because the competitive market is taut: everyone else is doing so, and anyone who does not is quickly priced out of business.
In the future, it will not be like that. Producers will not always want to provide their goods and services in the most efficient way. They may – for good local reasons – want to use a technology which is more expensive. For instance, it could make sense, from the point of view of the resilient community, to use less energy, water or material, at the cost of having to spend more on labour. Or local craftsmen may be able to keep up with local demand for long-lasting goods despite working for only three days a week. Or producers may simply decide not to produce the maximum quantity, and to take it easy and produce according to what they see as reasonable need, or what they have the time for, after spending time with family and neighbours.
All these choices would have the effect of raising the price of the goods supplied by that producer or – if other producers did the same – by the community as a whole. In a taut market, such decisions could not be made. If they were, they would not stick, because a producer that tried to do so would be quickly put out of business by others who went for the cheaper option, the efficient and competitive one. Any market that did manage to make such sensible, yet inefficient, decisions stick, would be slack – and it would be at constant risk of being stymied by competitive producers seizing the opportunity to make easy money by producing and selling at a lower price.
How can a community, despite all this, be mistress of its own fate in this sense? How can it sustain that condition of slack – that is, have the freedom to make enlightened decisions and make them stick? Well, here is the good news. The “normal” state of affairs, before the era of the great civic societies, and in the intervals between them, has consisted of political economies – perhaps better known in this case as villages – where the terms on which goods and services were exchanged were not based on price. Instead, they were built around a complex culture of arrangements – obligations, loyalties, collaborations – which express the nature and priorities of the community and the network of relationships and reciprocities between its members. No, don’t scoff. This is what households still do – and friends, neighbours, cricket teams, magistrates, parent-teacher associations, allotment holders; this is the non-monetary informal economy, the central core that enables our society to exist. It is outrageous to the received values of now: it is not transparent; it is nonconformist; social mobility in it is limited; it is neither efficient nor competitive; it is full of anomalies. But it keeps things going.
So, back to the question: how does this political economy manage to keep such an apparently unstable regime going? Well, it turns on culture. Sheer naked loyalties and family values can only go so far. There needs to be something interesting, connecting, going on too – something to talk about, to cooperate in, to mull over, to aim for, to laugh at; there needs to be a story to tell, something to coordinate and to do together. A culture is like the upright strands that you begin with in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself: no sticks, no basket; no culture, no community. It is the grammar, the story, humour and good faith that identifies a community and gives it existence. It is both the parent and child of social capital. And the social capital of a community is its social life – the links of cooperation and friendship between its members. It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith and reciprocal obligations the civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.
Ever since Adam Smith observed that people are willing to carry out almost any service for each other despite being motivated by nothing more than commercial self-interest, it has seemed to be unnecessary and ridiculous to suppose that there is any significant role for such higher motives as benevolence. Economists simply haven’t needed such concepts. Well, they do now. The economics of the future will be benignly and inextricably entangled with social capital, with intense links of reciprocity, in comparison with which the reduction of economic and social relations to the piteous simplicities of prices is not up to standard any longer, and is due for retirement. It is now all right to speak of benevolence as an economic concept, for economics is at the early stages of being reintegrated into community, and community into the whole nature of the living things that belong there. It will not be from the impersonal price-calculations of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from the reciprocal obligations that join a community together, and the benevolence among its members.
Slack is the space in which judgment lies. The early shocks may leave little room for choice: just one tolerable option could be a fine thing, and that may be as much as most of us can hope for, at least for the time being. In the mature settlement that could follow, however, the tyranny of decisions being in lock-step with competitive pricing will be an ancient memory. There will be time for music.

I hope you at least read the last sentence.

[jonny2mad]

Does the west have the wealth I thought we were massively in debt to the chinese.

I think biff and pretty much everyone else in this country have a outdated view of where we actually are in the world, we are broke yet one of the biggest industrys in this country is getting people to give money to other countrys via charity .

I don't see us in anyway adjusting and if we do it will be far to little far too late

[SiNonConfectus]

If you take it to the limit there will be no die off as there is no overshoot. Most of the forced actions you describe seem to reduce the possibility of overshoot by increasing resilience meaning that one disaster is less likely to begin a cascade.

Desperate logic somersaults appear to be involved to continue justifying a doomer stance.

[biffvernon]

I think

Are you sure?

[emordnilap]

Ah, what a loss David Lean was. An instinctive understanding of those two opposites, resilience and efficiency.

[RenewableCandy]

UE, as I understand it the dire economic conditions in the USA, and continental Europe, are resulting in a drop in family size there. So, at least for the time being, those decisions, along with the others about driving less etc, are taking us further away from the brink.

[UndercoverElephant]

UE, as I understand it the dire economic conditions in the USA, and continental Europe, are resulting in a drop in family size there.

No. That's causing a potential future problem because of the demographics - who pays for the retirement of the baby boomers. The dire economic conditions (at the moment) are mainly caused by a broken monetary system and unpayable debts inherited from corrupt banks, plus peak everything sending costs higher than they would otherwise be.

[Little John]

Futurology might be for mugs, but I have a theory/prediction about what is going to happen that I'd like some feedback on. TITTL stands for "take it to the limit" and it involves humanity doing what Biff wants them to because they are forced to, but not doing what UE wants them to because they haven't been forced, until it really does all go bang.

I think we are at the beginning of a stage in the collapse where even though the population is still rising, and economic growth still pursued as the holy grail, living standards are falling. All over the world people are being forced, by economic circumstances to eat less meat, cut out unnecessary car journeys and foreign holidays, heat their home more efficiently, start growing their own vegetables, etc... It will also involve a redistribution of wealth away from the west and towards some (not all) other places. This is indeed what Biff wants, right? The trouble is it's all being forced rather than voluntary, and there is no acknowledgement of the underlying problems.

The above process makes civilisation more efficient, and allows the population to continue rising, but it is just as unsustainable as ever. Instead of leading us towards sustainability it takes us to the limit of the number of people our sort of civilisation can support. It removes most of the slack from the system. Once everybody has stopped eating meat, the process has to stop. Once they've cut out all the unnecessary journeys, or got rid of their car, that process has to stop too.

There's only one way such a scenario can end. With no slack left in the system, all it needs is one natural disaster, or a couple of bad years for harvests, or a major war or revolution in the wrong place, and the die-off will start in earnest, and in multiple places at about the same time. I think this will be the start of a one-off transition. It will be the point where the majority in the developed world, as well as the BRICs, will realise that the good times are not coming back and instead start worrying how bad the dieoff is going to be - how long it will continue for and how many people are going to survive. This will be the point where the whole of civilisation will be forced (that word again) to start thinking the unthinkable - right out of the box - ANYTHING to offer some sort of hope, including things that might get you locked away if you said them today.

Anyway, it may be pointless futurology, but I'd bet my house something like the above is going to happen (if I had one.) The only question is how long it takes before we arrive at the limit and see what will be a turbo-charged start to the dieoff.

All criticisms, comments or possible extensions to theory would be most welcome.

UE

Completely agree with all of it UE.

[PS_RalphW]

Cambridge has been in a baby boom for some years now.

[RenewableCandy]

UE, as I understand it the dire economic conditions in the USA, and continental Europe, are resulting in a drop in family size there.

No. That's causing a potential future problem because of the demographics - who pays for the retirement of the baby boomers. The dire economic conditions (at the moment) are mainly caused by a broken monetary system and unpayable debts inherited from corrupt banks, plus peak everything sending costs higher than they would otherwise be.

Completely agree, but as I said, those high costs are causing people to put off, sometimes 'til forever, the prospect of having children. They want to first be able to...
-pay off their student debt
-find the deposit for a place to live
-pay for a wedding
-get a job which they have reasonable confidence won't vapourise as soon as they become a mum/dad
-be sure they have some reasonable prospect of keeping the children in the style to which they're accustomed.

The economy isn't allowing for any of this at the mo., for an increasing fraction of its participants. People, frankly, are being rather sensible.

[UndercoverElephant]

UE, as I understand it the dire economic conditions in the USA, and continental Europe, are resulting in a drop in family size there.

No. That's causing a potential future problem because of the demographics - who pays for the retirement of the baby boomers. The dire economic conditions (at the moment) are mainly caused by a broken monetary system and unpayable debts inherited from corrupt banks, plus peak everything sending costs higher than they would otherwise be.

Completely agree, but as I said, those high costs are causing people to put off, sometimes 'til forever, the prospect of having children. They want to first be able to...
-pay off their student debt
-find the deposit for a place to live
-pay for a wedding
-get a job which they have reasonable confidence won't vapourise as soon as they become a mum/dad
-be sure they have some reasonable prospect of keeping the children in the style to which they're accustomed.

The economy isn't allowing for any of this at the mo., for an increasing fraction of its participants. People, frankly, are being rather sensible.

So you think a generation is growing up who will just opt not to have kids? I'd like to think it was possible.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

David Fleming went into this in some depth in Lean Logic.

SLACK

A competitive market economy must, by definition, be “taut”. The price charged by Fred for his goods will hold only so long as the price charged by Dan for the same goods, in the same place, is no lower

I'm glad I can stop you there s it looked rather long.

Your daughter doesn't compete on price. She competes on quality.

There endeth the lesson in why you shouldn't absolutely trust arguments that come with their own narrow definitions.

[UndercoverElephant]

If you take it to the limit there will be no die off as there is no overshoot.

No. Taking it to the limit could be restated directly as "taking overshoot to the limit." That is precisely what I am talking about.

In fact, that might make a better acronym, and explain it better: TOTTL. Thanks!

[UndercoverElephant]

David Fleming went into this in some depth in Lean Logic.

SLACK

A competitive market economy must, by definition, be “taut”. The price charged by Fred for his goods will hold only so long as the price charged by Dan for the same goods, in the same place, is no lower

I'm glad I can stop you there s it looked rather long.

Your daughter doesn't compete on price. She competes on quality.

There endeth the lesson in why you shouldn't absolutely trust arguments that come with their own narrow definitions.

What do you think of the opening post, JSD?