An early lesson I learned in my pursuit of practical economics—indeed I turned it into a personal slogan—is that no curve ever rises forever. It came in handy in the 1960s. Virtually every industrial curve was visibly rising, irresistibly, it seemed. Those of us hired to advise industry on the future were tempted to point at all those uptrending lines as the easy way out. Our clients were already on board with that. But one can’t take the low road, not responsibly. So I had my dispiriting slogan. Industry journals didn’t help. They made the most of those trends; boundless optimism was not only normal, it was politically correct. Just recalling the atmosphere then now reminds me how everything looked in those innocent days.
It was a period of continuous and rapid…Integration. The Industrial Age had, as it were, come of age. All that remained was to put all of the many pieces together. Technology, in those days, did not mean what it means today—the spread of cybernetics into ever smaller devices of communication. The word then meant the application of new materials across the vast universe of all kinds of products—industrial machinery as well as consumer goods. This included, at the industrial level, changes to machinery to process materials better and faster. One of the hottest trade magazines, those days, believe it or not, was Steel, and almost monthly innovations in forming, shaping, cutting, or preserving steel filled the magazine’s breathless pages. That too came to pass. Steel tried to keep itself alive by opening its pages more widely to technology (in the old sense of the word) but couldn’t quite manage the job. The atmosphere had changed. No sooner had the economy integrated all of these arts, mechanics, and materials than industry (old meaning) lost the public eye; its struts, wires, tendons, and muscles disappeared (as they do in organic bodies) under skin—and in their case beneath shiny outer bodies, the fuselage, and the reflecting surface of new architecture.
The next big visible issue turned out to be the very negatives of the now submerged Age of the Machine. Once it vanished, its wastes became visible. For some decades, beginning in the 1970s, Environment became the issue and eventually turned all of us into either would-be-green recyclers or dug-in clear-cutters and adamant regulation-haters. And then dawned the Age of the Computer with the Apple. The child of cybernetics—am I surprised that my spark plug fires at the wink of a built-in chip? not in the least; I’m inclined to yawn—the child of the chip is the Social Network, perhaps the last and final stage of…Integration. It’s still rising. Oh the excitement, the new Political Correctness (“Follow us on Facebook, Twitter”). Rising. Going public. Making the billions mushroom from nothing. But no curve rises for ever.
Is the next big age the Age of Disintegration? Have we just seen the birth of it in that almost-successful attempt to set a limit—somewhat lower than the sky—to debt? To be followed more effectively by new innovations coming tomorrow. Is this age beginning at the top but promising to come down all the way to us, bringing its desirable products and services to our own humble little homes in a decade or two? We shall see. But if it comes, the dis, we must remember that all rising curves eventually dip—and then in turn produce yet other new exciting things to write home about—if the Post Office is still up and running.
Showing posts with label Trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trends. Show all posts
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Thursday, September 9, 2010
The House is Back
Two children on a trampoline—it was the first thing they’d installed—
Bounced high and cried out in delight beneath the shade of grand old trees
Behind the house that had gone south a year and then some month ago;
But it had started going south two years before that time—as I’ve
Related in these random pages a while back one April eve.
The signs of life began to sprout about a week ago when lo,
Behold an SUV with KY plates appeared and soon a rash
Of carpenters and plasterers and landscape architects arrived
And soon whole mounds of trash announced that normalcy would soon prevail.
And that is now.
All things therefore are looking up on Charlesvoix where once, and now
Again perhaps, auto execs did and still do take residence.
Kentucky plates suggest a state where foreign makers sited plants—
Where now the finally reviving two of the Big Three recruit
Freshly minted, trained executives anticipating private
Ownership, Gov Motors just a nightmare the public will forget.
The house gone south, meanwhile, stood empty, still, and uninhabited
And lost net worth enough so it's become a bargain at discount
With this result: it can go north again; it has been turned around.
The children shout
In glee and fright!
---------------
The prelude to this finale is here.
Bounced high and cried out in delight beneath the shade of grand old trees
Behind the house that had gone south a year and then some month ago;
But it had started going south two years before that time—as I’ve
Related in these random pages a while back one April eve.
The signs of life began to sprout about a week ago when lo,
Behold an SUV with KY plates appeared and soon a rash
Of carpenters and plasterers and landscape architects arrived
And soon whole mounds of trash announced that normalcy would soon prevail.
And that is now.
All things therefore are looking up on Charlesvoix where once, and now
Again perhaps, auto execs did and still do take residence.
Kentucky plates suggest a state where foreign makers sited plants—
Where now the finally reviving two of the Big Three recruit
Freshly minted, trained executives anticipating private
Ownership, Gov Motors just a nightmare the public will forget.
The house gone south, meanwhile, stood empty, still, and uninhabited
And lost net worth enough so it's become a bargain at discount
With this result: it can go north again; it has been turned around.
The children shout
In glee and fright!
---------------
The prelude to this finale is here.
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Lens of History
I’ve been attracted throughout my life to methods of seeing that which is much smaller or much greater than eye can focus. We don’t need tools at our own natural scale. We need not engage in social science to understand our own clan—meaning all the people to whom we are related by blood or marriage. The eyes and ears suffice. When ours was a young family first sinking roots in the United States, we didn’t even need a bank statement to know our net worth. We had a sheaf of treasury notes accumulated during service in the Army, and we could just count the envelopes; and we kept most of the money we earned at the apartment in cash.
Later I learned the power of statistics—and came to admire and value the services of our statistical agencies. Doubtless the greatest humanity has ever produced are resident, right now, right here in the United States. This is not an exaggeration. A start at celebrating them is recorded here, but I haven’t gone beyond an introduction. In any case, there is nothing quite like lenses that will bring the seemingly invisible into focus, and therefore praises to the makers of the Hubble telescope and NASA for putting it up in the sky; and equal praises to honor Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), one of the modern day’s pioneers.
Knowledge dependents on pattern-acquisition, as it were: seeing enough of very large things so that their lawful behavior becomes evident. And in this category I also place mythologies at the exalted and histories at the mundane end of the spectrum. Mythologies sum up the totality of human intuition about the nature of transcendental reality. History is our lens for understanding the immediate arrangements of society writ large.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of posts back, I was looking back at Rome again. I’m now and have always been fascinated by the transition between the republican era and the later monarchical phases, the Roman Empire. It really was monarchical although the Romans did not want to use the word “king.” The imperator was what we call “commander-in-chief,” and I smile a little in noting how that phrase developed legs during the last administration; so did the word “decider.” But never mind that. I would emphasize that the transit of Rome from republic to empire was not some kind of symbolical transformation of the sort our modern media love to engineer and then to detect in what they are pleased to call analysis. No. The transition followed a century of social disturbance beginning around 133 BC and ending in 27 BC. It was a period in which the powerful and moneyed oligarchy that ruled Rome was first challenged in 133 by the election of Tiberius Gracchus, restored to dominance by Sulla (around 82 BC), followed by Caesar’s rise to power after a major civil war (48 BC), and ending with the rise to power of Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian (later Augustus) in 27 BC.
Worth noting here is that this brief period holds most of the events and the personalities the American public knows about Rome from the movies: Caesar, Cleopatra, Anthony, and Brutus. A few other, later figures appear because they were particularly violent: Caligula, Nero.
Ultimately the battle here was between the moneyed class of large scale ownership (in the Roman context this meant the ownership of land and slaves)—and the people without means or relying on small parcels of land, handicrafts, or shops. The power, when it finally shifted, came to be vested in the state (not the little people), the state controlled by a single person, and that person backed by armed forces of which he was the commander-in-chief, thus imperator. The emperor also held all other meaningful political offices for life. As a tribune-for-life he had absolute veto powers over legislation, as censor-for-life he could order a census or appoint or remove senators, he was princeps of the Senate, meaning “first, most eminent, chief”; from this word we get the later meaning of prince. He was also the pontiff, thus the chief religious officer—butI need not go on. He essentially formulated, proposed, and caused legislation to be passed and then enforced by a bureaucracy consisting principally of his own servants, free and slave. The state had become the sole ruler and the emperor the sole ruler of the state. The Republic of Rome came into being in 509 BC and ended with Caesar in 48—a span of 461 years. The Empire lasted to about 476 AD, thus another five centuries. After the imperial period began, the change in power was never again a collective enterprise. It took place by family arrangement or by violent intervention backed by a military force.
What brought the transition about? The abuse of money-power. In the Roman setting it took the form of vast importation of slaves who displaced and impoverished the ordinary citizen. And in our case? We need but look around.
Let’s use the lens of history to look at our times. Using it suggests that those who say that we’re in an imperial time today are just idly chattering, symbol-mongering. No. We’ll know it when it comes. We’re presently enduring the misrule of a vast moneyed oligarchy. But other illusions need also to be set aside. Those who dream of revolution, whereby the “little people” will finally take power from the forces of capital, should not romantically imagine a process that will end in “direct democracy.” Never. Democracy—the kind we actually value, the kind that is still practiced at the local level of small communities—belongs to a middle stage of civilization, the time when the middle class actually has power. When that class gets shouldered aside by the vast oligarchies that currently rule us, the stage is being set for a century of chaos. That century will be violent—as were the 106 years that separated the tribune Gracchus from the emperor Augustus. After that the vote won’t matter any more. But a kind of order will return. And at the working level—which never really changes—the responsible people will, once again, clear off the rubble, mop up the blood, and get back to doing the necessary.
Later I learned the power of statistics—and came to admire and value the services of our statistical agencies. Doubtless the greatest humanity has ever produced are resident, right now, right here in the United States. This is not an exaggeration. A start at celebrating them is recorded here, but I haven’t gone beyond an introduction. In any case, there is nothing quite like lenses that will bring the seemingly invisible into focus, and therefore praises to the makers of the Hubble telescope and NASA for putting it up in the sky; and equal praises to honor Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), one of the modern day’s pioneers.
Knowledge dependents on pattern-acquisition, as it were: seeing enough of very large things so that their lawful behavior becomes evident. And in this category I also place mythologies at the exalted and histories at the mundane end of the spectrum. Mythologies sum up the totality of human intuition about the nature of transcendental reality. History is our lens for understanding the immediate arrangements of society writ large.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of posts back, I was looking back at Rome again. I’m now and have always been fascinated by the transition between the republican era and the later monarchical phases, the Roman Empire. It really was monarchical although the Romans did not want to use the word “king.” The imperator was what we call “commander-in-chief,” and I smile a little in noting how that phrase developed legs during the last administration; so did the word “decider.” But never mind that. I would emphasize that the transit of Rome from republic to empire was not some kind of symbolical transformation of the sort our modern media love to engineer and then to detect in what they are pleased to call analysis. No. The transition followed a century of social disturbance beginning around 133 BC and ending in 27 BC. It was a period in which the powerful and moneyed oligarchy that ruled Rome was first challenged in 133 by the election of Tiberius Gracchus, restored to dominance by Sulla (around 82 BC), followed by Caesar’s rise to power after a major civil war (48 BC), and ending with the rise to power of Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian (later Augustus) in 27 BC.
Worth noting here is that this brief period holds most of the events and the personalities the American public knows about Rome from the movies: Caesar, Cleopatra, Anthony, and Brutus. A few other, later figures appear because they were particularly violent: Caligula, Nero.
Ultimately the battle here was between the moneyed class of large scale ownership (in the Roman context this meant the ownership of land and slaves)—and the people without means or relying on small parcels of land, handicrafts, or shops. The power, when it finally shifted, came to be vested in the state (not the little people), the state controlled by a single person, and that person backed by armed forces of which he was the commander-in-chief, thus imperator. The emperor also held all other meaningful political offices for life. As a tribune-for-life he had absolute veto powers over legislation, as censor-for-life he could order a census or appoint or remove senators, he was princeps of the Senate, meaning “first, most eminent, chief”; from this word we get the later meaning of prince. He was also the pontiff, thus the chief religious officer—butI need not go on. He essentially formulated, proposed, and caused legislation to be passed and then enforced by a bureaucracy consisting principally of his own servants, free and slave. The state had become the sole ruler and the emperor the sole ruler of the state. The Republic of Rome came into being in 509 BC and ended with Caesar in 48—a span of 461 years. The Empire lasted to about 476 AD, thus another five centuries. After the imperial period began, the change in power was never again a collective enterprise. It took place by family arrangement or by violent intervention backed by a military force.
What brought the transition about? The abuse of money-power. In the Roman setting it took the form of vast importation of slaves who displaced and impoverished the ordinary citizen. And in our case? We need but look around.
Let’s use the lens of history to look at our times. Using it suggests that those who say that we’re in an imperial time today are just idly chattering, symbol-mongering. No. We’ll know it when it comes. We’re presently enduring the misrule of a vast moneyed oligarchy. But other illusions need also to be set aside. Those who dream of revolution, whereby the “little people” will finally take power from the forces of capital, should not romantically imagine a process that will end in “direct democracy.” Never. Democracy—the kind we actually value, the kind that is still practiced at the local level of small communities—belongs to a middle stage of civilization, the time when the middle class actually has power. When that class gets shouldered aside by the vast oligarchies that currently rule us, the stage is being set for a century of chaos. That century will be violent—as were the 106 years that separated the tribune Gracchus from the emperor Augustus. After that the vote won’t matter any more. But a kind of order will return. And at the working level—which never really changes—the responsible people will, once again, clear off the rubble, mop up the blood, and get back to doing the necessary.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
A House Gone South
There is a house on Charlevoix, a choice estate high on a mound
And bound around its ample girth stand firs and bushes dense and green—
Stood once stand still, but in the past a flag cracked high atop a mast
And nights on summer walks I saw warm lights from windows large and small
And in the Fall at times red lights and movement, music, cheer announced
A party underway to celebrate the harvest on Wall Street,
Halloween, or was it just the summer’s end? The house had two
Perhaps three children, too, and in the day you’d see abandoned on
The drive the boy’s turned-over trike and girls’ forgotten dolls and toys.
But that was then.
One fine day three years ago a For Sale sign appeared, discreet and
Tucked away, almost as if to say we want to sell but yet we
May still change our mind. Bushes slowly hid the sign behind
Their leaves, and then time seemed to stop as on a dime because the life
Inside the place began to flow more thinly now, then slow…
Although a single car (once there were three) still stood out in the snow.
The auto vanished too, replaced there by a box placed there by PODS
The mobile storage folk, to hold, perhaps, the last few residues
Of once rich harvesters of higher revenues now rent apart
Who knows, nasty divorce? or the worst auto sales since before
The day that Ford began to build the Model-T in old Detroit?
And that was later.
The other day, the sale sign gone, the vegetation taking charge,
The pod departed and no trace of life, I dared to stray beyond
The fence into the mansion’s unkempt grounds whence no longer
Veiled by bush or tree, I now could see the house abandoned to the
Birds, the mouse. And there I glimpsed through broken glass interiors left
To the past—torn bits of carpeting, a half-demolished desk-like
Thing, a fallen plastic jar that, rolling, had disgorged a wreath
Of sorts onto the naked floor. Another look revealed yet more
Unsightly scars, not least the plywood sheets that had replaced the
Windows raiding boys, presumably, had earlier destroyed and,
Running off, had left behind. “Alas, this house’s gone south,” I thought and
Shook my head, troubled in mind but homeward bound to eat my daily bread.
And bound around its ample girth stand firs and bushes dense and green—
Stood once stand still, but in the past a flag cracked high atop a mast
And nights on summer walks I saw warm lights from windows large and small
And in the Fall at times red lights and movement, music, cheer announced
A party underway to celebrate the harvest on Wall Street,
Halloween, or was it just the summer’s end? The house had two
Perhaps three children, too, and in the day you’d see abandoned on
The drive the boy’s turned-over trike and girls’ forgotten dolls and toys.
But that was then.
One fine day three years ago a For Sale sign appeared, discreet and
Tucked away, almost as if to say we want to sell but yet we
May still change our mind. Bushes slowly hid the sign behind
Their leaves, and then time seemed to stop as on a dime because the life
Inside the place began to flow more thinly now, then slow…
Although a single car (once there were three) still stood out in the snow.
The auto vanished too, replaced there by a box placed there by PODS
The mobile storage folk, to hold, perhaps, the last few residues
Of once rich harvesters of higher revenues now rent apart
Who knows, nasty divorce? or the worst auto sales since before
The day that Ford began to build the Model-T in old Detroit?
And that was later.
The other day, the sale sign gone, the vegetation taking charge,
The pod departed and no trace of life, I dared to stray beyond
The fence into the mansion’s unkempt grounds whence no longer
Veiled by bush or tree, I now could see the house abandoned to the
Birds, the mouse. And there I glimpsed through broken glass interiors left
To the past—torn bits of carpeting, a half-demolished desk-like
Thing, a fallen plastic jar that, rolling, had disgorged a wreath
Of sorts onto the naked floor. Another look revealed yet more
Unsightly scars, not least the plywood sheets that had replaced the
Windows raiding boys, presumably, had earlier destroyed and,
Running off, had left behind. “Alas, this house’s gone south,” I thought and
Shook my head, troubled in mind but homeward bound to eat my daily bread.
The Middle Class
Several years ago both Monique and I participated in the production a four-volume work entitled Social Trends & Indicators USA, a project that we’d envisioned ourselves and which then appeared under the copyright of ECDI† in 2003. The concept behind SIUSA (as we abbreviated the project in-house) was to illuminate trends in society by the use of government statistics. Each entry in these volumes consisted of a graphic followed by a page or two of succinct commentary. We placed the actual statistics we’d used to make the graphs at the back of each volume in numerical format—following the general rule that in socio-economic studies others should be able to examine your logic with all numbers disclosed. Six of us labored on this project virtually day and night to bring it home by the deadline. It was a memorable year filled with valuable discoveries. The highlight of each week was a meeting in the course of which each of us presented the entries we’d produced that week in summary—and we discussed them all. Perhaps the most general of our discoveries was that demographic structure drives everything else, all things being equal—but often also when they’re not. But all this just as a preamble to something else.
The other day Monique sent me a link with the laconic subject: “When you have a spare hour…” The link turned out to be the video of the 2007 Jefferson Memorial Lecture presented at UC Berkley by Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. (Yes, I do! I bow to those who fund these chairs. Many people don’t share their wealth, and those who do deserve the bow.) The lecture’s title was “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.” You can see the lecture here. Yes, it takes an hour. And yes. It’s worth it!
In this living version of the Ghulf clan there are quite a few of us with a keen interest in the cultural and cosmic climates. Tracking and documenting pieces of it that become visible in some way—through statistics, literature, comic books, pop music, esoteric culture, however we can get at it—is occupation as well as preoccupation. SIUSA and the other USAs we have produced were and are part of that effort. So is our interest in Peak Oil and my own in cyclic history. Well, Elizabeth Warren undertook a very careful study, in methodology identical to that which we followed in SIUSA. She compares a representative (median) family of four as it existed in the early 1970s to one as it was in the early 2000s. She too presents graphics and then makes succinct but penetrating comments—and the conclusion that emerges is dramatic. Listening to her one feels as if watching (helplessly because we are so tiny) the slow-motion evolution of a major disaster that’s coming with what seems to be a kind of inevitability.
But enough said. The lecture is worth seeing, the conclusions worth pondering. It’s better always to face the future knowing than not—and we may even be enabled to change the course of the raging river despite only holding a little cup in the hand.
__________
†Editorial Code and Data, Inc.
The other day Monique sent me a link with the laconic subject: “When you have a spare hour…” The link turned out to be the video of the 2007 Jefferson Memorial Lecture presented at UC Berkley by Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. (Yes, I do! I bow to those who fund these chairs. Many people don’t share their wealth, and those who do deserve the bow.) The lecture’s title was “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.” You can see the lecture here. Yes, it takes an hour. And yes. It’s worth it!
In this living version of the Ghulf clan there are quite a few of us with a keen interest in the cultural and cosmic climates. Tracking and documenting pieces of it that become visible in some way—through statistics, literature, comic books, pop music, esoteric culture, however we can get at it—is occupation as well as preoccupation. SIUSA and the other USAs we have produced were and are part of that effort. So is our interest in Peak Oil and my own in cyclic history. Well, Elizabeth Warren undertook a very careful study, in methodology identical to that which we followed in SIUSA. She compares a representative (median) family of four as it existed in the early 1970s to one as it was in the early 2000s. She too presents graphics and then makes succinct but penetrating comments—and the conclusion that emerges is dramatic. Listening to her one feels as if watching (helplessly because we are so tiny) the slow-motion evolution of a major disaster that’s coming with what seems to be a kind of inevitability.
But enough said. The lecture is worth seeing, the conclusions worth pondering. It’s better always to face the future knowing than not—and we may even be enabled to change the course of the raging river despite only holding a little cup in the hand.
__________
†Editorial Code and Data, Inc.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Hydrocarbon Lottery
The Census Bureau—that worthy supplier of great statistical instruments by means of which we see our world—provides (here) a tabulation of world population going some 12,000 years into the past. I’ve taken these data and graphed them in Excel, plotting the upper and the lower estimates the Census makes available.
The chart, shown below, is sloppy as such things go; the bottom axis, showing years, is unevenly spaced: on the left side intervals are thousands of years, in the center hundreds and then fifties, to the right tens. I present a more properly scaled picture of the same data (second chart), using intervals of 1,000 years. In that graph I’ve shown the 2000 world population as 6.071 billion for both the low and upper estimate.
Looking at these patterns, the first thing that stands out—by not standing out—is that the world’s population, going back thousands of years, barely changed. Our numbers never managed to exceed 500 million at any time until the year 1500, roughly the end of the Renaissance. The first great leap comes between 1700 and 1750—and after that population bursts upward like a geyser! The second chart, with its millennial scaling, shows the rise as an almost vertical ascent.
Wow!
Here is an analogy. Place a tiny bacterial population on a laboratory sheet of glass. Watch it shrink or slowly increase using some faint residual nutrients clinging to the glass, left there by invisible moisture adhering to your fingertips. Now place a tiny drop of sugary water on the surface of the glass and watch what happens. The bacterial population will explode.
The analogy is apt because the sugary water most easily identified as the likely cause of our surge in numbers is the harnessing of fossil fuels. If we plot U.S. energy consumption from 1850 to 2000, shown below courtesy of Wikipedia, we get a pattern very similar to our population curve. As shown here, coal production predates the harnessing of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power.
The chart, shown below, is sloppy as such things go; the bottom axis, showing years, is unevenly spaced: on the left side intervals are thousands of years, in the center hundreds and then fifties, to the right tens. I present a more properly scaled picture of the same data (second chart), using intervals of 1,000 years. In that graph I’ve shown the 2000 world population as 6.071 billion for both the low and upper estimate.
Looking at these patterns, the first thing that stands out—by not standing out—is that the world’s population, going back thousands of years, barely changed. Our numbers never managed to exceed 500 million at any time until the year 1500, roughly the end of the Renaissance. The first great leap comes between 1700 and 1750—and after that population bursts upward like a geyser! The second chart, with its millennial scaling, shows the rise as an almost vertical ascent.
Wow!
Here is an analogy. Place a tiny bacterial population on a laboratory sheet of glass. Watch it shrink or slowly increase using some faint residual nutrients clinging to the glass, left there by invisible moisture adhering to your fingertips. Now place a tiny drop of sugary water on the surface of the glass and watch what happens. The bacterial population will explode.
The analogy is apt because the sugary water most easily identified as the likely cause of our surge in numbers is the harnessing of fossil fuels. If we plot U.S. energy consumption from 1850 to 2000, shown below courtesy of Wikipedia, we get a pattern very similar to our population curve. As shown here, coal production predates the harnessing of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power.
The first mining of coal on record in the United States dates to 1748. Modern use of petroleum began when extraction of kerosene from “rock oil” began in 1852, the fuel used initially for lighting. The steam engine, which stimulated coal mining to feed it, dates to the late eighteenth century (the 1770s). The first internal combustion engine, a clumsy affair that ran on hydrogen and oxygen, saw the light of day in 1806, produced by the Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz.
The philosophical implications? One can’t help but think, looking at skyward rising curves that, well, what goes up, must come down. Was it wisdom or luck that opened cornucopia for us—or was it Pandora’s box? In any case, plenty to ponder here—not least the falling curves of oil discovery projected into the future. Will population follow where once it led?
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