Stainless Steal

The decay in quality reveals that the collapse of the neoliberal-hyper-financialization-hyper-globalization model has already occurred.

I've often addressed the dismaying decline of quality over the past 30+ years, for example, The "Crapification" of the U.S. Economy Is Now Complete (February 9, 2022).

I have attributed this to:

1) hyper-globalization, which pushes manufacturers to buy the cheapest components to lower costs. The failure of any one poorly made component renders the entire device useless junk which is dumped in the landfill.

2) Planned obsolescence as the corporate strategy to boost profits in an economy where everyone already has everything. By reducing the quality, product failure is accelerated, and the hapless consumer is forced to replace a device every few years that 30 years ago would have provided decades of trouble-free service.

3) Consumers have been trained to consume, no matter how poor the quality. Tossing stuff in the landfill is wonderful because this gives us another excuse to go shopping.

4) Since global production and distribution is dominated by rapacious cartels and quasi-monopolies, they don't care about the terminal decay of the quality of their product/service. They know we're going to buy their low-quality rubbish anyway because we have no choice, and they know the quality of "competing" (hahaha) products is equally abysmal.

Longtime correspondent Bart D., who coined the term Landfill Economy, pointed out a fifth source of decaying quality: resource depletion. It's not just hyper-globalization / corporate profiteering driven cost reductions at the expense of durability; it's also the increasing cost and difficulty of obtaining quality materials and components at any price.

Here are Bart's comments on "stainless steel":

"I found, what was for me, the most profound evidence of the ascendancy of the Fraud Economy that underpins the Landfill Economy.

I found it in the term and substance 'stainless steel.'

I own some old and by the standards of the day in the 1970’s 'cheap' stainless steel knives and cutlery. I use a few of these pieces as garden tools. They lay around in the dirt and weather 24-7 and 365 days a year. They are used for purposes never intended by their manufacturers, uses that they would classify as abuse. And I can pick these items out of the dirt, rinse them under a tap and they come up looking like new. They are shiny, silver and have no sign of rust.

And I also own some 'quality' stainless steel items that were manufactured in the last 5 years in China. They were not priced in the 'Cheap and Nasty' bracket.

These items do nothing more than live in a kitchen or out under the pergola and get wet with clean water.

With Plain water.

And they rust.

Prolifically.

So it seems that since the 1970s, we have managed to figure out how to make Fraud Stainless at a price point above actual stainless (inflation adjusted).

I have come to realise that we are now a VERY long way past 'Peak Quality' and Peak quality of life. And we seem to accept this degradation as normal.

We are now living in a comprehensive illusion of what is quality. I'm starting to wonder if there are any products being produced today that are genuinely superior to those produced 30+ years ago.

Advertising tells us that products are 'Premium,' but 40 years ago products with similar or superior specifications were produced as 'cheap.' Todays standard grade products would be regarded as Defective in the economy of pre-1990s.

Why is this happening? Almost certainly it's a product of resource depletion and substitution of superior and fit-for-purpose materials with inferior and faulty materials.

I have seen this also in copper pipe and road bitumen. The pre-90s versions of these products were durable and fit for purpose … whatever watered down substitutes we use now are defective grade products that degrade quickly even under normal working conditions.

I wonder how far quality can degrade before our economic model fails?

Maybe we're just arriving at the point of failure now?"

Thank you, Bart, for illuminating how stainless steel is now stainless steal: an ersatz simulation that is pure fraud and theft. Claiming that a product that corrodes within months is actually "stainless steel" is fraud, and given that consumers are paying premium prices for this fraudulent product, it is also blatant theft: the consumer is paying a premium price for a product which is known by its manufacturer and distributor to be defective / not the high-quality material that was promised.

Tossing all the low-quality goods in the landfill and replacing them with even lower quality goods is now the global model of "growth." But since very few of the discarded goods have recyclable materials that are actually recycled, this waste is growth model runs into limits of materials availability and cost: when even low quality becomes too costly, the bottom 80% of consumers can no longer afford to buy replacements.

As I explain in my recenty books Self-Reliance in the 21st Century and Global Crisis, National Renewal, once the economies of scale of mass production are lost, production is shut down as it is no longer profitable / viable at lower run-rates / capacity utilization.

Which brings us to Bart's projection of what happens on the downside of Peak Quality: when the system can no longer replace all the low-quality goods dumped in the landfill with equivalent quantities of low-quality replacements at affordable prices, the entire waste is growth model collapses.

The decay in quality reveals that the collapse of the neoliberal-hyper-financialization-hyper-globalization model has already occurred. We're simply waiting for the second stage, where it's not just the production of quality goods that collapses: the production of even low-quality goods tumbles off the cliff as economies of scale are no longer enough to keep production profitable.

Stainless steal won't survive impact. Fraud and theft eventually catch up with economies which have made them the centerpieces of "prosperity."



New Podcast: Turmoil Ahead As We Enter The New Era Of 'Scarcity' (53 min)


My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

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Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Reliance in the 21st Century (43 min)


My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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Weaponizing Global Depression

All this suggests a strategy that's only available to those few nations with these capacities: weaponize global depression.

Before we get started, I need to stipulate that I don't have an opinion one way or the other about weaponizing global depression: I don't agree or disagree, I don't "like" it or dislike it, I have no emotional investment in whether you "like" it or "dislike" it or if we agree or disagree. I'm addressing the topic because it's an interesting dynamic.

The general assumption now is that everything is propaganda, i.e. that every shred of content has been stripped of the 90% of messy reality to leave the shiny 10% that protects someone's vested interests and emotional stake. While propaganda is indeed ubiquitous and overabundant, not everything is propaganda. Propaganda is always certain about XYZ. Analysis, on the other hand, is always skeptical of neatly packaged, over-simplified received wisdom and alive to the uncertainties embedded in the messy 90% of reality edited out of propaganda.

We're quite fond of the illusion that our "likes" and "winning the argument" matter. They don't. Winning arguments, collecting "likes" and basking in the warmth of confirming our biases don't change anything. We cling to the illusion they matter because it gives us a warm and fuzzy sense of agency when in reality our agency is limited to our individual/household responses to all that we don't control or influence.

A third illusion is that policymakers control everything. They don't. Certain decisions topple dominoes, others are equivalent to closing the gate after the horses left. They're for show only; the 90% of messy reality is running off on its own now and policymakers dancing the humba-humba around the campfire (i.e. the illusion of control) aren't going to stop what's unfolding on its own dynamics.

I'm not trying to persuade you of anything or solicit a "like." I'm simply discussing an interesting dynamic.

With all that out of the way, let's look at weaponizing global depression. The key to this dynamic is the asymmetries built into the global economy.

One important asymmetry is energy, with exporting (producer) nations on one end and importing (consumer) nations on the other. A very small number of nations/regions occupy the middle: they export or import relatively little energy, as they are largely self-sufficient and can make do with what they produce themselves. They aren't reliant on exports for income or imports to keep their economy from collapsing.

Another key asymmetry is currencies and bond markets which are one integrated system: currencies are valued by the liquidity, depth, risk premium and yield of the bonds denominated in the currency.

A lot of people have a lot of opinions about currencies, and unfortunately many of these opinions are detached from the basic reality that currencies and bond markets are one system.

If a currency and its bonds don't trade freely on the global market, i.e. they're pegged to another currency (RMB to the USD for example) or capital controls limit the liquidity and depth of the market for the bonds, this places intrinsic constraints on the risk characteristics and thus the value of the currency and the bonds.

If the risk is high (or difficult to measure), demand for the bonds and currency will be limited. The issuing nation / central bank will be constrained in how much new currency / bonds it can issue without pushing the value off a cliff.

In other words, currencies and the bonds backing them have asymmetric risk premiums, liquidity and valuations. For players in size, for example sovereign investment funds, illiquid bonds are risky because when it comes time to dump their $10 billion stake, the market is bidless: there are no buyers in that size at any price.

Risk is tricky. It tends to become visible only after it's too late. Yes, there are hedges, blah-blah-blah, but at size there are no hedges.

A range of asymmetries arise between exporters of energy and consumers of energy in a global depression. Once demand for goods and services falls off a cliff, demand for the energy to generate those goods and services also falls off a cliff. As marginal demand is swept away, marginal enterprises, loans and employment are also swept away.

Far fewer people can afford to jet around the world and frequent restaurants, so demand for jet fuel, etc. also plummets.

Energy consumers aren't concerned with the cost of producing energy: that's your problem. As the price of oil / natural gas drops below production costs, consumers are cheering. (Recall that price is set on the margins: if demand falls faster than production, price collapses.)

Producers care very deeply about the cost of production and the price of the energy they export. Energy exporters are still bound by the commodity curse: it's so easy to make money selling energy, and so hard to compete in the global economy for other means of production, and so the producers depend on selling energy for a consequential share of the national income. The exporters have no substitute for the share of their national income derived from exporting energy.

The asymmetry in currencies and bonds plays out in the consumer nations. The few nations that can issue new currency and bonds without destroying the purchasing power of the currency can issue whatever currency they need to fund social welfare for those who lost their jobs. Yes, fewer people can afford pricy air travel, vacations and eating out, but they'll make do with preparing food at home and much cheaper forms of amusement.

Those nations that can't print more currency without destroying its purchasing power don't have this luxury. Belt-tightening is all well and good until a "nothing left to lose" revolution sweeps away the ruling elite.

The producer nations dependent on energy exports have an equallky difficult set of constraints. They can try to cut production to match plummeting demand, but game theory strongly favors cheaters who announce production cuts but pump as much as they can to maximize revenues as the price of energy drops.

Most energy exporters have built up savings in the form of central bank reserves and sovereign wealth funds, but they now discover another asymmetry in global depressions: the value of their stocks and bonds has plummeted, and even precious metal prices are dropping as everyone is forced to liquidate savings to fund the exporters' insanely high social welfare / military expenditures.

Why would bonds lose value? As the demand for buyers of newly issued bonds explodes higher (to fund deficit spending), bond yields rise globally as nations compete for the dwindling pool of capital willing to buy potentially risky bonds. As bond yields rise, the value of all existing bonds tumbles off the cliff.

So not only could energy revenues fall by half or more, the value of reserves could also fall dramatically. Nations dependent on energy exports will face a one-two punch with no viable Plan B to replace energy revenues with revenues from some other source.

Energy producers can cut production but they'll still be selling fewer units for far less money. Energy prices below production costs are "impossible" until there's competition for declining consumer demand. The frictionless pathway is to slash prices to maintain national income, and sell off the reserves and sovereign wealth fund assets to fund social welfare and military budgets.

This works for a while, but not for long. A global depression isn't just deeper than a recession, it's longer. Depressions occur when all the policy gimmicks reach diminishing returns and they fail to restore "growth" in credit and consumption. Eventually the energy exporters have to cut their government spending, and that will inevitably trigger social and political disorder.

Their difficulties are painfully visible to all, and the demand for any bonds they issue will be low due to the risk that the national enterprise is spending far more than it's bringing in and therefore could go bankrupt.

Add up these asymmetries and we find a very few winners and many losers. The winners are limited to those nations with these five capacities:

1. Self-sufficiency in energy, or close enough to manage with modest imports from friendly neighbors or allies.

2. Not dependent on energy revenues for the bulk of national income.

3. The capacity to sell newly issued bonds without reducing the purchasing power of the currency, i.e. the risk premium and yield are more attractive than competing issuances of bonds.

4. Maintain a freely traded (i.e. price and risk discovered by the market), liquid market in size for its bonds.

5. A diverse, adaptable economy that maintains deep, liquid, transparent markets for goods, services, risk, credit, bonds and other financial assets.

Systems are defined by their constraints. Should oil fall to $40/barrel and stay there due to declining demand, various constraints start limiting policy options. If savings are depleted to maintain the illusion of solvency,' various constraints start limiting policy options. If there's no demand for newly issued currencies / bonds, various constraints start limiting policy options.

Messy realities tend to generate the illusion that an array of policy options still exist, but eventually these will be pared away by the systemic asymmetries and constraints. Dancing the humba-humba around the campfire (such fun!) and spewing propaganda (if you'd just agree with me, everything will be fine!) won't change anything.

The most diverse, adaptive economies with the largest and most transparent markets and the most balanced energy production and consumption will be the winners, and every other nation will struggle due to the constraints and asymmetries described above. It's just the way systems function.

I discuss these dynamics in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal.

All this suggests a strategy that's only available to those few nations with all five capacities: weaponize global depression by jacking up bond yields and tightening credit so the increasingly fragile global economy slips off the cliff into a recession that quickly becomes entrenched in depression by decades of policy extremes that are finally generating unintended consequences that cannot be reversed.

The ensuing global depression will be bearable for those with the five capacities, and a system-breaker for everyone else.

It's nothing personal, it's just business. Systemic asymmetries and constraints present opportunities for the few and risks for the many.

I'm not claiming weaponize global depression is inevitable or even likely. What I am exploring is the potential for global depression to be weaponized as a policy option or as an unintended consequence of actions that stretch asymmetries and constraints to the breaking point.

Where does that leave us as individuals and households? It's best to take the long, emotionally detached view and and devote ourselves to maximizing our own Self-Reliance. The less we depend on high debt, high consumption and fragile global systems, the better off we'll be.





New Podcast: Turmoil Ahead As We Enter The New Era Of 'Scarcity' (53 min)


My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

Read excerpts of all three chapters

Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Reliance in the 21st Century (43 min)


My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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If We No Longer Pay Attention to Things We Don't Control, What's Left For Us to Focus On?

Our time is better invested in actually learning about trends that impact us directly.

Imagine making this simple change in your life: whatever you don't control, you stop paying attention to it. This includes a vast array of "news" and "crises" that we have zero control over: the wretched flooding in Timbukthree, geopolitics, distant wars, macro-economic trends, politics above the micro-local level, and so on.

Once we stop paying attention to everything we don't control, what's left to focus on? The simple answer is "whatever we do control," which tends to be in our household or individual sphere of influence: the duties, habits and rituals of everyday life. In other words, we control our responses to whatever forces we don't control.

But wait a minute. Aren't we supposed to be "engaged, informed citizens" so we can make informed decisions? And doesn't this require us to pay attention to everything presented to us as "newsworthy," "a dangerous crisis" and of "pressing national interest"?

That sounds nice, but precisely what "decisions" do we have a say in? We can vote for a toxic political party (there's two choices! Wow!) or a candidate who raised big bucks by promising the moon to constituents and big-money contributors, and we can vote for or against a local bond issue or a local regulation that's on the ballot.

How great is our control of whatever we're voting on? Shall we admit it's negligible?

Did anything we watched or read in the past few years change our minds, or do we vote pretty much as we've done for years because our views remain the same? For most people, the answer is "nothing I watched or read changed my views." So what was the point of squandering hundreds of hours watching/reading "news," "crises" and "commentary"?

These "decisions" come up every two years in some form. The rest of the time, exactly what is our control/influence? Posting tweets and social media comments? Uploading video rants? And how many people completely change their minds based on hyper-ventilating tweets or partisan outbursts, all of which tend to be one or two sentences long?

In today's hyper-partisan divide, the short answer is "no one." People tend to read what confirms their existing views and rage at whatever they disagree with. Neither changes any minds, nor engages those who have no interest in the staged spectacles in the Coliseum.

If the entire media/social media "industry" boils down to bias confirmation and outrage that changes nothing, then isn't the whole thing nothing but perverse, deranging entertainment? In other words, we enjoy confirming our biases and trashing those who disagree with us, and switching seamlessly between puppies and kittens and dire warnings of doom.

The owners of media/social media know this, and so they go to great lengths to make their junk food for the mind especially addictive.

But there is an opportunity cost to investing so much of our time and energy in perverse entertainment, for those hours could have been invested in what we do control, i.e. our own lives.

This is the point of Self-Reliance: focus our time, capital and energy on what we do control and stop wasting time and energy on time-sinks and emotional mudpits we don't control or influence at all.

Our time is better invested in actually learning about trends that impact us directly. Real learning takes time and study. This is the purpose of books. Other media are designed to influence without providing context or alternate histories. There is no way to cram the context and critiques into a short video program or a slide deck.

Unfortunately, reading books that are substantial enough to add to our understanding is losing ground to spectacles, which are of course designed to be more fun than actual learning.

Self-Reliance isn't about controlling or influencing others, it's about modifying our response to macro-trends so we not just survive but thrive. We don't control our governance, economy or society, but we do control our response to unfavorable trends. We can change careers, change where we live, change who we associate with, expand our network of makers and producers and pursue many other consequential, positive actions.

I'm not immune to the charms of puppies and kittens and impending doom, but the trick is to limit one's exposure as one might do to any dangerous form of radiation: a few minutes is OK but then shut down the source and return to investing in our own life.







New Podcast: Turmoil Ahead As We Enter The New Era Of 'Scarcity' (53 min)


My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

Read excerpts of all three chapters

Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Reliance in the 21st Century (43 min)


My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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What ChatGPT and DeepMind Tell Us About AI

What's interesting is the really hard problem AI has not been applied to is how to manage these technologies in our socio-economic-cultural system.

The world is agog at the apparent power of ChatGPT and similar programs to compose human-level narratives and generate images from simple commands. Many are succumbing to the temptation to extrapolate these powers to near-infinity, i.e. the Singularity in which AI reaches super-intelligence Nirvana.

All the excitement is fun but it's more sensible to start by placing ChatGPT in the context of AI history and our socio-economic system.

I became interested in AI in the early 1980s, and read numerous books by the leading AI researchers of the time.

AI began in the 1960s with the dream of a Universal General Intelligence, a computational machine that matched humanity's ability to apply a generalized intelligence to any problem.

This quickly led to the daunting realization that human intelligence wasn't just logic or reason; it was an immensely complex system that depended on sight, heuristics (rules of thumb), feedback and many other subsystems.

AI famously goes through cycles of excitement about advances that are followed by deflating troughs of realizing the limits of the advances.

The increase in computing power and software programming in the 1980s led to advances in these sub-fields: machine vision, algorithms that embodied heuristics, and so on.

At the same time, philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle were exploring what we mean by knowing and understanding, and questioning whether computers could ever achieve what we call "understanding."

This paper (among many) summarizes the critique of AI being able to duplicate human understanding: Intentionality and Background: Searle and Dreyfus against Classical AI Theory.

Simply put, was running a script / algorithm actually "understanding" the problem as humans understand the problem?

The answer is of course no. The Turing Test--programming a computer to mimic human language and responses--can be scripted / programmed, but that doesn't mean the computer has human understanding. It's just distilling human responses into heuristics that mimic human responses.

One result of this discussion of consciousness and understanding was for AI to move away from the dream of General Intelligence to the specifics of machine learning.

In other words, never mind trying to make AI mimic human understanding, let's just enable it to solve complex problems.

The basic idea in machine learning is to distill the constraints and rules of a system into algorithms, and then enable the program to apply these tools to real-world examples.

Given enough real-world examples, the system develops heuristics (rules of thumb) about what works and what doesn't which are not necessarily visible to the human researchers.

In effect, the machine-learning program becomes a "black box" in which its advances are opaque to those who programmed its tools and digitized real-world examples into forms the program could work with.

It's important to differentiate this machine learning from statistical analysis using statistical algorithms.

For example, if a program has been designed to look for patterns and statistically relevant correlations, it sorts through millions of social-media profiles and purchasing histories and finds that Republican surfers who live in (say) Delaware are likely to be fans of Chipotle.

This statistical analysis is called "big data" and while it has obvious applications for marketing everything from candidates to burritos, it doesn't qualify as machine learning.

In a similar way, algorithms like ChatGPT that generate natural-language narratives from databases and heuristics do not qualify as machine learning unless they fashion advances within a "black box" in which the input (the request) is known and the output is known, but the process is unknown.

Google has an AI team called DeepMind that tackled the immensely complex task of figuring out how proteins constructed of thousands of amino acid sequences fold up into compact shapes within nanoseconds.

The problem of computing all the possible folds in 200 million different proteins cannot be solved by mere brute-force calculation of all permutations, and so it required breaking down each step of the process into algorithms.

The eventual product, AlphaFold, has 32 component algorithms, each of which encapsulates different knowledge bases from the relevant disciplines (biochemistry, physics, etc.).

DeepMind's AI Makes Gigantic Leap in Solving Protein Structures.

This is how project leader Demis Hassabis describes the "black box" capabilities:

"It’s clear that AlphaFold 2 is learning something implicit about the structure of chemistry and physics. It sort of knows what things might be plausible.

I think AlphaFold has captured something quite deep about the physics and the chemistry of molecules... it's almost learning about it in an intuitive sense."

But there are limits on what AlphaFold can do and what it's good at: "I think we'll have more and more researchers looking at protein areas that AlphaFold is not good at predicting."

In other words, AlphaFold can't be said to "understand" the entirety of protein folding. It's good at limiting the possible folds to a subset and presenting those possibilities in a form that can be compared to actual protein structures identified by lab processes. It can also assign a confidence level to each of its predictions.

This is useful but far from "understanding," and it is a disservice to claim otherwise.

What's interesting is the really hard problem AI has not been applied to is how to manage these technologies in our socio-economic-cultural system.



This essay was first published as a weekly Musings Report sent exclusively to subscribers and patrons at the $5/month ($50/year) and higher level. Thank you, patrons and subscribers, for supporting my work and free website.


My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

Read excerpts of all three chapters

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My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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The Core of the Economy--The Middle Class--Is Crumbling

The net result of hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization is the crumbling of the middle class.

Neofeudal societies and economies lack a vibrant middle class. This is the defining feature of feudalism and its updated V2.0, neofeudalism: a nobility (based on birth or finance, it doesn't matter) controls the vast majority of wealth, political power and productive capital, all served by a powerless peasantry.

The modern versions of capitalism emerged when a European middle class arose and became powerful enough economically and politically to dismantle feudalism. The fundamentals of the middle class are:

1. A mindset / set of values embracing (as highlighted by writer Peter Frost) "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work."

2. Access to markets and credit so enterprises could be established and expanded.

3. Sufficient education to navigate regulations and the requirements of enterprise.

4. The free flow of labor, capital, goods and services.

Feudal economies lacked these fundamentals by design. All these forces were restricted to enforce the power and perquisites of the Nobility.

Neofeudalism is a trickier beast. Neofeudal economies and societies make a big PR show of being open to new enterprise, but the real-world reality is not so warm and fuzzy: new cartels and monopolies arise in a fierce struggle to stamp out competition and influence regulators to not just enable predatory cartels/monopolies but defend them.

The past 30 years can be characterized by the ascent of capital and the decline of labor. As the chart below shows, wages' share of the economy has been in a 45-year decline. The recent uptick may be a false breakout or it might be a change in trend. It's too early to tell. But in any event, wages--the bedrock not just of the working class but of the middle class--have been chipped away to the tune of $50 trillion siphoned away by capital. (Source: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 RAND Corporation)

Another mechanism is visible in the charts below showing the Share of Total Net Worth of the top 1% and the middle class, i.e. the households between 50% and 90% (this broad definition includes the spectrum fron lower middle class, households with incomes around the median, and upper-middle class households earning considerably more).

As the chart below shows, the top 10% own the vast majority of income-producing assets:, stocks bonds, income real estate and enterprises. The relative share owned by the middle class is at best modest, at worst negligible.

The key economic dynamic of the past 30 years is central bank-driven credit-asset bubbles which propel the assets owned by the top 10% to the moon. Those who own few such assets do not benefit from these asset bubbles, so their share of net worth (wealth) declines accordingly.

The two primary forces in the past 30 years are financialization and globalization, forces which accelerated under central bank / Neoliberal trade policies into hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization: hyper-financialization constantly inflates ever-larger asset bubbles, enriching the already-rich, while hyper-globalization forces labor to compete with lower-cost workforces globally, effectively transferring wages to capital, which can optimize labor / regulatory /credit / currency arbitrage to maximize corporate profits at the expense of the bottom 90% who depend on wages for their income rather than capital.

The most striking feature of the fortunes of the top 1% and the middle class is clearly visible: the share of total wealth of the top 1% soars to new heights in every bubble, while the share of the middle class dives.

The share of the middle class only rises when asset bubbles pop. This is the result of the top tier of US households owning the vast majority of assets: as bubbles pop, those who own few assets suffer far less than those who own most of the assets that bubble higher on the back of central bank stimulus and easy credit.

When the bubbles inevitably pop, the share of the top 1% crashes as the share of the middle class makes a temporary gain.

Please take a look. It's rather remarkable, isn't it?











The net result of hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization is the crumbling of the middle class, which has seen its share of the nation's wealth and income eroded for the past 45 years, a trend that accelerated in the past 20 years.

Neofeudal economies and societies are static, brittle, dysfunctional and incapable of generating broad-based prosperity. Does that sound like an economy we know?


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When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
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The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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A World Without Finance

We will enter a world without finance, and it will be a better world, for the economy will no longer be in thrall to the derangement and inequality of parasitic, predatory finance.

A world without finance is currently unimaginable, because finance is now synonymous with financialization. In this context, finance no longer refers to longstanding mechanisms that grease commerce such as short-term commercial debt (purchase orders, etc.) or long-term debt to finance the construction of new assets (mortgages, etc.)

A world without finance is unimaginable because the economy's "growth" and soaring inequality are now totally dependent on financialization. Finance is no longer about greasing commerce and the construction of assets, roles it played for thousands of years; finance is now a vast skimming machine for the few to enrich themselves at the expense oof the many, a set of swindles that skims from what remains of the productive economy to benefit financiers, corporations and speculators.

In other words, finance is nothing more than a parasitic system that has wormed its way into every nook and cranny of the economy. Where finance represented a few percent of the entire economy in previous decades, it now accounts for roughly 20% of the economy: nothing but churn.

Finance sells its "services" as hedges, but this is merely PR cover for predation. Finance creates no real-world goods or services; it is a structure of exploitation that is more like a criminal syndicate than a sector of the economy.

Given its parasitic, predatory nature, it's not surprising that finance is the primary engine of extreme wealth-income inequality. The fortunes of the few assembled over the past two decades largely trace back to the expansion of debt and leverage (i.e. financialization) which emphasizes marketing as consumption expands not from earnings but from the expansion of debt and leverage.

The problem is parasitic, predatory finance is inherently unstable, as it destabilizes the real economy by distorting every level of regulation and governance and deranges incentives to reward the least civic-minded, the least ethical and the sleaziest self-absorbed gamblers, those who demand a bailout when their private gains turn into private losses.

We're too big to fail, they whine, and the naive public bought that fraud in 2008-09.

I predict a wholesale eradication of finance once the public digs its way out of the ashes of an economy burnt to the ground by financialization. Finance and central banking will be truncated, limited to the core functions of greasing commerce and the construction of productive assets. All the weaponry of parasitic swindles, all the skims and scams of derivatives, swaps, corporate buybacks, etc. will no longer be allowed. Speculative gains will be so heavily taxed that those seeking wealth will be driven to actually generate real-world goods and services rather than financial frauds.

Consider this chart of Industrial production and the S&P 500 stock market index, from 1924 to the present. (Courtesy of correspondent David E.) Note that stocks more or less tracked the ascent of industrial production until the dot-com bubble imploded in 2000--a point in time that introduced the dominance of financial bubbles and the offshoring of production, i.e. globalization, as the "generators of wealth" and inequality.

Finance has one "product": credit-asset bubbles that ensnare and then lay waste to the real-world economy. The current bubble, The Everything Bubble, will be the last such bubble, as the diminishing returns of both financialization and globalization presage the end of their parasitic, predatory reign.

Note that while Industrial Production has been essentially flat for the past 20 years, the stock market has soared to new bubblicious heights of speculative frenzy. When the The Everything Bubble pops, there won't be a bailout of the swindlers and scammers, nor will a new and larger bubble replace the one that collapsed.

We will enter a world without finance, and it will be a better world, for the economy will no longer be in thrall to the derangement and inequality of parasitic, predatory finance.




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Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
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The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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The New Normal: Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn't about central bank bailouts, it's about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems.

The vapid discussions about "soft" or "hard" landings for the economy are akin to asking if the Titanic's encounter with the iceberg was "soft" or "hard:" either way, the ship was doomed, just as the global economy is doomed by The New Normal of Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies.

Death Spirals are the inevitable result of entrenched interests clinging on to the status quo and thwarting any adaptation or evolution that might threaten or diminish their share of the swag--and that includes any real change because any consequential modification has the potential to upset the gravey train.

The status quo "solution" is to borrow and blow whatever sums are needed to satisfy every entrenched interest. Filling the federal slop-trough for all the hogs now requires borrowing a staggering $1.4 trillion every year, and billions more in municipal, county and state bonds (borrowing money via selling bonds) on the local level.

This borrow and blow strategy avoids any uncomfortable discipline and difficult trade-offs: everybody gets everything they demand.

This strategy looks "unsinkable" until the iceberg looms dead ahead. History suggests that fiscal and political discipline is eventually imposed by the real world in one fashion or another when diminishing returns enter a Death Spiral.

Any limit on debt is of course "impossible," just as it was "impossible" for the Titanic to sink. But history is rather implacable in this regard. The self-serving hubris of "impossible" limits on largesse tend to collapse on contact with currency devaluation, structural inflation or a systemic crisis of legitimacy that sweeps away the entire worm-eaten facade of stability.

In other words, the entrenched interests benefitting from the status quo will continue to do what worked in the past until it all implodes. The pain of discipline and modest sacrifices is too great to bear, so let's collapse the entire system.

Autocracies excel at Death Spirals because they eliminate dissent, transparency and competing nodes of power. Nobody's left to push back on disastrous policy decisions, so autocratic regimes race toward the iceberg at full speed.

Rather than invest in real long-term solutions, everyone is in the casino, buying options that expire in a few hours. Rather than invest for an entire quarter--whew, three whole months!--speculators now consider a week an unbearably long time to hold a trade.

Speculative frenzies create their own Death Spirals, as gamblers front-run the "guaranteed" bailout of speculators by central banks. This is the consequence of moral hazard being elevated to "guaranteed": there is no need to actually wait for the inevitable central bank bailout of bets gone bad, we can place bets before the bailout because we know it's as assured as the sun rising tomorrow morning.

Nice, except central banks and bailouts also reach diminishing returns and enter Death Spirals. Doing more of what's failed seems to work once, then twice, if you give it enough juice, but the third time is iffy and the fourth time collapses the speculative casino that the status quo was trying to save.

No one who benefits from the Moral Hazard Casino Economy believes it's no longer sustainable. All the gamblers, big and small, are confident the Federal Reserve and other central banks can cover any losses and make good whatever befalls the casino. The hubris of the punters, big and small, is essentially infinite.

I'll get out before the house of cards collapses, everyone tells themselves. In the meantime, I'm going to front-run the inevitable bailout of this speculative frenzy.

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn't about central bank bailouts, it's about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems. Death Spirals and speculative frenzies have now been completely normalized. We can't imagine any other way to operate. But this New Normal won't last as long as punters believe. Doing more of what worked in the past is only accelerating the casino's demise.






My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

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When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
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The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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Why People Move from Blue States: It's Not Just High Taxes

Simply put, people are moving not just to escape unaffordable housing and high taxes. They're moving to escape fiscally irresponsible, ineffective, unaccountable governance.

Defenders of high state taxes like to point out that surveys find few high-net-worth households move primarily to lower their tax bills. This may be so, but it misses the point: high-income, high-net-worth households don't move away from high tax states if they're getting fair value for their taxes. But if services and infrastructure are crumbling around them even as their taxes keep ratcheting higher, then the benefits of moving become much more compelling.

In other words, if you're getting good value for your high taxes, then high taxes are not sufficient motivation to move. The problem is not high taxes per se, any more than a high cost of living is the reason to move from a world-class city with great amenities: world-class cities with great amenities have always cost more than less desirable locales, even in the 1600s.

The reason blue states are losing population isn't just high taxes; it's a lack of fiscal discipline and accountability, and insanely unaffordable housing costs. Immense floods of tax revenues sluice into the state coffers but the outcomes of all that spending diminish rather than improve. Problems don't seem to get solved even as the permanent "solution"--throw more money at it--fail due to the decay of fiscal discipline and accountability, and the rise of a "stakeholders" mentality where dozens of entrenched interest groups each hold a veto in every decision.

As I've explained before, straightforward government processes like getting a building permit have become Kafkaesque nightmares of delays and soaring costs, partly because every agency benefits from stretching the process out by finding reasons to demand a resubmittal: more delays means more hours of work and more fees.

Nobody benefits from a speedy permit process except the general public, and they have no political power. The same political class gets re-elected despite their poor performance, so there's no incentive to enforce any discipline or accountability. Failure is the New Normal as every "stakeholder" finds reasons to meddle with or nix any plan that might disrupt the self-serving, inefficient, ineffective status quo.

A great many city and county officials are doing their best to solve local problems and improve core services, but there's only so much they can accomplish if the state creates a culture of entrenched-interests dysfunction, skims most of the tax revenues and malinvests public borrowing.

As the excerpts below highlight, most middle-income people leave blue states because they will never be able to afford to own a home. But since middle-income households pay a modest percentage of income and capital gains taxes, the state machinery grinds on even as the priced-out-of-home-ownership middle class moves away.

But when the few who pay most of the income taxes have finally had enough and start leaving, the fiscal consequences quickly accumulate. The Everything Bubble has generated fantastic capital gains for the wealthiest class, and they've paid a disproportionate share of blue state income tax revenues on these gains.

(Note that California taxes long-term capital gains at the same rate as any other income: no long-term capital gains tax break for you, bucko.)

High-income earners fleeing California (by Dan Walters):

After 170 years of population growth -- occasionally explosive growth -- California is now experiencing population loss for the first time. As foreign immigration and birth rates declined, they no longer offset net losses in state-to-state migration. Since 2010, 7.5 million people have left California while 5.9 million people have come from other states.

"Most people who move across state lines do so for housing, job, or family reasons," Hans Johnson, a demographer for the Public Policy Institute of California, wrote earlier this year. Johnson also notes that those who leave California tend to be poorer and less educated than those who migrate to the state, which is not surprising given that housing and jobs dominate motivations.

There is, however, a less obvious subset of those who leave California -- high-income families seeking relief from the state's notoriously high taxes.

The newspaper found that 39,000 San Franciscans who had filed federal tax returns for 2018 had moved out of the city before filing 2019 returns. Collectively, they took $10.6 billion in income with them while people who moved to the city during that period reported just $3.8 billion in income.

Favored new homes are often in states that levy little or no personal income taxes. No-tax states include Wyoming, Nevada, Washington, Texas and Florida. Utah has a flat 4.85% rate.

Income taxes account for three-quarters of California's general fund revenues and the top 1% of taxpayers generate nearly half of those taxes.

That's just 150,000 taxpayers in a state of 40 million, so even a trickle of departures has a potentially huge impact on the budget.

Why the Middle Class Flees States That Tax the Rich:

A recent survey found that 37 percent of Californians are thinking of leaving the state for this reason alone. California has the highest housing costs among the 48 continental states, and government has much to do with that.

Costs are astronomical, even for government-favored, heavily subsidized affordable housing. The cost of building a subsidized unit of housing in California can be as high as about $700,000 a unit, according to a recent study by the Government Accountability Office.

Fueled by its taxes on high earners and on businesses, California has an enormous budget. Its general fund alone tops $200 billion. You might expect, for that money, top-notch services from government, but the opposite is true. One essential public-sector responsibility that heavily influences quality of life for everyone is basic infrastructure.

California consistently ranks low on that crucial measure, and it's not alone. Other high-tax states like New York also sit near the bottom of rankings for essentials like roads, bridges, and airports, while states with moderate and low taxes like Arizona and Nevada rank near the top. Money alone is clearly not the deciding factor in what kind of quality-of-life a government can help deliver, and residents notice.

Simply put, people are moving not just to escape unaffordable housing and high taxes. They're moving to escape fiscally irresponsible, ineffective, unaccountable governance that always wants more tax revenues while delivering diminishing quality services and infrastructure. There's nothing like a homeless encampment a few yards from your million-dollar cottage to modify one's calculation of the benefits of staying put. Throw in decaying public transportation, library hours being slashed and random crime, and all the supposedly great amenities start losing their luster.

The heavily subsidized lower-income households have every reason to stay. The top 5% who pay most of the taxes and who have more options are reaching the point where all the advantages of moving are starting to outweigh the advantages of staying. Should the trickle of wealth leaving turn into a flood, blue states will no longer be fiscally viable.



Note the extremely high cost of housing in California even as the primary workforce populace plummets. The soaring cohort of elderly won't be engines of growth; they'll increasingly be drawing benefits and subsidies from the state coffers. That's not a formula for fiscal solvency.




My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

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The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
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The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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Prepare to Be Bled Dry by a Decade of Stagflation

Our reliance on the endless expansion of credit, leverage and credit-asset bubbles will have its own high cost.

The Great Moderation of low inflation and soaring assets has ended. Welcome to the death by a thousand cuts of stagflation. It was all so easy in the good old days of the past 25 years: just keep pushing interest rates lower to reduce the cost of borrowing and juice credit expansion ((financialization) and offshore industrial production to low-cost nations with few environmental standards and beggar-thy-neighbor currency policies (globalization).

Both financialization and globalization are deflationary forces, as they reduce costs. They are also deflationary to the wages of bottom 90%, as wages are pushed down by cheap global labor and stripmined by financialization, which channels the vast majority of the economy's gains into the top tier of the workforce and those who own the assets bubbling up in financialization's inevitable offspring, credit-asset bubbles.

To keep the party going, central banks and governments pushed both forces into global dominance: hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization. Policy extremes were pushed to new extremes: "temporary" zero-rate interest policy (ZIRP) stretched on for 6 years as every effort was made to lower the cost of credit to bring demand forward and inflate yet another credit-asset bubble, as the "wealth effect" of the top 5% gaining trillions of dollars in unearned wealth as asset bubbles inflated pushed consumption higher.

Corporate profits soared as credit became essentially free and super-abundant and globalization lowered costs and institutionalized planned obsolescence, the engineered replacement of goods and software that forces consumers to replace their broken / outdated products every few years.

Every economic lever was pulled to extend the vast profits generated by hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization. Currencies were manipulated lower to boost exports, cheap credit kept zombie companies alive, bridges to nowhere and millions of empty flats were built to boost jobs and profits, and so on.

At long last, all these gimmicks have reversed or reached marginal returns: they no longer keep inflation suppressed, asset bubbles inflating and profits expanding. The malinvestment of global capital will be revealed and the costs of the policy gimmickry will be paid by years of stagflation: high inflation, low or negative growth and endless debt crises as the reliance on cheap credit to boost profits comes home to roost.

It turns out that the inevitable offspring of hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization are inflation, credit crises and the undermining of national security as the self-serving goal of pushing corporate profits higher via globalization led to fatal dependencies on competing powers for the essentials of modern life.

Correcting these decades-long extremes will take at least a decade as long-suppressed inflation becomes endemic, supply-chain disruptions become the norm and capital has to be invested in long-term national projects such as reshoring and the engineering of a new more efficient energy mix--projects that will only be expenses for many years.

This demand for structural investments with no immediate profit payoff is what drove the stagflation of the 1970s, a factor I explain in The Forgotten History of the 1970s and The 1970s: From Rotting Carcasses Floating in the River to Kayak Races.

The gains will not even be measured by our current outdated economic metrics of GDP and profits. The gains will be in the national security of essential supply chains and production and in the relocalizing of jobs and capital, not corporate profits.

Our reliance on the endless expansion of credit, leverage and credit-asset bubbles will have its own high cost: the collapse not just of the current Everything Bubble but of the engines that inflated one bubble after another.

Central bank and state authorities are thrashing about cluelessly, as all their gimmicks are now problems rather than solutions. The current policy gimmicks laid the foundations for a decade or more of high inflation, low growth and credit crises as the phantom "wealth" of credit-asset bubbles evaporates.

This will drive a reverse Wealth Effect as the top spenders are crushed by the collapse of asset bubbles. Long-term trends in demographics (shrinking workforces and the skyrocketing population of elderly) and depletion of resources will add fuel to the inflationary / low growth / credit crises bonfires.

Gordon Long and I discuss all these mutually reinforcing trends in A Great Stagflation (36 min). This is the culmination of our decade of programs about all the policy gimmicks that were pushed to extremes to maintain the illusion of stability and growth--an illusion that's evaporating as it makes contact with stagflationary realities.



Gordon's Stagflation Thesis Paper (free)

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My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

Read excerpts of all three chapters

Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Reliance in the 21st Century (43 min)


My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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Read more...