Prepare for the Repricing of Risk Globally

There are no more "saves" available for the next market meltdown.

The past 24 years can be viewed as an era in which risk declined due to the dynamics of globalization and financialization.

The ascent of China as "workshop of the world" generated a deflationary wave of lower prices for products (due to lower labor costs and lower quality components) that blunted the inflationary impact of the global economies adding $150 trillion in debt since 2000. Global debt, public and private, now tops $315 trillion, 333% of global GDP.

Absent the deflationary impact of globalization, this vast increase in money sloshing around would have sparked inflation. Absent the vast expansion of money via financialization, the expansion of production and consumption enabled by globalization could not have occurred.

At the same time, central banks coordinated policies to steadily reduce interest rates, reaching effectively zero or negative rates (when adjusted for inflation) in 2009 and beyond. This reduction of rates far below historic norms enabled creditors to borrow more even as their debt service costs fell.

Financialization vastly increased leverage and the commodification of credit/debt, enabling emerging-market nations and enterprises and consumers globally to increase their borrowing/spending.

Globalization generated incentives for nations and their central banks to "play nice" and cooperate with other governments and banks to spur profitable (and happily deflationary) trade. These coordinated efforts enabled the global economy to avoid the potentially fatal disruptions of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008-09.

Despite localized droughts and extreme weather, global food production increased by expanding land in production and intensifying agricultural methods.

All of these risk-reducing trends are reversing or reaching diminishing returns.

Extreme weather events are increasing, leading to massive losses by insurers, a trend described in As Insurers Around the U.S. Bleed Cash From Climate Shocks, Homeowners Lose (New York Times)(seechart below):

"In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly available financial data. That's up from 12 states five years ago, and eight states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody's, and those losses are increasing.

The growing tumult is affecting people whose homes have never been damaged and who have dutifully paid their premiums, year after year. Cancellation notices have left them scrambling to find coverage to protect what is often their single biggest investment. As a last resort, many are ending up in high-risk insurance pools created by states that are backed by the public and offer less coverage than standard policies. By and large, state regulators lack strategies to restore stability to the market."

Much of the rising cost is a result of global insurance losses, which boost the reinsurance rates insurers must pay to cover the risks of extreme events generating extreme losses that push insurers into bankruptcy. Hawaii insurance chief doesn't see carrier exit as costs rise:

Reinsurance is something insurance companies buy to cover extraordinary losses, and it is part of a policy's price. This reinsurance cost, which is tied to the global insurance industry, has increased 20% to 50% annually during the past several years, according to Ito.

"The cost to insure homes or condos is going up because of this tremendous surge in the reinsurance costs," he said.

Ito said there were 23 climate-related disasters in the United States in 2023 that caused at least $1 billion in losses, and that in five of the past six years, the reinsurance industry incurred losses of over $100 billion worldwide.

"Reinsurance is worldwide," he said. "Events that happen in Europe, or in Asia, or in Kansas, or in Florida, all impact the cost of reinsurance that insurers pay regardless of where they write business."



The rising costs of insurance reflect a critical dynamic of risk: in a tightly bound, interconnected global system of finance and trade, risks arising anywhere in the system increase costs and risks throughout the system.

This is the downside of increasing our dependence on tightly bound global systems to lower prices: disruptions and risk now spread rapidly to every node and participant in the global system: events far away trigger the cancellation of your insurance policy or an astounding increase in its cost.

What were beneficial in the low-risk growth phase--increasing dependence on global capital and trade flows to lower prices and boost borrowing--are now sources of rising risk--risk that cannot be fully hedged even as the cost of hedges such as insurance rise sharply.

Let's consider the other dynamics turning a low-risk era into an unstable, high-risk era.

Our starting point in an examination of risk is the nature of the global system we are dependent on / embedded in. The dominant economic model in this system is "the market," an idealized construct in which buyers and sellers "discover the price" of everything from currencies, risk, goods, services, labor and capital, and any scarcities are filled by new production (as people rush to reap higher profits by expanding production) or substitution (beef too expensive? Replace it with chicken).

This construct creates a happy illusion: the system operates as a closed system in which all the moving parts are visible and measurable. This creates the illusion that the system is inherently self-correcting and therefore stable, as buyers, sellers, producers and consumers all pursuing their own self-interests will maintain what's known as dynamic equilibrium: prices may spike or collapse for a short time, but the system will quickly adapt and equilibrium will be restored.

The real world is not a closed system in which all the moving parts are visible and measurable. The real world is an open system operating not solely by the pursuit of self-interest but by natural selection unguided by any goal or destination.

We presume "Progress" has an inherently upward trajectory: everything inevitably gets better as technology advances. In other words, we view the dynamics of history and Nature as teleological: they are on a path heading toward a goal.

This is a misunderstanding of Nature. Natural selection has no goal. If external changes disrupt an ecosystem, some species may be wiped out. From their point of view, this was not inevitable progress toward a goal.

The tightly interconnected global system is akin to an ecosystem. It is an unpredictable, unstable open system, not a predictable, stable market. External events can lead to scarcities for which there are no substitutes or increases in production, and irreplaceable links can be broken, collapsing the system beyond repair.

When the Vandals wrested the North African wheat production away from Roman control, the Roman Empire lost the primary food source feeding the half-million residents of Rome, many of whom were granted a free bread stipend--hence the term "bread and circuses."

Since there was no substitute for this lost wheat, and the residents grew little or no food themselves, the result was the collapse of the entire structure. (There were other factors, of course, such as the unaffordable cost of maintaining a paid mercenary military, pandemics, etc.--what we now call a polycrisis.)

The point here is risk is often hidden in systems that are stable for long periods of time. It isn't non-existent; it is simply out of sight. This conditions us to believe that the system is self-correcting, and so we become complacent.

A recent example of this is the way the Federal Reserve and other central banks have "saved" the stock market every time it stumbled for the past 15 years, since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. We're now conditioned to "buy the dip" because every time the market dips, the banks leap into action and markets soar to new highs. This is like clockwork, and so only fools doubt that the next dip will also be "saved" and markets will once again soar to new heights.

In the context of global risk, "buying the dip" appears to be low risk. But this conditioning / complacency overlooks the fact that China "saved the global financial system" by rapidly expanding its own debt load, what we call "leveraging up" debt, much like a homeowner with a modest mortgage and plenty of home equity can borrow against that equity, leveraging the collateral into much higher debt loads.

China is now mired in the same slow-growth, over-indebted, property-bubble, rising inflation, decaying global trade environment as every other nation which precludes it "saving the world" again.

Now that the deflationary impulse of rising global trade has reversed, there's nothing to counter the inflationary pressures generated by the decay of globalization and financialization: interest rates cannot be pushed back down to zero, as that will only boost inflationary forces. Since collateral has already been "levered up," there's no more pool of collateral to support a new credit bubble.

Should central banks attempt to "save the market" by dropping interest rates to zero, that won't boost borrowing and spending because the system is already over-levered: staggeringly large sums of debt are already unsupported by collateral, for example, commercial real estate in the U.S.: buildings that sold for $200 million a few years ago are now entering foreclosure and being auctioned off for $10 million or less. The underlying value of the property--the collateral supporting the loan--has collapsed.

In other words, there are no more "saves" available for the next market meltdown.

Another systemic source of risk was described by Benoit Mandelbrot in his book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. (The book's original 2004 subtitle was "a fractal view of risk, ruin, and reward." The current edition's subtitle is "A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence." I prefer the original subtitle, which is more to the point: risk and ruin.)

In the conventional view of risk / portfolio management, "100-year floods" occur, well, every 100 years or so. This risk of such a devastating disaster occurring in any one year is thus low.

But as Mandelbrot explained, these catastrophic floods don't occur every 100 years--they occur every 5 years or so, as the mathematical models used to ascribe risk are deeply flawed. Nature is fractal, and thus prone to sudden instability.

Nassim Taleb explored the nature of unpredictable/improbable risk in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

The decades of relative stability between 2000 and 2020 conditioned us to complacently believe the global system was now so robust and our stabilizing institutions (central banks) so powerful that risk was if not banished, manageable and could be readily hedged.

This is not realistic, and so we're ill-prepared for shocks to the system that fatally destabilize trade and capital flows we assume are permanently dynamically stable, i.e. any spot of bother will be corrected by one institution or another.

Another systemic source of risk is the thinning of systemic buffers is not visible. In other words, the rising risk of instability is invisible to us as long as the system appears to be functioning normally. So we're surprised when fisheries collapse, ground water dries up, financial systems implode, and so on, because everything appeared to be more or less the same.

We can view the human body as a metaphor for the way a system attempts to maintain homeostasis / equilibrium, but the effort required overtaxes the systems tasked with correcting / rebalancing the entire system. The individual feels "normal" and has no awareness of rising risk until they experience a cardiac arrest or their metabolic disorder strikes them down.

Risk is slowly being repriced globally, as costs rise and trade and capital dependencies undercut stability. What we currently view as predictable closed systems will be revealed as unpredictable and potentially destabilized open systems that cannot be restored to previous forms of stability.

How do we operate in a world in which risk cannot be fully hedged, and apparently small events can collapse critical systems on which we're dependent? The first step is to set aside conditioning that leads to complacency and false assumptions of safety / stability. The second step is to mitigate risk before it rises up like a tsunami: reduce debt, exposure to financial risks, reduce our dependency on global, tightly bound interconnected systems, move to places with a diversity of essentials, and invest in our own self-reliance. I wrote my book Self-Reliance in the 21st Century as a general guide to this de-risking process.

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Podcasts: Crisis, Sacrifice and the New Economy, with Emerson Fersch (1 hour)

Financial Nihilism, Inflation & The Collapsing American Dream.

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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 Crises and Sacrifices Yet to Come

The timing of finally embracing risk and sacrifice as the only option left is exquisitely sensitive: finally caving in a moment too late leads to the system collapsing beyond recovery.

The sense that we're approaching a tipping point into a crisis with no easy resolution is pervasive, a sense that beneath the veneer of normalcy (the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates and that will fix everything), we sense the precariousness of this brittle normalcy.

While many are uneasily scanning the horizon for geopolitical crises, others see the crisis emerging here at home, possibly a political crisis or a financial crisis that ensnares us all.

Few look at the decay of our social order as the source of crisis. Few seem to notice that corruption has become so normalized that we don't even recognize the ubiquity and depth of our corruption; we tell ourselves that this isn't corruption, it's just healthy self-interest, the "invisible hand" of the market magically organizing our economy to optimize efficiency and productivity. This provides cover for our worship of self-interest, a polite phrase for limitless greed.

While the media glorifies illusions of salvation and grandeur (AI!), few look at what's been lost in the decay of our social order, a list that starts with sacrifice for the common good and civic virtue.

The American Dream has a peculiarly truncated vision of sacrifice: we make individual sacrifices to advance our personal goals, but sacrifices for the common good are not part of the Dream: sacrifices for the sake of our fellow citizens are at best unnecessary and at worst a waste of money, something only chumps fall for.

The Smart Money spends a fortune evading taxes, as part of the prevailing ethos: Get rich by whatever means are necessary and let the Devil take the hindmost.

What few seem to have noticed is specific classes of the citizenry have already been sacrificed to clear the path for limitless greed and corruption to reap the spoils. These classes include the majority of the citizenry, the bottom 90%, though the burdens of the systemic cannibalization / predation have fallen most heavily on the bottom 50%, whose share of the nation's financial wealth is effectively signal noise: 2.6%.



The generational divide is equally stark: Boomers hold 51% of household wealth, while Millennials hold a mere 9%.



The divide between wage earners and owners of capital is staggering, yet of little interest to the financial media: Labor's share of gross domestic income (GDI) has declined for decades, resulting in the transfer of $149 trillion from wage earners to owners of capital:



The sacrifices yet to come will fall on everyone, but they will fall most heavily on capital as capital has scooped up the vast majority of the financial gains for the past 45 years. The owners of capital are already whining, as if the addition of $50 trillion to their wealth in the past four years is their birthright, the legitimate rewards of their brilliant creation of stupendous gains in productivity rather than the illegitimate gains of a centrally planned bubble that enriched the few at the expense of the many.



We are reluctant to face the consequences of our corruption and our vastly unequal economy. The dynamics of our ability to rationalize away the coming crisis are crystalized in this graphic composed by Dave Pollard in his post Why We Cannot Prevent Collapse:



In summary, we are fixated on the short-term, enamored by our own power, intoxicated by normalization and conditioned to being "saved", confident that our salvation will be delivered via a painless central bank "save" should anything threaten to overturn our apple cart.

Financial podcaster Emerson Fersch asks a cogent question: what catalyst will finally tip the system into disorderly incoherence? My answer is the core of our recent podcast, Crisis, Sacrifice and the New Economy.

I don't have a crisp answer that fits in a Tweet or a Tik-Tok video because any prediction is nothing more than a guess due to the nature of the global economic system: an open, (i.e. emergent) tightly bound system that has veered far from equilibrium and is prone to sudden drops into chaotic disorder in which there are no guarantees that the previous stability / equilibrium can be restored.

We know a few things that offer some minimal guidance. We know that in complex, highly interconnected /tightly bound systems, small perturbances can generate large effects.

We also know that should events occur faster than the system's stabilizing feedbacks can respond, the system is highly prone to collapse.

We also know that humans don't change anything that requires exposure to open-ended risk and sacrifice until there is no other choice.

Lastly, we know that the timing of finally embracing risk and sacrifice as the only option left is exquisitely sensitive: finally caving in a moment too late leads to the system collapsing beyond recovery. When this moment arrives, who will be ready and who will resist, rationalize and prevaricate until it's too late?

When we're finally ready to bargain--OK, we'll sacrifice a bit--it's too late to stop the whirlwind.


Podcasts: Crisis, Sacrifice and the New Economy, with Emerson Fersch (1 hour)

Financial Nihilism, Inflation & The Collapsing American Dream.

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

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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How Many Millennials Will Be Rich Enough to Buy the Boomers' Millions of Unaffordable Bungalows?

Absent demand from tens of millions of wealthy, high-income buyers, asset valuations will fall as Boomers sell off assets to fund their retirement.

There's a peculiarly flawed logic behind the widely held view that the Baby Boomers will seamlessly transfer tens of trillions of dollars of their wealth to the Gen-X and Millennial generations as they exit stage left. This is flawed for a very basic reason: the extremely overvalued assets that will be transferred--real estate and stocks--only reached such extreme overvaluation because there is a surplus of buyers who are sufficiently wealthy (and willing) to pay bubble-inflated prices.

Since the ownership of both real estate and stocks is concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest 10% who tend to be older, how many Gen-Xers and Millennials have the means to buy million-dollar bungalows and overpriced portfolios? If buyers are scarce due to entrenched wealth-income inequality, then once Boomers start selling their vast holdings of stocks and millions of overpriced homes, prices will plummet if sellers outnumber qualified and willing buyers.

In other words, the bloated valuations Millennials hope to inherit will only remain at the currently overvalued levels if millions of qualified buyers emerge to snap up every Boomer bungalow at today's bubble prices. If there are fewer buyers than sellers, prices will decline accordingly.

Younger generations hoping to inherit million-dollar McMansions and stock portfolios overlook that many aging Boomers are planning to sell their stocks and homes to fund their retirement. Boomers who are wealthy on paper are wealthy due to their ownership of stocks and real estate; they need to liquidate these assets to afford to retire at their desired level of comfort.

Another overlooked factor is inheritances often require selling the house to split the money between heirs. Once again, the inheritance depends on buyers emerging like locusts to buy up every house being sold at absurdly overvalued prices. How many younger people will have the means or willingness to buy the millions of overpriced bungalows being dumped on the market?

Hopeful heirs also overlook that prices are set on the margin. Take a neighborhood of 100 homes. If every home that sells fetches fewer dollars, the sale of only 10 homes can cut the valuations of the other 90 houses in half in a few years.

People are living longer nowadays, and since few retirement / nursing homes are being built, many Boomers will have to stay in their own home as they grow old. Assisted living / nursing home fees run around $10,000 to $12,000 or more a month; private nursing care in residential homes typically runs between $6,000 to $9,000 a month. Few can afford these options unless they sell their house. It's far more affordable to continue living at home until the end of one's life.

That can either consume the inheritance or extend the transfer of assets to the point the heirs are in their 70s. For example, my Mom is 95 years old, bless her heart, and she sold her house 17 years ago to fund her retirement in an assisted living complex. Her house proceeds funded her retirement years; there will be little left (if any) for her heirs.

If we consider the vast concentration of wealth in the top 10% (typically the wealthiest Boomers), it's clear there aren't enough young people who can afford to buy assets at today's valuations to keep the prices at nosebleed levels. As this chart shows, the top 10% own 44% of all real estate in the US, while the bottom 50% of households own a meager 11%.



That's much more than their share of the nation's financial wealth, which is a rounding-error 2.6%:



Boomers own 42% of all real estate value, with Gen-Xers holding 30% and Millennials owning 14%. We can surmise that the majority of Gen-Xers who can afford to buy a home have already done so. Given their relatively modest numbers and age, counting on Gen-Xers to soak up millions of Boomer Bungalows for $1 million does not reflect generational / financial realities.



That leaves the buying of millions of Boomer Bungalows for $1 million each to Millennials, who have the numbers but not the wealth to do so. Boomers hold 51% of household wealth, while Millennials hold a mere 9%.



So the expectation that nosebleed valuations for houses and stocks will remain at a "permanently high plateau" is based on flawed reasoning that Millennials will be buying millions of homes being dumped by Boomers to fund their retirement at today's prices, and this buying by Millennials will maintain the high valuations of homes and stocks they will eventually inherit--possibly far later in their own lives than they anticipate.

This doesn't add up. The concentration of wealth in the top 10% and the Boomer generation means there cannot possibly be enough buyers in the ranks of those with few assets, high debt loads and modest incomes with sufficient wealth and income to buy Boomer assets at today's bubble prices.

Since the top tier of older, wealthier folks own 50% of all wealth, there is no way those with lesser means can afford to buy all those assets at today's bubblicious valuations. It simply doesn't compute.

Absent demand from tens of millions of wealthy, high-income buyers, asset valuations will fall as Boomers sell assets to fund their retirement. In many cases, the wealth younger people hope to inherit will be consumed by costly nursing home fees.

This is the price of enabling a concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 10% and the older generations who bought assets at pre-bubble prices and have enjoyed the appreciation created by stupendous bubbles.

But those valuations will only be reaped by the first sellers. Everyone selling as demand falters due to insufficient numbers of buyers who can afford to pay today's prices will find valuations will fall once selling overwhelms demand.

The expectation that tens of trillions of dollars in assets whose value is set on the margins will magically retain their bubble valuations as aging Boomers liquidate their assets en masse in an economy where only 20% of the populace can afford to buy a house at today's prices is not grounded in demographic or financial realities.


New podcast: Financial Nihilism, Inflation & The Collapsing American Dream.

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

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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Financial Nihilism and the Collapsing American Dream

Following the conventional path is a deadend. It isn't easy to carve a path outside the well-worn pathways of debt servitude, but it is possible.

America has become a nation bifurcated into haves and have-nots, and this is generating large-scale, enduring economic, social and political consequences. In a nutshell, older generations who bought homes and other assets at low prices decades ago have benefited enormously as credit-asset bubbles have pushed the value of these assets to the moon. These generations are wealthy not from any boost in national productivity--they're wealthy simply because they happened to buy assets in the early stages of a multi-generational bubble.

Younger generations are experiencing a double-whammy: they're priced out of homes and other assets and they're being crushed by the stagflation that comes with credit-asset bubbles: now that the deflationary impact of globalization has faded, the super-low interest rates of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and vast expansions of credit and currency have finally generated embedded inflation and suppressed the only real engine of stable prosperity, increasing productivity.

This generational / class divide has led to giving up on the American Dream--or the Chinese Dream: in China, Financial Nihilism is called lying flat or let it rot, expressions of individual rejection of the social pressures to overwork and sacrifice one's life for a rat-race with rapidly diminishing returns. This is an apt description of Financial Nihilism.

That the American Dream--homeownership and steady improvements in earning and wealth--is out of reach of most young Americans is painfully obvious, and their response is Financial Nihilism: borrowing and spending freely to enjoy whatever is still within reach and giving up on homeownership and retirement, a trend captured in acronyms such as YOLO (you only live once).

This may sound carefree, but it is a profound expression of despair and hopelessness. This reality is visible in headlines such as these:

Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates that they've given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says.

Key Engines of US Consumer Spending Are Losing Steam All at Once: Americans rely on credit, as disposable income declines.

Gen Zers are paying hundreds for dirty sneakers to show off their 'nonchalant attitude'.

Financial Nihilism is the inevitable result of a Gilded Age level of extreme wealth-income disparity between the haves and have-nots, a stark reality few seem willing to examine as a driver of terminal social decline. What is a young person entering the job and housing market supposed to think about our economy and society after absorbing these realities?

The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks even with market participation at a record high.

An estimated 26% of Fort Worth's single family homes are owned by companies, city says.

Gen Z Sinks Deeper Into Debt: Inflation drives many to credit cards to cover costs, leaving them with bigger balances.

That the ladder of upward mobility is broken is self-evident. The ratio of home prices to median income--at record levels of unaffordability--is telling. So is corporate ownership of vast swaths of America's housing stock: the corporate rich get richer as they jack up rents, while the poor get poorer paying higher rents for zero advance in the quality or quantity of the product.



The bottom 50% of American households own a vanishingly small share of the nation's ballooning financial wealth:



The hopelessness of escaping this downward slide into precarity / financial insecurity is debilitating, and so it is little wonder Why Americans Are Dying from Despair: The unfairness of our economy, two economists argue, can be measured not only in dollars but in deaths.

"Among advanced economies, this deterioration in pay and job stability is unique to the United States. The problem isn't that people are not the way they used to be. It's that the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be. This has had devastating effects on the family and on community life.

A more unexpected culprit identified by Case and Deaton is our complicated and costly healthcare system. In order to revive the American Dream for people without college degrees, we must change the way we pay for health care.

The dispiriting politics of stasis and scapegoating can prevail for a very long time, even as the damage comes into clearer view. We are better at addressing fast-moving crises than slow-building ones. It wouldn't be surprising, then, if we simply absorbed current conditions as the new normal. We are good at muddling along."

The decay of everyday life isn't limited to financial precarity: work and unpaid shadow work demand more of us as diminishing returns bleed us dry. Is Anyone Else's Life as Stupidly Complicated by Digital "Shadow Work" as Mine Is? (May 22, 2024)

The Loneliness of the American Worker: More meetings and faceless chats. Fewer work friends. How the modern workday is fueling an epidemic of isolation.

Simply put, the system isn't working for the younger generations and those who didn't have the means to buy assets a generation ago. This drives gambling (as the only available avenue to financial security) and populism (rejecting The Establishment in favor of Outsiders who propose throwing a monkeywrench into the well-oiled machine of those relishing their position atop the status quo).

This chart of option volume reflects the explosion of speculative betting in the stock market:



Following the conventional path is a deadend: borrow a fortune to get a bachelor's degree, sacrifice yourself to enrich your corporate/state masters, borrow an absolutely crushing sum to buy a house--there's a term for this path: debt servitude.

So what solutions are within reach? The unconventional ones that make up the de-risking toolbag of Self-Reliance. Gordon Long and I discuss these tools in our podcast Financial Nihilism, Inflation & The Collapsing American Dream.



Among the many solution-strategies we discuss, here are a few I highlighted:



It isn't easy to carve a path outside the well-worn pathways of debt servitude, but it is possible for those willing to grab a machete and hack their way to a life that works for them. This is why I wrote a general guide to de-risking and solutions that are within our own control, Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

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


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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If AI Is So Great, Prove It: Eliminate All Surveillance, Spam and Robocalling

AI is for the peons, access to humans is reserved for the wealthy.

Judging by the near-infinite hype spewed about AI, its power is practically limitless: it's going to do all our work better and cheaper than we can do, replacing us at work, to name one example making the rounds. It's going to revolutionize everything from science to marketing, all the while reaping trillions of dollars in profits for those who own the AI tools, apps, etc.

All these extravagant claims make good clickbait, but let's set a higher standard: if AI is so great, then prove it by eliminating all the surveillance, spam and robocalling that's making daily life such a chore. If AI is so powerful and can do pretty much anything a human can do only faster, better, cheaper, then why doesn't someone assign it a simple task: make all surveillance, spam and robocalling go away and become a thing of the dreary, dreadful past.

I mean, come on, how hard would that be? Humans can spot spam and robocalling a mile away, so shouldn't AI be even better at completely eliminating these miseries from our already-digitally-overloaded lives? as for surveillance, how hard would it be to identify and block every tracker, data vacuum, etc. on all our connected devices?

How hard would it be for AI to identify the entities and humans profiting from ruining our lives with surveillance, spam and robocalling? Wouldn't a publicly updated list of those responsible, including names, business addresses, email accounts, etc. be transparency in action?

As I outlined in Is Anyone Else's Life as Stupidly Complicated by Digital "Shadow Work" as Mine Is? (May 22, 2024), we're squandering our lives dealing with completely needless, useless complexity imposed on us by monopolies, scammers (oh wait, isn't that a redundancy?), rapacious tech platforms, fraudsters and marketers.

If AI is so great, why doesn't it do all this stupidly burdensome "shadow work" for us? When yet another corporate monopoly's products and/or services fails miserably, then why can't AI get on the phone with a tech-support person halfway around the world and get it sorted?

We all know the reason why AI will only add to our misery and shadow work: there's no profit in making our lives easier unless we pay for the "privilege" of not being surveilled, spammed and robocalled to death. This is the price we're paying for allowing tech/corporate monopolies and cartels to dominate our economy, society, political order and daily lives: the only way AI will reduce our shadow work is if reducing our misery is more profitable than adding to it.

If we lived in a truly well-ordered economy / society, every individual participating in surveillance, spam and robocalling would be renditioned to Devil's Island where they could enjoy the company of all the other grifters and scammers who profited from our immiseration.

But alas, we live in an economy / society that has been optimized for parasitic predation and exploitation. And so AI will be deployed not to eliminate the obvious sources of our immiseration but to increase them, until our desperation reaches such an extreme that we're willing to sign up for a special deal, only $99.99 a month (for six months, then the price reverts to $399.99/month, plus applicable taxes), a service that comes with an AI app to fix everything that's broken and dysfunctional.

If you want to actually fix what's broken, well, that requires speaking with a human being, and that's going to cost you extra. AI is for the peons, access to humans is reserved for the wealthy.



new podcast: Financial Nihilism, Inflation & The Collapsing American Dream with Gordon Long (42 min).

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

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


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Uriel C. ($70), for your monumentally generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, Austin B. ($70), for your exceedingly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Lee W. ($70), for your magnificently generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, James B. ($70), for your superbly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...