The Book: The Return of the Great Depression, by Vox Day, 267 pages.
Click here to read my (much briefer) book review on Amazon.
The Gist: This latest book by WND columnist Vox Day documents his case that the Great Depression, a distant memory to all but the oldest among us, is fixing to happen again with a vengeance. The book opens with a vivid description of the scene in go-go Tokyo in the late 1980s, a scene much like an irrationally exuberant New York city in the early 2000s, in which the whole of the Japanese economy was drunk on the easy money of the Heisei boom and was convinced of its can’t lose prosperity. Yet we know the fate that befell the Japanese soon after–the Japanese economy quickly fell from its apex of power and influence and crashed, destroying billions of yen’s worth of wealth and resulting in years of hard times know as the Lost Decade. Twenty years hence, the Japanese economy still hasn’t recovered, growth is still flat, and the Japanese central bank’s attempts to stimulate the economy into life with near-zero interest rates were and remain ineffectual.
Day uses the example of the late 1980s Japanese experience…a people’s whose “pride and glory on display” only to be later “transformed into farce and indignity” as their prosperity vanished…as a metaphor for the fate that awaits the USA and much of the rest of the world. Day spends the bulk of this tome methodically demonstrating the validity of this metaphor for the reader, first by explaining how easy, low-cost bank credit–in other words, loans with exceptionally low interest rates–begets boom times and economic malformation. But the consumption upon which the cycle of usurious debt* depends has its limits, ceilings beyond which even the most profligate government/banking “stimulus” cannot pass. There is a limit to how much the consumer will load themselves up with debt, just as there is a limit to how many cars, televisions, refrigerators, and DVDs they can reasonably enjoy, just as there is a limit to how cheap the government can make the money (see the lower right-hand corners of RGD Figures 1.1 and 2.1 below). When this happens, attempts to reinflate the bubble with progressively easier and easier money fail, and the inevitable economic reset to intrinsic, uninflated value occurs. This reset to actual value is know as a recession if minor, or a depression if major.
These graphs demonstrate what happens when the government can’t make money any cheaper to stimulate more consumption. Nothing happens. Even stimulus after stimulus has little effect. Note how low the interest rates are in Figure 1.1, representing the Japanese economy. The Nikkei is flat, despite desperate attempts to re-inflate the investment bubble with cheap money.
Next, Day ably shows how the three major data points (plus a fourth introduced later in the book that I include for discussion here) used to measure economic performance and economic/monetary intervention is hopelessly flawed and invalid. He states:
The truth is that no one really knows anything…the mass of numbers, figures, and reports, and statistics are all very crude approximations that do little more than create the illusion of accuracy.
Day backs up this bold statement by examining each of the these four metrics in detail. The first of these metrics, gross domestic product (GDP), is a dataset constantly in flux, subject as it is to continuous revision. Now revisions or refinements of a percent or two may not sound like much, one or two percent of a trillion-dollar economy is no small figure. What’s more, historical GDP is often revised upward–in the government’s favor, naturally–by government-employed statisticians, sometimes altering the historical record so much that significant economic events like the recession of 2001 are often “revised” out of existence. How one is supposed make good decisions based on historical data when the historical measures themselves are subject to such revisionist shenanigans at any time is somewhat lost on me.
The second measure, consumer price index (CPI), is shown by Day to also be fatally flawed, primarily by virtue of its heavily politicized nature (CPI is often kept artificially low so as to prevent large COLA increases), making it extremely vulnerable to political manipulation. But it is also defective in Day’s eyes because the CPI measure most commonly used, “core” CPI, is hardly core at all, as it fails to account for key components of consumer expenses, most notably, food and energy. Day finds this amusing, because, as he quips, “so few consumers buy groceries, heat their homes, or fill their cars with gasoline”. In fact, core CPI fails to account for approximately 60% of any given household’s monthly expenditures. Moreover, using this flawed measure as a barometer of inflation and/or overall economic health is a mistake because, just as it underreports price inflation apparent to the consumer, it also underreports price deflation. In other words, in these tough economic times, those who would fancy themselves captains at the helm of our national economy, using these indexes, would have little clue as to the magnitude of the actual contraction that has already taken place. As the saying goes, GIGO, and decisions based upon crappy measures cannot help but be crappy decisions themselves.
Note the delta between the projected increase in prices according to CPI and the actual movement of prices. Should make you sleep better at night to know that your leaders are using such wonderfully accurate data to make such monumental decisions with
The third index, unemployment, is tricky to measure since employment itself is a very subjective concept, fraught with arbitrary definitions–for example, where does one draw the line between “fully employed”, “partially employed”, and “unemployed”?–deemed necessary from an statistical analysis standpoint, and thoroughly imbued with the subjective opinions of disgruntled out-of-work former laborers. It gets worse: the BLS also doesn’t count as employed those who haven’t worked in the last four weeks and have no intention of returning to work. Thus the SAHM who chooses to stay home is lumped together with the wastrel childless wife who sits at home all day, pops bon-bons and watches soap operas, the out-of-work bank teller who has looked and looked and looked for work but can’t find it and has given up, and the reluctant hausfrau who wishes to gain remunerative employment but cannot because it costs too much in child care and other expenses for her to (re)join the labor force. Added to mixing of apples and oranges, Day calculates that the most widely used measure of official employment, U-3, only captures the working habits of a mere 14% of the non-institutionalized** population aged 16 and over. Thus Day shows that the standard measure of unemployment, and even its slightly broader sibling, U-6, are both extremely limited in their representativeness of the overall population as well as their validity in characterizing the employment state of that population.
Fourth is the money supply, which one would think would be easy to track: simply count the notes in circulation. But this is not the case: currency in circulation is merely a fraction of the money supply. This fraction is known as M1. But as with the previous three, nothing is quite that simple, and other aggregates of the money supply, M0, M2 and M3, track progressively larger and more amorphous approximations of total number of dollars in circulation. But as this editorial states, even the broadest measure of the total amount of money in circulation, M3 (which the Fed stopped publishing a few years ago) itself doesn’t come close to accounting for the total amount of credit that it out there. One would think this measure would be quite important to track, yet the Fed seems unconcerned with the explosive growth in the money supply and the impact that this growth has on the behavior of the economy as a whole or on the time-preferences of each of the billions of individual actors within that economy.
Piggybacking on his contention that “no one knows anything”, Day then contends that a nation’s economy is too large, with too many actors, for anyone to exert any modicum of control. As justification, Day compares attempts to control the economy to an intractable problem from the physical sciences called the “n-body problem“, which, simply stated, is the geometrically increasing complexity of calculating the movement through space of an n number of celestial objects, each gravitationally interacting with all the others. Each actor in the national economy is likened to a body in the n-body problem, and the reader is then invited to consider just how complex this computation would be, with literally billions of economic actors in the economic universe. Econometrists have been fully aware of this computational complexity as well as its mathematical intractability since at least the 17th century; consequently the field of econometrics side-steps the n-body problem entirely by simplifying the behaviors of each of the actors in the n-body problem to a few approximations that permit their equations to be resolved. In short, they turn the massive, un-solvable n-body problem into a nice, elegant 3- or 4-body problem. Yet, as with any simplification, errors result, errors that render the entire model’s predictive ability worthless. This simplification (and its effects on the models built using such simplification techniques) is known as the “Ricardian Vice“. Unfortunately for us, the Keynesian economic model upon which our modern political economy is now based*** follows the same pattern…each of the aforementioned major statistics that are used to “control” our economy suffer from the Ricardian Vice, as are the billions upon billions of individual economic transactions somehow summed up by a wave of the Ricardian hand into generalized behaviors that fail to account for the small acts that individuals have that may result in large effects on the overall state of the economy. The following quote summarizes Days argument in this section of the book thusly:
What the theoretical economists and the practical financiers alike have failed to take into account is that the impossibility of socialist calculation applies to the price of money as well to the prices of goods and services. A central banker has no more ability to correctly ascertain the intersection of the collective supply and demand curves for money in a modern economy than the historical communist planner was able to calculate the correct number of shoes required in the now-defunct socialist economies
If Keynesian economics, a school of thought that seeks to defeat the business cycle through the use of technical measures such as those highlighted previously to foster endless economic growth, is demonstrably theoretically and empirically unsuccessful at accomplishing either task, to what then does Mr. Day ascribe its popularity? The answer lays in the political top-cover that Keynesianism provides to politicians who happily exploit it as a pretext to engage in never-ending government expansionism and the spending this expansionism engenders. This top-cover is a two-fer: not only does it give the politician the appearance of “doing something” through so-called “stimulus”,**** but it also allows the pol to take credit for the good times created through easy credit.
A word here is required about psychology. Day points out in his book how many times Keynesian theory mentions the words “psychology” and “psychological”. While possibly being a product of the times…after all, Freud’s theories were all the rage when Keynes wrote his General Theory, it certainly suggests that a major part of Keynesian and neo-Keynesian theory concentrates not on empirical, scientific control of the economy but on a psychological feel-good campaign to prop up consumer confidence so that the consumer continues borrow-and-spend to consume. Like a shark that must keep swimming to breathe, the (neo)Keynesian economy depends on consumers taking out loans for material consumption, and anything that causes them to save and not spend (or the banks to refuse to lend) threatens the oxygen supply for the entire economy. Thus the emphasis placed on stimulus, enticing the consumer to take out loans and buy things, on happy talk from the various Administrations and Wall Street financiers, and on getting the banks to be willing to risk loaning out again.
Next, Day expounds briefly on the Fed and how the Fed’s actions launch the business boom-bust cycle predicted by Austrian economic theory. Day demonstrates that, rather than being a watchdog to control inflation as is often (but erroneously) thought, the Federal Reserve Bank is actually the initiator of monetary inflation. Readers are informed that this is also not without precedent…the Fed is actually the fourth incarnation of a central bank in US history, each of its predecessors having self-destructed for engaging in inflation of the nation’s currency. It seems that one of the first things that a central bank does, particularly one that engages in fractional reserve banking, is inflate the currency; the current Fed is presently on the same track, having engaged in rampant inflation that has reduced the value of the dollar to a nickel in less than a century. It is this inflationary extension of bank credit that, according to Austrian-school monetary theory, sets the stage for expansionary booms, malinvestment, economic bust and bank runs, and economic contraction.
Thus far, Day has built the case that it is impossible to control the economy in the ways that our leaders and financial professional think they can, and certainly not with such crude tools. Moreover, Day introduces us to the inevitability of the debt-fuelled boom-bust business cycle, and how the Keynesian remedies that supposedly smooth out the boom-bust cycle merely pour more fuel onto the fire. Yet these by themselves do not necessarily spell GD2; to that end, Day offers ten exhibits as to why the recession the world entered in 2008, if not delayed off by “successful” economic intervention, will deepen into a worldwide depression in the near future:
1. The investment boom leading up to 2008 was bigger and broader than in 1929. Interest rates were lower, and the duration of the expansion was longer and affected a much broader proportion of the economy in 2008 than in the times leading up to GD1.
2. Counter-cyclical fiscal policy was enacted on a bigger and wider scale than in 1929.
3. There is less margin today for government intervention than in 1929. The government had much more lebensraum to enact debt-fuelled economic “stimulus” back then than today.
4. Loan defaults are spreading into other sectors of the economy.
5. The “rescued” banks and corporations, rather than being returned to health, were instead resurrected as “zombies”. The “too-big-to-fail” policy merely propped up unhealthy businesses while short-circuiting the process of creative destruction and reallocation of resources necessary for an economy to recover from malinvestment.
6. Derivatives and the credit contraction multiplier. This refers to the contraction of every dollar and the collapse of the credit that is leveraged upon each, sometimes as large as a factor of 40. However, rather than “unwinding” these debt derivatives, the banksters are in effect “doubling down” on their bets.
7. Labor inefficiency. This refers to policies that encourage partial employment, such as employing two people at 20 hours per week than one person at 40 hours per week. Indications are that companies in the US are increasingly electing to under-employ their workers rather than simply laying them off, perhaps due to the social costs inherent in full-time versus part-time workers.
8. A shortage of war, at least one in which the country is the victor. However, Day suggests that socioeconomic theory suggests that the longer a downturn lasts, the greater the probability that a depression-inspired war will occur.
9. The economic drag effect from environmental legislation such as Waxman-Markley.
10. Socio-nomic patterns and the “Grand Supercycle” bear wave. Elliot wave theory posits that we are on the cusp of a global downturn of huge proportions.
Mr. Day marries up these ten reasons that the economy is headed for a downturn with six potential future outcomes. These outcomes are, in order of his forecasted probability: Great Depression II, the Great Recession that doesn’t fully develop into a depression, hyperinflation and stagnating growth, a jobless recovery, “Fallout 4″, live and in color, and a V-shaped recession culminating in a return to a happy-days-are-here-again bull market. It should come as no surprise that to the reader that, given the case he makes in his book, Day believes GD2 to be the most probable and, if Austrian theory is to be believed, the most healthy for our country overall. Thus, Mr. Day suggests that we’re in store for a GD2 that will be one-third worse than GD1, with a 35% decline in real GDP over a five-year period and a bottom on 2012 or 2013 at a Dow below 1,500. Stern and sobering stuff.
Day ends his book with a laundry list of things that the US could do immediately to bring about economic recovery. 1. Stop digging. Raise interest rates, allow deflation, and permit the deleveraging process to begin. 2. No more bailouts that create zombie banks and zombie companies. 3. Cut takes in half. This permits consumers to deleverage themselves faster, as well as help shape the economy in a way that is congruent with consumer preferences. 4. Require a supermajority for federal spending. It goes without saying that there should not be a third simulus package. 5. Audit the Fed. Find out where the ugly truths are, and expose the inner workings of this semi-independent institution to the light of day (no pun intended). 6. Repeal laws that partially nationalize the financial industry. 7. Withdraw American troops from all overseas locations. War is expensive, and these resources are and will be needed elsewhere. 8. Stop the expansion of the labor force and the collapse of wages by halting immigration and establishing incentives to permit married women with children to raise them at home. 9. Ban bankster bonuses and other perverse use of the taxpayer’s money. Since they signed up for the people’s money, they should have no truck with following the people’s terms. 10. End the Fed.
My analysis: Putting aside the occasional typo error, which ocurred with some frequency toward the end of the book, overall, I thought this was a good book on par with Sowell’s Basic Economics in terms of the “a ha!”-producing, connect-the-dots moments it provided. The book itself isn’t terribly technical, and it is appropriate for beginners not steeped in Austrian economic theory, although a basic background certainly does help since Day’s Austrian orientation undergirds his entire argument. I myself found grateful that I had previously read Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression; Rothbard’s tome certainly helped to provide the cognitive backdrop useful to understanding Day’s book.
One of the things I liked best about this book is how it absolutely shreds the idea that smoothing out business cycles using technical analysis and intervention is even remotely possible, or should even be attempted in the first place. Here Day’s argument dovetails nicely with Sowell’s…that there is no way that the socialist planner can know all the information at every point of transaction in an economy…and thus the same principle of lack of sufficient knowledge extends to bankers and monetary authorities as well.
Reading this book, I was also interested to note the Fed and the Bank of Japan take an active role in monetary policy management whereas the Swiss National Bank, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Riksbank of Sweden, and the Reserve Bank of Austria take a more mechanistic rules-based policy of monetary management. I wonder if there is a correlative relationship between the large Japanese/American investment bubbles and the smaller ones in these other countries as a result of this active management style?
Lastly, I also very much appreciated Mr. Day’s casting of the field of economics as “the study of political economy”. This terminology reinforces the fact that economics is not a physical science but more a study of the interactions of people, institutions, and governmental organs. In other words, politics. And politics often trumps facts, and any attempt to study the field without considering the effect of irrational politics on supposedly rational transactions in an economy will likely fall short.
* For more reading on usury lending, I suggest a trip here.
** U-3 also excludes other institutionalized populations, such as the uniformed US military, which was a whopping 2.2M in FY2005.
*** I found the footnote on the bottom of page 157 particularly apt: “Mainstream economics today is largely an incoherent synthesis of Keynesianism with Friedmanite empiricism tarted up with econometrics and flavored with a dash of neo-classicism. It seldom makes any sense, for the very logical reason that it is not a theoretical system but a collection of concepts taken from various economic theories.
**** The below table drawn from RGD shows the timing of each anti-recession stimulus package. Note how each comes “late to need”
About the author: EW is a well-trained monkey charged with operating heavier-than-air machinery. His interests outside of being an opinionated rabble-rouser are hunting, working out, motorcycling, spending time with his family, and flying. He is a father to three, a husband to one, and is a sometime contributor here at Spearhead. More of his intolerable drivel is available at the blog The Elusive Wapiti.
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{ 55 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent Review.
Rothbard explains the cure. This book is free in PDF
Depressions and Their Cure
There are a lot of people predicting worse to come for the economy. Every day I read such predictions. They may well be correct but the time scale can be longer than they expect. What is of interest to me though is the effect this will have on feminism. There was a time I thought that a sever economic downturn would see feminism retreat. I can no longer hold that opinion. In fact I have had to revise my expectation to the reverse conclusion that feminism will be greatly strengthened by an economic downturn.
My former optimism was based on the assumption that in a downturn productive male employment would be preserved while unproductive female employment would wither. As we all know this hardly seems to be the case. Even in Japan which was discussed in the article 20 years of economic problems has not displaced feminism.
I think part of my misreading of the situation was that I thought economics would dominate over politics. This I can now see is not the case. Political ideology is in my view clearly paramount. I don’t think this should be a surprise since in the end politicians never seem to be able to change their minds and alter course. Things have to be pushed to destruction and only then is there change.
If I had to bet then I would put my money on more female supremacy being offer as a solution to economic problems. The worse the problems become the more the same solution will be offered and indeed followed.
Absolutely agree!
I’m glad you mentioned Japan. That country is now plagued with what is known as “grass eater males”: men who simply have not bought into the BS of being a provider.
Should the economy sink deep and men massively unemployed, I believe, on the contrary that feminism will not survive.
Women will be extremely resentful at the mere thought of paying very high income taxes just to keep millions of men in jail or unemployed. Just think of the societal damages..
I do not believe that women could keep the country, the economy, social security, caring for their (possible) children: basically do everything, alive, while men sit lazily under the shade of a tree.
Ask any African woman if she likes doing 100% of the job while her mates flirt with everything that has a skirt on and bring her back HIV
The bigger problem will be rounding men up to assume the provider role again, against which they will offer a resounding “NO”.
We are going to get a rough ride, all of us: fasten your seat belts..
Men will find another way to live. Women will have no choice but to adapt.
Whatever happens, I will adapt. I don’t care too much about the future: que sera sera.
Rebel you could be correct. I was thinking of the grass eating males when I was making my post. To me though this is just evidence of men being pushed aside and indeed pushed out of society. I have to say that I do think women are capable of all the things you list. The trouble is that 30 years ago I would not have thought women capable of everything they have done since then. I clearly underestimated what was to come.
By the way I don’t think that women would be so kind as to see us laze under trees. In fact we would be lucky to make it to the bread line and the soup kitchen. Even these things may be too much to expect in the future. We may in fact only have grass to eat. We may even not be permitted to be born at all.
>>There is a limit to how much the consumer will load themselves up with debt, just as there is a limit to how many cars, televisions, refrigerators, and DVDs they can reasonably enjoy, just as there is a limit to how cheap the government can make the money
I think it’ll be a good thing when the economy collapses for this reason… Economies based on consumption do just that– consume. After a while we’ll have used up our natural resources in an orgy of worthless trinkets and BS items we don’t need. We already know we’re running out of oil, yet, our only solution to the problems of mankind is to CONSUME so that we can make these damn numbers in this artificial financial system we’ve created add up. Maybe we’ll think of some reasonable solutions to our problems.
At least we won’t have a landfill the size of Texas filled with broken and abandoned plasma TVs 100 years hence.
A very good review, EW. My husband is reading The Return of the Great Depression right now and it will be my turn after he is done.
>>Even in Japan which was discussed in the article 20 years of economic problems has not displaced feminism.
Feminism has never had the kind of cultural significance in Japan as it’s had here. Over there, the family dynamic remains largely unchanged from how it was post WWII. The man is still the major breadwinner, and the woman still takes care of the children, the finances, and basically runs the home.
It’s not the threat to society there that it is here, so its sustainability can’t really be exposed. It’s too minor to do any damage to the average home.
Japan has a lot of problems with the way it does things that I would not like to duplicate here, but one thing that I really appreciate about them is the concept of ame. Rather than rush off to bed the nearest alpha male when your partner shows any ILVs, Japanese women are taught from an early age that their ideal relationship is one in which your partner should be able to request help and get you to take care of them, at least for a short time. It’s the opposite “OMG how dare you show weakness to me I’m so going to cheat on you!” thing we’ve got going here, where you have to stay perfect.
Maybe they do have affairs left and right, but at least they can pretend to love each other.
Sorry, where I said >>its sustainability can’t really be exposed
should have read >>its unsustainability can’t really be exposed
Blegh, put too much faith in Firefox’s spell checker.
By the way I don’t think that women would be so kind as to see us laze under trees. In fact we would be lucky to make it to the bread line and the soup kitchen. Even these things may be too much to expect in the future. We may in fact only have grass to eat. — Paul
Have a look at this map.
From Powell River on the South, to Highway 97 running up the middle, to Kitimat in the North, there is a population of less than 5,000 people – mostly small Indian fishing villages on the coast, and the odd wilderness retreat in the middle of nowhere. The distance from Powell River to Kitimat is approximately 400 miles as the crow flies.
It is highly liveable. There is just no infrastracture there, and it is sheltered from the East by mountain ranges, and the West by the Ocean – the West Coast is thick rainforest, btw, and on all of those arms that go inland… take your sailboat, a few guns, a couple axes and head into one of them. The place is virtually untouched, and filled with deer, moose, grouse, ducks, etc. etc. There is seafood in the ocean, and the rivers are full of world class sized salmon, not to mention hundreds of untouched fresh water lakes.
T’will be a frosty day in hell before you’ll see me selling apples on a streetcorner!
That is a map of British Columbia, Canada, btw.
And, as of yet, I’ve never heard of us shooting border jumpers.
So assuming that all of this is true, how can I maximize my profits and minimize my losses while this goes down?
I don’t give a shit about “saving” the US, finding a unicorn, or any other quixotic tasks. I just want to make money cash money and keep as much of that value as possible, and so far as I am concerned nothing that’s technically legal (or even arguably legal – lawyers can be hired and jurisdictions can be changed if the money justifies the trouble) which produces rewards commensurate with the risks it off the table.
And I am pretty ignorant right now regarding complex economics so any explanations can’t be too detailed without telling me where to study up on the basics. I’d just like some broad strokes and ideas to guide my research, and I know some guys here know this kind of stuff like the backs of their hands.
>>The place is virtually untouched, and filled with deer, moose, grouse, ducks, etc. etc. There is seafood in the ocean, and the rivers are full of world class sized salmon, not to mention hundreds of untouched fresh water lakes.
Good luck with that. The population of the US is probably way too large for the continent to support, at least the way you’re talking.
I think people splintering off into small subsistence agriculture communes is much more likely. I’m so going to miss the internet and computers… Still, if I could be around tolerable people (read: not 99% of the people I’ve ever met) it would be nice.
Gold and silver coins.
The population of the US is probably way too large for the continent to support, at least the way you’re talking.
Why would I care about that?
Fedrz its an interesting picture you pain and an interesting idea. I live in the UK but have in fact been to the area you identify. Certainly there and up into Alaska there is nothing but open space and I suspect good hunting for those who know how. Men used to live there for some part of the year as they prospected for gold. It could well be that it will only be in such places that men will continue to exits at all. There may be males living elsewhere but they wont be men.
@too late for romance
read mark nestmann’s book “the lifeboat strategy” it gives you many investment ideas in the process of teaching you about asset protection.
the key message of that book is with investments don’t think locally think globally.
A worldwide economic collapse won’t be a problem for me. I’ll just eat the feminist. (Have you seen how fat they are. Nature has a way of balancing things out.)
Too much bad cholesterol.
I’ve taken the ferry through the Inside Passage. There’s nobody there — you’ll see nothing for hours on end but trees and islands on either side. All the while there are fish jumping, whales breaching, birds everywhere… All you’d need to survive comfortably would be a clear patch of land for a garden, a few guns (ideally a 12 gauge shotgun, an elk/bear rifle, a varmint rifle – e.g. my mini-14, which can handle a wide range of varmints
– and a .22), and a complement of gardening and carpentry tools. For real luxury, just have a trailer barged out there and get a wood stove and a Husqvarna to feed it. You’d only have to go to the store a few times a year for supplies and you’d be good to go. It’s my idea of heaven.
Vox Day is not correct. It’s going to be MUCH worse than the great depression if they get it going.
I have already made my plans.
duh.
You can’t open your borders to tomato pickers, give away all your cash to feel good charities – like Americans have done – then charge the bill to Treaury Note IOU’s in Beijing and expect more
“Let the Goodtimes Roll”
I think it’s true that the coming crisis is going to be “what do we do about all of these underachieving men?”. It’s an issue not just for women, but for the society as a whole.
My guess is that the first response will be a social campaign to encourage men to “behave responsibly” to their communities and so on — by improving themselves so that they can, and do, provide for a family and children. When that doesn’t work (and I doubt it will, due to everything from the educational system to the dating market), other solutions will be looked at, at least in theory.
One theory is that with the advances of robotics and automation coming in the decades ahead, we simply don’t “need” that many men any longer (when you view men reductively from the perspective of what kinds of things men seem to do in the society that women do in far fewer numbers). When robots are building houses and infrastructure, are fighting our wars and so on, the fundamental roles that society still looks towards men to provide even in this feminist age will be finally obsolete. If that comes to pass, it won’t be terribly long before the suggestion is made to curb the birthing of males, likely based on what will be the perceived role of all of the excess males in social maladies. I could imagine in such a scenario that male babies become reduced to 25% or less of births, preferably genetically selected to have only the most superior genesets for breeding purposes. Children will be raised collectively by the state apparatus and the birth mothers. Sexuality would have been either largely suppressed (or dealt with via synthetic means as well) or largely channeled into the direction of female homosexuality as the norm.
Another option would be to have the state continue to grow, and become a really socialist government, which does not give men the option to opt out. In other words, men will be assessed of their abilities and the state will simply force them to attend whatever training the state deems fit and work at whatever the state deems fit, regardless. I could very well imagine this scenario in the not too distant future as well.
The key to me, though, is that it is very unlikely that the society as a whole would tolerate for an extended period of time having a large group of underperforming, underachieving men. Something will be done about that, and my guess is a lot of the options looked at will not be great for men as a class.
Rebel January 19, 2010 at 08:27
‘grass eaters’, ‘going galt’…whatever the saying. There is now a generation of men who refuse to pay for a woman or children. I have joined them. I would say to all men they should do this and let women fend for themselves. When they are poor they will be more compliant…
What’s easier? Giving a man a good sex life for a living or working for a living?
Hhhmmmm….maybe 20 hours of ‘sex and intimacy’ versus 160 hours work + commute a month.
Even a WOMAN can figure out which one is better. LOL!! This is why there are prostitutes. It is because it’s one of the easiest jobs there are and it is well paid. prostitutes aren’t prostitutes because there are no other jobs around. It is because there are no other jobs so well paid for so little around.
I like my situation now. I don’t even talk socially to a woman unless it is clear she is offering me sex. The only women I talk to socially where this is not the case are the wives of my colleagues.
But…the collapse is coming. I can’t see what is going to stop it. And it’s going to be really bad. And us men should just let the women suffer. We are going to have a hard enough time of it ourselves.
There are those who say buy gold. I think gold is over priced right now and there is evidence the bad guys have cornered the gold market. And in any case, you can’t eat gold. My own view is that it is going to get really bad and that all that will count is fgood and water. And since we have so many people it will not be possible to grow food as people will come along and steal it. My view of the future is that people are going to kill each other in massive numbers for the scant food available. Of course, this assumes they get their war going. People stockpiling food are laughable in my opinion. And some really well informed people are doing that.
…and a Husqvarna to feed it.
Plus, then you’ve got an instrument to play too!
Heh, heh. I like that song.
I have mentioned this problem on my blog for some time..
http://dissention.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/do-you-see-the-problem-01/
Ah…. This is what I come here for. Brain food. Very nice.
Advocatus, nice post.
Have you guys checked out The Economist’s Big Mac Index? They created it to be funny, but it’s supposedly actually a pretty good measure of purchasing power parity.
One would think this measure would be quite important to track, yet the Fed seems unconcerned with the explosive growth in the money supply
I think the growth might be intentional; they’re using inflation to reduce the cost of servicing the national debt.
7. Labor inefficiency. This refers to policies that encourage partial employment, such as employing two people at 20 hours per week than one person at 40 hours per week.
I think he’s missing a point that will probably be obvious to your readers here: married women with children prefer part-time work. As men leave the work environment, they are often replaced with 2 part-time women. This increases inefficiency and lowers productivity, but it also lowers social costs because those women are cheaper since they’re often riding on their husband’s health care plans, life insurance, retirement, etc. But it’s a bit like a pyramid scheme; it only works as long as the married women’s husbands aren’t the ones leaving. That’s the problem today; the married women are going into part-time work to replace their husband’s full-time employment.
3. Cut takes in half.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what does this mean?
One of the things I liked best about this book is how it absolutely shreds the idea that smoothing out business cycles using technical analysis and intervention is even remotely possible, or should even be attempted in the first place.
Amen. Why is it so difficult to get people to understand this simple concept?
Should the economy sink deep and men massively unemployed, I believe, on the contrary that feminism will not survive.
Feminism (and the associated materialism and socialism) won’t survive because feminists don’t reproduce. So, it’s a mute point anyway. It’s an ideology that has overplayed its hand and is going the way of the dodo.
Japan is a good example of that. Only the most traditional women are still having children, and then usually only one or two (fertility rate of 1.3). The country is aging and depopulating. Depopulation only lasts until there is an internal fertility resurgence, or the society is overtaken from the outside by a more fertile society. And I think mass-euthanasia of the aging and infirm is a real possibility. After all, most people acquiesce to the murder of innocent children; do you think they’ll give a darn about the old or sick?
You guys keep mentioning alternative futures but you’re forgetting about the tried and true habit of conquering decadent and depopulating countries. Do you really think prime real estate like America and Europe is going to go empty and get filled with robots? Really?
Thomas Sowell is a genius, by the way. His The Einstein Syndrome was life-changing for us.
It’s a possibility. Remember that technological advances can be true game-changers. Robotics as a discipline is humming along, and the military is actively engaged in developing robotic “soldier” type weapons platforms (they don’t look like humans, but they act like soldiers). At some point they will be very good, and will help prevent the depopulating country from being overrun because we will have them and others will not.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100119/ap_on_bi_ge/us_marriage_economics
“The shifts in earnings capacity coincided with a marked decline in the share of Americans who are married. Among U.S.-born 30- to 44-year-olds, 60 percent were married in 2007, compared with 84 percent in 1970. For African-Americans, the rates were even lower — 33 percent of black women and 44 percent of black men were married in 2007, the report said. “
At some point they will be very good, and will help prevent the depopulating country from being overrun because we will have them and others will not.
For how long? Look at nuclear weapons. It doesn’t take long for the others to catch on, I’d say.
Perhaps, but there’s always the next thing. It’s like The Red Queen analogy as well — while everyone else is trying to catch up, we’re moving on to the next thing. I mean if we look at conventional weapons even as they stand today, no other single country can really go toe-to-toe in terms of conventional weapons, even though the technology is out there. Eventually, of course, they will, by means of arms sales and dissecting weapons and making their own. But by then we’ll be running armies with The Terminator in them. Unless we dramatically cut our military spending, I do think that the Pentagon and our political class will continue to place importance on maintaining a technological edge in military terms. As a result, I suspect that our country will continue to persist for quite some time even as it changes demographically.
Hmm… but that would presuppose 2 important things:
1) People will allow politicians to take their money to spend it on electronic gadgets and robots that are used to lower our happiness (not just our fun and sexual fulfillment, but our deeper joy), and lead to our eventual demise (through depopulation).
2) That that money even exists. The government’s already basically running on pretend money as it is.
The population of the US is probably way too large for the continent to support, at least the way you’re talking.
Wrong. The population density of the US is much lower than that of almost all other developed countries. Britain has 8 times the density of the US.
In fact, if the entire US, excluding the mountains, had an Ohio level of density (let alone a Connecticut level of density), the US would have over 1 billion people, and would still not seem crowded.
2 is true, we could simply be bankrupt for an extended period and be forced to cut military spending on things like this.
As for 1, it will be easily peddled as being good, because it would arguably cut down on American combat deaths. Hard to argue against that really.
Nukes also cut down on American combat deaths but we don’t use them either.
True but irrelevant. They will simply wage unconventional war. You might have noticed something like that happening over the last few years.
Yes but that works as sniping, not as taking over a country.
That’s because nukes have huge environmental and political downsides. They are strategic weapons, primarily, not tactical ones. Good to have ‘em for deterrence, really bad to use ‘em. Bot-warriors are totally different. And they are going to come — prototypes are already in testing, frankly.
You think robots will be taking over countries? I am going to take a wild guess and say you have no experience with either robotics or warfare.
Prototypes do not impress me. The incredible complexity of this idea, combined with the procurement process will ensure that a fantasy robot army will take an eternity to actually be fielded (assuming that they even work at all).
But it will give the technophiles something to fantasize about, I guess.
Interesting analysis. I’m no economics major but I see a huge flaw in that article which causes to me to question all the rest of it.
How’s bringing the troops home going to fix the economy? That’ll just add more people standing around looking for work. And I don’t need the competition.
A better way to solve this problem would be not allowing any more people to join. The armed forces should close it’s doors for good. Eventually, after a couple decades, people will retire, get killed, go awol, whatever. Then everything will just fade into oblivion, slowly, but without costing those people their jobs. Sure right now they might be driving tanks, but by the end of their career, they could do airport security, or work for border patrol. I’m sure that would solve two birds with one stone. No more army, but an impenetrable wall between Mexico and the US.
Remind me what the Canadian gun laws are…
Remind me what the Canadian gun laws are…
We are a pubic hair from getting the long-gun registry repealed.
We, in the West, are not as Socialist as one might think. We only make up 1/3 of the population. And yet, we vote over 70% as a unit to fuck over the socialist east, who has, for the past 40 years operated under the ospice of “Fuck the West, We’ll Take the Rest.” (The West is where the $$$ is, just not the population).
There are lots of buried guns out west, heh heh.
And, after 40yrs, we finally grew big enough to get a Western Prime Minister… and, while he has to do back flips to please the East, he knows he better please us in the end, or he has no fucking home to return to. Seriously.
Rebel January 19, 2010 at 08:27
“Ask any African woman if she likes doing 100% of the job while her mates flirt with everything that has a skirt on and bring her back HIV”.
Paradoxically, you just expressed a feminist view.
Trust me, the men in Africa aren’t busy chasing skirt, while the women do all the work. NOT BY A LONG BLOODY SHOT.
Too much TV perpetually showing you the hardlife of the African women, whilst neglecting to show you the hard yakka the husband is pulling in some major city or urban area to send money back to her in the rural area is what you dont see.
Despite being Australian, I follow American politics with interest. Let me just say what a delight it is to me to see a pro-abort feminist who kept her maiden name, kept an innocent man in jail for two extra years, and who probably got made a candidate because she is female, lose in such humiliating circumstances.
Goodbye Martha Coakley. And fuck off Emily’s List!
“Piggybacking on his contention that “no one knows anythingâ€, Day then contends that a nation’s economy is too large, with too many actors, for anyone to exert any modicum of control.”
Yes, that is a key point – the American economy, along with some other ones around the world, are far too complex for anyone or anything to ‘control’ – thus the only solution is to split up nations and economies further; for instance, the USA could become around 5-7 different economic zones grouped by states which are similar in many ways, i.e. The PacNW, The Southeast, the Upper Midwest, New England, etc. The largest states such as California, New York, Texas, and so on ought to even be able to have much more local and regional control over their statewide economy.
As a Southerner this to me means that The South will soon gain more independence from the hegemonic national economy and be allowed to develop along its own lines, basically a Neo-Confederacy. Same with areas like the American Pacific Northwest, which would be a manageable nation if it was on its own or just loosely tied to the USA in a Confederation.
We need to split the USA up in to a least 5-7 different economic zones, and even (peacefully) break the USA up in to smaller nations which are more economically and socially manageable. I think that the state of Texas will take the first steps towards this and will eventually seek to secede entirely from the USA.
A mandatory stint of military and/or social service (of about 2 years) should be put in place for all unemployed men not in college between about 18-35 – this would give the unemployed people daily structure, a small personal income, three square means a day, a roof over their head, daily exercise, basic combat skills, etc. However, THESE DRAFTED MEN SHOULD NOT BE SENT TO WAR OVERSEAS OF ELSEWHERE – something tells me we will need them here in the coming years to possibly quell social disturbances and such. The unemployed men and women who are inducted in the military ought to be strictly segregated by gender, ideally separate military bases altogether. Again, this is not a draft for planned future wars, but rather a peacetime draft for chronically unemployed people – being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan ought to be left open to volunteers.
Also, the state governments should immediately institute a ‘Green Jobs Corp’ for unemployed men and women – it would be a public/private partnership, and these workers would receive a living wage for doing various ‘green-collar jobs’ – stuff like going around planting trees in deforested areas, tearing down old decrepit buildings and recycling the old materials, repairing damaged topsoils around the nation, learning how to tend to a farm or raise livestock, learning sustainable construction skills, manufacturing solar panels/wind turbines, creating or cleaning up public parks, and on and on…the possibilities are endless because the general living environment can always be improved upon.
Most importantly these programs should be organized as locally as possible – by state (NOT FEDERAL), province, then county, city/town, district, and down to the very local level, true grassroots. Even in terms of the military service, it should be organized preferably by state (militias) and not federally.
All of the you uber-free market Austrian Schoolers are truly deluded – there hasn’t been a free market in most Western nations since sometime in the 19th Century. Free markets don’t exist anymore except on a very local level (and often not even then), they went extinct a long time ago – get over it. And no, I am not a socialist, but I am a Third Positionist: ideally combining the most favorable elements of both capitalism and socialism. There is a new party along those lines in Cali, by the way – http://american3p.org/
black/german: Feminism (and the associated materialism and socialism) won’t survive because feminists don’t reproduce. So, it’s a mute point anyway.
it is interested, when a punter having your levels of intelligence says such things
feminism is viral, it spreads from dead brain to dead brain. it is ridiculous to posit that feminism will somehow die with its adherents
it thrives in converting new followers, much more than by birthwright.
the problem is that males are trying to fight feminism by use of woman’s tactics, arguing, claiming victim (even though true in many cases), etc
this will NEVER work, as women especially, when stripped of the christian ethic, simply do not have the base sense of mercy, honor, and justice required tosee the larger picture that is not limited to their own direct experience
we will not see progress until men respond with MEN’S tradition of persuading tactic: simple claim of authority, backup with potential violence in extreme cases. it is this which works so well to keep young boys in line,
once men finally shed their limits and hesitation in applying the same to women – especially the ‘backup with violence in extreme case’ – feminism will die like a beach whale
when men finally have guts to insure what women like the duke girl end up DEAD, in a ditch, we will see welcome change, not until then however.
In order to run an army with Terminators in them, somebody needs to build and maintain those robots. I’m in one of the most technologically advanced and demanding job specialties in the Marine Corps, for instance, and most of the guys I know who enlisted are so pissed off at the Marine Corps (and for some, America) that they certainly not going to re-enlist. Furthermore, less and less quality people are seeing enlistment as a wise choice. (Older generations seem to have a hard time gauging the extent of this, and why it is happening.) If society keeps punishing men (especially as men are born entirely into an abusive system which they can’t understand and which only grows more wacky with each new day), they’ll find no reason to build and maintain that army of Terminators. I like the John Bagot Glubb article/quote on this:
RE: PAUL….
” We may even not be permitted to be born at all.”
COUPLED WITH:
A Womans right to chose…..
And , males left without a reproductive right o preserve our sex.
Spells eventual doom
Or eventual male gender – population control.
Modern sciences capacity to aid such chosings…
http://www.fertilityfriend.com/Faqs/Gender-Selection-The-Shettles-Method.html
Potentially, much…much…more grave looking future for males than I can get these CHILD LIKE, DICK-ACTIVE / BRAIN-DEADs. to realalized….
I have constantly harped to MRAs. ( anti-feminist-Jonny-come-latelys ) about men needing to amp up the conversation over 3 party surrogatcy/reproduction approach for males …to no avail …or follow up …or disscussions ….or interest in the topic .
So when we face sex selection. – ………extinction ……….( and we will ! )
Do you think “GAME”…..will….have much meaning ?
( Insert. denial /childlike – humor here )
Gentlemen…..all else…… is a waste of effort and time,….at this point
In your
” GAME ”
This angle , as a pursuit and focus for the young MRAs…… is a must !!!
The BabyDoom aged MRAs just don’t get how serious this threat is…and…its stealth appoach….and they are your leaders on these mens websites.
Its not politics…stupid….
The real upcoming threat to males is found in…
SCIENCE……
BUT….carry on as you were….( 40 years behind the feminist curve )
” and then….they came for me….and there was no left….”
I am going to take a wild guess and say you have no experience with either robotics or warfare.
I used to work as a sw engineer in robotics development (although for production, not warfare) and am married to an electrical engineer, so I have a bit of experience and knowledge in the subject.
The problems with robots are many:
1) As J explained above, robots have to be built and maintained. You can build robots to do that, but somebody has to build THOSE robots, and so on. At some point, you need humans designing, building, and maintaining robots. In our manufacturing division, there weren’t many humans involved (highly robotic), but our research and design facility grew at a faster rate. Every robot resulted in 5 or 6 new engineers, which is why the company grew exponentially at the same time as automating the production line.
2) In order to do that, you’d have to convince the best engineering minds in America (largely men) that human males are irrelevant for protection and production purposes and they should create artificial beings to take over that function. In other words, you’d have to convince men to make men reproductively irrelevant. The day that happens is the day we can pack up the human race and go home.
3) The robots would occasionally go bonkers and start killing the people they were meant to protect. Yes they would. Anyone who has worked in manufacturing and development can tell you that there’s always going to be a few crap editions of any production line, no matter how you tweak it (see Six Sigma). Remember that the robots would be designed by humans and therefore fallible. Most people wouldn’t be willing to live with that risk.
4) The creation of those robots would involve humongous energy and resource outlays. Alone the amount of water necessary would be mind-boggling. People would have to curtail other parts of their lives to free up these resources. We can’t even get people to give up SUVs and large-screen TVs. The only people willing to make such sacrifices would be those who believe in the future of the human race, precisely the people who wouldn’t want such robots in the first place.
5) No system is perfect. If we made warfare so asymmetrical, it would take away other people’s concerns about killing us. They already suffer under a sense that our warfare is not proportional (they kill 3000 Americans, we wipe out their whole country). It’d become a case of “all’s fair…”
As our population reduces it also becomes more concentrated, thereby increasing the benefit of biological, chemical, or nuclear warfare. Things that robots couldn’t actually protects us from very well. One of the things that has protected America all this time is its sheer size and dispersed population. If you bunched us up in the big cities on the coastlines (inevitable in a declining population), it would make us easy targets.
Avinguda Diagonal,
it thrives in converting new followers, much more than by birthwright.
Yes, it does. That is the point. It survives by outsourcing reproduction to non-feminist women. But we’re not willing to take that anymore. They used to sugar-coat their theories and ideas in euphemisms like “choice” and “civil rights” but we’re not buying it anymore.
And we’re protecting our children from their influence. You can raise non-feminist children quite simply by turning off the TV (except for personally selected DVDs), monitoring Internet usage, and homeschooling or sending them to a carefully selected private school. Why do you think feminists are so gung-ho about public schooling? It’s their chief weapon in indoctrination.
I’d just like to point out (whenever I can) that there are five main sources of indoctrination for any language ideology (feminism being the one currently popular): public education, the news media, the entertainment industry, corporate America, and the legal system.
A wise warrior cannot fight both the enemy targeted by his commanders, then fight the commanders as well.
They still have that finest of quality: loyalty.
They don’t wish to appear as betraying the formerly great.
Reality is a bitch.
Reality is ugly. Often painful.
Roman Legions once were the epitome. Once.
Today, they are a mere memory of a faded glory.
Agreed that R0bots are a bad sci-fi fantasy. Also, we ARE cutting our defense budget. Gutting it more accurately. China is challenging us for control of the Western Pacific, they have about 24 million men who will never have wives without foreign conquest. Cheap diesel subs with ultra quiet new-generation outfits are aircraft carrier killers.
Nor are nukes “obsolete.” They certainly can be used to wipe out/decapitate political/cultural leadership, in a lightning strike. Particularly if done by a non-state or quasi state group, like AQ or the Taliban. They only need, after all, to “borrow” the nukes. Most victim societies will pay up, lacking any ability to retaliate or defend against further attacks. [Obama has ordered a unilateral nuclear disarmament, currently the Pentagon is fighting this.]
For example, factions within Pakistan could lend AQ a nuke to wipe out Copenhagen over Mo-toons. In that case, Denmark ceases to exist as a nation, and is ruled by Muslim immigrants as a Muslim nation.
Most of the surviving women would welcome traditional polygamy and dominant men even if they end up in a harem.
Meanwhile, you see angry White guys ages 22-55, who went from bottle service at clubs or poker nights with the boys, to nothing, and can’t find anything either in Obama’s world. With women getting taxed hard and White women comparitively getting the shaft, tax-wise. Being last in the patronage line. This is why women voted only 4% for Coakley and Unions barely favored her.
THAT IS A HUGE SHIFT.
There is not any more money for the Welfare System. Not any more margin for national defense. Imagine crotch-bombers dropping airliners on major US cities every week. Or Bombay style fire teams through malls and schools and sports stadiums. There is no more “give” in the system, and men are fed up. White women, too.
Nor are people going to go off the Grid to live like Ted Kcyzinski (sp?)
What you will get is some figure, good or bad, who is a man on a white horse. Offering the tried and true method of trusting your neighbor: by ethno-state loyalty.
What made America “different” was its margin — economic growth and the frontier offering a multi-ethnic state (Anglo, Celtic, African) with a relatively small government not controlling everything in life. That’s now gone, spent away. It is worth noting that FDR deported every Mexican he could find and kept Blacks out of the New Deal. Its why despite his failure to fix the Great Depression, he kept getting re-elected.
@whiskey
If the US wants to be exclusive and wallow on their dirt, fine for me. But a Frontier rule set based exclusively in whatever there’s a war or not (also seen in WWII) AND deporting the families of inmigrant soldiers is a major dick move.
@Snark
You need to see the pictures, now that’s deppresing.
Things will never get as bad as people think they will. This recession will hurt, but the only result will be a more totalitarian government. And America, even after a big recession, is still plenty rich to oppress its people for decades to come.
Hopefully a great leader will come along to save this government, but its highly unlikely.
Samseau –
Perhaps, perhaps not. According to John Bagot Glubb (props to Charles Martel for that excellent piece):
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