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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] The Five Stages of Financial Collapse

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Five Stages of Financial Collapse
  • Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:57:45 -0800

Harmon Seaver wrote:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/02/five-stages-of-collapse.html

Interesting speculations on the nature of collapse, and I think Orlov is right in that collapse is not a straight drop to the sub-basement of total chaos, but a progression that can stop at any one of his 5 steps. That's why I'm not a doomer--there are too many other stable states for collapse to rest at besides "we're all gonna die."

Orlov describes his work as "conjecture" and it certainly is. It's about as data-free an essay as I've seen in a long time. He gives no support for his ideas, no examples except the USSR's collapse, and only speculation there about the causes. I disagree with him: he says the command-and-control structure of the USSR allowed it to survive better than the market economy of the US will. But centralized control structures are notoriously poor at dealing with rapid change (e.g. FEMA and Katrina), and I think the USSR merely shows how difficult it is for an industrial state to collapse fully.

A far better system to deal with rapid change than a centralized one is a highly distributed network of independent agents, like our economy. Look at ecosystems; they deal with energy descent all the time. Western economies are like ecosystems and thus more resilient to chaos than centralized ones. Look what Russia ended up with when the gov't collapsed: independent mafia warlords who stabilized it at a high (though unpleasant) level until the gov't could function again.

I don't think the gubment will bail us out; I think local action and shifting networks of responsive people will.

Orlov also gets the housing bubble wrong, saying that we're going to have immense numbers of empty homes. Banks are already letting people miss long strings of payments on sub-prime mortgages without foreclosure, since they know getting some eventual mortgage payment is better than millions of empty houses causing further drop in home prices as well as a surge in homelessness. In fact, it's homeowners who are now walking away from their houses into cheaper ones (Thursday's Wall St Journal, page 1), leaving the banks unhappily stuck with houses worth less than what is owed. Banks know that in wholesale foreclosure, they are the big losers.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com




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