Up until today I’ve been moderately sanguine about Ebola outside of some poverty struck African countries with compromised health care systems (and places like Greece.) The main danger is incompetence and austerity, as with the CDC and Texas fumbling their Ebola cases.
No more.
Ebola is aerosolized in pigs. This may not seem like a big deal, but in many countries, like China, pigs live in very close proximity to humans. If Ebola gets into South China and the Chinese do get right on it, it really could kill millions. In any country where large numbers of people live cheek and jowl with their pigs, this is potentially explosive.
And if it does explode that way, well, some of those people will wind up traveling to your first world country while asymptomatic (or while with a light fever).
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Industry illegally injected about 3 billion gallons of fracking wastewater into central California drinking-water and farm-irrigation aquifers, the state found after the US Environmental Protection Agency ordered a review of possible contamination.
According to documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity, the California State Water Resources Board found that at least nine of the 11 hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, wastewater injection sites that were shut down in July upon suspicion of contamination were in fact riddled with toxic fluids used to unleash energy reserves deep underground. The aquifers, protected by state law and the federal Safe Water Drinking Act, supply quality water in a state currently suffering unprecedented drought.
Now. Will anyone go to jail for this?
No.
Did they save a lot of money doing this, and therefore make money?
Yes.
Will they continue doing it?
Yes.
What will stop this sort of thing from happening?
Sending senior executives, CEOs and board members to maximum security prisons, after impounding all their assets under criminal forefeiture laws, thus forcing them to rely on public defenders. Prosecute them under RICO statutes to make sure you sweep the executive suite.)
(No, I don’t approve of criminal forfeiture laws as they exist right now (seizure before guilt is proved), nor do I approve of RICO. But if they’re being used against ordinary people, they should be used against the executive class. Best way to get them repealed, too.)
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Guidance is falling all over the world for economies, with even Germany at risk of falling into recession. The US dollar has been rising in a huge flight to safety, while the price of oil has been dropping. Growth in the world economy has ultimately been based on the BRICs and those have been based primarily on Chinese demand along with a series of new housing and equity bubbles. Those who say there is no inflation are fools: there is plenty of it, showing up in real estate and stock markets.
Meanwhile, in the developed world, all of this money has gone to the top, not to the top 10%, but to the top 3% or so (depending on how you cut the pie), with the majority going not just to the 1% but to the top .1%. Demand has been driven almost entirely by the demands of the rich: high level housing in global cities like London; and stock market appreciation vastly above any conceivable rate of productivity increase. Corporations have made their profits by engaging in oligopoly pricing, with US cable giants making almost 100% returns on “high speed internet”, for example.
The market for real-estate is nowhere close to clearing: there are many more houses, apartments and condos empty than there are homeless people; prices are rising far faster than either inflation or wages, and debt is piling up on on new home entrants, especially in the United States, where the student loan bubble has impoverished the people old folks expect to buy their houses at inflated prices.
The base of the economy, of a mass economy, is thus rotten. However, it needs to be emphasized that the majority of the economy post 08 has been based on central bank money printing: that money has been used to directly and deliberately inflate housing and stock markets. There is no “economic recovery” as the post-war world understood it, there is only print-priming, bubble pumping, oligopoly pricing and austerity driven buyout activity.
Demand for actual workers has been kept low while profits and gains from bubbles have been kept high, leading to massive cyclical gains for the rich. The late Jane Jacobs worried (a little early, but presciently) that we were moving into an old-style world. She got the details wrong, but she got the essence correct: as many have observed in the decades since, the plan is aristocracy, and the plan is succeeding. There is aristocracy by right (billionaires) and there is aristocracy by position (corporate officers), and there are important retainers and local gentry (centi-millionaires), but the well-being of the majority of the population is not a concern
What is a concern is making the system self-perpetuating: locking in high profits, making sure that the heirs of the aristocracy keep the gains, and making sure that labor never gains the ability, either politically or through economic pressure, to upset the game.
They will not succeed, due to exogenous shocks to the system they cannot control, and due to their own rather shattering incompetence, but that does not mean things will get better for ordinary people, instead what is more likely is social collapse amid climate change and a number of wars, as America loses its hegemony (by some measures China is now the world’s largest economy. Do not expect that America will go easy into that long night, nor that China will not remodel the world as it continues to rise.)
Many countries are now more tied to China that to the US for survival: their elites make their money selling commodities to China, not the US, and their ordinary people get their imported goods the same way. Again, do not expect this to not affect the world.
The US is still the dominant power, to be sure, and it will use its dominance and all its tools to hang on and make more billionaires and centi-millionaires, but its day of hegemony is over. Nor, I suspect, will China’s day (if it succeeds in overthrowing the American Raj) be long.
In the meantime, recession comes, in the midst of the ongoing depression. Buckle up, it’s going to be ugly.
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The Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement in in trouble, and one of the reasons is Japan has refused to eliminate agricultural tariffs. Japan is entirely correct in this.
Japan’s agriculture is not efficient: it costs more to grow food in Japan than it does in many other nations. If Japan removed its tariffs, its agricultural sector would either be eliminated or forced to consolidate and specialize in crops it has a comparative advantage in. Whatever these are (perhaps silk), they wouldn’t be staple food crops. Japan would thus lose what ability it has to feed itself and would have to buy even more food on world markets than it does today.
Regular readers will recognize this pattern from the article on why the third world is even more impoverished today than it was 40 years ago. Now Japan is by no means a third world country, and money would be loaned to it to buy said food, but Japan is not a healthy economy either. The Japanese recently lowered the value of the Yen significantly, and their exports didn’t increase.
Contrary to economic dogma that sort of thing happens fairly often: people simply are already buying as much of what Japan makes as they want.
Japan is not what it was 30 years ago, or even 10. It runs an export deficit and it is barely running a current account surplus any more . Even when the economy was healthy, having to buy much of its energy was painful, having to buy its food would be even more so.
But more importantly, it would make Japan vulnerable to anyone who controlled foreign currency loans they need to buy the food, and to the major food producers. Japan can print money, to be sure, and has, but there comes a point where you can’t, where people won’t take it. Japan isn’t there yet, but they risk being there someday soon. And bear in mind that as global warming bites, food will become more and more scarce. Right now we have a huge food surplus, that will not remain the case.
Countries which cannot produce what the rest of the world needs, nor produce what they need, are always in great danger from other nations which can cut them off. They give up power over their own fate, and others will take advantage of it to force them to do as they wish, including opening up their markets to allow the commanding heights of the economy to be purchased.
Japan has been badly run for decades, and made the same mistake the US did when its bubble collapsed: they did not wipe the debts off the books, but instead extended and pretended. That lead to the long “bright depression”, but it is now leading them into a much worse period.
They are, however, doing something right in refusing to remove their tariffs. To be sure, they are doing so for domestic political reasons (the small rural farmers are politically powerful), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still the correct thing to do.
Since the TPP is, overall, a terrible trade agreement (they virtually all are) let us hope the Japanese stick to their guns and that it does scupper the agreement. It’ll be best for them, and for us.
(An earlier article on the same topic disappeared except for the title. This is a rewrite, but with additional detail.)
(Article changed to indicate that Japan is still (barely) running a current account surplus, not a deficit.) -10/14/2014)
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In my recent post on Ebola I mentioned that the turn off point for Africa being able to handle an epidemic was in the 70s and 80s. That’s worth a full post on its own. The first thing to understand is this: 3rd world GDP growth in the post-war liberal period (roughtly 46-68 or so), was good. It was above population growth in most cases. That changed around about the time OPEC grabbed the West by short and curlies, squeezed and wound up with tons of money they didn’t know what to do with. This is an act in three parts:
ACT 1: Banks Loan Money to Third World Countries
Lots and lots of it. The pitch is this: we know how to develop countries. You’ll borrow this money, invest in development and have more than enough money to pay off the loans. Except that they didn’t know how to develop countries and even those countries in which the leaders didn’t steal the money, the loans grew faster than the tax base, leaving governments less and less able to administer their own countries.
ACT II: Money, Money, Money and Cash Crops
So, you need $. Foreign dollars. How do you get them? You could do what Japan, Korea, the United States and Britain all did, and develop real industry behind trade barriers, of course, but that’s not what the experts are telling you to do. What they’re saying is “you have a competitive advantage in certain commodities: cash crops and maybe minerals. You should work on that.”
Most cash crops are best grown on plantations, so if you want to move your economy to cash crops, you have to move the subsistence farmers off their land. That means they will go to the cities and need food that you no longer grow (since you’re growing cash crops to sell to Westerners.) But hey, that’s ok, because with all the foreign currency you’ll be getting from bananas, coffee and so on, you’ll be able to buy that food from Europe and America and Canada. Right? Right!
Except that everyone is getting this advice, and everyone is growing more cash crops, and the price drops through the floor and you have a thirty year commodities depression. You can’t feed the people you’ve shoved off the land without taking more loans; there are no jobs for those people, so now instead of self-supporting peasants you’ve got a huge amount of people in slums. But, on the bright side, while not enough hard currency has been created to develop, or even stay ahead of your loans, enough exists so that the leaders can get rich; the West can sell grain to you; and you can buy overpriced military gear from the West. Win! For everyone except about 90% of your population.
ACT III: The IMF
The above was standard IMF and World Bank advice, of course. Don’t let anyone tell you that the World Bank or IMF want a country to develop; their actions say otherwise. What they do need to do is push neo-liberal doctrine. So, now that your country is vastly in debt and can’t feed itself without foreign food which must be bought in hard currency, the IMF says “well, we could give you more money, BUT”.
The but is that they want you to stop subsidies of food and let food prices float. That they want you to reduce tariffs on goods, even though tariffs a huge source of tax revenue for you, because your government is crippled and your people have tiny incomes, so you really don’t have the ability to tax them. Then they want you to open up your economy to foreigners buying it up, so foreigners can own every part of your economy worth having (anything that generates hard currency, basically.)
FINIS
After all this your country is a basket case, and when something like Ebola (or terrorism) happens, you do not have the administrative or fiscal capacity to deal with it.
Win, Win, Lose.
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The risk from Ebola is greater than it seems. Not only is it out of control in Africa, there is no reasonable chance it will be brought under control in Africa: it will have to burn itself out. This is because the countries simply do not have the administrative capacity to handle it: not enough beds, nurses, isolation suits, money, etc… The best plan I’ve seen for helping them is Vinay Gupta’s suggestion to use survivors are the primary care givers in community centers. (Note that community centers not run by survivors would likely increase the spread of Ebola, not decrease it.)
Fundamentally, however, the decision point for handling Ebola properly passed in the 70s and 80s, when neo-liberalism, the IMF and Western bankers conspired to reduce the growth rate of Africa from its post-colonial high to below its population growth rate. The governments in question do not have the capacity to handle Ebola, and no one is going to send over enough nurses, doctors and equipment to make a difference. Even if they did, the administrative problems of these countries, lack of infrastructure and distrust in Western medicine mean they would be less effective than you think.
Poor people with inadequate health care, nutrition and sanitation are resevoirs for disease to develop. They always have been. Attempts to explain this to the rich, both the global rich, and the American rich, have been in vain for the past half century or so. What happens in Africa, or India, can come back and kill you, just like what happens in the Middle East (half a million dead kids, and so on) can turn out to be very bad for Manhattan.
So much for Africa. But other nations are at risk as well. The widespread waves of austerity and the destruction of countries have left gaping holes in the medical infrastructure of the first world. Does anyone think Greece, for example, could handle Ebola? Spain already fumbled a case, leaving a nurse who said she probably had Ebola in a public waiting room for hours, while she was symptomatic.
Austerity, cheapness and incompetence kills. America has about 40 million uninsured. The initial symptoms of Ebola look a lot like the flu. Think about what most uninsured are going to do if they get a bad flu? Best case is a trip to the clinic to get some antibiotics. The same is true of many insured. Going to the hospital for a bad case of the flu is overkill, and hospital stays are expensive. Bankruptingly so.
And imagine you are poor, uninsured and have no paid vacation days, then come down what looks like a bad flu? I imagine you might still go wipe old people’s bums, or clean rich people’s houses, or go to work in retail. Sure, soon enough you’ll be too sick to continue, but for a few hours…
Many other countries are in no position to do the sort of contact tracking that is required to stop something like Ebola. Think of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor. Entire cities, indeed provinces, are beyond the writ of the government, essentially controlled by drug gangs.
I don’t see Ebola as an existential threat unless it mutates. It’s still fairly hard to pass it to another person; it isn’t communicable when it’s asymptomatic, and so on. But if it goes airborne, or if it becomes communicable during the incubation phase, it could turn into something truly horrible. And the more people who get it, the more likely a mutation is to occur.
There are some threats where we’re all in it together. Money and position may buy us some immunity, but they cannot buy us total immunity. Climate change is one of those threats; another is communicable diseases. We can only, so far, be grateful that this isn’t the super-flu many scientists have been worried about. Ebola may kill in a particularly nasty fashion, but the last great Flu Epidemic killed more people than World War I.
In the meantime, my sympathies go out to West Africans, who will largely suffer this without meaningful help. And I warn the Europeans that they are far more vulnerable than they think: the lack of internal borders, the near-failed or failed (Greece) States and austerity means that if Ebola gets a foothold it may be far harder to contain than they believe.
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This is the second collation of articles on why our world is what it is, and how we can change it. Some of these articles are old, as I don’t write as much as I used to about economics because the decision points for avoiding a completely lousy economy are now past. The last decision points were passed when Barack Obama announced his economics team and refused to try and get rid of or bypass Bernanke to enforce decent policy on the Federal Reserve.
However this economy was decades in the making, and if we do not understand how it happened we will only wind up in a good economy through accident, and having obtained a good economy, will not be able to keep it. These articles aren’t exhaustive, a better list would include almost 5 centuries of economic history, at least in summary, and certainly deal with the 19th century and early 20th century.
I was heartened that hundreds of people read the articles linked in my compendium on ideology and character so I dare hope that you will, again, read these pieces. If you do you will walk away vastly better informed than almost anyone you know, including most formal economists, about why the economy is as it is.
The Decline and Fall of Post-War Liberalism
The Pundits today natter on and on about income inequality, but the fundamental cause of income inequality is almost always how power is distributed in society. As power goes, so goes income: and wealth. The last period of broad based equality was the liberal period which started with the Great Depression. You can locate the end of that era at various points from 1968 to 1980, but 1980 was the point where turning back became vastly difficult, because it was the moment when a new political order was born: an order born on crushing those who were willing and able to fight effectively for their share of income and money.
Why Elites Have Pushed “Free Trade”
Those who are middle aged or beyond remember the relentless march of free trade agreements, the creation of the WTO and endless drumbeat of propaganda about how FREE trade was wonderful, inevitable and going to make us all rich. It didn’t, and it was never intended to, but understanding fully why it only enriched a few requires understanding the circumstances required for free trade to work; the incentives for free trade; and the power dynamics which make free trade perfect for elites who want to become rich, often by destroying the prosperity of their own countries. Free trade is about power: and power is about who gets how much.
The Isolation of Elites and the Madness of the Crowd
All societies change and face new challenges. What matters is how they deal with new circumstances. America in specific, and most of the developed world in general, are in decline because of simple broken feedback loops: to put it simply, ordinary people live in a world of propaganda and lies; while the rich and the powerful live in a bubble, isolated from the consequences of their decisions on the majority of the population or on the future.
The Bailouts Caused the Lousy “Recovery”
This may be the hardest thing to explain to anyone with a connection to power or money: the bailouts are WHY the world has a lousy economy; not why it isn’t even worse. If you cannot understand why this is so, if you cannot understand that other options were, and are, available, other than making people who destroyed the world economy even richer and more powerful, then you will never see a good economy ever again.
The Rapid Destruction of Countries
You may have noticed; you probably have noticed, that countries are becoming basket cases faster and faster. Some are destroyed by war and revolution, others by forced austerity, but however it happens, the end of anything resembling a good economy in places like Greece, or Ukraine, or Italy, or Ireland or through war, in places like Lybia and Syria is sure. Understand this: what is done to those countries, is being done to yours if you live in the developed world, just at a slower pace. And one day, you too will be more valuable dead than alive.
Why Countries Can’t Resist Austerity
Many of you will realize that much of the answer to this is related to the article on free trade. Weakness, national weakness, is built into the world economic system, and done so deliberately. The austerity of the past six years is just the impoverishment of ordinary people, for the profit of elites, on steroids. But it is worth examining, in detail why countries can’t or won’t stop it, and what is required for a country to be able to do so.
Why Public Opinion Doesn’t Matter
We live in the remnants of a mass society, but we aren’t one any more though we think we are. In a mass mobilization society with relatively evenly distributed wealth and income and something approaching competitive markets public opinion mattered. If it was not King, well, it was at least a Duke. Today it matters only at the margins, on decisions where the elites do not have consensus. Understand this, and understand why, or all your efforts to resist will be for nothing.
Money, my friends, is Permission, as Stirling Newberry once explained to me. It is how we determine who gets to do what. He who can create money, rules. This is more subtle than it seems, so read, and weep.
It’s not How Much Money It’s Who We Give It To, and Why
We have almost no significant problems in the world today which we either could not have fixed had we acted soon enough, or that we could not fix or mitigate today, were we to act. We don’t act because we mis-allocate, on a scale which would put Pyramid building Pharoahs to shame, our social efforts.
Higher Profits Produce a Worse Society
No one ever told you that, I’m sure. Read, and learn.
The USSR fell in large part because of constant and radical mis-allocation of resources, because those running the economy did not receive accurate feedback. Despite the triumphal cries of the West and the managerial class who pretend to be capitalists, a version of this exact problem is at the root of our current decline, and it would serve us well to understand how and why the USSR fell.
Of all the ideological bugaboos of our current age, one of the strongest is the idea that private enterprise is always more efficient and better. It’s not, but that belief is a very profitable one to our elites, and understanding how the engine of privatization works is essential to understanding both our current economic collapse and how the fake bright economies of neo-liberal era, especially the early neo-liberal period of Thatcher and Reagan, were generated.
It is, perhaps, odd, to put this article so far down the list, but it’s wonky and important and not very dramatic. Simply enough, what we define as prosperity isn’t, which is why we are sick, fat and unhappy with rates of depression and mental illness and chronic disease which dwarf those of our forbears despite having so much more stuff. Fix everything else, and if we insist on continuing to produce that which makes us sick and unhappy, what we have will not be what we need, or want, nor, truly, prosperity worth having.
The Four Principles of Prosperity
Prosperity, at its heart, is an ethical phenomenon, as much as it is anything else. Without the right ethics, the right spirit, it will not last, nor be widespread. If we want a last prosperity which is actually good for us, we will start by reforming out public ethics.
How to Create a Good Internet Economy
The internet is wonderful, but despite all the cries of progress, progress, it has mostly made a few people rich, created a prosperous class of software engineers who often lose their jobs in their 50s, and at the same time as it has risen, seen the decline of the prosperity of most people in the developed world. It has not produced the prosperity we would have hoped it would. Here’s why, and how to fix it.
Concluding Remarks
The above is so far from comprehensive as to make me cry, but it’s a start. I do hope that you will read it and come away with a far better idea of why the economy sucks for most people, and a clear understanding both that it is intended to, why it is intended to, and how the old, better economy was lost.
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We are in immense amounts of trouble:
The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday.
The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became blood like that of a dead man; and every living thing in the sea died.
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I will be starting a new series on technology and its effect on society. Before I do so I want to take readers through some of my previous writing on ideology and character, and how they help form the societies we live in. Taking the time to read these articles (a short book’s worth), should vastly improve your understanding of the world and the articles to come. It should be worth your time even if you read the articles when they were published, as at the time they lacked both context and commentary, and were not collated to be read together so that the connections were obvious.
Baseline Predictions for the Next 60 Years
While not an article about ideology, this is an article about where our current ideology and character are going to take us: to the brink of disaster and possibly beyond, while continuing to impoverish and disempower larger and larger segments of the human race. This might be a slightly optimistic piece: there’s some reason to believe our actions in the world’s oceans could destroy the oxygen cycle, and if so, events will be much, much worse.
What an Ideology Is, and Why We Need a New One
Too many people think ideologies are some airy-fairy nonsense and that they are pragmatic men and women operating on common sense and facts. Such people are amongst the greatest of all fools: our entire society is based on interlocking ideologies; the primary of which are neo-liberalism, capitalism, human rights and socialism. It is not obvious, nor was it obvious to most societies that have ever existed, for example, that food should be distributed based on money; nor that ideas could be property. How we organize things; our particular ideas about markets, their role and who should lead us, are ideological. If we want to change society, we need to be able to control markets so they aren’t producing a world that makes us sick, unhappy, and, in increasing numbers, dead.
How to Create a Viable Ideology
We may look at current trends and realize that if we don’t reverse them, and reverse them fast, billions will suffer or die; but creating an ideology which can reverse them requires us to understand what makes an ideology viable and powerful. An ideology which does not create believers willing to die; and to kill, on its behalf, will lose to those that do. An ideology which cannot prevent people from selling out; from betraying, will definitely lose in the current world, where there is so much money available at the top to simply buy out (for billions) those who create something new, so that something new can be turned into nothing but a monetization scheme.
Our Theory of Human Nature Predicts Our Policies
The ideas of an ideology determine how our society is run, and of those ideas, none is more important than what we think human nature is.
A Theory of Human Nature Suited to Prosperity and Freedom
If we are trying to create a prosperous, free world, our policies must be based in a theory of human nature that is both true enough and which leads to policies which create widespread affluence and human freedom.
Ideology and character are intertwined. Character determines what we do and what we don’t do, and how we do it. The character of large numbers of people determines the destinies of nations and of the world itself. If we want to make the world better (or worse), we must change our own character. Those who fail to understand how character arises will never change the world except accidentally.
How Everyday Life Creates Our Character
and, as noted, our destiny. I always laugh at radicals who want more schooling, because schooling is where people learn to sit down, shut up, give the approved answers and do what they’re told. Working life, as an adult, continues this process of learned powerlessness and acquiescence and even in our consumptive and political lives we continue the trend: choosing from choices offered to us, rather than producing what we actually need.
How Everyday Life Creates Sociopathic Corporate Leaders
Those who lead our corporations control most of our lives, even more than the government, because they set the terms by which we live, die, and can afford the good things in life. Our daily life is prescribed by them, from how we work to what we eat, to what we entertain ourselves with. We need, therefore, to understand the character traits our leaders are chosen for, and how that choosing works. If we can’t learn to create and choose better leaders, we will never have a better world.
The Difference Between Ethics and Morals
If we want an ideology that tells us how to create a better world, and people with the character to create that world, we must understand what sort of people they should be. Key to doing this is the understanding of how they treat other people: the people they know, and more importantly, the people they don’t.
The Fundamental Feedback Loop for a Better World
The shortest article on this list, this is also one of the most important and speaks directly to how money directs behaviour and to matters of choosing our leaders.
It’s been so long since parts of the West were truly prosperous that people forget what it’s like, and forget that it creates a different type of person than a scarcity society.
Late 19th and Early 20th Century Intellectual Roots
Lived experience creates character, character feeds into ideology. It’s worth looking at how various themes of the Victorian era were created by those who lived through that time and the time that came before.
What Confucius Teaches Those Who Want a Better World
Amongst those who have created powerful ideologies Confucius is in the first rank, Confucianism having been the most important ideology of the most populous and advanced region of the world for most of the last two thousand or more years. Confucius was very aware of what he was trying to do, had a theory of human nature, and a theory of character and we would be fools not to learn from him.
Concluding Remarks
I hope that those who are interested in creating a better world will read the articles linked above. What I’ve written amounts to a short book, and the ideas are interrelated. If you have read a few of my posts, or even read all, but not thought on them or read them with each other in mind, you cannot have the full picture of how these ideas work together, and why the different parts are necessary.
Ideas are often destroyed in practice by those who do not understand the reasons for the various parts and prescriptions and who feel they can pick and choose without that understanding. Character and ideology and ethics and every day life are all intertwined: you cannot pick one and say “this is supreme”: they create each other.
Nor, of course, is the above a complete intellectual package. Large chunks are missing. My next piece will be a review of some key economic articles on why the world is specifically as it is today: why we lost post-war liberalism, why we have austerity and neo-liberalism and so-called free trade. That piece comes after this one because without understanding our own character and the character of our leaders and how ideology works, we cannot understand our current circumstances.
I will then be moving on to new articles on technology, geography and environment, and their effect on societies though the ages, with an emphasis on those technologies and environments which create prosperity, freedom and egalitarian cultures and why they do. There is a great trend today, an argument, about changing the tech to improve society, but it will only work if we understand how technology changes society.
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The calls are coming in.
Assuming they are correct, I think this vote is a mistake, and I note that having been given a clean vote to leave and a chance to live their own values, but having given in to fear; for me, at least, Scottish complaints about privatization of the NHS and other cuts to the social state will now ring rather hollow.
However, as with Greece voting to have its economy destroyed by refusing to take a chance on Syriza, people are voting their fear and for the status quo. Older folks seem to want to just hang on, and are unwilling to take chances for a better future and they can’t really believe that their own elites are intent on impoverishing them, and, effectively, in many cases, killing them. (Because that’s what deliberate austerity policies do.)
The Great Complacency will come to and end; but people aren’t going to like how that happens. Oh well.
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