Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 20 of 91

Way Past Time to Leave America

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On June 10, 2021

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I wrote this article in January of 2010. I’m re-posting it because, alas, it is STILL important. I had some hope Biden could at least put through a good economic package; I was wrong.

My errors are far more often on the side of “hope” and optimism than pessimism, which is something people who consider me a pessimist get wrong.

I have updated commentary after the piece.

The Unvarnished Truth About the US

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products, the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all, if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are available anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions are arrayed against it.

The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have ten months to do something and ram something through. Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and not rubber-stamp radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.

That is, however, a faint hope.

Add to this the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology, or anything else, and I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around. The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, along with ologopolistic markets, and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed.”

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington. This will put their influence on steroids. Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money. And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before -— and even then, it was still very unlikely. Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough, and corporations weak enough, for there to even be a chance.

So, my advice to my readers is this:

If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US, places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who came to to the US understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than the US, and they came to a place where they thought freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now -— it is time to get out.

I am not the only person thinking this. Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.

There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.

But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure, if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure. Because it will be very, very steep.

I understand that not everyone can leave the US. Look within the US for places that will be least affected. I don’t know what those are. I suggest being willing to adopt “protective” coloring; if you aren’t, and things go really south, understand that the right (and a big chunk of what passes for the center in the US) is itching to do a purge of left-wingers and, indeed, of a lot of centrists (the Clintons, for example).

Next, I’m Canadian, and despite our image, things aren’t going great in Canada. We are badly infected by US-style politics, but even if we happen to win against them (not a sure bet at all — and remember my comment about my errors being errors of optimism), we are a US satrapy which the US may decide to take direct control of. Even if they don’t, Canada cannot realistically resist most US demands if the US is serious; well, not without steps Canada has refused to take, like getting a credible deterrent.

Smart Jews fled Germany to other European nations, and wound up in the camps anyway.

Canada and Mexico (a completely failing state) may well not be far enough away.

Next: Understand that the world IS moving towards a new cold war. It looks like China/Russia + allies vs. America/Europe plus allies, at least so far. There is some chance that Europe will try to go third-path, but so far it is choosing to go with the US, despite misgivings. You can see this in its rejection of Huawei 5G, after a great deal of wavering. Some countries even started to deploy 5G, and are now dismantling it.

There are some other considerations, like China now competing with Germany more than being a customer, but overall Europe seems to be choosing the current hegemon over the new rising one. This is a startling failure on the part of Jingping (who is incompetent at almost everything except controlling the Party). Other countries should be falling into China’s arms, but China now wants to be a bully, too; to reap the rights of being powerful.

So, where you settle will have a lot to do with your future mobility; which part of the walled internet you’re in and so on. Look at countries and consider which side they’ll be on, or if or how they might manage the neutrality dance. This will matter for extradition, visiting the relatives, what technology you use and much more (Russia, for example, is where people in the US really want go, not because Russia is great (it’s a mafia state) but because Russia won’t extradite).

It is, of course, possible that I am wrong, and the US will pull it out. Every great nation (“great” is not a synonym for “good”) pulls it out over and over again until they don’t. England lost an empire then created another, for example, but Britain seems unlikely to exist soon: Both Northern Ireland and Scotland will likely go, and it’ll just be England and Wales again (and even Wales may go in 20 to 30 years, which would be losing a possession conquered 800 years ago).

So, it’s always possible that the US will pull it out. History goes in waves: There was a Gilded Age before, and it ended. That may happen again this time, either by force or luck of disaster.

That said, I don’t think that’s where the smart money is, and you’ll be gambling with more than your life.

If you do stay, remember that you have two defenses: (1) Other people who care for you and will fight with you (fight is not entirely a metaphor here), and; (2) Anonymity: Sliding along with no one really knowing anything about you and your beliefs (far harder than it once was).

All of this is complicated by climate change and environmental collapse putting pressure on systems never designed to withstand shocks.

Be well and be safe, whatever you do.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write. So please consider subscribing if you like my writing.)

How Finance Sharks Destroy Industries: Chicago Tribune Edition

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On May 27, 2021

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This isn’t going to be a long one. The way today’s private-equity and other takeover artists work is simple: They buy up a company, and then load it up with debt to pay for having bought it. They generally take healthy companies (ToysRUs was running a profit), then once it’s taken over, they slash and cut. The business will often go bankrupt — if it doesn’t, it operates as a shadow of its former self; its products are worse, it has fewer employees, and so on.

This is now being done to the Chicago Tribune Newspaper.

I don’t think a lot of commentary is necessary. This should be illegal. You should not be able to stiff the company you bought with a huge loan to pay off the expenses you incurred buying it out (while you also pay yourself bonuses in the tens of millions).

Just make it illegal. It has destroyed innumerable companies, and the overall affect is to reduce employment and economic activity. It’s nothing but damage to the economy at this point. Private equity doesn’t take over badly-run companies and make them better now (if it ever did, which is questionable), it just damages or destroys companies so that the people who take them over can have a third super-yacht and a tenth vacation home, and in many cases, be invited to the island run by whoever has replaced Epstein.

These people literally act as parasites. Make what they do illegal, and find a way to take back their stolen wealth.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write and the happier I am. So please consider doing so if you like my writing.)

CDC Decides to Just Not Count All Covid Cases

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On May 25, 2021

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If you’re vaccinated, you can still get Covid, but… (courtesy of my favorite Dalek.)

Now, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped investigating breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated people unless they become so sick that they are hospitalized or die.

Now, this may seem reasonable, but people with breakthrough Covid can give it to other people, and they can get Long Covid from it.

And, yeah, you can still die.

Earlier this year, the agency was monitoring all cases. Through the end of April, when some 101 million Americans had been vaccinated, the CDC had received 10,262 reports of breakthrough infections from 46 states and territories, a number that was very likely “a substantial undercount,” according to a CDC report issued on Tuesday….(my emphasis)

Some 995 people were known to have been hospitalized, and 160 had died, though not always because of Covid-19, the new study said. The median age of those who died was 82.

So, we’re not going to count cases unless they wind up in the hospital, but the people with Covid are still infectious and can still die (looks like about a 1.5 percent chance, based on the numbers above).

This, along with the decision to stop recommending masks for people who are fully vaccinated (which, yeah, people who don’t believe in vaccination will lie about) smacks of “the pandemic is all but over, nothing to see here.”

“If we don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist!”

Neither the CDC, nor the WHO have covered themselves in glory during this pandemic. In fact, they have burned credibility like it’s ten cent oil, and they want to set the world on fire. They said masks didn’t help, then they changed their minds. They resisted evidence that the virus was airborne vigorously, and as a result, didn’t emphasize proper ventilation. They were wrong about schools, where, yes, children and teachers do get infected and pass it on.

What should have be a disease we stomped into the ground is now likely to become chronic (also because of refusal to share vaccine manufacturing information), which will, it must be admitted, earn Pharma tens of billions of dollars every year, so I guess that’s a win. And who really needed old people, or people who are immune-compromised? Think of all the saved money on pensions and healthcare for people who are mostly worth more dead than alive to governments and corporations. (Especially since the kids of old people can spend their money. It doesn’t require mom or dad or grandpa or grandma to be alive.)

Back in the Bush era, a joke I liked was: “Stupid or evil?”

“Why not both?”

It sure is fun to be ruled by incompetent psychopaths.

Over in Britain, the government is now trying to deny that they started off with a herd immunity strategy: “Let almost everyone get it and who cares if grandma dies?” But anyone with a memory span of more than year remembers that they did.

Psychopaths. The rich get richer if Covid isn’t stopped. The richest people in the world have seen massive increases in their wealth and income because of Covid. Life is fucking marvelous and Covid has been a blessing.

Understand this in your bones. The people making decisions not only don’t care if you die, if you dying will make them richer or more powerful, they’ll go with the decision path that leads to you or your mum or your best friend dying or winding up homeless. You are nothing to them, you’re meat. A prey animal.

Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write and the happier I am. So please consider doing so if you like my writing.)

Neoliberalism in India and Covid Deaths

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On May 18, 2021

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I’ve had my eye on India ever since I found out that calories per capita had dropped in India over the last 30 years.

That’s not what happens when things are going well, unless a huge number of people have moved to sedentary jobs, which they had not.

Neoliberalism is about production and supply trains. They’re very complicated, and the parts for a finished good may be made in a dozen countries and shipped to a plant which does the final assembly. The IP holder often skims ten to 30 percent profit off of this.

Most countries currently industrialized didn not industrialize under neoliberalism. They ran protectionist trade policies and exported their way to mature economies. That was generally allowed because they were a military ally or satrapy. Japan was first Britain’s ally, then for the US. Taiwan and South Korea were American satrapies, etc.

China used a hybrid model. They got themselves into the supply chains by offering high profits to Westerners, generally through simple wage arbitrage (“our workers cost less”). They put heavy pressure on people who took those profits to give them their technological secrets (IP) in exchange. And for much of the early period, they also ran a protectionist policy, keeping their currency low against the US dollar. They turned neoliberalization into mercantalism, and because less than five countries have EVER industrialized under any system but mercantalism, they succeeded.

They were able to do this because they made it very worth the while for greedy Western elites to ship jobs to them; they made a lot of Western elites rich. They knew exactly the deal they were offering.

India was socialist for a long time. They felt it didn’t work, so they decided to try neoliberalism.

But, they ran into the fact that it made more sense to offshore to China, and they didn’t do neoliberalism smart — they didn’t control their currency properly or find another way to turn neoliberalism into mercantalism. China kept large parts of their economy state-controlled, and used those companies actively. Yes, state-controlled companies were less efficient, but they gave the State power, and they provided ways of spreading welfare to people that the private companies weren’t taking care of. Not immiserating too many people meant making sure that Chinese citizens saw the new industrial and trade policies as good for them.

India, on the other hand, got in mostly on service jobs. “We speak English, so we can do service center stuff,” and a fair bit of IT outsourcing and offshoring.

But they neoliberalized as if they were already a first world nation; they sold off public enterprise and gutted state control over the economy as if there were a huge surplus created by decades of good growth which could be cannibalized to create a rich class.

India did create a small new middle class and rich, yes, but they did so without creating widespread prosperity.

Because of the way human psychology works (we have a strategy, it has not worked, we must do it harder because we are always right until we are overthrown), when the old elites couldn’t really make this work, a toxic mix of neoliberalism and Hindu Nativism took control of the country, with the face of Modi.

Modi’s a right-wing nationalist, verging-on-fascist (some would take out the word “verging”). But he’s also a neoliberal’s neoliberal. Practically, his first act was to de-monitize: removing large bills from circulation and forcing poor people to use electronic money. This was sold as crushing corruption, but what it did was make sure that the government and financial elites could grab more money from more transactions, while crushing the informal economy most Indians live in.

Recently, he’s passed a law which allows farms to be bought more easily. And so they will be (farmers, not being idiots, have opposed this law).

So Modi’s run the same play you can see in right-wing parties around the world: He’s offered nativism and feel-good, right-wing identity politics (Hindus are the best, Muslims are scum, get rid of them, no Hindu girl should marry a Muslim, etc.), and then run policies which will, over time, hurt the poor and create more rich.

But these general policies were running long before Modi.

One of those policies that has now been brought to light by Covid is that the public health care sector was gutted under neoliberal governments, so that private healthcare could make more money. So now, when it’s needed, there isn’t enough public (or private) care around.

This is how neoliberalism works: It looks for a public good and then it gets rid of it. This can be a regulation which, if removed, allows profit (making it hard to buy farms means they can’t be bought up and turned into large cash farms; cutting pollution rules means someone makes more money, etc.) or it can be by making public services shitty, or selling them off to the private sector, or other variations.

Again, in a developed country with a large prosperity cushion like the US, France, or Canada, you can do this for a while, and it doesn’t look so bad.

If, on the other hand, you do this to a country which had never hit developed status in the first place, well, people eat less calories, and when a pandemic happens, hospitals turns away patients in droves.

Neoliberalism doesn’t work when trying develop or industrialize countries, unless you game it so it turns into protectionist trade. China did that, India didn’t, and Indians are now paying the price.

Neoliberalism is designed to create rich elites while crushing ordinary people. In India’s case, it also created a small middle class (because that’s rich, really, in India, as anyone who’s spent much time there knows. Middle class means you have servants, for example. It’s not middle class like in The US or Europe.)

Neoliberalism is not designed to help anyone but the rich, except temporarily. Some asset holders will win (say, if you owned a house in 1980 in the US and didn’t sell until retirement, then moved somewhere cheap.)

But no other groups win for any length of time, because neoliberalism is the policy of looting, of pumping asset prices and of crushing wages. That’s the policy regime. It does what it’s meant to: It creates a rich class and, for a while, it keeps enough people supporting it who won’t win the end (unless they die soon enough) by giving them large, unearned asset price increases that are much greater than inflation.

India needs a new strategy. The overwhelming of its medical infrastructure is exactly the result of the neoliberal policies it has followed for decades. Modi is only the latest and worst, not the first.

I wish the Indians well. They have a very challenging few decades ahead of them, perhaps the most challenging of any non-African large country in the world. I hope they get their act together, ASAP, or a lot more Indians than Covid is killing will die, and die ugly, as climate change, ecological collapse, and water shortages hit.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write and the happier I am. So please consider doing so if you like my writing.)

The Inflation Spike: What it Will Do & How to Take Advantage

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On May 11, 2021

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So, many people have noticed there’s been a lot of inflation. Timber is up about three times. There is an international chip shortage (thank you Crypto). The price of everyday goods has risen significantly.

First: No, this isn’t a precursor to hyperinflation in core countries.

Second: Yes, higher inflation is here to stay, beyond what can be concealed by statistical tricks like hedonics. (Assuming the Fed doesn’t hammer the economy into the ground, which I don’t think they will.)

The temporary effect is pandemic driven. A lot of capacity was shuttered during the pandemic, and it will take time for it to ramp up. Once it’s back up, prices will stabilize.

The permanent effect is driven by increased consolidation. A lot of small and medium businesses went out of business during the pandemic, and they aren’t all coming back. They were replaced by larger businesses. Those larger businesses (who, for example, bought up a lot of rental housing) will use their market power to raise prices and they will keep raising prices as long as they have little effective competition (a.k.a., as long as they are oligopolies). In industries like rental properties, they will keep properties off the market to increase prices, because capital is cheap and they can afford to do so.

Right now, this is being mitigated by pandemic government spending, like the additional $300/week for UI benefits. It is also being mitigated, on the low end, by the fact that a decent chunk of the bottom-end died. (Line cooks had the highest pandemic fatality rate of any job class.)

Remember that what matters is not what inflation is, but whether your wages are rising faster than your expenses. If companies are forced to raise wages more than they raise prices, you are better off.

This is why Republican governors removing UI benefits are hurting people. They’ll still get price inflation, without wage inflation, leading to people who are, overall, worse off.

The test here is if Biden, through his fiscal package, can pour money to the poor fast enough to keep the labor market tight. If he does, people’s wages will rise because businesses will have to raise wages to get workers.

If Biden pulls this off, he gets re-elected. He might even win the 2022 midterms. If he doesn’t, he becomes a lame duck President in 2022.

So, if anyone from the administration or Democrats in Congress are reading this, remember: Re-election and keeping power requires flooding poor people with money and good paying jobs like the jobs refitting buildings in the stimulus. Do that, and wage inflation will out-pace price inflation; people will feel great, and you and Biden will soar to re-election and do so with a larger majority which will allow you to do even more — win more seats and create a semi-permanent majority.

It really is that simple and that hard.

For readers, there is still a boom coming, there will be a period where the market is tight (there is already, as I predicted). Get your vaccines, and if you need a job, get one while the getting is good. Consider trading up: See if  you can get a better paying job than the one you have right now.

There is no guarantee Biden and Congress won’t fuck this up and let this turn into price inflation higher than wage inflation, so make while the making is good.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write and the happier I am. So please consider doing so if you like my writing.)

Who Deserves the Good Things in Life?

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On May 5, 2021

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On Wall Street, they have sayings. One of them is that they “eat what they kill.”

They mean this in a good way — that they earn their money by making the right bets or by landing the big clients. That money is theirs: They went and got it.

Of course, one could see it in another way: All the businesses, Private Equity, for example, has destroyed, buy buying them, paying themselves, loading the businesses up with the debt, and then letting them go under.

They earned that money by killing. ToysRUs for example, which was making a profit until they loaded it up with debt to pay for their takeover and the bonuses they gave themselves.

Or, say, causing the 2008 financial crisis, which had a bill that has to be at least 100 trillion and involved millions of people losing their jobs, homes, livelihoods, and in many cases, lives.

Finance, that is to say, demonstrably does more damage to everyone else than it does good, but it pays very very well, especially now that they own every government, so central banks are willing to print trillions of dollars to socialize their losses, while letting them keep the money they stole.

They don’t even actually win bets: If, in 2008, they had taken their losses, they would have all gone out of business.

It’s just a scam; a matter of brute force. They can print money and borrow money at rates ordinary people will never see and government makes sure they never take real losses and that markets go up no matter what is happening to the economy.

Then, there are the studies that show that the more money someone has, the worse their behaviour — the more sociopathic and less generous. Poorer people give more to charity as a percentage of income or wealth than rich people, which makes sense, as most rich people are rich because they care about money more than anything else.

The simple fact is that people like nurses, teachers, janitors, garbage pick up, farm workers, and factory floor workers are who create most value. On the intellectual and creative side, the designers, engineers, scientists, and other creators are the ones who create value, not the suits. In fact, suits often reduce value: It isn’t engineers and designers who wanted planned obsolesence (19th century engineers fought it bitterly) or to remove the right to repair.

Most financiers don’t even finance creation any more; they finance destruction. Most managers are, at best, a wash, any random person would do about as well and maybe better (management literature shows this clearly, it isn’t in dispute). As for CEOs, higher compensation correlates to worse performance, and during the 40s through the 70s, before the massive rise in CEO compensation, had far more growth than our era. CEOs eat what they kill, is all. They control who gets paid what, so they pay themselves the most. It has nothing to do with merit, except if merit means “you deserve whatever you get.”

“You deserve whatever you get.”

That’s really what we mean by merit, today, isn’t it?

Not, “you contributed to society,” or even, often enough, “you contributed to your organization,” but “whatever you have the power to seize, at whatever cost to anyone else, is what you deserve.”

It’s not even about “whatever you can get legally.” Wall Street’s entire 2000s run was based on extensive fraud, they then, with the help of Obama, stole millions of houses using fradulently signed statements. Wall Street currently makes huge amounts of money by front-running investors, simply paying to get faster access and information.

So much for deserve, as we use it.

My personal take is that there are awards that should definitely be merit based. Medals, titles, and so on. A lot of positions should only go to those who have shown they “deserve” them, though our ideas of what that means are really warped when the entire media weeps about how Hillary Clinton was “the most qualified candidate in history,” when she had displayed both terrible judgment (Iraq, Libya, pushing Trump) and incompetence (losing two campaigns as front runner, bungling Hilary-care.)

But I am heterodox. I don’t like incentives. I don’t think people should get more for doing more, because I think incentives usually warp behaviour in horrible ways.

Instead, in a surplus society, we should just ensure everyone has good quality of what they need: housing, healthcare, food. Take the fear and greed away, and send them to work without the whip of hunger. In such a world, oddly, by not doing what we do now, you’d see some of what orthodox economics says should happen, happen. For example, picking up garbage would be highly paid, because it’s not fun (though it is useful).

Let money buy anything that doesn’t matter: A fancy vacation, a TV so high-definition it looks like reality, a set of five-million thread count sheets so smooth you barely feel them, or an animatronic bear that loves you, really.

Deserve, in a surplus society, is really about FEAR. People who spend their entire lives operating from fear do not create good societies.

No one needs or deserves to be a billionaire (and if anyone ever did, it’s someone like Jonas Salk, not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.) Having such people costs far more than money, as Bill Gates has proven by restricting vaccines.

Forget deserve. Give everyone a good life, and see what world people who aren’t scared create.

We’ve tried everything else. Maybe it’s time to try and run a society not based on fear.

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The Most Radical Statement I’ve Ever Read

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On May 4, 2021

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From Dr. Robert Tabash, in Bethlehem:

The poorest deserve the best.

I stared, stunned at this for a while, because it’s absolutely 180 degrees from how we do things. To do this would be a complete repudiation of our entire society, and every society of which I am aware.

I stumbled across it in the replies to this tweet, on the same general theme.

It’s hard to say much about this, because it’s almost impossible to imagine a world in which we do this.

Of course, this comes from Christians, and it’s why I have contempt for most modern Christians, especially evangelicals.

Christ was a radical. Unbelievably radical. “As you have done to these, the least of mine…” and telling the rich to sell all their possessions and give them to the poor. Real Christianity, the path of Jesus, not all the crap accreted about Christianity, is perhaps the most radical, and hardest, in the world.

This is why most “Christians” don’t follow Jesus’s clear instructions: Doing so is hard. That’s fine, I don’t either. But I also don’t call myself a Christian.

But put the Christianity aside, if you can, and marvel just in the idea of a world completely topsy turvy to the one in which we live, where those who are poorest; those who are weakest, get the best, because they are the ones who need it most, and we care for each other.

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Why Progress Always Required Space Travel

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On April 28, 2021

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When  I was a teenager I read The Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth.” The Club ran consumption, pollution and population numbers thru some simple models to see what would happen. The model misses climate change, so we’re worse off than they expect (much worse off) and some other factors, but the stuff it models has been coming in approximately as expected.

The standard model of progress, often assailed by thinkers like John Michael Greer, assumes that there aren’t significant limits to growth that we can’t substitute out of. Run out of oil? Switch to solar? Run out lithium, figure out another way to make batteries? Run out of water, mass-desalinization? Run out of soil, make soil or grow plankton in water. Run out of fish? Fish farms.

Etc…

But the people who created the model, who championed it, aren’t as optimistic and stupid as their opponents often indicate: the standard future model of people who believe in progress requires space exploitation precisely because we can’t assume we can always find a substitute on Earth for what we lack.

If you want, in other words, to keep GROWTH you must exploit space. Send out the space miners! Harvest solar above the atmosphere. Explore, exploit, grow!

You don’t necessarily have to colonize space in any meaningful way to do this, though the earlier imagineers thought we would: this can be done by robots and telepresence mostly, with a very few actual humans in space.

Note that this side-cuts most of the standard complaints about space colonization: other planets nearby all suck, and are worse for life than Earth (even shitty places on Earth like Antarctica) and space itself is full of deadly radiation and other problems we don’t know  how to fully mitigate.

Doesn’t matter if you’re just sending out robots to get stuff (lithium, say) and bring it back.

BUT none of this matters in a larger sense because the real problem isn’t running out of lithium or copper or helium or any other simple substance like that.

It’s destroying the biosphere, climate and ecosphere

Earth’s true wealth is an intricate web of life, from creatures simpler than bacteria all the way up to blue whales, including plants and fungi and insects and a wild variety of creatures we don’t understand or haven’t even discovered.

That, along with Earth’s climate, is what you can only get on Earth, at least within the solar system. That’s what we’re destroying.

So… space exploitation? Why not. It may help deal with some bottlenecks. But it still won’t let us continue GROWTH and the standard progress model, because the real limit to growth is simply that if we go past the Earth’s carrying capacity — which I will say, despite some disagreeing with me — we unequivocally have, we then start destroying that carrying capacity and all the things we must have that only Earth supplies.

Earth is the Jewel, the most important place in the universe for humans, right now. We cannot do without it and what is important about it is not copper or lithium, it is precisely climate and LIFE (ecosystems). Our destruction of those two things is what makes the standard model of progress impossible.

We’ve got a limited resource, created by processes of evolution which take millions of years to work. We are so ignorant we cannot even create a self-sustaining biosphere; we cannot fix what we are breaking.

Anyone and any system destroying the Earth’s climate and ecosphere is thus, then, doing the greatest wrong possible for the future of humanity, and of much life on Earth. Our mass genocide of other species is a slow form of strangling ourselves.

Space can help, but it won’t get us around the real issues. Only true respect for the genuine non-renewable resources we MUST have and which exist only on Earth can create a positive future for humanity and for all the species we have held hostage and not yet murdered, who are unfortunate enough to be trapped on Earth with us.

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