The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer

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СКАЧАТЬ that tries to manage its economic affairs by means of superstition. That may be so, but the habit in question didn’t die out with the ancient lowland Mayans; it’s alive and well today, with a slight difference. The Mayans built huge pyramids of stone; we build even vaster pyramids of money.

      It’s all too accurate these days to describe contemporary economics as a superstition in the strict sense of the word. The patterns of dysfunction summarized in this chapter — the factors inherent to the profession of economics that make for bad decisions; the blindness to the impact of non-economic factors on economic processes; the belief in the infallibility of free markets in the face of contrary evidence; the reliance on “cooked” and irrelevant statistics — are all part of a way of thinking about economic life that worked tolerably well, from certain perspectives, during the age of economic expansion that was kick-started by the Industrial Revolution and reached its peak in the late twentieth century. Like the Mayan habit of building pyramids, though, the reasons why it worked were not the reasons its votaries thought it worked, and underlying changes in the energy basis of the world’s industrial economies have made today’s economic superstitions a severe liability in the future bearing down on us.

      Undead Money

      Like most complex intellectual superstitions — consider astrology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance — economics has a particularly strong following among the political classes. Like every other superstition, in turn, it has a solid core of pragmatic wisdom to it, but that core has been overlaid with a great deal of somewhat questionable logic which does not necessarily relate to the real cause and effect relationships that link the superstition to its benefits. My wife’s Welsh ancestors believed that the bowl of milk on the back stoop pleased the fairies and that’s why the rats stayed away from the kitchen garden; the economists of the twentieth century, along much the same lines, believed that expanding the money supply pleased — well, the prosperity fairies, or something not too dissimilar — and that’s why depressions stayed away from the United States.

      In both cases it’s arguable that something very different was going on. The gargantuan economic boom that made America the world’s largest economy had plenty of causes. The strong regulations imposed on the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression made a significant contribution (a point that will be explored in more detail later on in this book); the accident of political geography that kept America’s industrial hinterlands from becoming war zones, while most other industrial nations got the stuffing pounded out of them, also had more than a little to do with the matter; but another crucial point, one too often neglected in studies of twentieth-century history, was the simple fact that the United States at mid-century produced more petroleum than all the other countries on Earth put together. The oceans of black gold on which the US floated to victory in two world wars defined the economic reality of an epoch. As a result, most of what passed for economic policy in the last 60 years or so amounted to attempts to figure out how to make use of unparalleled abundance.

      That’s still what today’s economists are trying to do, using the same superstitious habits they adopted during the zenith of the age of oil. The problem is that this is no longer what economists need to be doing. With the coming of peak oil — the peak of worldwide oil production and the beginning of its decline — the challenge facing today’s industrial societies is not managing abundance, but managing the end of abundance. The age of cheap energy now ending was a dramatic anomaly in historical terms, though not quite unprecedented; every so often, but rarely, it happens that a human society finds itself free from natural limits to prosperity and expansion — for a time. That time always ends, and the society has to relearn the lessons of more normal and less genial times. This is what we need to do now.

      This is exactly what today’s economics is unprepared to do, however. Like the lowland Mayan elite at the beginning of their downfall, our political classes are trying to meet unfamiliar problems with overfamiliar solutions, and the results have not been good. Repeated attempts to overcome economic stagnation by expanding access to credit have driven a series of destructive bubbles and busts, and efforts to maintain an inflated standard of living in the face of a slowly contracting real economy have heaped up gargantuan debts. Nor have these measures produced the return to prosperity they were expected to yield, and at this point finger-pointing and frantic pedaling in place seem to have replaced any more constructive response to a situation that is becoming more dangerous by the day.

      The sheer scale of the debt load on the world’s economies is an important part of the problem. Right now, the current theoretical value of all the paper wealth in the world — counting everything from dollar bills in wallets to derivatives of derivatives of derivatives of fraudulent mortgage loans in bank vaults — is several orders of magnitude greater than the current value of all the actual goods and services in the world. Almost all of that paper wealth consists of debt in one form or another, and the mismatch between the scale of the debt and the much smaller scale of the global economy’s assets means exactly the same thing that the same mismatch would mean to a household: imminent bankruptcy. That can take place in either of two ways — most of the debt will lose all its value by way of default, or all of the debt will lose most of its value by way of hyperinflation — or, more likely, by a ragged combination of the two, affecting different regions and economic sectors at different times.

      What that implies for the not-too-distant future is that any economic activity that depends on money will face drastic uncertainties, instabilities and risks. People use money because it gives them a way to exchange their labor for goods and services, and because it allows them to store value in a relatively stable and secure form. Both these, in turn, depend on the assumption that a dollar has the same value as any other dollar, and will have roughly the same value tomorrow that it does today.

      The mismatch between money and the rest of economic life throws all these assumptions into question. Right now there are a great many dollars in the global economy that are no longer worth the same as any other dollar. Consider the trillions of dollars’ worth of essentially worthless real estate loans on the balance sheets of banks around the world. Governments allow banks to treat these as assets, but unless governments agree to take them, they can’t be exchanged for anything else, because nobody in his right mind would buy them for more than a tiny fraction of their theoretical value. Those dollars have the same sort of weird half-existence that horror fiction assigns to zombies and vampires: they’re undead money, lurking in the shadowy crypts of the world’s large banks like so many brides of Dracula, because the broad daylight of the market would kill them at once.

      It’s been popular for some years, since the sheer amount of undead money stalking the midnight streets of the world’s financial centers became impossible to ignore, to suggest that the entire system will come to a messy end soon in some fiscal equivalent of a zombie apocalypse movie. Still, the world’s governments are doing everything in their not inconsiderable power to keep that from happening. Letting banks meet capital requirements with technically worthless securities is only one of the maneuvers that government regulators around the world allow without blinking. Driving this spectacular lapse of fiscal probity, of course, is the awkward fact that governments — to say nothing of large majorities of the voters who elect them — have been propping up budgets for years with their own zombie hordes of undead money.

      The only response to the current economic crisis most governments can imagine involves churning out yet more undead money, in the form of an almost unimaginable torrent of debt; the only response most voters can imagine, in turn, involves finding yet more ways to spend more money than they happen to earn. So we’re all in this together, guiding our actions by superstitions that no longer have any relation to the world in which we live. Everybody insists that the walking corpses in the basement are fine upstanding citizens, and we all pretend not to notice that more and more people are having their necks bitten or their brains devoured.

      As long as most people continue to play along, it’s entirely possible that things could stumble along this way for quite a while, with stock market crashes, sovereign debt crises and corporate bankruptcies quickly covered СКАЧАТЬ