Society is approaching a breaking point

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  James Howard Kunstler: The Coming Economy Of “Less”

  Society is approaching a breaking point

  by Adam Taggart

  Monday, March 12, 2018, 12:20 AM

Tags

• Daily Digest 
• Economy 
• Energy 
• environment

Author and commentator James Howard Kunstler returns as our podcast guest this week for an update on where we are in The Long Emergency timeline.

In this discussion ranging from the pervasiveness of propaganda in today's media to the risk of nuclear war, Kunstler also re-news his warnings of a current secular economic slowdown.

After too many years of market interventions, magical thinking, racketeering, and bleeding the 99% dry, he warns that our culture and economic system will soon reach a snapping point:

The important story is what happens in the financial sector and how it effects the economy in the next twelve to eighteen months. As we know, the financial system is the most abstract and fragile of all the systems that we depend on because the other systems can't run without it. The trucks won't make the food deliveries to the supermarkets unless the finance system works. The gasoline won't get to the pumps at the stations.

Nothing's going to move if the financial system cracks up. People no longer trust each other to transact, to get paid. And so they stop transacting.

We're talking about a falling standard of living and getting used to an economy of "less". It sounds kind of Ebenezer Scrooge-ish to suggest that people may have to do with less rather than more, because more has always been the expectation in our lifetime. But that's probably a fact. And as I've said more than once, reality has mandates of its own. Circumstances are going to inform us about how this economy is emerging and where we need to go with it. And we can either pay attention or just sit there with our fingers in our ears. 

What we're talking about here is the armature of our culture and economy that people hang their lives on. And that armature is crumbling. There are fewer things that people can hang a life on in a meaningful way, or a way that even ensures that they can have a little bit of security looking into even a short-term future.

For example, I had a day yesterday that felt like national Murphy's Law Day. I got a screw in a tire. The screw was in a place where, under New York State law, they're not allowed to fix the tire if the screw is near the outside of tread. So I had to buy a brand-new tire. And then I was going to take the trash to the dump in my old pickup truck, which I keep around for that purpose. But the battery was dead. So I had to go down to the auto parts store and buy a new battery, and bring it home and put it in.

Now, I'm among the lucky people in this land who can actually buy a new tire and buy a car battery. But probably some enormous percentage of the population, like 78% or 84% — I'm not quite sure what it is — they don’t have enough money to buy a new car battery if their car dies on some god forsaken freeway shoulder 38 miles from home. Imagine how crazy-making that is. I can easily, because I was a truly starving bohemia until well into my 40s, struggling just to pay the light bill while writing book after book. So I know what it's like to live day after day in that kind of financial anxiety.

I imagine that the financial anxiety out there right now is just so extreme that there's a whole mass of people who are being pushed to the limits of their sanity.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with James Howard Kunstler (57m:11s).

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James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."

Home From Nowhere was a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly.

His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, published by Simon & Schuster / Free Press, is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with it's mutilated cities.

This was followed by The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st Century."

His 2008 novel, World Made by Hand, was a fictional depiction of the post-oil American future. The sequel to that book, "The Witch of Hebron," was published in 2010.

Mr. Kunstler is also the author of eight other novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches and Maggie Darling. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.

Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has no formal training in architecture or the related design fields.

He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.