Predictions Of The Future

When I was in graduate school studying Economics decades ago there were two names that were most prominent: Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. It was the early 1970s, and revolution was still in the air, so Marx was more popular with students. For me it was simple. In Marx’s landmark Das Kapital (Capital) he showed how Capitalism contains the seeds of its own ruin, becoming increasingly monopolistic until declining profits result in system collapse. It seemed pretty obvious then, and seems even more obvious now.

As popular as Marx was among the students, he was largely ignored by the faculty, who were focused in various ways on making Capitalism work. There were two approaches to advancing this agenda, Monetarism – controlling the money supply, and Keynesianism, the use of taxation and government spending to stimulate the economy in recessions and depressions and slowing it down in times of rapid expansion, known as fiscal policy. It is the art of balancing boom and bust. Keynes's renowned work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money introduced his ideas in great detail.

There was one Marxist on the faculty, Art Ford, and I suspect that a few others were compatible with Marx, but not in any dedicated way. Monetarism, personified in the ideas of the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman, was largely debunked and ridiculed, somewhat unfairly, but Friedman was a free-market extremist, and had an annoying and arrogant personality.

Though Keynes espoused an approach that was credited with ending the Great Depression and getting Allied countries through World War II, he ironically echoed Marx, saying at one point "In the long run we’re all dead," though perhaps not with the same meaning as Marx. It is kind of a moot point now. The U.S. Government no longer practices taxation and spending to balance the business cycle, and instead only deficit spends, lowering taxes for political reasons while increasing spending for similar reasons. Keynes would be rolling over in his grave, were it possible.

For me it took a biologist, Barry Commoner, to transcend all these competing ideas. He was a Marxist (I knew him. He told me this personally.), but predicted the demise of Capitalism from a resource perspective, that the depletion of petroleum reserves would cause innovation to decline, resulting in profits to fall to zero. What sealed the deal was a class I audited in economic growth theory, which was all imaginary equations, no reality. The system could grow forever because various equations based on nothing say it can. In the long run, according to these equations, we just keep having more and more ad infinitum.

Commoner, author of The Closing Circle, died in 2012, well-before our current malaise. Like Karl Marx, he didn’t live to see his prediction come true. Also like Marx, he didn’t have much of a plan for what came after. It is one thing to look at what is and deduce what it is trending towards. It is quite another to predict or advocate for something for which there is no evidence beyond one’s imagination. Marx imagined Communism, a form of social organization that has appeared only in name. Commoner’s easy answer was a vague utopia of Socialism.

I don’t have such a rosy view of the future. If we survive as a species there may be pockets of mutual, ecologically integrative, humble clusters of people, but the mass system, with its concentrations into nation-states, is through. It has led to what we have now, and the secular trend, as economists say, is towards ill will, xenophobia, escapism, fanaticism, corruption, chaos and violence. As we have seen in the last couple of centuries, this violence can often descend into genocide, such as today in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,  Indeed, right here in the U.S.A., as European settlers grew into masses, genocide against the unmassed indigenous populations followed as automatically as night follows day.

Whatever humans exist after the fall of mass civilization, they will have to contend with what we leave behind: plastic waste of various kinds everywhere, a plethora of poisons, a warmed climate that devastates life as we know it, extinction of more and more species, extremes of weather and depletion of resources.

This is uncharted territory. Anyone who claims to have a chart for the future is a fraud. What we can do, though, is summarize the things we can’t do, which is most of what we are doing now, and hope for the best. We can start with ending gratuitous war and fascism.

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Here's a song. Here's another.

R.I.P. Dickey Betts. My favorite Allman Brothers song. This instrumental features Betts in an interwoven rhapsody with Duane Allman, especially at 27:10. Donovan's original of this tune can be heard here. Some background on the song.

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Barry Commoner also wrote likely the best analysis of our fossil fuel addiction, The Poverty Of Power. Here's an interview with Studs Terkel, where he discussed the book. It is previewed here.

A recent interview with William Robinson on Madison's WORT discusses the crackdown on free speech on U.S. college campuses.