Decline of the Empire

There's No Hope At All — Zero, Zip, Nada — Forgettaboutit!

As I work on another long essay on ... more human horseshit ... I thought I'd pass along this little economic update from the Wall Street Journal (February 6, 2014).

It must be read and understood in the context of the productivity/wage graph I've included below. I'm going to use that graph in the introduction to my next essay. I've emphasized the key items. Read it and weep.

The Argument From Ignorance

I see that Elizabeth Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction has been published. Before I get to Kolbert, for whom I have a lot of respect, I am reminded of some text I wrote in another context but didn't publish.

All of my published material on DOTE is guided by my firm belief that the human-made world should make sense. Let me illustrate that view with a typical example of muddled thinking I found at the blog treehugger. The post is called Diasterbation Turns You Blind. That post was written on May 5, 2010, and the author Sami Grover was upset by what he perceived to be a new wave of pessimism in the environmental movement.

The Last Bubble?

It's time to check in with the stock market, which I last wrote about in Human Craziness Goes Hyperbolic (November 25, 2013).

Although we are in Year 18 of what I call the Bubble Era, things seem to have taken a turn for the worse lately, a development which remained only a (remote?, likely?) possibility only a few years ago.

The most conspicuous of these bubbles is in the U.S. stock market, whose valuation (as measured by various indices) now threatens to touch Heaven itself. We acknowledge of course that the U.S. stock market is not in a bubble "officially" unless former Fed fixture "Easy Al" Greenspan says it is not in a bubble. Happily, we've got the reverse confirmation we need.

The S&P 500 on November 25, 2013 in the 18th year of the Bubble Era

America's Predatory Elite

I discussed the elite as opportunistic predators in my long essay Economics As A Moral Science?  That essay was a follow-up to my post Homo sapiens — The Rationalizing Animal. In that first essay I defined the three most important social groups in United States, or indeed, in any other large, complex human society—the elite, the beneficiaries of the status quo, and the disenfranchised.

I spent a lot of time setting that discussion up by laying out a simple but "good enough" theoretical framework which helps us understand why we Americans "are not all in this together."  That view helps us understand why the vast the majority of ordinary Americans (the disenfranchised and others) are sometimes regarded as "prey" to those at the top.

A more specific discussion helps us understand who makes up America's current elite, and why those people "they don't give a fuck about you" (i.e., those outside the group, and paraphrasing George Carlin). In 2011, Professor G. William Dunhoff, who is in the sociology department at UC-Santa Cruz, published an anonymous letter from an investment adviser who is intimately acquainted with America's predatory elite.