John Michael Greer's Blog, page 81

The Metaphysics of Money

To mention money and metaphysics in the same sentence, as I did at the close of last week's post, is to invite any number of misunderstandings. The hoary habit of thinking that walls off philosophical questions in a ghetto of abstractions apart from the world of ordinary life gets in the way of clarity here as so often, but there's an even more basic problem: most people these days have no clear notion of what the word "metaphysics" means in the first place.

The tangled history of the word p...

Why Economists Fail

The last two posts here on The Archdruid Report, while they dealt with issues that are becoming increasingly hard to avoid as industrial society begins its long slide down the slopes of Hubbert's peak, were something of a distraction from the theme I've been trying to pursue for the last few months, the theme of deindustrial economics. I want to return to that theme here, and continue exploring the possibilities and risks of economic life in an age of decline.

Mind you, it may have occurred to...

Daydreams of Destruction

Last week's post on The Archdruid Report got rather more than the usual number of responses. Most of the comment – no surprises there – focused on my suggestion that the hopes for a better future retailed so freely by all sides in today's cultural conversations face certain disappointment. At first glance, this may not seem like a controversial statement; one of the crucial facts about the future, after all, is that the fossil fuels that prop up current lifestyles across the industrial world...

A Terrible Ambivalence

I'd meant to spend this week's report talking about scarcity industrialism, the kind of economy that will be defined for us in the near future by the conjunction of resource scarcity with the immense mass of embodied energy we call an industrial civilization. There's a great deal to be said about the forms such an economy will likely take, and the harsh challenges and unexpected opportunities that it will bring to a world still far too used to getting as much energy as it wants whenever it ha...

The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism

Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so offer a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are setting the future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in the dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed almost unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of these news items seem to have been missed by most observers.

The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is planning to ba

Entropy Gets No Respect

The relation between modern industrial society and the scientific ideas that supposedly guide it is more complex than a casual glance will necessarily reveal. The ideology a society believes that it embraces and the assumptions about the world that actually underlie its actions and institutions are not uncommonly at odds with one another. It often takes the most strenuous sort of willed inattention to fail to notice the gap, but efforts toward that end can count on the support of public opinion

Betting on the Rust Belt

I owe, I think, an apology as well as a few words of explanation to the regular readers of this blog. The weeks I've taken off from posting here this summer have not been as innocent as they seemed, and those of you who may have imagined me basking in the mostly theoretical sun on some gray and rainy Oregon beach are about to be sadly disillusioned. Conspiracy fans take note: a plot has been afoot.

Over the last few weeks, my spouse and I have relocated to the other side of North America and a

The Archdruid Takes A Break

Once again The Archdruid Report will be on a brief hiatus until the middle of August, s I'll have essentially no internet access until then. Once I'm back online, I'll have some announcements to make, and something new to offer that I think longtime readers will find entertaining. In the meantime, The Ecotechnic Future, which is the sequel to The Long Descent and discusses many of the concepts introduced here over the last couple of years, can now be preordered from New Society. Thank you all f

The Economics of Entropy

Over the last few weeks, my posts here on The Archdruid Report have tried to sketch out a way of understanding economics that doesn't contradict the laws of physics or the evidence of history. Perhaps the central concept I've been developing along these lines is the sense that there is no such thing as "the" economy in any human society; there are, rather, three economies, each of which follows distinctive rules.

The primary economy, in this way of looking at things, is the natural world itself,

The Anti-Ecology of Money

Last week's Archdruid Report post built on one of E.F. Schumacher's more trenchant insights to propose a controversial way of making sense of modern economics. Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful, drew a distinction between primary goods produced by natural processes, and secondary goods produced by human labor, and pointed out that secondary goods can't be produced at all unless you have the necessary primary goods on hand.

This is quite true, though it's a point often missed by today's economists