Posted on 05/03/2023 4:47:52 AM PDT by MtnClimber
“Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” — Thomas Sowell.
“Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” — Thomas Sowell
Historians of the future, poaching ‘possum snouts in sorrel sauce over their campfires, will trace the fall of Western Civ in the 2020s to the dissolving hallucination that was called the financial economy. It was a phantom parasitical organism that thrived on the back of a real economy based on making-and-doing things derived from the natural world, turbo-charged by fossil fuels.
The orgy of making-and-doing went on for two-hundred-plus years. Even with cyclical “recessions,” the making-and-doing always increased in the aggregate, while its products got ever more plentiful, elaborate, and complex. The phantom financial parasite clinging to its back got used to this “growth” and it, too, developed ever more ingenious ways to suck the life out of its host organism, until it became a greater entity than the host itself, breaking its back.
The whole of this chapter in the long-running human project had strange effects on human minds that had not changed much since the late days of hunting and gathering. After the first hundred years of fossil fuel plentitude, humans had a hard time telling the difference between the host and the parasite. Both of them seemed to thrive equally. The real economy produced food and useful things and the financial economy produced money, which could buy food and useful things.
People made things incessantly, especially better and better tools and engines. That allowed people to grow more food and make more useful things that provided comfort and convenience. The financial economy made more and more money. It also produced myriad new ways for money to represent itself. At first, these things such as stocks and bonds (ownerships and loans-at-interest) were firmly attached to activities in the real economy — that is, they were sucked directly out of the host’s makings-and-doings....
And the parasite grew larger than the host until it broke its back.
“Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” — Thomas Sowell.
Good article except where he said that the manufacturing economy has faltered because fossil fuels became scarce. That’s just wrong… very wrong. There has never been more.
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