Winter Solstice - Are We Turning A Corner?

The economic news has seemed to be a little better of late, at least on the home front in the USA. The Eurozone crisis is still flaming, so markets are still unresolved. But a few numbers here in the US economy have given some people renewed hope that this so-called jobless recovery is happening. Is economic spring just around the corner?

The Winter Solstice is a celebration of the fact that from here on, the days will be getting longer. There will be more light each day. And for those of us who live in higher latitudes that is meaningful. I've heard a few comments to the effect that just like the solstice, we may have reached a turning point in the economy and each day there will be a little more “light”.

I don't think so. There are several things to remember about cycles like the seasons. Most of all they go round and round. There will be a Summer Solstice in June. The economy has its cycles too and the real question is, over the long run, is it a simple cycle, or is it a spiral? And if so, which way is it going.

West Texas Intermediate crude prices are still north of $90/barrel. Tapis and Brent have been running $100 plus for a long time. Many more traditional economists are finally coming to realize what the biophysical economists have been saying all along, that the price of oil has a direct impact on the direction of the economy in terms of GDP growth. High oil prices lead to a drag on the general economy in all sectors. Today the only way governments have to appear to be countering this fact is to create more fiat money (e.g. quantitative easing) to make it seem as if there is more actual wealth available and GDP looks like it is still growing (albeit at a pathetic pace compared with what is considered robust!) They are hoping that sooner or later the whole thing will turn around, just like the Winter Solstice, and we will get back to the old normal of growth and “prosperity”. They are, of course, just aggravating the situation. The only time we might expect the price of oil to diminish is when the economy goes into a clear recession and demand goes down. The ups and downs in the economy, reflected in the price of oil and the stock markets, reminds me of the preditor-prey population dynamics models based on the Lotka-Volterra equations. The equations describe two interacting populations that affect each other's sizes with time delays. One goes up, the other follows but as it does so it negatively impacts the size of the other, which then goes down and the other one follows. Rabbit populations expand; foxes eat rabbits and with more of them the fox population goes up accordingly; then there are more foxes and they eat more rabbits so the latter population declines; and the foxes go hungry. Something like that.

The price of oil, however, is only a symptom. It tends to reflect the fact that the net energy we get from what oils we are producing is going down. Right now there is a hubbub going on about how the US is awash in oil and natural gas. What the MSM doesn't mention, or fails to analyze, is the fact that this new oil is terribly expensive to harvest. In reality, it simply takes more energy to extract tar sand oil, or shale oil (and gas) than it did extracting conventional oil (and gas). Ergo, it is more expensive even if the supply seems to be going up. By the ordinary laws of standard economic theory, greater supply should push the price of a commodity down. Or, at least, it should not trend upward, as has been the case since 2005.

Of course, energy is not like any other commodities. The Second Law of Thermodynamics rules the day. So, as we are seeing, even if supplies (actually we refer to “potential supplies”, or proved reserves) seem to be up the “purchasing power” of our money with respect to real physical work goes down.

So, unfortunately, this seeming turn around is not like the Winter Solstice. There will come an effective Summer Solstice before anything like a Spring Equinox is seen in the economy. We're in a permanent winter! In other words we are on a downward spiral that will not halt until or unless we discover some incredible source of high power energy. The likelihood of that is looking slimmer every day. Meanwhile the population continues to grow, the wealthy continue to burn up resources at a phenomenal rate, the oil continues to decline in value, and the natives are growing restive. All you pagans out there had better get in touch with the spirits. See if you can convince them that the economy really ought to be more like the annual cycle we celebrate tonight. 9:30pm(ish), Dec. 21 on the west coast (22nd on the east coast).

Comments

[c woof]

@Bruce
I want to thank you for (I assume)what many, if not all, here have been thinking/have already thought--I'm a newby to the blog, so it may have already been covered during the months I have yet to read-- and have (in my case) been pondering.
As I read more here, I hear the same thoughts gathering-- that more of like mind need to connect, and the internet has, I think, yet to expose its true power. If ever there was a time to put to the test what it is really capable of, now is that time.
And computers are more powerful than ever, no end in sight. It appears to me solutions might be found, if the momentum can be maintained or even (as appears to be happening, in parallel with the crisis) accelerated.

Another side of the same coin, which will win out? Will sapients prove more vicious than super-sapients, and will viciousness be the true determining factor? Or will wise council and planning prove its mettle? And will the sapients prove just clever enough to short-circuit any end-arounds dreamed up by others, thus defeating progress?
Of course, I'm assuming these questions are extremely premature and we won't live to have to answer them...
AN ASIDE-- in my youth I tried my hand at novel writing, starting with a post-apocalyptic tale which started with two friends and their partners trying to survive. My grandmother was not impressed with my first 6-pages of draft, so it never happened, but here I am an adult, and the same scenario (due to a different underlying reason-- not nuclear war between two ideologies, but instead struggle at the end of food) lies before me as I stare down the road to the future!!
Truth is ever stranger than fiction....

[Selfgovus]

@Bruce,

"If this is a valid premise, would not non-sapients be expected to behave in ways that ensures die-off in a sufficient manner and thus further sapient evolution?"

Yes!

I see people every day making it easier and easier for the universe to snuff them out.

Besides all of our unhealthy habits including smoking and over-eating, even things like the use of antibiotics is making the species susceptible to mass die off.

I believe the sapience needed by the universe is already out there.

[Aboc Zed]

@bruce

Your questions indicate that you yourself is as sapient as "human" can get

I can assure you that the people you are talking about are looking for each other

They now need to come up with the way to identify each other and form a community that will be functional under current socio-economic system and evolving in parallel with the structures of "human ape"

i do not know if you are inclined to do anything more than posting your questions in this forum but even if you are not your questions do further evolution and as such deserve proper recognition

well done

great writing

[Bruce]

"i do not know if you are inclined to do anything more than posting your questions in this forum but even if you are not your questions do further evolution and as such deserve proper recognition

well done

great writing"

@Aboc Zed (Alex?),

Thank you for the kind words, but I'm not sure if a sapient or super-sapient can be rightly said to be so were he to acknowledge same, i.e., he who says he knows does not know and thus does not know that he does not know. :-)

I am rather highly motivated to seek out like-minded individuals for the purpose of becoming a member of a community you describe.

I must say, however, that I have made similar attempts over the past 10-20 years with little success and not a little bit of disappointment, frankly.

Quite often the primary impediments to tangible progress were the very factors you discuss, such as politics/ideology (and the inability to see one's biases and how they impede a broader, deeper understanding); "pecking order" (those seeking authority to advocate a particular political/ideological agenda and use others' efforts to advance the narrow, self-interested agenda); and, of course, the very human tendency to try to financially exploit at the expense of the organization and others involved.

The demands and complexities of modern life do not always permit one to devote the necessary effort and resources to such critically important endeavors. Then again, is there anything more important in a long-term existential context than contributing to the successful next step in the evolution of the species via the creation of a highly self-selected and adaptable sub-species of human (???) ape living in an ecologically self-sustaining condition?

Please feel free to share your thoughts about how one might connect with such a community.

[Aboc Zed]

bruce,

i do not have a cookie cutter approach or an algorithm that would automatically label particualr individual as a member of that community

yes i share your "if you say ou know then you don't know" but i also can say this this language template comes to us from a philosophica ltradition ans since philosophical tradition like religious tradition are traditions of the past i am skeptical about them simply because the kind of knowledge or whatever they called knowledge then has been many times redefined and imbued with "new" meaning

i completely share the sentiment that existing structures,modes of interaction and group participation are inadequate and therefore we should not try to use them

to me it is first and foremost an experimentation and a journey that has not even close to the begining

all i know is that at some point in the future mankind will have to embark on this journey and if i feel and think this way and i am human then there should be others like me and it would benefit to connect

my next step is to think that if they sare my feeling about inadequacy of our collective upbringing then those people should be willing to try new ways of cooperation and collective problem solving

especially in terms of intellectual output

and a key ingredient for me is the desire to work on our own mental habits that we all acquired while growing up

it is clear for me that we can only be 'transitional' and very vaguely at that

it is not easy and requires tremendous mental concentration and few are willing to implement this kind of thinking in their "being"

why?

because one has to develop basically two "virtual" personalities and modes of thinking in their head: one to function in default human condition (pecking order and pooping on the lessers) and the other completely horizontal structure, egoless, open-minded experimental discussion aiming at feeling out the protocol that might be conducive to a tiny step into ight direction by molding young mind in the "flavour" of this particular group

and this is where the problem is: it is hard to be "invested" in a "double-think" life - it is very taxing on a mind that has not learned to embrace unpredictability of life and craves the stability of 'belif-system'

these are my thoughts put in the language that has existed for millenia and i am trying to appropriate it for "new" meanings - a process that happens anyways but much easier when there is a like-minded group who are early adopters of new knowledge

[Aboc Zed]

bruce,

more to the point of complexities of life preventing one from participation on a group

yes it is true but he solution is very simple because it is a number game

as soon as more than 3 individuals identified each other there will be a treshold number after which the group will be self-replicatinf and will perpertuate itself much like default human condition of institutionalized ignorance (pecking order and bs-ing for status)

i call it institutionalization engine kicking in

of course each individual member still will be able to be kicked off the group by default human conditin (say you have kjids and one of them gets into troble and yu need money to take care of it - you of course will have no time to spend on 'the good of future generations') but nobody is special to the degree to be irreplaceable: in nature we are all merely a replica of homo species design and it does not matter what particular kind of nonsense we carry in our heads

what matter is the way of our interaction and now we have all the knowledge we need to kick start the ways of interaction that are next step in terms of evolutionary proces and are superiou to the ways of homo sapiens sapiens

it is a tiny step in the right diectin that counts and once there is enough of timy steps that happen one after another the system gets on the next level and the quantitative changes manifest as qualitative - i am sure theis law of hegel dyalectics is completely internalized in you and many others

[George Mobus]

C.

If you have taken a look at my latest blog you may have inferred, correctly, that I have come to the conclusion that even the average smart person cannot be convinced or converted because of things like cognitive dissonance and too many built in judgment biases. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that only an appeal to the natural human tendency to 'believe' will have any purchase on getting people to change their behaviors.

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What,

I think in time you will realize that it really is about energy. Politics merely reflects a deeper cause and that is biophysical.

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Bruce,

What evidence is there to suggest that sapient evolution can progress without mass die-off? That is, is not mass global die-off a requisite condition for further evolution of sapience and avoidance of human ape extinction?

I'm not sure what you would regard as evidence. There is good and rapidly accumulating evidence that humans have been "evolving" in the sense that certain cognitive traits have been under selection due to cultural influences (I just got a copy of Steven Pinker's new book, "The Better Angles of Our Nature", in which he proposes several possible pathways by which humans have been evolving more pacific inclinations). However, the second question seems more to the point. My thesis holds that a technological, esp. farming, society tends to select for logistical and tactical thinking rather than strategic thinking. This being the case, there can be no advances in sapience (which depends very much on strategic thinking) so far as genetics is concerned. Ergo I would conclude that a bottleneck is a prerequisite for creating an environment in which strategic thinking, along with the other cognitive components of sapience, would be favored. And, it would also provide an opportunity to "seed" the future with higher sapient people if we were to choose to do so (and, of course, assuming we were able to determine who!)

But I do not see the trail of logic you pursue re: the higher sapients taking actions that would facilitate a die-off. In my view of sapience there would be no compulsion to "boost" death. Nature alone is probably sufficient to handle the decline of population rapidly enough. All the high sapient survivors need do is survive and hang on.

As to your question regarding the whereabouts of super-sapient (or my terminology of higher sapients), you might be surprised. I didn't dream this thesis up in a vacuum! I have some models to work from.

George

[José]

Dear Bruce,

Quoting T. S. Eliot, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality". Neither the leftist mind can. Your apocaliptical lucidity is simply apalling, and leaves nothing to be said.