Executive Summary

• The government is NOT riding to our rescue here. So don’t count on it.
• Our decisions today will determine our destiny tomorrow
• The most important single insight to base your future plans on
• How to focus the time you have now

If you have not yet read Part 1: These Are ‘The Good Old Days’, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

What happens when multiple unsustainable trends converge and everything changes?

At the micro level that’s impossible to predict.  Local mileage will vary tremendously in this story.  Some nations will improve, others will implode.  Some communities and individuals will prosper, others will wither away.

At the macro level it’s easy to project because it’s simply a matter of trend extrapolation versus the far trickier challenge of predicting the future.

As fossil fuel net energy wanes the broad complexity of the current economy will also wane.  Things will simplify.  There will be fewer job categories, and fewer things to buy.  That all may prove to be a boon as people rediscover that lower living standards can, and paradoxically often is, be accompanied by a higher quality of life.    Happiness over stuff.

As the idiocy of the debt binge of the past five decades finally penetrates the thick skulls of Team Elite, the only choices are to abandon it or face the complete destruction of the involved currency systems (hat tip to Von Mises).

Abandoning it means less stuff, it means austerity, it means ruined political careers, the loss of enormous piles of debt-based wealth, and a vast skinnying down of a bloated financial industry.  So, not a very popular option among the current ruling classes who are over-exposed to every one of those ailments.

On the other hand, the destruction of the currency system means the pain is shared by everyone with a bank account and a paycheck, but it too means a vast turnover in political dynasties and financial fortunes.  Also not popular among Team Elite.

So here we are, with the can being endlessly kicked down the road because nobody in power exists who can stomach being a true leader.