Suddenly, nothing seems to be working.
The stock market, where millions of Americans were assured their nest-eggs would assure a secure retirement, is in free-fall. Some of the most venerable names on Wall Street have collapsed or are near death. A $700 billion “rescue” seems to have done little good. General Motors is running out of cash. Oil prices ran up to historic highs before dropping, but only because of a worldwide recession. Home ownership — “the American dream” — has toppled into foreclosures and falling values. And even during the most recent boom most Americans actually saw their wages stagnate or lose ground.
Experts for more than a year have struggled to give all these crises a name. A pullback? A recession? Another Great Depression? Thanks to Americans’ relative affluence and the legacy of government programs beginning with the New Deal, another Great Depression is unlikely. But we will be tested by an unprecedented convergence of forces, and most of them not in America’s favor.
I call it the Great Disruption.
Today’s financial meltdown has been more than 25 years in the making. The big drivers: deregulation, debt, and a hollowed out American economy. Somehow we persuaded ourselves that financial swindles and house building could substitute for a real economy that produced real things. That we could keep consuming beyond our means, increasingly borrowing from foreign creditors, including nations that do not mean us well. All of this was encouraged by some of the top economists and business thinkers, who constructed elaborate computer models and fetching philosophical arguments to make it all seem inevitable and good. No wonder they have been as baffled by the crisis and incoherent in addressing it as Herbert Hoover and his advisers in 1929. (And of course, like their historical soul-mates, they spent years denying the crisis even existed, denouncing critics as alarmists).
The Great Disruption is, at its heart, about unsustainability made real. The bad news is that more than financial unsustainability will collapse in the coming years. Global warming is already moving faster and more destructively than scientists had predicted. It will bring huge economic and social costs, and cause vast unrest, migrations and potential conflict. Oil worldwide is at or near peak; much oil will remain, but it will be costlier to find and refine, and is located in hostile places. Worldwide demand for oil is unsustainable. A similar scenario is in play for water.
At the same time, America is overstretched militarily and environmentally as well as financially. Not only that: As it turns out middling performance in science and math education, pulls back on funding for research and puts off investing in 21st century infrastructure, other nations are rising to challenge American pre-eminence. They, too, however, will be challenged by the Great Disruption. With hundreds of millions of poor, rural residents, a downturn in China could bring destabilization with global implications. China, too, is locked in the loop of the unsustainable: from its debt-for-stuff relationship with America to its planetary pollution footprint.
The generations now living will be challenged by the Great Disruption and its consequences no less than our forebears in the 1930s. One thing is clear: the worst mistake we could make is to spend trillions trying to maintain the unsustainable, to operate as if the next 30 years will be a repeat of the past 30. Our worst enemy may be unsustainable thinking. |
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