Degringolade

Post-Impressionism / Albert Marquet/ The Louvre Embankment

Colonel Lang is one of my daily reads.  I can’t say as I always agree with him, but he is a good source for things that need looking at.  Even if I don’t agree with his assessment, I feel that not taking his opinions into consideration makes my arguments weaker.  

Now, on his site last Saturday, he had a lede of,  “The depopulation timebomb facing the West is about to explode”,  Presented what seemed to me to be an alarmist slant on a positive occurrence.

The population has to go down.  Ideally it would be done with old people dying in their sleep and young people being greedy and not having too damn many kids.  I don’t see that happening, but it is a nice thought.

The only folks who really hate the idea are the capitalists.  Without a growing population, their wet dreams of increased profits kinda go by the wayside.  Capitalism can’t exist without growth.  

But capitalism is in trouble and everyone is going out of their way to ignore it.  Capitalism REQUIRES growth.  Capitalism is how you manage economic growth.  But growth is only possible with three large scale inputs; Energy, resources, and population.  The slope of the curves of access to these three inputs must always be positive for capitalism to work.

I am not advocating for any particular system to replace capitalism.  We currently haven’t seriously addressed the idea that the current system is approaching failure mode where the slopes of the input curves are flattening out ominously.