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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2021 7:11:42 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 4, 2021 20:40:03 GMT
Richard D. Wolff – Why the Troubled U.S. Empire Could Quickly Fall Apart braveneweurope.com/richard-d-wolff-why-the-troubled-u-s-empire-could-quickly-fall-apartThe American Empire will not be destroyed by another nation, but from the enemy within: unbridled capitalism. Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism, the latter of which is now available in a newly released 2021 hardcover edition with a new introduction by the author. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. The U.S. wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan showed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and the funding of the domestic military-industrial complex were, more than geopolitics, the key drivers of these wars. Empires can die from overreach and sacrificing broadly social goals for the narrow interests of political and economic minorities. The United States has 4.25 percent of the world’s population yet accounts for about 20 percent of global deaths from COVID-19. A rich global superpower with a highly developed medical industry proved to be badly unprepared for and unable to cope with a viral pandemic. It now wrestles with a huge segment of its population that seems so alienated from major economic and political institutions that it risks self-destruction and demands the “right” to infect others. Refusing to accept lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates in the name of “freedom” mixes a frightening stew of ideological confusion, social division, and bitterly rising hostility within the population. The January 6 events in Washington, D.C., showed merely the tip of that iceberg. Levels of debt—government, corporate, and household—are all at or near historical records and rising. Feeding and thereby supporting the rising debts is the Federal Reserve with its years of quantitative easing. Officials at the highest levels are now discussing the possible issuance of a trillion-dollar platinum coin to have the Fed give that sum in new credit to the U.S. Treasury to enable more U.S. government spending. The purpose goes far beyond political squabbling over the cap on the national debt. The goal is nothing less than freeing the government to inject still more massive amounts of new money into the capitalist system to sustain it in times of unprecedented difficulty. The Fed learned that today’s capitalism needs such quanta of monetary stimulus thanks to the three recent crashes (2000, 2008, and 2020) witnessed by the capitalist system. A desperate empire approaches a version of the Modern Monetary Theory that empire leaders mocked and rejected not very long ago. Extreme inequality, already a distinguishing feature of the United States, worsened during the pandemic. This inequality fuels rising poverty and rising social divisions among the haves, the have-nots, and the increasingly anxious think-they-haves. Attempts by employers to recoup the profits lost to the pandemic and to the capitalist crash during 2020 and 2021 have led many to impose additional squeezes on employees. This has led to official and unofficial strikes that continue amid a reawakening labour movement. On an individual level, the rate of workers who have been quitting their jobs has been hitting record highs. Attempts by employers to recoup profits lost over the last two years also show up in the ongoing inflation besetting the empire. Employers set prices for what they sell. They know the Fed has juiced up the potential purchasing power by flooding markets with new money. Demand, pent up by the pandemic and the economic crashes, will help, at least for a while to support inflation. But even if temporary, the inflation will further worsen income and wealth inequalities and thereby set the U.S. up for the next crash. On top of this new century’s three crashes (2000, 2008, and 2020), each worse than the one before, another crash, which could be still worse, could challenge the capitalist system’s survival. Fires, floods, hurricanes, droughts: the signs of climate catastrophe—not to mention its fast-climbing costs—add to the sense of impending doom provoked by all the other signs of empire decline. Here too, the tiny minority of fossil fuel industry leaders has succeeded in blocking or delaying the social action needed to cope with the problem. Empires decline when their long habits of serving minority elites blind them to those moments when the system’s survival requires overriding those elites’ needs, at least for a while. For the first time in over a century, the United States has a real, serious, ascending global competitor. The British, German, Russian, and Japanese systems never reached that status. The People’s Republic of China now has. No settled U.S. policy vis-à-vis China has proven feasible because of internal U.S. divisions and China’s spectacular growth. Political leaders and “defence” contractors find China-bashing attractive. Denouncing China serves as popular scapegoating for many politicians in both parties and as support for an ever-increasing defense spending by the military. However, major segments of large corporate business have invested hundreds of billions in China and in global supply chains linked to China. They do not want to risk them. In addition, for decades, China has offered one of the world’s lowest-cost, better educated and trained, and most disciplined labour forces coupled with the world’s fastest-growing market for both capital and consumer goods. Competitive U.S. firms believe that global success requires their firms to be well established in that nation with the world’s largest population, among the world’s least-costly workers, and with the world’s fastest-growing market. Everything taught and learned in business schools supports that view. Thus the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed former President Donald Trump’s trade/tariff wars and now opposes President Joe Biden’s hyped-up programme of China-bashing. There is no way for the United States to change China’s basic economic and political policies since those are precisely what brought China to its now globally envied position of being a competitor to a superpower like the U.S. Meanwhile, China is expected to catch up to the United States with equality of economic size before the end of this decade. The problem for the U.S. empire grows, and the United States remains stuck in divisions that preclude any significant change except perhaps armed conflict and an unthinkable nuclear war. When empires decline, they can slip into self-reinforcing downward spirals. This downward spiral occurs when the rich and powerful respond by using their social positions to offload the costs of decline onto the mass of the population. That only worsens the inequalities and divisions that provoked the decline in the first place. The recently released Pandora Papers offer a useful glimpse into the elaborate world of vast wealth hidden from tax-collecting governments and from public knowledge. Such hiding is partly driven by the effort to insulate the wealth of the rich from that decline. That partly explains why the 2016 exposure of the Panama Papers did nothing to stop the hiding. If the public knew about the hidden resources—their size, origins, and purposes—the public demand for access to hidden assets would become overwhelming. The hidden resources would be seen as the best possible targets for use in slowing or reversing the decline. Decline provokes more hiding, and that in turn worsens decline. The downward spiral is engaged. Moreover, attempts to distract an increasingly anxious public—demonizing immigrants, scapegoating China, and engaging in culture wars—show diminishing returns. Empire decline proceeds but remains widely denied or ignored as if it did not matter. The old rituals of conventional politics, economics, and culture proceed. Only their tones have become those of deep social divisions, bitter recriminations, and overt internal hostilities proliferating across the landscape. These mystify as well as upset the many Americans who still need to deny that crises have beset U.S. capitalism and that its empire is in decline.
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Post by Admin on Nov 4, 2021 20:41:41 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 13, 2021 17:24:25 GMT
This was published in 1980: The dominant paradigm in North America includes the belief that "economic growth," as measured by the Gross National Product, is a measure of Progress, the belief that the primary goal of the governments of nation-states, after national defense, should be to create conditions that will increase production of commodities and satisfy material wants of citizens, and the belief that "technology can solve our problems." Nature, in this paradigm, is only a storehouse of resources which should be "developed" to satisfy ever increasing numbers of humans and ever increasing demands of humans." How many years have gone by, how many generations, and aren't we still living and teaching the same thing? www.fraw.org.uk/data/ap/devall_1980.pdf
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Post by Admin on Nov 15, 2021 16:31:34 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 15, 2021 17:26:17 GMT
#125 William Rees: Cognitive Blindspot; The Road To Extinction Last Born in the Wilderness Podcast 1.98K subscribers In the face of abrupt climate change, catastrophic loss of biodiversity around the globe, and rapid species decline across the board in recent decades, why are we, as a species, unable to clearly perceive the very perilous situation we find ourselves in? What is it about creating very large-scale, complex systems (technologies, cultures, societies), that makes us unable to perceive how our way of living detrimentally impacts planetary life-systems, which we rely on for our own survival and well-being? In the face of the physical reality we are forging for ourselves and all other life on this planet, what can we expect to happen in the face of these profound changes currently underway? In this segment, Dr. William Rees discusses the neuro-biological, cognitive and cultural barriers to sustainability, including human’s well-developed capacity for self-delusion. Dr. Rees is human ecologist, ecological economist, and is the originator and co-developer of the Ecological Footprint Analysis, the world’s best-known metaphor for the human "load" (the resources required of ecosystems to maintain our current mode of living) on the planet. Learn more about the Ecological Footprint concept at The Global Footprint Network website: www.footprintnetwork.orgThis is a segment of episode #125 of Last Born In The Wilderness "Marching Toward Collapse: Biophysical Limits & Our Cognitive Blindspots w/ William Rees." Listen to the full episode: bit.ly/2HGdECePodcast website: www.lastborninthewilderness.comSupport the podcast: PATREON: www.patreon.com/lastborninthewildernessONE-TIME DONATION: www.ko-fi.com/lastborninthewildernessFollow and listen: SOUNDCLOUD: www.soundcloud.com/lastborninthewildernessITUNES: www.goo.gl/Fvy4caGOOGLE PLAY: goo.gl/wYgMQcSTITCHER: goo.gl/eeUBfSSocial Media: FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/lastborninthewildernesspodcastTWITTER: www.twitter.com/lastbornpodcastINSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/patterns.of.behaviorLicence Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed) www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIHPmJyBOAY
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Post by Admin on Nov 16, 2021 15:35:30 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 18, 2021 12:22:18 GMT
This is how civilisations collapse It is far from Hollywood's vision of Hell BY ARIS ROUSSINOS unherd.com/2021/11/this-is-how-civilisations-collapse/Last week, in an attempt to explain away the supply chain woes that are increasingly leading to goods shortages in America, President Biden cited a popular neoliberal fable. He observed that to make a pencil, wood and graphite must be sourced from the other ends of the world before the finished product can end up in American hands. “It sounds silly, but that’s exactly how it happens,” Biden mused, “that’s just the nature of the modern economy.” But the result, he added, is that “when global disruptions hit… it can hit supply chains particularly hard”. For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who used the pencil fable to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, “but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”. As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in Globalists, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible. They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of a total system collapse. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean you’re no longer able to buy a new car; a drought on the other end of the world means empty shelves at home. As archaeologists and historians have increasingly begun to stress, our globalised world has seen two antecedents in the past: in the interconnected, hyper-specialised trading systems of the Bronze Age, and those of the Roman Empire at its height. When both buckled under a wave of unexpected shocks, the result was not decline or recession but total collapse, a process defined by the great theorist Joseph Tainter as “fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”. This is, as Tainter observes, “a suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated” society, where “the flow of information drops, people trade and interact less” and “specialization decreases and there is less centralized control”. This is not a Spenglerian moral fable of societal decline, but an inexorable process whereby growing complexity and sophistication bring with them a growing fragility: when a combination of shocks arrive, the entire society is suddenly forced to reorganise itself. It is not an extinction event or the end of the world: life goes on, just in a poorer, simpler fashion. The great trading civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean present just such an example. As the archaeologist Eric H. Cline notes in his recently reissued book 1177 BC, for more than two thousand years the great civilisations of Egypt, Western Asia and the Aegean had formed a single interconnected trading system, dependent on complex trading networks that “were open to instability the minute there was a change in one of the integral parts”. When crisis struck, shortly after 1200 BC, it took down all the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean simultaneously. As Cline notes, “perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of earthquake, drought, and invaders all occurring in rapid succession”. A “domino effect” followed, in which, thanks to the globalised nature of their world, “the disintegration of one civilisation led to the fall of the others”. The collapse of Roman civilisation, a product of an overextended, underfinanced empire weakened by internal feuding among its political elites, presents another apposite example. As the archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins emphasised in his 2005 book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, the most remarkable aspect of Roman civilisation, archaeologically speaking, was the ability of even the poorest members of society to afford cheap and high-quality consumer goods, enabled by immense specialisation in production and an interconnected trading network that spanned the entire empire. Yet after Rome collapsed, such goods were only available for the very richest members of society. In the production of ceramics, the use of coinage and the construction of stone buildings, the Western half of the empire suddenly sank back to a level of societal complexity lower than in Iron Age prehistory, not returning to a Roman level of sophistication until the later Middle Ages. And indeed, as Ward-Perkins warns, the Roman economy’s complexity was the precise reason its collapse was so total: “economic complexity made mass-produced goods available, but it also made people dependent on specialists or semi-specialists — sometimes working hundreds of miles away — for many of their material needs.” While this worked well in times of stability, it precipitated collapse when trade routes were disrupted. Like Friedman, or Biden, Ward-Perkins observes that today “we are wholly dependent for our needs on thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of other people spread around the globe, each doing their own little thing”. Yet he draws a very different conclusion about the desirability of this situation, noting that now “we would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency”. Yet of course, even as they were living through its early stages, the Romans were unaware their society was collapsing. Yes, goods were harder to come by, infrastructure was increasingly degraded, urban life was increasingly unsettled, economic growth was only a memory, and new religions boomed as people tried to make sense of their declining prospects. But even still, the military failures on the empire’s eastern fringes barely impacted life in the imperial centre. For some people, great profits could still be made: for most, things went on much as before, though with a lower standard of living with each passing year. No doubt, things will improve soon, Romans told themselves: this is only a temporary blip. The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base. This is the process of what Greer terms “catabolic collapse” — “the stairstep sequence of decline” where decades of crisis are followed by decades of seeming improvement, though the underlying society is left weaker and less resilient before the next crisis hits: “rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.” This gloomy view accords well with the Marxist theorist Wolfgang Streeck’s 2016 analysis that the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, has led us into a period of civilisational entropy and decay. For him, we experience “life in the shadow of uncertainty, always at risk of being upset by surprise events and unpredictable disturbances and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck”. It is a period where the state can no longer guarantee its citizens order or security, where “deep changes will occur” in an unpredictable fashion, and where every last effort to squeeze profit out of a collapsing system further undermines the social structure. For Streeck, this interregnum is a time when personal wealth dwindles and financial insecurity becomes the norm. Indeed, as Streeck observes, it is a period where “as growth declines and risks increase, the struggle for survival will become more intense”. It offers “rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”. It is not a vision of hell, or of the kind of apocalypse fantasised by Hollywood, but simply of a degraded version of the present: a world closer to the modern Global South than our recent past. It is not necessarily a sudden cataclysm, but a process that will take decades, perhaps even centuries, to fully reveal itself. Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total. As Ward-Perkins warns, Rome’s system of complex supply chains “worked very well in stable times, but it rendered consumers extremely vulnerable if for any reason the networks of production and distribution were disrupted”. The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil. As Tainter notes, “the whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator” of decline. A focused effort on domestic resilience is, after all, in itself evidence of reduced civilisational complexity: as trade routes wither and consumption begins to drop, we should strive to ensure that we are heading towards a controlled descent and not a sudden, cataclysmic crash. The imperial centre may not hold, but our lives must go on.
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Post by Admin on Nov 18, 2021 19:40:19 GMT
Article Open Access Published: 11 November 2021 Volcanic climate impacts can act as ultimate and proximate causes of Chinese dynastic collapse Chaochao Gao, Francis Ludlow, John A. Matthews, Alexander R. Stine, Alan Robock, Yuqing Pan, Richard Breen, Brianán Nolan & Michael Sigl Communications Earth & Environment volume 2, Article number: 234 (2021) www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00284-7Abstract State or societal collapses are often described as featuring rapid reductions in socioeconomic complexity, population loss or displacement, and/or political discontinuity, with climate thought to contribute mainly by disrupting a society’s agroecological base. Here we use a state-of-the-art multi-ice-core reconstruction of explosive volcanism, representing the dominant global external driver of severe short-term climatic change, to reveal a systematic association between eruptions and dynastic collapse across two millennia of Chinese history. We next employ a 1,062-year reconstruction of Chinese warfare as a proxy for political and socioeconomic stress to reveal the dynamic role of volcanic climatic shocks in collapse. We find that smaller shocks may act as the ultimate cause of collapse at times of high pre-existing stress, whereas larger shocks may act with greater independence as proximate causes without substantial observed pre-existing stress. We further show that post-collapse warfare tends to diminish rapidly, such that collapse itself may act as an evolved adaptation tied to the influential “mandate of heaven” concept in which successive dynasties could claim legitimacy as divinely sanctioned mandate holders, facilitating a more rapid restoration of social order.
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Post by Admin on Nov 24, 2021 17:45:36 GMT
Global economy faces uncertainty www.hellenicshippingnews.com/global-economy-faces-uncertainty/Countries around the world appear to be faced with economic slow down as well as a surge in inflationary pressures, a situation typically termed as stagflation. Also, there is no clear idea when the current supply chain bottlenecks will ease. Global financial markets are also at the same time facing turbulence, further adding to the climate of economic uncertainty. The US economy grew at a 2 per cent rate in the third quarter this year, the slowest growth since the pandemic era economic recovery. The problem has been further compounded by labour shortage. A combination of strong demand and limited supply is pushing up prices. Europe and China are also experiencing growth problems on the back of supply chain disruptions. China reported that its third quarter GDP grew at a disappointing rate of 4.9 per cent from the previous quarter as industrial activity slowed down. Germany is also hit by supply bottlenecks affecting its export oriented manufacturing sector. Manufacturing output in Germany was 10 per cent below pre-pandemic period during the third quarter. The Japanese economy grew by 3 per cent in the third quarter on an annualised basis. Thailand a major developing economy in Asia recorded a negative growth rate of 0.3 per cent during the same quarter. The annual inflation rate for the US is 5.4 per cent for 12 months ending September, 2021 with little sign of abating. Rising consumer demand is fueling inflation which is running 30 years high in the US. The Bank of England has already predicted that inflation would reach 5 per cent next year in the UK and also inflation is surging in the Euro zone. Despite central banks and government authorities’ response to the initial surge in inflation was that higher prices would be “transitory”, it is unlikely to be so, rather increasingly becoming persistent. Some economic observers believe that if inflation continues to accelerate, it will be very expansive and very costly to get things under control. In a recent press conference US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said it was “very, very difficult to forecast and not easy to set policy”. The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, last month told that the central bank would “have to act” if inflation proved to be stubbornly high, then decided not to do so. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has signaled that the European Central Bank (ECB) would tolerate a short term spike in inflation and said that a rate rise in 2022 was “off the chart”. In fact, Eurozone annual inflation surged to 4.1 per cent in October. Such a price spike has not been seen since 2008, i.e. the highest inflationary surge in 13 years. But that position could become untenable if inflation in the Eurozone continues to rise as inflationary pressures show very few signs abating in the US. Norway, though not a member of Eurozone or the EU, is the first developed country that has already hiked interest rates. Such statements are indicative of central banks ability to provide “forward guidance” has become very limited, thus significantly compromised their ability to deal with crucial aspects of monetary policy. This in turn has created turbulence in bond markets. Forward guidance about the future direction of monetary policy plays a very crucial role for investors decision making. Its two aspects help shape the view of investors – the path of policy rates and the strategy about asset purchases. The path of short term interest rates generally appears to be well understood but the central bank like the Federal Reserve must provide a clear signal as to the pace of future asset purchases to avoid unnecessary volatility in financial markets. Central banks set monetary policy in response to not only the business cycle but also to underlying structural shifts in prevailing “normal” level of interest rates that are appropriate for their economies over the medium term. Over a longer span, all central banks are being affected by structural factors that are putting upward pressure on interest rates. Now all these mixed massaging and rising inflation have caused an upward pressure in bond yields and a fall in bond prices – bond yields and prices are inversely related. The upward trend in bond yields reflect not only policy uncertainty but also reflect overall longer term structural trends globally which are largely seen as an increased spending prompted by the post-pandemic reopening and supply bottlenecks pushing price levels up. Fuel and food prices are soaring worldwide combined with supply chain disruptions, further pushing up prices. The price of oil is likely to go up further which can spur an economic crisis. In emerging and low income economies rising fuel and food prices could stall economic recovery from the pandemic induced 2020 recession. The rising inflationary pressures is pushing central banks to tighten interest rates. Rising interest rates lead to higher financing costs for banks and consequently to higher lending rates. This in turn leads to a slowdown in consumption and investments. This can have negative effect on the price of financial and real assets because present value of future returns from these assets decrease. Also, when central banks manipulate interest rates to encourage or discourage borrowing and spending, they are knowingly distorting prices and behaviour in the financial markets. In the current circumstances tapering to avert inflationary pressures require central banks to have a clear understanding where they stand in the cycle. Therefore, plans to reduce bond purchase or raise interest rates or both at the same time may prove to be a risky proposition under the current economic climate. If central banks are forced to take more aggressive action to contain inflation, it will have detrimental effects on aggregate demand, thus lowering growth. Lower economic growth with high levels of debt in developed countries will cause major economic and financial turbulence and even a crisis. The combination of slowing growth and persistent inflation remains the major challenge. Now fiscal policy support is set to slowdown into 2022 after governments around the world, especially developed countries, ran up the biggest debt since 1970s. That makes it even more difficult to work out the trajectory of global growth. The Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago in an article pointed out that central banks were trying to chart a path that would curb inflation but not choke off growth as they “navigate the process of weaning economies off the extraordinary measures – including rock – bottom interest rates and enormous bond – buying programs deployed to support their economies”. Larry Summers who was treasury secretary to President Clinton and director of the National Economic Council for President Obama in an interview with Judy Woodruff of PBS also told that monetary policy needs to focus on stopping inflation. To achieve that objective he suggested that the Federal Reserve to accelerate taper i.e. to stop buying large quantities of bonds and push up interest rates off the zero floor. As the global economy is entering the final quarter of 2021 with enormous head winds, policy makers in major industrialised economies are faced with the daunting task of supporting growth while keeping inflation under control at a time when these economies are also hit by domestic and external supply disruptions. All these problems coupled with the recent turbulence in bond markets are an indication that crisis experienced a year and a half ago may resurface again. Therefore, that will require economic policymakers to develop very carefully crafted policy mix to respond to the complex situation they face now keeping in view that full recovery may take years, not quarters. Source: Financial Express
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Post by flyingcarpet46 on Nov 30, 2021 10:19:21 GMT
/ Humans connecting to wildebeest
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Post by Admin on Dec 1, 2021 16:21:32 GMT
Opinion Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-doomed-to-go-extinct/Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer prefaced a song called “So Long Mom (A Song for World War III)” by saying that “if there's going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now.” Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was more than 2 percent—the highest in recorded history. Half a century on, the threat of nuclear annihilation has lost its imminence. As for overpopulation, more than twice as many people live on the earth now as in 1968, and they do so (in very broad-brush terms) in greater comfort and affluence than anyone suspected. Although the population is still increasing, the rate of increase has halved since 1968. Current population predictions vary. But the general consensus is that it’ll top out sometime midcentury and start to fall sharply. As soon as 2100, the global population size could be less than it is now. In most countries—including poorer ones—the birth rate is now well below the death rate. In some countries, the population will soon be half the current value. People are now becoming worried about underpopulation.
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Post by Admin on Dec 8, 2021 12:48:47 GMT
This Mysterious, Indestructible 'Black Box' Will Tell The Future What Happened to Us PETER DOCKRILL6 DECEMBER 2021 At a distant end of the Earth – hidden somewhere on the remote Australian island of Tasmania – a strange structure is about to witness and record the end of the world as we know it. www.sciencealert.com/this-mysterious-indestructible-black-box-will-tell-the-future-what-happened-to-usThe project, called Earth's Black Box, is a giant steel installation, soon to be filled with hard drives powered by solar panels, each of them documenting and preserving a stream of real-time scientific updates and analysis on the gloomiest issues the world faces. Information related to climate change, species extinction, environmental pollution, and impacts on health will all be chronicled in the monolithic structure – so that if some future society might one day discover the archive, they'll be able to piece together what happened to our planet. "Unless we dramatically transform our way of life, climate change and other man-made perils will cause our civilization to crash," the Earth's Black Box website explains. "Earth's Black Box will record every step we take towards this catastrophe. Hundreds of data sets, measurements and interactions relating to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and safely stored for future generations." In a sense, the box, which evokes the brutalist design of Norway's famous 'Doomsday Vault', actually serves a somewhat complementary purpose. While the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a fortress designed to protect a vital backup of the world's seeds in case the worst ever happens, Earth's Black Box is conceived as an ongoing record of the world's trajectory towards a dire predicament. "The idea is if the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible recording device will be there for whoever's left to learn from that," Jim Curtis, executive creative director at marketing agency Clemenger BBDO, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). "It's also there to hold leaders to account – to make sure their action or inaction is recorded." The project – a collaboration between Clemenger BBDO, creative agency The Glue Society, and researchers at the University of Tasmania – is due to be completed in its undisclosed location in early 2022, but the box's systems are already partially active, in that they are 'live recording' environmental updates in a beta test. Part of the point of the exercise, the box's makers say, is to help nudge humanity away from doomsday-like scenarios, with the mere existence of the installation hopefully encouraging today's society to act more progressively and responsibly in terms of climate action and environmental stewardship. "When people know they're being recorded, it does have an influence on what they do and say," The Glue Society's Jonathan Kneebone told the ABC. "That's our role if anything, to be something in the back of everyone's mind." While some might belittle Earth's Black Box as a PR stunt designed to capture people's attention – as opposed to a serious scientific documentation project – there's no doubting the world urgently needs more attention and action on these issues, no matter how those eyeballs are secured. In a world where ice sheets are destabilizing in response to unprecedented levels of global warming, where greenhouse gas emissions are headed the wrong way, where water is running out, and where animals are vanishing with such speed that scientists say we've entered our planet's sixth mass extinction, this is not the time to look away. "The purpose of the device is to provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations, and inspire urgent action," the Earth's Black Box makers say. "How the story ends is completely up to us."
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Post by Admin on Jan 1, 2022 17:58:50 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 7, 2022 21:53:19 GMT
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