3forces

By: James Lyman BSAE, BSEE, MSSM

Economic & Finance Report

In our present political discourse for the sixteen elections, candidates are talking about income disparity, climate change and how American business is doing quite well while the lives of a preponderance of Americans continues to deteriorate. With gay abandonment, candidates stand before eager crowds expounding how they intend to rectify all this if elected. And never a word about how they intend to do it, other than more of the same. Low taxes, low interest rates, more government regulation, income redistribution, laws banning this or that to equalize all the people. But none show any comprehension of why our present economy is the way it is, no idea what forces are at work causing changes to the world we live in.

There are three major forces now at work, which are pressing so many people out of the social-economic system. These are: 1) The high cost of keeping each individual in a high technology society, 2) The alienation of people as they allow themselves to fall further and further behind, coupled with 3) Advancing technologies which are increasingly replacing people at their jobs. The high cost of keeping individuals in our modern society is the cost in terms of natural resources, minerals, water, arable land, energy, pollution, climate change … oil … especially the oil! Most people have already forgotten that the near economic collapse was precipitated by the sudden spike in oil prices in 2007, the shock waves causing the collapse of major

financial institutions. This spike was predicted by M. King Hubbert’s modeling of world oil production1, and further concludes that oil will continue to be a diminishing critical resource into the twenty-first century. Diminishing water supplies across the world is a growing problem for producing food, and the only real answer to global warming is to reduce the human population.

With America’s service or hyper-consumerism based economy, these three forces point to long term profound influence on the economy, as it restructures itself to a new environment. With people becoming more alienated in the society they live in, because they fail to advance technologically, they are less and less able to make substantive contributions to society and the economy. This coupled with the high cost of keeping individuals in our advanced technological

society, is causing people to be sloughed off from the economic system to be come burden. And on top of all this, the third force of technology is creating the means and machines to replace the jobs of those discarded people, meaning there’s little future for them. In being so backwards and behind, there is little chance of displaced people regaining a toe hole in the twenty-first century to resume being contributors.

This is the reason for the growing income disparity in America, and why business in America is doing relatively well, while so many Americans are not. And because this fundamental fact is ignored, no solution can ever be found to address this problem. Those candidates who gleefully stand before cheering crowds proclaiming how they are going to reverse this situation, have no idea what is driving the problem, let alone what must be done to at least halt the process … let alone reverse it. No one is addressing the painfully glaringly fact that these are people which the twenty-first century does not want, does not need, and has no use for. How can any rational modern person consider they can solve any problem, when they DON’T have any understanding of it? It’s the height of absurdity!

It’s the third force of technology displacement that allows these other two forces to come into play full force, because now there isn’t any driving need to keep these people in our economic system. This is why none of what these candidates are preaching about the economy has any substance whatsoever. Why elections at all levels have become home coming queen elections with no real bearing on the problems people are facing. While it is easy to just ignore the plight of these people, in actuality, with the continual growth of technology, this problem will just continue to grow as more people are cast off by obsolescence. Therefore, the burden of useless people will continue to grow, slowing pulling down the rest of us. It’s a problem that won’t go away, and can only be addressed by fully understanding the problem in depth. There’s no way to just stop things … to just have the world stay the same as today, simply because technology continues to advance, so the means of technology displacement will therefore continue to grow. Furthermore, there isn’t some super evil person or some small secret malevolent sinister group who is controlling technology and therefore something that is controllable by the legislative process. The process is driven by the sum total of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals making individual decisions in their own self interest.

In today’s political discourse, if you are not talking about obsolete people, then you are talking absolute nonsensical gibberish! It’s that central to our financial and economic well being.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *