mengwong

... iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses. ...
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81)

A juvenile populace that eats its seed corn is headed for the cliff.

I wonder if any of the candidates have the gumption to say "fellow Americans, we've made some bad mistakes. We've borrowed against our future, and now we have to pay. The sooner we pay, the sooner we recover. The longer we wait, the longer we suffer."

There is flint in the American character that will respond maturely to bad news firmly delivered; but that flint is buried deep. An election year is a terrible time to dig it out.

I wonder how things would be different if more of the country had grown up on Heinlein.

Let's say we've had seven years of fat. Now, choose between two hypothetical futures. Choice A: we collectively tighten our belts, opt for seven years of lean, and together we all make it to the other side. Choice B: one more year of fat, followed by the execution of the poorest tenth of the population, followed by another year of fat, and another round of slaughter of the most costly and least productive ...

I imagine Choice B looks a lot like last days on Easter Island. (At least, the morality-tale version of Rapanui, whether or not it actually happened.)

An economist would say that the question depends on how much you discount the future. If you discount it enough, your Pareto curve will get so steep that you might as well adopt the sand tiger shark as a mascot.

I have a harebrained theory that discount rates arise from the fact that we die. If we were immortal, the rate would be zero. I hypothesize that the discount rate of a population can be indexed to its life expectancy. More precisely, it can be indexed to some weighted average of the objective, the subjective, and the evolutionarily instinctive life expectancy. (i.e., the superego, the ego, and the id.) The life expectancy according to the id is pretty much fixed at about 35, tops. Re-weighting requires education and civilization.

Five years ago Michael Pollan mentioned that this might be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be shorter than their parents'. I believe it: the high-carbon lifestyle is not just bad for the environment: it's also bad for the people who practice it. Here in Singapore, my maid (physically active, eats mostly vegetables) may well live longer than my mother (sedentary, eats mostly meat). In America, that future is now arriving: it's just not evenly distributed. If you buy my theory, the consequences are staggering. Inverted yield curves are only the tip of the iceberg.

The larger consequence is that America might, for the first time in its history, reverse its progression along the r-K continuum back toward r-selection. Down that path lies poverty and the third world.