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People are intellectually lazy when it comes to elections. They vote for their candidate as if they are supporting their favorite sports team. Except with the sports team many will actually study the stats and question the coaches decisions.Originally Posted by Grok
There are a lot of young adults (college age) posting to MDA who don't have a clue as to the bigger picture they face in their future. A lot of them argue for "sustainability" yet they'll vote for bigger government programs which requires an ever expanding economy to support it. To understand sustainability they first need to have a grasp of complexity and what it takes to maintain that complexity. Increasing complexity pushes a culture to collapse and unsustainablility. Obamacare is the most complexity thing pushed in the last four years. As a spoof, the Republicans put up this schematic of what they thought the system would look like http://wizbangblog.com/images/2009/0...care_chart.jpg but this is actually how Obamacare's schematic looks out http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpre...complexity.jpg
Everything in the nature/environment is an energy system. The economy is an energy system. In order to have an economy capable of supporting a complex culture, that economy requires positive Net Energy (or Energy Return On Energy Invested). Professor Joseph Tainter is a renown expert on why culture's collapse. He calls this relationship between energy and complexity "The Energy Spiral." The less net energy a society has the less complexity it will support. Yet we have young adults who want to hamper the very energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas) which support the world they living in. In their minds, it's as if society could simply switch to an alternative and society would simply rock on, and be cleaner.
Chris Matenson has this power point presentation on energy and complexity
Mary Logan of the University of Alaska, whose father was a major figure in the 1970's environmental movement, also talks about the life altering energy and complexity issues these young adults are facing in this lecture Dr. Mary Logan - Whither Complexity?
And I'll through in this lecture by Joseph Tainter "The Collapse of Complex Societies" and what it means for today's world.
Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (1 of 7) - YouTube
Admittedly, those three sources will take some time to watch and learn how all three are talking about the same problem these college people are facing. Yet I'll wager not one of them will bother to watch and learn any of it...especially if they draw an opinion that I some conservative hack.
But the bottom line is this: their world is in collapse and they can't see happening. The dollar is going to collapse because we have a Keynesian economic philosophy which ignores this relationship of net energy to complexity but which tries to maintain all these grand social programs through borrowing and printing money. It took the Roman Empire 300 years to collapse. We could do it inside of 30 years if the net energy it requires falls of the energy cliff. Tainter shows a striking comparison of the Roman Empire's collapse, and what preceded it, to our own economy. They also instituted grand social programs and they also devalued their currency to support their government programs.
