Descent, pt. 5

This is the fifth entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, Descent, pt. 3, and Descent, pt. 4.

To do what?

What sense is to be made of The Long Descent? Greer plainly asserts that it's in our interest to pursue a produce-more, consume-less lifestyle, that we equip ourselves with the knowledge and skills to produce goods and services that other people will need and that we learn to get by on fewer resources and with less reliance upon the market economy. Does this mean that I should quit my software job and concentrate on raising backyard chickens? How enthusiastically should I take Greer's advice, if at all?

To be fair, Greer does not advocate that we all change suddenly and radically. Though, by arguing that we should be generalizing rather than specializing and pursuing “trailing edge” technologies rather than leading-edge ones, he clearly departs from modern conventional wisdom. Greer suggests that his are lower-risk strategies in upcoming years than conventional wisdom's, but I'm not wholly convinced and for three reasons. These reasons are: timing, scope, and creativity.

Timing is everything

It's no great secret how to forecast with greater accuracy: be more vague. The less specific a forecast is, the more likely it is to come true; the more specific it is, the less likely it is to come true. The Long Descent aims for accuracy but at the cost of specificity. As a result, Greer operates on the scale of decades and centuries rather than months and years. This means that The Long Descent is probably more correct than what could otherwise be expected with a book predicting the ramifications of a big issue like peak oil. (We'll see.) On the other hand, even if Greer gets the big picture mostly correct, his timing may easily be off by decades, and it's the months and years that matter most with respect to most individuals' day-to-day fortunes and fates. For example, if I came into the certain knowledge that the software industry will entirely cease to exist within thirty years, I might continue my current career with the hope that the industry's death happens later rather than sooner. After all, I'm highly invested in my current career, and a shorter career in software may still be more lucrative for me than a longer career in backyard chickens. This is to illustrate how it may be that Greer's argument is both more accurate and less relevant.

Do we have any reasons to suspect that Greer's predictions will be off by decades? I think so. Here are three possibilities.

• The trend of decreasing global oil production throughout the 21st century may prove significantly asymmetrical to the increases of the 19th and 20th centuries. The downslope may be flatter than the upslope. There is some evidence to support this currently, as oil production has been flat for nearly a decade now, though some view this as evidence that the eventual downslope will be sharper. I think this shows that we don't know one way or the other.

• The other fossil fuels may make up for lagging oil production for a while. Natural gas production is expected by many to peak soon, but coal may not peak for two more decades.

• The decrease of prosperity and material wealth may lag behind energy production by a short while. Many instances of our material infrastructure embody more energy than they require for continual operation. Some examples are: houses, roads, and dams. These will continue to provide value for a while after we lose the ability to produce them as cheaply as we now do.

• Increases in energy efficiency may slow the decline for a while.

None of these reasons assure me of anything, which is my point. While I think the prudent, long-term bet is to expect longer and harder economic contractions and shorter and milder recoveries, it may well be a few decades before Greer's four horsemen pay us a visit. How should one spend these next decades of uncertainty? If timing the fall weren't difficult enough, there are the differences between how decline affects individuals and how it affects civilization as a whole.

I'm reminded of the saying that a recession is when your neighbor is out of work, and a depression is when you're out of work. Though the patterns of booms and busts for large economies play out as long, sweeping curves of GDP graphs and stock market charts, the perspective of any one individual is more like the discrete, on-off state of a light switch on the wall. The economy's GDP may drop by 2%; if you're not self-employed, chances are that your income will stay about the same or drop by 100%. Civilizations have built into them a complex set of negative feedback loops that work to prevent the civilization from zooming one way or the other too fast; individuals for the most part lack such stabilizing influences, especially individuals utterly dependent upon the market economy.

It's easy to view Greer's catabolic collapse and long descent as abstractions for our own personal fortunes, that our lives will follow a similar long-descent pattern as the world around us does, but such thinking doesn't jive with personal experience with recessions. I think what we should instead expect is that most of us will be largely unaffected at any given time by the descent until the horsemen visit us while sparing our neighbor—or come for our neighbor while sparing us. Or they come for both us and our neighbor while people in another industrialized country halfway around the globe are spared.

Just to illustrate my point, imagine you lose your job and remain mostly unemployed for several years, during which time you also lose your house and your car. You think of several worthwhile career changes, but each change requires further education or certification, and you're too busy and broke muddling through day by day to get back on track with long-term plans, especially if you have a family to support in the meantime. Meanwhile, most everyone else around you is unaffected by the “sluggish” economy and wonders a bit about your bad luck. It might be that the economy will overall take a 75% hit spread out over the seven or so decades of your lifetime, but you may very well take that hit all at once halfway through. The economy sweeps along the mild undulations of the economists' charts; your own fortune blinks in and out like with the flicks of a switch.

What does this mean? My take is that it adds to the uncertainty of timing the descent and suggests that we temper our expectations of our best laid plans. But what about Greer's advice of learning practical skills? I'll expand upon this more next week when I write about my two other criticisms, scope and creativity, and wrap up this long review.