I think we are there. Industry is based on consumers, and we have everything. Next we can make things with less human involvment, and we are close to building machines that make China obsolete. 3-D Printers are coming along fast.
As for population, some 8.4 billion possible DNA outcomes, and we start producing doubles.
What gets edited out now is removed from the genome. Humans are not from all the people who ever lived, they are from a minority that survived, and produced children that survived, and that process continues.
Industry needed consumers to reach a level where consumers in mass are no longer needed. Those living beneath a sheet of tin outside some slum city, are not consumers.
Population will not be reduced due to enlightened programs, it will come do to sudden system failures. Depending on oil, when prices spike, supplies are short, food costs rise, and there is no way to deliver what no one could pay for. Water is another system heading for failure.
When it starts it reduces demand, as if no one can buy oil, they will also not be able to buy food. Production will be cut back.
We see it in our housing market, after the loss of great wealth, prices down by half, it is still not a buyers market, and million have made other living arangments. Loss of demand kills construction, and houses sit empty.
Our government is faced with eating it's self. Spending based on consumers has failed, debt is very real, and raising taxes will only make it worse.
We are at Post Consumer Economics, and it is all down from here.
We have entered the endless recession, and all of the spending that reduces the value of money barely keeps us there. A decline of GDP is the future, a depression that never ends.
Prices are falling because we have an excess, reduced demand, for electric, gas, and food is over produced for an export market that could dry up, when the people we used to import from no longer have our business.
We do not have to cut back food production, drought is doing that for us. We will eat, but those who used to eat our food will have to find something else.
We have enough coal and natural gas to keep things running. Other places are not so well off. Without oil imports, they no longer have the electric to pump water. They never developed a farming sector, or like the liberated Rodisia, turned the most productive farms into squatter camps, who now beg for food. HIV rates reach up to 50% in Africa, no treatment is available.
That is part of why half of Nigeria is under fifteen. still overpopulated, and about to have a population boom. It will not end well.
China runs on imported oil, food, and exports manufactured goods. Loss of market and they are in serious trouble. China has never had a recession. They have been keeping it going by building buildings that sit empty, high speed rail that costs more than flying, and even a command economy has limits.
OP is getting what he wanted, a worldwide decline of the industrial consumer economy. Unemployed people will spend everything on food and water, and demand will continue to drop. Deflation is the long term economy.
The result should be avioded, perhaps a billion will survive. The odds of several pan-epidemics being unstopable, could reduce that farther.
It will be good for the trees.
It will not be orderly, and for social and medical reasons, many of the survivors should be killed. Cannibals infected with HIV, no other way to deal with it.
Species survival is going to impose some standards.
26 Dec 2012, 3:21 pm
