Consequence of climate change – people cannot afford insurance

by Pam_Andrade

After Sandy, a dire choice: Lift home or face sky-high insurance, but many can’t afford either  
[Via | StarTribune.com]

George Kasimos has almost finished repairing flood damage to his waterfront home, but his Superstorm Sandy nightmare is far from over.

Like thousands of others in the hardest-hit coastal stretches of New Jersey and New York, his life is in limbo as he waits to see if tough new coastal rebuilding rules make it just too expensive for him to stay.

That’s because the federal government’s newly released advisory flood maps have put his Toms River home in the most vulnerable area — the “velocity zone.” If that sticks, he’d have to jack his house up 14 feet on stilts at a cost of $150,000 or face up to $30,000 a year in flood insurance premiums.

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Why a loaded die is like climate change. Climate change is shifting the odds, resulting in huge financial effects. Do we decide that our whole society – which is responsible for climate change – helps pay for these effects or do we just leave those who happen to be on the losing end of the die toss to bear the brunt?

Higher sea waters mean that flood plains near the coast will change. This means that hones that used to stand outside the need for flood insurance are now inside. And the increased odds bring larger insurance premiums.

Which means that they now have two options: lift their homes on stilts above the flood level or pay for huge increases in flood insurance premiums.

If you chose to build in a flood plain, you go into it knowing the consequences. But when a flood plain moves into you, it can be devastating.

A simple home elevation can cost $60,000. Insurance premiums could be increased $30,000 a year. Government hel – help from all of us – is being constricted due to concerns abut the debt.

Many people are in denial:

They think Sandy was a fluke, a storm to end all storms, the kind they won’t ever see again. And they’re preparing to do battle with the government for the right to continue living just as they have for generations — in low-lying abodes that were never built to endure storms, let alone the fierce hurricanes of the 21st century.

But sea levels continue to rise. And it appears that current weather changes may drive more hurricanes up the eastern seaboard than into the Gulf. This will happen again.

And  while America has decided that it can help rebuild homes damaged by storms like this it has also decided to greatly reduce Federal subsidies for flood insurance, even for people who have the misfortune to now live where rising sea levels can reach them. 

We mandated higher premiums for those in a flood plain, shortened the revision times for determining where flood plains exist and removed lower rates that were grandfathered in. Now if the flood plain increases due to climate change, many people are just on their own. We decided that helping those hurt by increasing climate change was not as important as lowering the debt.

So many people living in what had been dry areas of the coast face some horrible options, including simply walking away from their homes because they cannot afford to pay for them anymore and no one will pay for the huge insurance premiums. Entire areas may soon be ghost towns because few can afford to live there.

The insurance companies know about climate change. That is why the rates are going up. Our attitude seems to be to just let those people who, through no fault of their own now live in a flood plain, to bear the full brunt of this change. One that will get larger as we move forward in this century.

I believe that since we are all responsible, we should all pay. But some Americans believe that only the unlucky should have to pay.

Members of Congress – both Republican and Democrat, in the House and in the Senate – are trying to fix this problem, introducing legislation that would ameliorate some of these huge insurance changes now affecting millions by making us all become part of the solution. And some of our conservative Americans want to keep things as they are, letting the unlucky deal with it.

Do we come together to help everyone or do we let the unlucky fend for themselves?

We need to make sure we have a very good conversation here because it will happen again and it will get worse. This can not be ignored or denied.

 

Faking covers of Time Magazine to support denialism

The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers – by David Kirtley
[Via Greg Laden's Blog]

This is a guest post by David Kirtley. David originally posted this as a Google Doc, and I’m reproducing his work here with his permission. Just the other day I was speaking to a climate change skeptic who made mention of an old Time or Newsweek (he was not sure) article that talked about fears of a coming ice age.

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Here is the image going around:

The cover on the left is faked. Here is the original:

Checking all the issues from the 70s reveals no cover talking about a coming Ice Age. There were some articles inside thaty discussed the possibility of an Ice Age along with articels discussing possible warming. That was the state of knowledge then,

We are about 40 years on now. The science is no longer divided. We are not entering an Ice Age and the world is warming.

The only ‘facts’ that denialists have are fake magazine covers.

 

For those hearing that CFCs cause global warming, not carbon dioxide…

by mccun934

Qing-Bin Lu Revives Long-Debunked Claims About Cosmic Rays And CFCs
[Via Climate Progress]

A (new) paper by Qing-Bin Lu in the International Journal of Modern Physics B is gaining attention for asserting that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), not CO₂, is causing global warming. This sensationalist headline is typically repeated with little mention that Lu’s claims are not new, and they have not held up to scientific scrutiny in the past.

The following is a guest post by Climate Nexus. Text in PDF format here.

A new paper by Qing-Bin Lu in the International Journal of Modern Physics B is gaining coverage for its claim that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), not CO₂, is causing global warming. This sensationalist headline is often repeated with little mention that Lu’s claims are not new, and have not held up to scientific scrutiny in the past. In fact, Lu has been promoting his theories about CFCs for years, and mainstream scientists have found no merit in them. Critics have said Lu makes a fundamental scientific error by confusing correlation with causation, and does not effectively challenge the physical evidence of the warming effects of CO₂, a body of knowledge built up over 150 years.

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This is not a new hypothesis and one that has been examined a lot over the last decade or so. It has not been found to be credible.

In addition, the journal it was published in has a reputation for being sloppy with peer review. This does not mean it is wrong; just reasons to be careful.

One problem with this hypothesis lies in a basic difficulty with many so-called ideas – correlation does not mean causation. There apparently is no physical process to support what he proposes.

Meanwhile there is well over 100 years of data about carbon dioxide that does support causation. So this hypothesis needs to do more than just come up with another mechanism.  It also has to explain why higher carbon dioxide does not have the effect that physics suggests it does.

In science, you have to explain all the data, not just the the data you want to.

Printing solar cells – 10 meters a minute

by Rhys Asplundh

CTRL+P: Printing Australia’s largest solar cells |
[Via  CSIRO]

The printer has allowed researchers from the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC) – a collaboration between CSIRO, The University of Melbourne, Monash University and industry partners – to print organic photovoltaic cells the size of an A3 sheet of paper. According to CSIRO materials scientist Dr Scott Watkins, printing cells on such a large scale opens up a huge range of possibilities for pilot applications.

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Being able to cheaply print out  solar power cells could change things once again. 

This technology could allow solar cells to be placed in all sorts of locations not found today. And these cells can be designed to efficiently capture certain wavelengths that standard solar panels cannot. 

Such additive manufacturing will change many things.

Amazon goes full Buckminster Fuller in South Lake Union?

Amazon proposes a colossal biospherelike Seattle campus 
[Via | Internet & Media - CNET News]

The latest fad for tech companies’ new office buildings seems to involve making them as far-out and avant-garde as possible. And Amazon is the newest firm to jump on that train. The e-commerce giant and gadget maker unveiled a slew of new drawings (PDF) on Tuesday that reveal a series of colossal, mirrored, biospherelike domes alongside a taller rectangular building that could be its new campus. The designs were created by architecture firm NBBJ and also include a copious amount of green space and landscaping. The intent behind the design, according to the project proposal (PDF), is to “create an alternative environment” where “employees can work and socialize in a more natural, parklike setting.”

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Wow. Domes. Right in the middle of South Lake Union. Here is what the footprint will look like:

That is Westlake Ave. on the diagonal. 6th, 7th and 8th running horizontally. There are mostly parking lots there now.

And this is how the document describes the domes:

When viewed close up, what appears as a homogenous skin stretched over the curved forms is perceived to be composed of a repeatable module that comprises the form of the entire building. 

These do not look just like the geodesic domes popularized by Fuller, they nevertheless house his spirit. A normal geodesic dome is made up of strutting that forms a chord or great circle across the entire sphere (i.e. you can draw straight lines around the dome). Here the struts seem to form a spiral.

I wonder how that changes their structure?

Printing food is more disruptive than printing guns

by FUNKYAH

3D-printable food? NASA wants a taste
[Via Ars Technica]

NASA has bestowed a $125,000 grant upon a research corporation to pursue the development of 3D-printable food, according to a report from Quartz. Anjan Contractor, who runs Systems & Materials Research Corporation, hopes to design a system that will turn shelf-stable cartridges of sugars, complex carbs, and protein into edible food on demand.

Contractor asserts that by the time the population reaches 12 billion people (“peak human” for Earth being around 9.5 billion to 10 billion people), we will have to change our perceptions of what “food” is in order to sustain everyone. A modified RepRap 3D printer serves as Contractor’s theoretical prototype design for printing food.

Contractor plans to keep the printer open-source and envisions situations where recipes can be traded and tweaked by users. The printer could even theoretically produce foods based on the optimal nutritional makeup for the consumer, whether it’s a young boy, old woman, or hung-over college student.

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It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. I’m expecting that special materials will be used that permit the actual simulation of connective tissue, viscera  and intercellular connections that give food its texture as well as taste. 

And of course, it will have to be fairly rapid printing. No one is going to use this at home  if it take 4 hours to produce a steak. Also, printer jams have to be very rare.

Just think of the effects on the food producing industry if this gets perfected. Why raise cattle is the steak can be replicated at home? Why would McDonald’s exist if you can make a hamburger at home?

I’d expect some of the corporations to be pushing to outlaw printing food at home. Maybe by making a regulatory play about food safety? 

Because if it gets perfected, the reason for a McDonalds, for a Taco Bell and perhaps even for most supermarkets, will be greatly reduced. 

However, it may not be possible to print some ice cream so Ben and Jerry’s will probably hold on.

Molecular paleontology is so cool

by Patrick Feller

The sea shall give up her dead
[Via john hawks weblog]

I really like this ScienceNOW account by Traci Watson of new work that has uncovered ancient DNA in deep-seafloor contexts: “Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below Sea Floor”. The article covers two studies, including one looking at 11,400-year-old DNA from the abyssal plain, another comparing more ancient and recent Black Sea seafloor samples. The latter study may help to redate the last time the Black Sea basin was flooded from the Mediterranean:

One type of marine fungus, for example, first appeared in the sediments roughly 9600 years ago—exactly when some forms of freshwater plankton and a freshwater mussel vanish, the team reports this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That suggests that marine waters started to invade the lake roughly 600 years earlier than thought. The team also found DNA from a form of marine alga in 9300-year-old sediments, though the alga doesn’t show up in the fossil record until 2500 years ago, says molecular paleoecologist Marco Coolen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and an author of the Black Sea paper.

What a neat project it will be, to explore seafloor DNA for unexpected inclusions. There’s a good reason to fund much more work here, given that the 11,400-year horizon where this is already practical is so near the Younger Dryas. We need a fleet of tiny autonomous vessels to find the interesting stuff — we can call them, “Glomar Venters”!

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We are gaining greater and greater expertise in deriving genomic DNA sequences from life that died ten thousand or more years ago. And sequencing becoming cheaper, allowing greater investigation of these questions.

Here we have investigation of the DNA molecules found in silt from the Black Sea. They tell us when the Black Sea changed from a freshwater lake to a salt water sea. Because the types of life seen changed.

And they found DNA from life whose fossils were not found from that time. I wonder if similar things can be done using territorial soil samples instead of marine?

Deaths due to hotter weather

by Noël Zia Lee

Heat-related deaths in Manhattan projected to rise
[Via EurekAlert! - Medicine and Health]

(The Earth Institute at Columbia University) Researchers say deaths in Manhattan linked to warming climate may rise some 20 percent by the 2020s, and, in some worst-case scenarios, 90 percent or more by the 2080s. Higher winter temperatures may partially offset heat-related deaths by cutting cold-related mortality — but even so, annual net temperature-related deaths might go up a third.

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While fewer people will die in winter due to rising temperatures. this will more than be made up by  those who die during the summer.

in fact, the greatest increases in deaths will happen in May and september as the high temperatures of summer extend into normally pleasant months.

A 20% increase is not something to ignore. More than 1000 people might die every year just due to the increase in heat.

Used to be that attacking science was a career killer

by kevin dooley

Climate science denier appointed President of New Mexico State Univ.
[Via Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog]

What an embarrassment. (Thanks to Lawrence Torcello for the pointer.)

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Now you get to run a University. Isn’t America wonderful?

Skeptics of AGW a disappearing breed – except in politics and the media

Zombie climate sceptic theories survive only in newspapers and on TV | Graham Readfearn
[Via Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk]

Study finds overwhelming scientific consensus that humans have caused global warming, but media still hasn’t caught up

Here’s the news from 1991 – a vanishingly small number of peer-reviewed studies in science journals argue that humans aren’t the cause of global warming.

Here’s the news from 2013 – since 1991, less than two per cent of all peer-reviewed studies say climate change is caused by something other than human activities (that’s burning fossil fuels and digging up forests, to you and me).

Both the news from 2013 and the news from 1991 come from new research published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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The paper – Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature – is Open Access.

Here is the take home figure:

 

What is interesting is not that there really are no papers the reject AGW. It is the increase in number that take no real position. This took place rapidly in the late 90s and has stabilized.

The paper looked at some of the possible reasons for this and came to the conclusion that scientists were taking no position because it was simply understood that AGW was happening. By 2000 or so, they no longer felt they needed to state the obvious and were more concerned with new problems, not with restating what was already known.

There have been millions of dollars invested to make people think there is not a scientific consensus regarding climate change. As the conclusions state:

A key strategy involved constructing the impression of active scientific debate using dissenting scientists as spokesmen (Oreskes 2010). The situation is exacerbated by media treatment of the climate issue, where the normative practice of providing opposing sides with equal attention has allowed a vocal minority to have their views amplified (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004). While there are indications that the situation has improved in the UK and USA prestige press (Boykoff 2007), the UK tabloid press showed no indication of improvement from 2000 to 2006 (Boykoff and Mansfield 2008).

The data show otherwise.

 

Could the Gaboon viper’s scales help create better solar panels?

by Life As Art

The Gaboon Viper Has Ultra-Black Scales So You Can’t See It
[Via Phenomena » Not Exactly Rocket Science]

“It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.” – Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap.  

The Gaboon viper is a fairly docile creature, and that’s where the good news ends. It also has the longest fangs of any snake—2.2-inch-long weapons that swivel forwards like switchblades. The fangs are connected to such huge glands that they deliver more venom than any other snake—a cocktail of toxins that thin the blood, trigger massive internal bleeding, and can stop hearts.

And to make things much, much worse, the Gaboon viper is virtually impossible to see.

From above, its head looks like a dead leaf. Its five-foot-long body is patterned with rectangles and hourglasses, and shaded in cream, yellow, brown and black. Against the leaf litter of its forest home, the viper simply fades away.

Now, Marlene Spinner from Kiel University has discovered one of the secrets to the Gaboon viper’s exceptional camouflage: The black on its body is really, really black. Not just black, but black. Ultra-black. None more black.

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The article – Snake velvet black: Hierarchical micro- and nanostructure enhances dark colouration in Bitis rhinocero – is Open access, so you can look at the pictures.

The upshot is that the highly patterned viper has black areas that reflect such little light that the deep blackness confuses our eyes.

WHen the scales from these black areas are examined under an electron microscope, unusually small ridges were found. When regular scales are coated in a metal in preparation for use in an electron microscope, they take on the color of the metal. Because light is reflected back to our eyers.

But the black scales remain back, even after coated. Light does not get reflected back.

It appears that these very small ridges bounce any incoming light around so it cannot reach our  eyers. It appears black because there is little light coming from them. And it does not matter which direction we move our etes too. 

It is like once light enters, it cannot escape.

Turns out this is something that solar panels would love to be able to do. We want to use all the light energy and let little of it escape. We would like the panels to look black. We have created some materials that are even more efficient than viper scales in holding onto light but they are brittle and hard to work with.

Perhaps something like these scales will be helpful.

Harboring parasites for protection

by siamesepuppy

Ladybird Invader Carries Deadly Parasite as Biological Weapon
[Via Phenomena » Not Exactly Rocket Science]

When Europeans arrived in the New World, they brought devastating diseases like smallpox, which killed more native Americans than guns and other weapons. Infections go the other way too: When grey squirrels from North America arrived in the UK, they brought a squirrel pox virus that decimated the local red squirrels. Time and again, animals have invaded new regions and killed the locals by inadvertently bringing biological weapons with them.

Now, Andreas Vilcinskas from Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen has found that one the world’s most invasive insects—the harlequin ladybird—also belongs in the biological weapons club.

It hails from central Asia, but was willingly introduced to Europe, North America, and other parts of the world, by people who were seemingly undeterred by the outcomes of bringing cane toads to Australia or mongooses to Hawaii. Like those other invaders, the harlequin has brought ruin to local ladybirds, many of which have declined dramatically since its incursion.

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Luckily I knew that a ladybird was the same thing as a ladybug.

While not all the science is in, it does look like the invasive harlequin ladybird has some built in defenses which may explain why it is taking over habitat.

It’s circulatory system is awash in a mix of anti-biologics and other molecules. These do not seem to have any effect on the health of other ladybirds. WHat does affect them is a single-celled parasitic fungus. The fungus has no effect on the harlequin ladybird – perhaps because all of the anti-biologics.

But when native ladybirds are exposed to the parasite in the lab, they die. 

Now the researchers have to show that this transfer happens in the wild. If so, then we will know that some organisms carry around their own biologic weapon, one that removes their competitors.

Be amazed at how far the volume of Arctic ice has dropped

Animation of Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volume 1979-2012
[Via DeSmogBlog - Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science]

If your roof is leaking, do you ignore it and hope it will fix itself? 

This new animation created by Andy Lee Robinson depicts Arctic Sea Ice minimum volumes reached every September since 1979. It’s a depressing sight, for sure. Andy makes it a little less difficult to view with his own piano sountrack, a composition called “Ice Dreams”:

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Great visual of how the minimum volume in the ArcticIce has dropped

Best recent science article title: NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax

 by purpleslog

NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax
[Via Psychological Science]

Abstract

Although nearly all domain experts agree that carbon dioxide emissions are altering the world’s climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a platform for denial of climate change, and bloggers have taken a prominent role in questioning climate science. We report a survey of climate-blog visitors to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Our findings parallel those of previous work and show that endorsement of free-market economics predicted rejection of climate science. Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that, above and beyond endorsement of free markets, endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Martin Luther King, Jr.) predicted rejection of climate science as well as other scientific findings. Our results provide empirical support for previous suggestions that conspiratorial thinking contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.

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Love the title. What the paper suggests is that providing scientific facts to people may not change their minds if those facts make them uncomfortable. They just create a conspiracy to deal with that discomfort.

A pre-publication form of the paper is available. Previous studies have shown that people’s personal world view correlated with their rejection of climate change and that this was strongly associated with strong free-market capitalism.

This survey of 1100 people gave a similar result. The people who strongly agreed with this statement  describing capitalism

“An economic system based on free markets .802 unrestrained by government interference automatically works best to meet human needs.”

also generally agreed with this one

“The claim that the climate is changing due to emissions from fossil fuels is a hoax perpetrated by corrupt scientists who wish to spend more taxpayer money on climate research,”

The correlation was quite strong with something like 80% of those picking the first one also picked the the second.

But the study also put in a lot of other conspiracy theories, including aliens at Roswell, Princess Di’s death was an assassination ordered by the British royal family, the US allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen, the moon landings were faked, the New World Order  is planning to take over the planet. They also asked about specific science statements about HIV/AIDS and  lung cancer.

What they found was that there was not only a strong correlation between those who were free market capitalists and rejection of climate change, They also saw correlations with rejecting other science facts. Not only did they reject climate change but they also rejected HIV as the cause of AIDS and smoking as the cause of lung cancer.

The researchers also found that those who accepted one conspiracy theory – that scientists are perpetrating a hoax– were much more likely to accept other  conspiracy theories. .

This is the first report of a correlation between conspiracy ideas and a rejection of science. The report suggests that people do not just ascribe to conspiracy theories because they are a convenient explanation for facts that they do not want to believe.

It suggests that conspiracy theories are actually a basic approach to dealing with the world and that people who accept one conspiracy theory are much likelier to accept more, all the time rejecting facts science presents, even if these facts have no relevance to any of their theories.

That is, creating conspiracy theories is a way of thinking, not just a way to deal with inconvenient facts. And that way of thinking also includes rejecting scientific facts.

Now this is an initial study and there will need to be some further investigation. But it demonstrates that single conspiracy theories do not appear to operate in isolation but become part of a multitude of conspiracy theories that weave together to create a world view.

And that world view tends to reject science. As new but uncomfortable scientific facts arise, these people simply create a new conspiracy, rather than dealing with the discomfort.

Hiding from facts actually requires the creation of conspiracies for which there are no facts. Interesting. But it begins to make sense.

So they are willing to believe in facts that do not exist in order to not believe in facts that do exist.

Denying inconvenient facts by creating conspiracy theories seems to make it easier to deny other inconvenient facts by constructing other conspiracy theories.

Hiding from reality in a Cargo Cult World requires continuing construction of new conspiracies. Rejecting facts requires new conspiracies to be created even if there is no evidence for those new conspiracies at all. 

I guess we will have to see how well this holds up. It suggests that presenting people facts will do little to change their views. If they have decided that climate change is a hoax, then scientific facts will do little good.

Maybe the best thing is to come up with counter conspiracy theories. 

We need an ‘ism’ for post-growth economics

by gIadius

We’re Hooked on ‘Growth,’ But It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
[Via BillMoyers.com]

This blog post original appeared on the Colorlines blog.

As the New York Stock Exchange reached an all-time high this month, you’d think that the good times were back. But that would be incorrect. What happens on Wall Street has very little to do with what’s going on in the real economy. Corporate profits have never been higher, but — excluding the highest earners — real wages are at a 40 year low. With this fundamental disconnect — and political gridlock in Washington — it’s unlikely that our economy will return to health anytime soon.

The good news is that in thousands of communities across America, people are working together to bring about what may be the beginning of a new national economic contract. Where Washington and Wall Street are falling down citizens are banding together, not just to ameliorate the suffering caused by national stagnation, but to launch innovative economic initiatives that might create a brighter, fairer future for everyone.

These localized efforts, which fall broadly under the banner of “post-growth economics,” are beginning to stitch themselves together into a national force that holds the promise of stronger neighborhoods and greater individual well being. As Dr. Margaret Flowers, co-founder of Its Our Economy and co-author of the report “An Economy for the People and the Planet” said to me recently, the point of the post-growth movement is to create “an alternate economy that’s designed to meet human needs.”

With its focus on human beings and the preservation of the natural habitat that sustains us, this growing movement is actually the fusion of two areas of alternative economic thought, one environmental and the other social. For decades both have recognized that our current economic structure is unsustainable and leaves too many people behind. Modern capitalism has core deficiencies that harm the planet and contribute to human suffering. Rather than relying on the national political class to soften the blow, the post-growth movement seeks to remake capitalism from the bottom up.

Instead of subsidizing global corporations focused on scattering short-term profits amongst distant shareholders, post growth initiatives foster local economies that are cooperative and based on trust.

Think it’s too good to be true? Gladly, it’s not. Here are three ways in which these alternative economic values are playing themselves out and providing hope.

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We have capitalism, socialism, mercantilism, feudalism, etc. we need an ‘ism’ for this.

Read Erik Frank Russell’s classic “And then there were none” to get an idea of perhaps what is being discussed. What sort of society is created when economic needs are not dependent purely on growth? When social obligations become the currency, not strictly labor and capital needs? When central control of almost everything is disbursed?

What happens to the idea of labor and capital when the means of production are so automated as to drive incremental costs near zero? What does a post-growth economy really look like?

In many ways, free market capitalism replaced mercantilism. It focussed more on the market relationship of the user rather than the manufacturer.  Instead of solely focussing on the goods being made – how to tax them, how to control their movement across borders, etc. – capitalism grew to a more disbursed model, one where the interactions across national borders between capital and labor become much more paramount.

This has resulted in increasing growth of the economy. In fact, the growth in GDP per capita in the United States has been almost constant since the early 1820s.

The amount of ‘product’ produced per person is one way to describe productivity – how much of the economy each person provides. When we look at productivity over the last 70 years or so, we see the same curve.

I’ve shown various versions of this. Here is the latest one:

The productivity curve has continued along the same line as it has since the 1820s. And so did household income – whether median wages, hourly wages etc. were looked at. Then around 1980 things changed. Worker pay stagnated.

One large reason for this appears to be technology. More work can be done by fewer people because of technology. This puts downward pressure on wages as we  see more and more people trying to fill fewer and fewer positions.

we can see this in the increasing time it takes for employment to recover. Here is a figure showing the recovery times for post WWII recessions:

Before 1980, every recession was back to original levels inside of 24 months. NOw look at the recessions since: 1981 – 27 months; 1990 – 31 months;  2001 – 47 months; 2007 – ? Each one longer than the previous, as the economy continues to grow.

Corporate profits are at all time highs. Our economy is 2.5% higher than it was before the last crash, yet we have 3 million fewer people employed. These are not generally the works of evil people but of long term trends

So what happens at the end game – when technology and robots essentially make everything for zero incremental cost but people have no wages to pay for them?

I think it may have aspects of the Moyers article. And of the Russell story. It may be somewhat like the Jetsons, where they had an upper middle class lifestyle with one person working 1 hour a week. Perhaps a life stipend will be in order.

The gap between the riches from productivity and what people are ‘paid’ will be greatly reduced.  It won;t be free market capitalism – which elaly works to disburse scarse resources – because resources will, in many cases, no longer be scarce.

So we need something we can add ‘ism’ to.