Every time I do a Q and A after a college lecture, somebody says (with a fanfare of indignation) — so as to reveal their own brilliance in contrast to my foolishness — “You haven’t said anything about overpopulation!”
Right. I usually don’t bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we ...read more
Hypercomplex Systems Will Fail Due to Scarcity of Energy and Credit
Nov 11th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Economics, Featured
In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual - that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in ...read more
Iran Fidgets in the Middle East: World War III Anybody?
Oct 6th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, International, Politics
When Alan Greenspan predicted three percent economic growth showing up in the reported figures for the third quarter of 2009, did he mean executive compensation packages? Maybe the lesson here is: don't ask a crackhead to predict the future supply of crack. Greenspan's greatest success may be to drive economics ...read more
Inflation, Deflation, Peak Oil and Complex Systems
Sep 29th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
In my father's house are many mansions. Surely one of them has a room with no elephants in it....
Not to crunch too many metaphors right here at the top, but a consensus seems to be firming up in the animate jello of the Internet that we have entered the Season ...read more
Ruinous Debt to Create Futureless Suburbia
Sep 25th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we've paid bitterly for some of that. But now it's our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.
It's odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account ("Eight ...read more
Reality Receding Across America
Sep 17th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
Now that everybody in the USA, from the janitors in their man-caves to the president addressing congress, has declared the "recession" over, is exactly the moment when what's left of the so-called economy is most likely to implode. If there were still shoeshine boys on Wall Street, they'd be starting ...read more
Cars, Wishes and the Apocalypse
Sep 9th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread. It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a ...read more
Debt and the Fog of Numbers
Aug 11th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
One of main reasons behind the vast confusion now reigning in the USA, our failure to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us (or what to do about it), is our foolish obsession with econometrics -- viewing the world solely through the "lens" of mathematical models. We ...read more
Monumentally Tragic Disappointment on the Horizon
Aug 4th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
Whenever the herd mentality lines up along a compass point leading to "permanent prosperity," or a yellow brick road lined with green shoots, or something like that, I tend to see the edge of a cliff up ahead. We are now completely in the grips of the deadly diminishing returns ...read more
Contraction and Electric Car Whimsy
Jul 16th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
The cat coming out of the bag this week -- a frazzled, flaming, rabid, death-dealing cat -- is the news that Goldman Sachs will announce impressive second-quarter profits, and set aside $18 billion or so for employee bonuses averaging $600,000 per head (though, of course, not evenly distributed among them). ...read more

