coming crisis: June 2006 Archives

The price of gas has been remarkable stable in my little corner of the world this week: it’s exactly the same as it was when I posted this image almost a week ago. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been spending the week scared shitless. Well, not really... but kinda.

• A New York Times article dissected at Daily Kos suggests that avian flu is quickly mutating into a form easily transmissable by humans...

• Also at Kos, blogger redstar looks at recent economic news that suggests that a significant economic slowdown is beginning:

At this juncture, there are really only two likely scenarios - one bad, one very bad.

The bad one is a recession, perhaps a deep one. Official inflows into USD are a leading indicator of this, in fact, the stagflation of the '70's and the recessions in the '80's were both preceded by this very thing.

The very bad one is the financial crisis the Volcker warns of which, if like the crisis precipitated by Nixon taking the US off the gold standard, may be tolerable, but all the same painful. Of course, back in Nixon's day, US exposure to foreign holdings of US assets wasn't quite what it is today, and even then, development of the Eurodollar market almost caused the US to lose control of its currency, something it is about to lose in the near future. ...

Either way, count on the job market to tighten, wages of average workers to languish even further, and inflation, especially at Wlamart and Target, to take a bigger and bigger bite out of your take-home, pre-heating bill pay.

I so don’t want to turn Geek Philosophy into the Global Warming Blog, but it could be rather interesting to devote at least some space to trying to guess what the coming crisis might be... the coming crisis as predicted by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books about a generational theory of history, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069; The Fourth Turning; and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. (Just to be clear, for those who haven’t read their work, they don’t suggest that horrifying shit isn’t happening all the time, just that the particular personalities of the four generational types they posit, as well as at what stage of their lives each generation is at, at the time particular bad shit happens greatly determines how society reacts to the shit, whether it just shrugs and absorbs it and moves on, or whether it freaks out and goes crazy. As you may suspect, we are, if Strauss and Howe are to be believed, and I suspect they are, at the latter stage of the cycle.)

This crisis, according to Strauss and Howe, will be on a par with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II in its dramatic impact upon society, in its level of threat to our society as a whole, and in how its resolution will shape the entire next generational cycle, say, the next 75 or 80 years of so. Global warming certainly is looking like an excellent candidate -- see my long essay on Al Gore from a few days ago for some evidence of how people are sensing the urgency and import of that issue -- and with that in mind, I’m creating a new category for postings here -- “coming crisis” -- and starting my “neighborhood BP gas price watch.”

I was so galvanized by the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth (my review is here) that I felt compelled to, a few days later, snatch up one of the last tickets available to Al Gore’s town hall-style discussion at New York’s Town Hall (the theater in Times Square, not the seat of local government). That was on May 25th, and since then, I’ve been watching how astonishingly well the film has been doing in limited release -- at the moment its per-screen average is better than The Break-Up’s and second only to the surprising smash hit, for an unusual midweek release, of The Omen; one commenter at Atrios’s blog recently complained that, where he lives, he could see the idiotic “comedy” RV in an almost empty theater but there was no sign of Truth in his area yet, which is truly bizarre from a pure business perspective if nothing else. And I’ve been letting the experience of seeing the film and seeing Gore in person sink in, and I find myself feeling optimistic, maybe, for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the direction our society may be going in. And I’m itching to do something about pushing us in that direction. I can’t recall ever feeling like this before. And could be it’s symptomatic of a grand shift in Generation X from complacency and apathy to caring and action.