From Limits to Growth to Regeneration 2030. An Article by Jeffrey Sachs

The 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Limits to Growth," in 1972, continues to generate interest. This is the original English version of the article by Jeffrey Sachs published in Italian on "Il Sole 24 Ore" -- courtesy of Susana Chacon. Above, the cover of the recent report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond", that re-examines the 1972 study and discusses its relevance for us

From Limits to Growth to Regeneration 2030

Jeffrey D. Sachs   |   May 26, 2022   |   Il Sole 24 Ore

Fifty years ago, Italian business leaders in the Club of Rome gave a jolt to the world in their path-breaking report Limits to Growth.  That thought leadership continues today as Italian business leaders launch Regeneration 2030, a powerful call for more holistic, ethical, and sustainable business practices to help the world achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement.  The 50-year journey from Limits of Growth to Regeneration 2030 shows how far we have come in understanding the critical challenges facing humanity, but also how far we still have to go to meet those challenges.
 
The half-century since Limits to Growth also defines my own intellectual journey, since I began university studies at Harvard University exactly 50 years ago as well.  One of the first books that I was assigned in my introductory economics course was Limits to Growth.  The book made a deep and lasting impression on me.  Here for the first time was a mathematical simulation of the world economy and nature viewed holistically, and using new systems dynamics modeling then underway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 
 
Limits to Growth warned that compound economic growth was on a path to overshoot the Earth’s finite resources, leading to a potential catastrophe in the 21^st century.  My professor huffily dismissed the book and its dire warning.  The book, the professor told us, had three marks against it.  First, it was written by engineers rather than economists.  Second, it did understand the wonders of a self-correcting market system.  Third, it was written at MIT, not at Harvard!  Even at the time, I was not so sure about this easy dismissal of the book’s crucial warning.   
 
Fifty years later, and after countless international meetings, conferences, treaties, thousands of weighty research studies, and most importantly, after another half-century of our actual experience on the planet, we can say the following.  First, the growing world economy is indeed overshooting the Earth’s finite resources.  Scientists now speak of the global economy exceeding the Earth’s “planetary boundaries.”  Second, the violation of these planetary boundaries threatens the Earth’s physical systems and therefore humanity itself.  Specifically, humanity is warming the climate; destroying the habitat of millions of other species; and polluting the air, freshwater systems, soils, and oceans. Third, the market economy by itself will not stop this destruction.  Many of the most dangerous actions – such as emitting climate-changing greenhouse gases, destroying native forests, and adding chemical nutrients to the rivers and estuaries – do not come with market signals attached.  Earth is currently treated as a free dumping ground for many horrendously destructive practices. 

Twenty years after Limits to Growth, in 1992, the world’s governments assembled at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit to adopt several environmental treaties, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity.  Twenty years later, in 2012, the same governments re-assembled in Rio to discuss the fact that the environmental treaties were not working properly.  Earth, they acknowledged, was in growing danger.  At that 2012 summit they committed to establish Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide humanity to safety.  In 2015, all 193 UN member states adopted the SDGs and a few weeks later signed the Paris Climate Agreement to implement the 1992 climate treaty.
 
In short, we have gone a half-century from the first warnings to today.  We have adopted many treaties and many global goals, but in practice, have still not changed course.  The Earth continues to warm, indeed at an accelerating rate.  The Earth’s average temperature is now 1.2°C warmer than in the pre-industrial period (dated as 1880-1920), and is higher than at any time during the past 10,000 years of civilization.  Warming has accelerated to more than 0.3°C per decade, meaning that in the next decade we will very possibly overshoot the 1.5°C warming limit that the world agreed to in Paris.    
 
A key insight for our future is that we now understand the difference between mere “economic growth” and real economic progress.  Economic growth focuses on raising traditional measures of national income, and is merely doing more of what we are already doing: more pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, more destruction of the forests.  True economic progress aims to raise the wellbeing of humanity, by ending poverty, achieving a fairer and more just economy, ensuring the quality education for all children, preventing new disease outbreaks, and increasing living standards through sustainable technologies and business practices.  True economic progress aims to transform our societies and technologies to raise human wellbeing.  

Regeneration 2030 is a powerful business initiative led by Italian business leaders committed to real transformation.  Regeneration aims to learn from nature itself, by creating a more circular economy that eliminates wastes and pollution by recycling, reusing, and regenerating natural resources.  Of course, an economy can’t be entirely circular – it needs energy from the outside (otherwise violating the laws of thermodynamics).  But rather than the energy coming from digging up and burning fossil fuels, the energy of the future should come from the sun (including solar power, wind, hydroelectric, and sustainable bioenergy) and from other safe technologies.  Even safe man-made fusion energy may be within technical and economical reach in a few decades.   
 
On my part, I am trying as well to help regenerate economics, to become a new and more holistic academic discipline of sustainable development.  Just as business needs to be more holistic and aligned with the SDGs, economics as an intellectual discipline needs to recognize that the market economy must be embedded within an ethical framework, and that politics must aim for the common good.  Scientific disciplines must work together, joining forces across the natural sciences, policy sciences, human sciences, and the arts.  Pope Francis has spurred the call for such a new and holistic economics by encouraging young people to adopt a new “Economy of Francesco,” inspired by the love of nature and humanity of St. Francis of Assisi. 
 
Sustainable Development, Regenerative Economy, and the Economy of Francesco are, at the core, a new way of harnessing our know-how, 21^st century technologies, and ethics, to promote human wellbeing.  The first principle is the common good – and that means that we must start with peace and cooperation.  Ending the war in Ukraine at the negotiating table without further delay, and finding global common purpose between the West and East, is a good place for us to begin anew. 

Published in Il Sole 24 Ore for the Trento Festival of Economics, June 4, 2022

The Dewdrop World is a Dewdrop World, and yet, and yet..... The Ethereal Nature of Collapse

It is said that the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa wrote this haiku upon the death of his daughter: "The dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet......." (tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara). It is poetry at its best: it hints at much more than it says. Here, I start from this poem about dew being an incorporeal thing to examine how another incorporeal thing, such as money, can affect us.

 

A few days ago, I was looking again at the presentation that Nathan John Hagens produced for the Earth Day of 2021. I had watched it when it appeared, but something made me return to it. It is a long story, but the point that remained in my mind is when Nate shows a graph with a clear "Seneca" shape for the global oil production curve. That is, something that grows slowly, then declines rapidly (at minute 38 of the presentation). Later, at minute 44, he shows a similar curve for the GDP. 

 

Nate attributes the slanting forward of the curve to financial effects. My first reaction to that was that financial tricks, in themselves, do not produce oil (and can't raise the GDP, either). How can a basically non-existing thing such as money, mainly numbers stored in computer memories, affect the real world in such a way?

But, rethinking the matter, I am not sure anymore that the financial world really is an ethereal and inconsequential thing. Maybe it is the opposite. As I learn more about more things, I am always surprised by what I discover. My latest epiphany came from a talk given by Fabio Vighi, who teaches at the University of Cardiff, about a correlation between the lockdowns of 2020 and the global financial situation and, in particular, of the "REPO" market (you can find his take at this link). 

I must confess that I had no idea of what the REPO was, not even that such a thing existed. Now, I know that it stands for "Repurchase Agreements" and I think I have some idea of how it is supposed to work. Basically, it is a market where financial operators can resupply with money by borrowing it. Where does that money come from? Typically, financial firms with large pools of cash do not want to let that money sit around, so they lend it to financial institutions, banks, at low interest rates. Then, the banks will use this money to fund short-term needs. The REPO market is a short-term thing.

I am far from having assimilated the obscure mechanisms operating inside the entrails of the REPO market, but this much I can understand: it determines the cost of money. Now, connect this concept with the real economy. The economy is made out of real things: resources, materials, equipment, goods, people, and more. And everything in the economy is subjected to depreciation (a name that economists use for the thing that physicists call entropy). If you want to fight depreciation (entropy) you must expend energy. (you can do that in an open system -- in closed ones, entropy always increases, but this is not the case for the economic system.) 

So, to keep the economy running, you need energy. In order to get energy, you need energy (you probably heard the concept of "energy return on energy invested", "EROI"). But, in order to get energy to be invested, our economic system is geared in such a way that you need that non-physical thing called "money."  No money, no investments. No investments in energy, no production of energy. 

What if there is no money? Energy is not produced. Then people become very poor, and many die. Incidentally, it also happens that the rich get richer, but that's another story. Apart from the rich, the poor slide down the downward step of the curve: the Seneca Cliff. I do think that Nate is right in his interpretation: the Seneca Cliff would arrive even independently of financial factors, but financial factors can make it steeper. Money doesn't create resources (as economists are fond to say). But it can direct more resources to exploitation, making it faster. That gives people the illusion that there is more of it. 

You see how everything is connected: our fate is determined by such mysterious things as the one called the "REPO market." Then, something horrible happened in 2019: a cash crunch caused the repo rate to soar — reaching as high as 10 percent intraday on Sept. 17. It pushed up the federal funds rate to levels much higher than it was supposed to be (between 2-2.25 percent) at the time.

The interesting thing about the story is Fabio Vighi's interpretation that the lockdowns of 2020 were the result of the attempt of the powers that be to cool the REPO market and avoid a financial Seneca Cliff. If this was their aim, they succeeded spectacularly.

Note how the REPO rate went down from the Spike of September 2019 to a very low, and apparently stable, level in 2021. So, Fabio Vighi's interpretation could make sense. But can it be true? Personally, I think it might well be the case, but it is also true that correlation does not mean causation and the spike disappeared much before the lockdowns. On the other hand, the powers that be may have been scared enough that they put into practice an emergency plan they had concocted long before. Whatever the case, they will never tell us the truth. 

The thing that doesn't cease to amaze me, though, is how it is possible that humans placed themselves to me so dependent on the thing called "money."  It is an ephemeral entity that has no physical consistency.  I can also understand that small disturbances in the repo (and other money) markets can ripple through the entire system. The physicists call this the "butterfly effect" and you know how small perturbations can send huge systems tumbling down to their doom. Money has no more consistency than the morning dew. And yet, and yet......

Take a look at this incredible painting by Quentin Matsys, "The Money Lender and His Wife." painted in 1514 and representing two burghers of Antwerp, the ancestors of the people who have been playing with the REPO market in modern times. Just like Issa's poem, this painting hints at much more than it shows, but in the opposite way. Whereas Issa hints that the world is not real, here we see it as even too real. Reality is gold coins, much more important than the book of devotions that the wife of the banker should have been looking at, but she is not. Yet, the true value of those coins is all in the minds of people, by themselves they are not worth more than dew in the morning.

You can find Nate Hagen's 2021 posts at https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/

A more recent documentary is at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0w3GfW240M 

 

The Collapse of Trust in Science: Climate Science is one of the Victims

 

 

The blog of El Gato Malo is fun to read and, often, reports useful data and correct discussions of the COVID pandemic -- of course, it is very political, as you can see if you peruse the site. But when the Gato tries to apply his skills to climate science, it is a complete disaster, such as in this screed about the climate of planet Venus. The Gato's failure is a good example of how you should always maintain a certain degree of humility when you approach a field you are not familiar with. 

The problem is not so much the site of a person who signs himself as "The Bad Cat".  The problem is that it is a wave. It could become a tsunami. There is a clear phenomenon of loss of trust in science resulting by the mounting evidence of corruption and politicization of those who claim to be the "voice of science" and whose advice the public should follow. The result is a wholesale rejection of everything that's supposed to be supported by "Science." It is not just that climate science becomes a conspiracy by the Greens. It also becomes a commonplace opinion that chemtrails exist, that renewables consume more energy than they produce, that electric cars pollute more than diesel and gasoline cars, that peak oil is an invention of the oil companies, and much more. 

Climate science is an easy victim of this phenomenon because it is a complicated matter that most people do not completely understand (and maybe nobody does). It is relatively easy to comb the data to find examples that don't (or don't seem to) agree with the standard interpretation. From there on, it all becomes politics and all attempts to use reason or data are destined to fail. Politics is not based on data. Just look at the comments to El Gato's post and be horrified: you are staring directly into the abyss. 

Yet, we must cling to science because it is the only thing we have that allows us to understand the world around us. In a sea of corruption, ossification, and ignorance, there do exist islands of sanity and understanding. Below, you can see an example of an attempt to develop a new way of looking at the ecosystem. It means not just turning CO2 into the villain of an adventure movie, but trying to understand how the whole system works and the role of the biosphere in maintaining the climate we need to survive. If we lose good science, we lose everything (UB)

From "The Pround Holobionts" Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Do we focus too much on CO2 alone? An appeal for the conservation of natural ecosystems

 Have we exaggerated with the idea that CO2 -- carbon dioxide -- is the arch villain of the story? Aren't we overemphasizing solutions that imply CO2 removal? How about geoengineering, sometimes touted as "the" solution that will allow us to keep going on burning fossil fuels? 

There is no doubt that the emissions of carbon dioxide are returning the ecosystem to a condition that was never seen before at least one million years ago. There is no doubt that CO2 is warming the planet and that none of our Sapiens ancestors ever breathed in an atmosphere that contains a concentration of CO2 of 420 parts per million -- as we are doing. 

But by focussing so much on CO2 alone is easy to forget what humans have been doing to the ecosystems that keep the biosphere alive (and with it, humankind). The ecosystem is a giant holobiont that strives for stability: a fundamental element to stabilize Earth's climate. It is a dangerous illusion to think that we, humans, can replace the work of Gaia with our fancy carbon capture machinery, or whatever other tricks we may concoct. 

Here is a reminder by a group of people from Eastern Europe who managed to maintain a certain degree of mental sanity. They remind us of the damage we are doing. Will anyone listen to them? (UB)

Appeal to the international community, governments, scientific, public organizations and business

https://www.es-partnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Appeal_Protect-Ecosystems.pdf

RECOGNIZE THE VALUE AND ROLE OF NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE!

Terrestrial and marine natural ecosystems are the basis for preservation of biological life on Earth. They have existed almost unchanged for millions of years and all this time have supported climate stability, biochemical flows, global water circulation and many other processes, irreplaceable and essential for preservation of life on our planet. Undisturbed natural ecosystems maintain the Earth's temperature, suitable for human life.

The laws of nature are the basis of life on Earth, and all the laws of human society that regulate economic, political, social and cultural relations are secondary to them and must take into account the biosphere’s operating principles and man’s place in it.

However, over the past decades, human activities aimed at meeting the needs for food, energy and 
water have caused unprecedented changes in ecosystems, including land degradation and deforestation. These changes have helped improve the lives of billions of people, but at the same time, they have destroyed nature's ability to regulate the environment and maintain the climate.

According to current estimates, more than 75% of natural ecosystems are subject to degradation and loss of their functions, which undermines all efforts to preserve the climate and threatens the achievement of SDGs, including hunger, disease and poverty eradication. 

Humanity is standing on the edge of a precipice. Over-threshold disturbance of ecosystems leads to
irreversible loss of the gene pool, up to complete disappearance of ecosystems. In the face of growing efforts and understanding of the threat of climate change, it is now necessary to recognize and support the unique role of natural ecosystems in preserving the climate and a vital environment. International climate policy adjustments and fundamental changes in national development strategies are required.

We call to wake up and recognize the fundamental and irreplaceable value of natural ecosystems and for strong and urgent action, including:

1.  To recognize the goal of preserving natural ecosystems as humanity’s highest priority and stop their further destruction through adopting a global moratorium on any further development of territories still untouched by human activities, with international support mechanisms, including funding.
2.  Promotion of large-scale natural reforestation is an urgent task. Climate-regulating functions of forests, associated with the ability to retain soil moisture and maintain continental water transfer, are their main value, which are orders of magnitude higher than the cost of wood. Undisturbed forests should be completely removed from economic activity by law and allocated to a separate category with the maximum degree of protection. 
3. At all levels, from international to regional, national and local, it is necessary to review ongoing development strategies and take urgent measures to protect natural ecosystems and wildlife. It is necessary to adjust all sectoral policies, including agricultural practices, in order not only to meet the demand for food, but also to minimize the burden on natural ecosystems
4. A transition from conventional sectoral management to basin and ecosystem management is required, including raising the status of nature conservation goals. Water resources management should ensure that natural ecosystems are guaranteed priority in water supply that is necessary for their conservation, as well as protection and restoration of aquatic and other ecosystems - from mountains and glaciers to deltas and reservoirs.
5. Measures aimed at preserving natural ecosystems also require a review of existing incentives and tools and creation of new ones, so that ecosystem services are no longer perceived as free and unlimited, and their management takes into account the interests and roles of the populations and local communities which directly depend on them and are their custodians.

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International Socio-Ecological Union, Eco-Forum (of 54 public organizations) of Kazakhstan, 
Association (non-governmental organizations) «For Sustainable Human Development of Armenia»,
Eco-Forum (independent non-governmental organizations) of Uzbekistan, as well as professional and non-governmental organizations of Armenia, Moldova, Russia, USA and others

The Age of Exterminations VIII -- How to Destroy Western Europe

US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., (1891-1967). He was the proposer of the "Morgenthau Plan" that would have turned post-war Germany into a purely agricultural region, exterminating tens of millions of Germans in the process. It was approved by President Roosevelt but, fortunately, it was never put into practice. 

In the book titled "The Death and Life of Germany" (1959), Eugene Davidson tells us how, after that WW2 was over, the US military authorities explicitly ordered the American servicemen in Germany, and their wives, to destroy the leftovers of their meals. They wanted to be sure no food would be left for their German maids and their starving children. It was not an isolated story. After that Germany surrendered, in 1945, the general attitude of the Allies was that the Germans had to be punished. For this purpose, they deliberately limited the supply of food to Germany. 

This attitude of the Allies predated the German defeat. In 1944, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, had proposed the plan that would take his name, the "Morgenthau Plan." It called for the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a medieval technology level. That would have been obtained by the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure. A consequence of the plan would have been the death of tens of millions of Germans: a primitive agricultural economy would not have been able to sustain the German population. 

The Morgenthau Plan was initially approved by President Roosevelt, and it was even publicly diffused in the press. It was later abandoned by President Truman, but it remained a practical set of guidelines for the allied policies in Germany until 1948 and an untold number of Germans starved to death. Some people speak of at least one million victims of the famine (or even several million) during the period from 1945 to 1948. Others propose smaller numbers, but we'll never know for sure. 

As we all know, the Germans were far from being innocent in the global extermination game. In addition to the Shoah, the German government engaged in the extermination of other ethnic groups, including German citizens judged to be a burden for society. In 1942, they developed the “Generalplan Ost” (General Plan for the East) that foresaw the extermination of tens of millions of Slavs in Eastern Europe. The survivors would be used as servants and laborers for the German "master race" (Herrenvolk) who would colonize the former Slavic lands.

It is impressive for us to remember how, less than a century ago, there were Western governments happily engaged in planning exterminations involving tens of millions of Europeans. Could these dark times return? It is said that society is just three hot meals away from barbarism. We could rephrase this old saying as, "society is just one defeat away from extermination." 

Indeed, the events of the past few months saw Western Europe inflicting a terminal defeat on itself by abandoning its main source of energy: Russian oil and gas. For the time being, Russian gas keeps flowing into Europe and the lights are still on, although it cannot be said for how long. 

Yet, Europe continues planning for its own defeat, as we can read in the recently published "REpowerEU" plan. The plan is mostly greenwashing, recommending such things as hydrogen and other useless technologies. But the substance of the plan is in its calling for huge investments in new regasification facilities that will allow importing large amounts of liquefied gas from the US. The EU plans to switch to sources that will be much more expensive (and also more polluting) than Russian gas. 

If applied, the REpowerEU plan could lead Western Europe to a situation similar to what the Morgenthau Plan foresaw for Germany in 1945: deindustrialization. For this to happen, it is not necessary for Europe to go dark. It is sufficient to increase the cost of energy to such a level that European industrial products would cease to be competitive in the world market. That would generate a spiral of decline that would strangle to death the European economy. Eventually, Europe would become unable to import a sufficient amount of food for its population. Famines would necessarily follow. A new Morgenthau plan, this time Europe-wide. 

Is that possible? As usual, history does not really repeat, but it rhymes. The events of World War II are not so remote from us that we can exclude that they would be repeated in some forms -- including widespread famines and exterminations in Europe. Below, you can find an interpretation of the current situation by Michael McGarrity -- who comments on the Facebook group "The Seneca Effect." This text is reproduced with his kind permission. 

Medieval EU: Plant Oats, Raise Goats.

By Michael McGarrity 23 May 2022

How many years will it take for Russia to adapt and stabilize to a new level of sanctions? Probably not long but, in the meantime, I believe that Europe will deindustrialize as plentiful, reasonably priced, Russian energy and food now sanctioned must be substituted by some yet to be identified source. Today, the German Prime Minister was "hopeful" that in 2023 Energy Production in Senegal may be ramped up to provide additional energy for Germany. This is highly irrational. Siemens, a great German technology company that requires large quantities of energy to produce its products, is now scrambling to find new sources. 

It is likely that many countries will be buying Russian energy through third-party countries such as India. Germany may now buy Russian energy from India at greatly increased prices, it will be rebranded as Indian, not Russian energy while companies such as Siemens lose competitive advantage in the world markets due to greatly increased energy production costs. Over the long term, a general reduction in global energy supplies will harm those who have to pay the highest prices. By this winter, the EU faces significant risks of energy and food shortages. The domino effect on energy will have lag times in the EU. They are not yet evident, but they are already operating.

As European energy and food stores deplete, likely by this winter, the EU economy will become medieval. Russia is self-sufficient in terms of energy and food, but there is not a sufficient supply of energy and food in the world to replace the sanctioned Russian sources in the coming years. The die is cast. The EU is due for a minimum of two years of deindustrialization. Russian Arctic natural gas facilities can't be switched on and off like a light switch. Grain that is not planted can't be harvested. Fertilizer that doesn't exist can't fertilize crops. Some yet to be implemented substitute energy sources such as Senegal will take years to be realized. China, India, and Mexico will quickly take over markets held by great German companies like Siemens. The cake is baked for the EU in terms of rapid deindustrialization, which may be permanent.

All this is part of the delusional thinking underlying the sanctions on Russia, yet to be realized in terms of impact. The reality is that 440 Million EU Citizens are on a fast track to a dystopian Medieval life and there is no turning back due to the scale of the problem, which is related to physical, not ideological constraints. The Russian economy might be destroyed by the sanctions, but no Russian will go hungry or cold. Russia may evolve a self-sufficient standard of living similar to that of the mid-1990s, while Europe goes back to the 1400s: goat carts and bearskin clothes.

I'm no expert in Geopolitics or Finance. I'm an expert in large-scale disaster recovery testing. Nothing theoretical, all practical exercises timed to the minute of what it takes to restore systems, supply chains and such. Politicians such as the German Prime Minister, touting notions of instant natural gas production in Senegal are delusional. It's time for EU citizens to start planting oats and raising goats.

"The Limits to Growth" after 50 years: More relevant than ever

 

50 years after the publication of the first report to the Club of Rome, "The Limits to Growth," it is time to re-assess the validity of its evaluation of the destiny of humankind. Are we really destined to collapse? Or can we still make the right choices and avoid it? It is discussed in a new report to the Club of Rome titled "Limits and Beyond."

Can you think of a book published in the twentieth century that we still remember 50 years later? There is one that has left such an important mark that we are celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. It is the report to the Club of Rome published in 1972 with the title "The Limits to Growth".

"The Limits to Growth" was a study of the future of the global economy. Its basic message was that growth could not continue to go on forever on a finite planet. And not just that. It also said that if we continued to exploit natural resources without worrying about depletion, pollution, and overpopulation, things would start to go pretty bad: the economy would collapse. When? Maybe during the first 1-2 decades of the 21st century. 

The message of "The Limits to Growth" was hard to digest in the 1970s, an age of optimism and enthusiasm for technological progress and economic expansion. So, from the beginning, the study was criticized and demonized in every possible way, so much that many people, still today, are convinced that it was "wrong" for one reason or another. Actually, there was nothing wrong with the study: it was only affected by the unavoidable uncertainties in the parameters of the system. But the very fact that it was demonized so heavily means that it said something fundamental, relevant to our survival as a civilization and perhaps even as a species.

But what was so special about that book? Many things: perhaps the most important one was that it was the first study that addressed the problems of the future of humanity in a "systemic" way, that is, using a model that, for the time, was incredibly sophisticated. Let me explain: today there is a lot of talk about "artificial intelligence," but the concept was born in the 1960s. "The Limits to Growth" was part of the concept of using computers as a tool to help human intelligence. 

One of the problems we face when we try to manage complex systems, that is systems where many factors interact with each other, is that the human mind heavily relies on "intuition." We tend to focus on single parameters and consider them as the only relevant factor. Did you notice how people tend to interpret the world's problems on the basis of single factors? "Overpopulation!" "Climate change!" "Pollution!" "Peak Oil" "The public debt!" and so on. All these are relevant factors, certainly, but none of them is the only problem. But how can we estimate their effect when every single factor interacts with all the others? If you focus on the wrong parameter, you can make enormous mistakes. 

That's where a computer can be helpful. The computer is not intelligent, but for this very reason, it is not swayed by ideology or other kinds of personal biases. So, in 1972, the authors of the "Limits to Growth" created a computer-based model that analyzed the human economy according to various hypotheses on the availability of resources, pollution, population growth, and other things.

It was not a prophecy, not a political program, and not a religious revelation, either. The "Limits to Growth" model was simply an evaluation designed to answer the question, "what will happen if ……?" The results were stark clear. If the economy remained focused on growth at all costs, the global economic system would reach its physical limits around 2010-2020. And it wasn't just a matter of stopping growth. It was much worse: the model predicted the collapse of the system.

Today, given the current situation, we may legitimately wonder if we are finding ourselves at the beginning of the collapse that some of the scenarios of "The Limits to Growth" had seen in store for humankind. Is that our future? Maybe, but let me repeat that "The Limits to Growth" was not a prophecy: there was nothing unavoidable in the scenarios it proposed. And the authors never saw themselves as prophets of doom. The study was conceived as a roadmap to avoid collapse! 

Unfortunately, we didn't put into practice the solutions that the study proposed, such as reducing the consumption of natural resources, slowing down economic growth, and the like. But it is also true that today many things have changed. The revolution in renewable technologies has changed the rules of the game. With renewable energy, in principle, we can phase out fossil fuels and avoid the main causes of the coming collapse: depletion and climate change. Yes, but this does not mean that renewable energy comes for free: we have to invest in it and not a little. Unfortunately, up to now, we have not invested enough, not to mention the bureaucratic obstacles that hinder the new installations. 

Even if we could move toward renewables fast enough that we could smoothly replace fossil fuels, that would not be sufficient to avoid all problems. Never forget that the origin of collapse is its opposite: growth. Already long ago, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, noted that ruin is rapid after growth: it is called the "Seneca Effect." If we want to avoid the "Seneca Cliff," the rapid decline that arrives after the growth phase is over, we need to recognize the limits of our planet. Growth at all costs is a dream of the 20th century, that we must abandon now.  

So, we are facing difficult times, but we can muddle through if we make the right choices. Meanwhile, there is a new book that re-examines the whole story of "The Limits to Growth" and its relevance for our present and our future. It is titled "Limits and Beyond," a multi-author book that includes contributions from 21 authors, including two of the original authors of the 1972 "The Limits to Growth." It is edited by Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alvarez Pereira. Already available for purchase! 

Turning the West into a new Soviet Union -2: the Demise of Restaurants

 

Restaurants were never a feature of the old Soviet Union, discouraged because of their bourgeois nature. Earlier on, though, Russia had restaurants patterned on the West European model. This scene is from the 1965 version of "Doctor Zhivago," taking place during the years of the Russian Revolution. It shows the contrast between the well-dressed middle-class customers and the revolutionaries singing in the street. 

This is the second post of a series dedicated on how the West is turning into an organization very similar to the old Soviet Union. The first post was titled "Becoming what we despised"

I think I was in elementary school when one of my assignments was to read a story that I still remember as one of the cruelest things I ever read in my life. It told of a peasant who went to town and decided to eat at a restaurant, something that he had never done in his life. He sat at a table, anticipating in his mind the good things he would eat. But he stumbled immediately into a problem: he couldn't read the menu. Through a series of mishaps, he managed to order three times the same peasant dish of pasta e fagioli (pasta with beans) that he used to eat every day at home. The image on the right is not directly related to this story, but it may well illustrate it (from "Storia di un Naso" by Vamba, 1953).

I imagine that the story of that poor peasant was supposed to be fun, or perhaps even "educational," although how anyone could think of such a thing escapes my mind. But the author had caught something right. A fundamental feature of restaurants in Europe was the social discrimination aspect. 

 

The first establishments called "restaurants" appeared in France in the late 18th century, before the French Revolution. They were different from the old "taverns" that catered mostly to travelers and non-residents. You see in the figure (from Google "Ngrams") how the term "restaurant" replaced that of "tavern" over the 19th century

In many senses, restaurants followed the evolution of the European society. The nobles of old would never dream of "eating out" -- they had their cooks, their kitchens, their mansions, as in the story told in the recent movie "Delicious." Restaurants, instead, were a typical bourgeois thing: they didn't cater to the nobles, but neither to the working class. The menu was the first barrier that kept the illiterate out (those we call "deplorables" nowadays). Then, different prices selected customers according to their wealth. Being seen to eat at a classy and expensive restaurant was a way to prove one's social status. So, the restaurant experience was patterned according to how the middle class imagined the life of nobles, including the illusion that they could afford an assorted range of servants: stewards, butlers, cooks, and maids. 

Over a couple of centuries of existence, restaurants followed the social evolution of Western society. With the prosperity of the "magic decades" of the mid 20th century, there appeared a market for restaurants for the working class. The "fast food" concept prospered, pushed onward by the new way of life, with women not anymore forced stay home to prepare food. 

If formal restaurants had mirrored the life of the Upper Class, fast food joints mirrored the life of the working class. No question of being served by waiters: customers would simply pick up their food at the counter and carry it to their table, the way they would do it at their company's canteen. The extreme of this category was the "vending machine restaurant" with no human employees at all. It was the equivalent of picking up one's tv dinner from the refrigerator, at home, and eat it in front of the TV. The concept never really caught up in the West, but it seems to be popular in Japan. 

Over the 20th century, with the increasing monetization of society, more and more people could afford to eat out, a fashion that had never existed before. Eateries soon started to fulfill a new role in addition to feeding people: socialization. Busier and busier people didn't have the time and the resources to invite friends for dinner at home, so they started to meet in restaurants. A further role also appeared with the increasing perception of rising crime. Eating out offered safety for the price of a hamburger and a soft drink. Your children could also have a safe birthday party at a fast-food restaurant.  

With time, tourism expanded the demand for eating out: restaurants popped up everywhere. Variety paid: everything that was exotic and innovative was favored and enjoyed. Entire cities, such as Florence in Italy, were turned into giant food courts to serve millions of tourists for whom the culinary experience abroad had mostly replaced the cultural one. 

In parallel, on the other side of the iron curtain, a completely different social situation was developing. During the 19th century, restaurants had been introduced in Russia in the French style, termed ресторан (restoran). But, with the Soviet Union, restaurants were discouraged by the state: they were seen as a waste of resources and their class divisive character was incompatible with the idea that the Soviet society had no social classes -- theoretically. 

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, up to relatively recent times, you could walk along the streets of former Soviet cities and find no "Restaurant" sign. That doesn't mean, of course, that restaurants didn't exist. They did, of course, but mainly as part of hotels as a service for travelers. There was no tradition of "eating out" among Soviet citizens. But the Soviet elites, the members of the номенклату́ра (nomenklatura) had their perks and could enjoy good food in establishments reserved for them. 

Over the years, the former Soviet Union has been "westernizing" and, today, if you walk in the streets of Moscow or any other large Russian city you'll find the familiar signs of all kinds of restaurants, including ethnical and fast food ones. Curiously, though, the West may be starting a movement in the opposite direction: "sovietizing." Restaurants may be among the first victims of this trend. 

It happened during the past two years. It was unexpected, sudden, even brutal. "Eating out" had been the normal thing for nearly a century in the West. Then, with the pandemic, governments started enacting all sorts of quixotic laws, rules, and restrictions, with many of them seemingly specifically directed to punish restaurants and their customers.

Not only restaurants were forced to close during lockdowns, but when they reopened, their schedule was limited by law, they could not operate at full capacity, in some cases you could eat only outside, not inside, or maybe standing and not sitting (or the reverse). The body temperature of the customer was taken at the entrance and, for a certain period, in Italy, you were supposed to give your name and address to the management. Then, they would communicate it to the authorities as part of a statewide "tracing" mechanism (it never worked). The police could come inside at any moment to check that everyone followed the rules. 

Right now, in Italy, the QR code is replacing all the previous rules (except for face masks, still mandatory). It applies to all restaurants, everywhere: no QR code, no food. And to have a QR code you need an updated status of three vaccination shots (you'll need more in the future -- they already announced that). That leaves out all those (millions of people) who didn't want to be vaccinated and those who decided to avoid restaurants as a form of solidarity for them. In addition, the government as acted with rules that seemed to have the only purpose to stop international tourism, one of the main sources of revenue for Italian restaurants. In the photo, you see a restaurant in Venice. It was taken by the author during the Christmas tourist season at lunchtime: no customers whatsoever. 

In a city like Florence, the result was a disaster. I don't have quantitative data, but you can see the situation by walking around in Florence. The restaurants that were once chock-full of people, now are half-empty -- at best. In many cases, it is clear that the owners can resist for just a little longer, but that then they will soon go bankrupt. Many have already closed. In the picture, you see a restaurant closed and for sale in the suburbs of Florence. 

Officially, it was all part of restrictions designed to fight the pandemic. Yes, but the haphazard nature of the rules and the lack of proof that they had any effect is remarkable. What happened that made restaurants a preferred target for the government's wrath? Were they really spreading the covid around? Or were they guilty of some unspeakable sin? 

I don't think there ever was a concerted effort on the part of the PTB (powers that be) to destroy restaurants. It was just part of the "new normal" or the "Great Reset." In many ways, it involves turning back and walking in reverse the path that has led us to where we are today. 

As I said, restaurants have always been a typical middle-class thing. They appeared together with the European middle class, and they are following its destiny. During the past few decades, the middle class has been gradually pushed back into the fold of the lower class. The restaurant business could not avoid being affected by the trend. 

The tradition of eating out is still alive in the West, but the resources for doing that are not there anymore for a middle class that's struggling to survive, and failing at that. On their side, the rich, like the nobles of old, don't eat at restaurants, at least not at the same kind of restaurants that the deplorables can afford. For the very rich and politically exposed persons (PEPs), appearing at a restaurant without an armed escort would be dangerous. Like the nobles of old, they have their private cooks and exclusive places. And they socialize with each other throwing expensive parties at their homes. A habit that we find in ancient history, even in Roman times and earlier. 

You may have seen the picture of Bill Gates supposedly standing in line waiting for his turn for a burger. It is surprising that many Westerners seem to believe in this kind of cheap PR stunts. In the old Soviet Union, if Leonid Brezhnev had diffused a picture of himself standing in line to buy shoes, people would have laughed themselves to death. But it is known that Westerners are sensitive to propaganda.

In any case, the current Western elites are acting just like the old Soviet elites. They don't care about what the commoners eat, although they are worried that they may revolt if they go hungry. So, they tend to allow a basic supply of food for the deplorables, but they consider restaurants (and the associated tourism) as a waste of resources. The rich much prefer to funnel the surplus produced by the economy into their own pockets rather than having it dissipated by the commoners. Worse, restaurants are a place where the deplorables can socialize and maybe concot evil plans. So, it is better to force them to stay at home.

The Covid pandemic offered plenty of excuses to stop people from eating out. Different factors reinforced each other. One result of the financial strain is that the quality of the food and of the service is going down (I can testify that myself). And I shiver at the thought of what they could do to the food they serve to you in order to save a little money. Finally, the QR code turned out to be the perfect method to keep the deplorables out. It is a more sophisticated and tuneable tool than the old written menu. 

So, Western restaurants are in the crosshair and it is unlikely that they will survive, at least in the form we are used to seeing them. It is not so much because the PTB are evil -- they are no more evil than most categories. It is mostly because the economic contraction coming from the twin impact of depletion and pollution is pushing the Western economy back to what it was a couple of hundred years ago. 

And what is in store for us, the deplorables? We have to adapt, as always people do when things change. Our ancestors would have found our habit of "eating out" weird and incomprehensible. Yet, sharing food remains one of the basic ways for humans to socialize. Even in the old Soviet Union, people did socialize. They would do that mostly at home, cheaply, rather than paying money to multinational restaurant chains. In terms of material goods, they were surely much poorer than the average Western family, and the living quarters were cramped -- no suburban two-story homes for them! They had to adapt and help each other locally. And they surely did. 

Curiously (actually, not so curiously), we are seeing something similar in Italy. People being barred from entering restaurants are organizing informal parties in the street. The photo shows a "free aperitif" in Italy with free food for everyone and no need for QR codes). It looks remarkably similar to the paintings of life in a medieval village that Peter Bruegel left to us. But, of course, the police tend to intervene in force to disperse those subversives!

Things always keep moving. We may need to accept that not everything can be monetized and that there are ways to socialize that don't necessitate paying money for bad food and the pretended "safety" of a restaurant. In my case, like a peasant of old, I haven't eaten at a restaurant for months, and I am discovering that it is perfectly possible to do that and be perfectly happy. And no "espresso" coffee either. Another Italian tradition that's going down the drain. 

Maybe we can retake our lives in our hands and socialize the way our ancestors have been doing for millennia. Maybe we will return to the ancient peasant use of the veglia (vigil) when several families would collect in someone's home to chat and save on the wood for eating. Or maybe we'll get back to something like the Sumerian times when the alewives served beer to everyone with the blessing of the Goddess of Beer Ninkasi. Why not?

Below: a Sumerian QR code to assign rations of beer. Some things never change, some things always return. 

Note added after publication: on the subject of restaurants, you may be interested in this article by Kara Voght describing how mom and pop restaurants lost it big with the pandemic, unlike the large restaurant chains (h/t Christine Eleanor Anderson). You may also be interested in this recent article by Jeffrey Tucker that arrives to conclusions similar to mine. As a general note about PEPs in restaurants, I can cite two cases I know of in Italy. Some years ago, the mayor of Florence was having dinner at a restaurant, when another customer rose up and criticized him for some policies he disapproved. According to the newspapers, the mayor was so distressed to have been addressed by a commoner that he suffered a minor nervous breakdown. More recently, the mayor of Rome had dinner with his wife in a restaurant. Later, he was accused to have paid for the dinner with the city's official credit card. It was all part of a smear campaign orchestrated against him and, in this case, it was only based on the statement of the restaurant owner. It was shown that it was a complete fabrication, but only after that he had been forced to resign.  

How we Became What we Despised. Turning the West into a New Soviet Union

 

For everything that happens, there is a reason for it to happen. Even for turning the former Free World into something that looks very much like the old "Evil Empire," the Soviet Union. I understand that this series of reflections will be seen as controversial, but I thought that this matter is important and fascinating enough to deserve a discussion.

It all started two years ago when we were asked to stay home for two weeks "to flatten the curve." Two years later, we are looking, bewildered, at the wreckage around us and asking ourselves: 'what the hell has happened?'

In such a short time, we found that our world had turned into something very similar to one that we used to despite. The old Soviet Union, complete with heavy-handed police, censorship of the media, criminalization of dissent, internal passports, and the state intruding on matters that, once, were thought to be part of every citizen's private decision sphere. 

Surprising, perhaps. But it is a rule of the universe that everything that happens has a reason to happen. The Soviet Union was what it was because there were reasons for it to be that. It was not an alien world populated by little green men. It was an empire similar to the Western one, just a little smaller, and it concluded its cycle a few decades before us. We can learn a lot from its story. 

Dmitri Orlov, born in Russia, was among the first who noted the parallel paths that the Western and the Soviet empire were following. His first book was titled "Reinventing Collapse" (2011). Let me propose to you an excerpt where Orlov tells us of an event he experienced in St. Petersburg in the years just after the collapse of the Union. At that time, the people who had dollars, as Orlov did, had a market power that ordinary Russians couldn't even dream of. We see here the consequences of being so rich that you don't worry about carrying small change with you. 

There was also an old woman in front of the store, selling buns from a tray. I offered her a thousand-ruble note. "Don't throw your money around!" she said. I offered to buy her entire tray. "What are the other people going to eat?" she asked. I went and stood in line for the cashier, presented my thousand-ruble note, got a pile of useless change and a receipt, presented the receipt at the counter, collected a glass of warm brown liquid, drank it, returned the glass, paid the old woman, got my sweet bun, and thanked her very much. It was a lesson in civility. 

Looks like a funny story, but it is not just that. It is a deep metaphor of how a market economy works, and also how it may NOT work. The problem is that, unless some specific conditions are met, a market economy is unstable. Money tends to end all in the hands of a few, leaving the rest with nothing. It is the law that says "the rich get richer." It has a corollary that says, "and everyone else gets poorer." 

There is only a way to avoid that a market economy leads to the rich getting everything: it is growth. If the economy grows, then the rich cannot pull money out of the market fast enough to beggar everyone else. The result is the illusion of a fair share. So, you may understand why our leaders are so fixated with growth at all costs. But don't forget that those who believe that an economy can grow forever can only be madmen or economists. 

But how do you make the economy grow? The magic word is "resources." No resources, no growth (actually, no economy, either). And if you exploit a resource faster than it can reform (it is called overexploitation), then, at some moment, the whole system will crash down. It is what happened to the Soviet Union and may well happen to us, too. But let's go in order.  

Let's go back to the story of Dmitry Orlov trying to buy a sweet bun in St. Petersburg. If the old woman had accepted Orlov's offer to buy the whole tray, the price of the buns would have skyrocketed to levels so high that nobody except him could have bought them. So, Orlov could have crashed the whole market of sweet buns of that particular place. The standard Western economic theory has that, at that moment, another old woman with another tray should have magically appeared to sell buns. Supply must always match demand: it is a postulate. But things don't work like that in the real world.

The market mechanism that matches demand and offer, the way you are taught in the Economics 101 course, can work only in conditions of relative abundance. If people have dollars, then someone will make buns for them and profit from the sales. If they only have rubles, then it may well be that nobody will bother to satisfy their demand: no profit can be made from nearly worthless rubles. 

But rubles and dollars are the same thing: pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. What makes the difference is a working -- or not working -- economy. The Russian economy after the fall of the Soviet Union wasn't working anymore: its roubles could buy little more than sweet buns and even that risked being disrupted by a rich foreigner passing by.

The problem was structural. Even before the collapse, the Soviet system couldn't produce an output large enough to sustain a free market economy. In part, it was an ideological choice, but mostly it was because it was because of the need to funnel a large fraction of production to military expenses. The Soviet Union was rich in natural resources, especially mineral ones. That was an advantage, but also a temptation for other countries to invade it. The idea of turning Russia into "the world's gas station" is recent, but it was around already long ago. And that was not just a temptation: over a couple of centuries, Russia, was invaded several times, the last time in 1941. If there ever was an "existential risk" for a country, that was it. The invading Germans had clearly stated that their plan was to exterminate some 20-30 million of Soviet citizens. 

The consequence is obvious: in order to survive, the Soviet Empire had to match the rival Western Empire in military terms. But the Soviet economy was much smaller: we can roughly estimate that it always was no more than about 40% of the US economy, alone. To match the huge Western economic and military machine, the Soviet Union needed to dedicate a large fraction of its economic output into the military system. Measuring this fraction has never been easy, but we can say that in absolute terms the Soviet military expenses nearly matched those of the US, although still remaining well below those of the NATO block. Another rough estimate is that during the cold war the Soviet Union spent about 20% of its gross domestic product on its military. Compare with the US: after WW2, military spending went gradually down from about 10% to the current value of about 2.4%. In relative terms, during the cold war, the USSR would normally spend four times more than the US for its military.

In a free-market economy, these huge military expenses would have drained the market of resources, beggaring a large fraction of the Soviet citizens. To keep the market functioning, the Soviet government had to play the role of the wise old woman in Orlov's story. It used its "five-year plans" to make sure that sweet buns for the Soviet citizens were produced, that is, the fundamental needs for life: food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and vodka.  

The five-year plans also had the purpose to limit the production of items that were considered "luxuries." For instance, the Soviet Union was a producer of caviar and, nominally, the price of caviar was low enough that most Soviet citizens could afford it. But caviar was not normally available in shops. When a batch of caviar tins appeared, people would stand in line hoping that there would remain a few cans left for when their turn came. This feature avoided that the rich could corner the caviar market, driving prices sky-high, just like Dmitry Orlov could have done with the sweet buns. It also had the effect of giving Soviet citizens the illusion that their rubles were worth something. But they understood that the ruble was a form of "funny money," not the same thing as the mighty dollar. Soviet people used to say "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work," and they were perfectly right. The ruble was a limited kind of money: it couldn't be always be used to buy what one wanted (just like when the Western government locked their citizens in their homes: they had money, but they couldn't use it). 

Now the pieces of the puzzle go to their places. The need for a tight control of the economy shaped the Soviet society: the media were controlled, censorship enacted, dissent criminalized, and more. Those who publicly disagreed that communism was the best possible government were considered to have psychiatric problems thanks to a subservient medical establishment. Then, they could be hospitalized, sometimes for life. (I know that it looks very much like.... you know what, but let's keep going).

Not only the Soviet system was strained to the limit, but it was also critically dependent on the availability of cheap resources. So, it was vulnerable to depletion, probably the factor that caused its collapse in the late 1980s. It is not that the Soviet Union ran out of anything, but the costs of natural resources simply became incompatible for the Soviet economy. Later on, the core of the Soviet Empire, Russia, could return to being a functioning state only because it didn't have to pay the enormous costs related to keeping an empire together.  

On the other side of the iron curtain, the relatively low military expenses and abundant natural resouces made it possible for the American citizens (most of them, at least) to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle, unthinkable elsewhere in the world. They lived in suburban houses, had two cars in every garage, could go wherever they wanted, had overseas vacations every year, could buy whatever they wanted without standing in line. The US citizens could even afford a certain degree of variety in the information they received. The state control on the media was enacted in subtle ways, giving citizens the illusion that they were not exposed to propaganda.

It was the kind of lifestyle that president Bush said was "not up for negotiation" -- except that when you deal with Nature, everything is up to negotiation.

The current problem is that the resources that made the West so rich and so powerful, mainly crude oil and other fossil fuels, are not infinite. They are being depleted, and production costs increase with depletion. And that's not the only problem: something else is choking the Western economic system: it is the enormous cost of the health care system. 

In 2018, the US spent $3.6 trillion in health costs, nearly 18% of its GDP. Today, it is probably slightly more than that. Yes, health costs in the US are nearly ten times larger than military costs. It is probably not a coincidence that troubles started to appear when these costs reached the same level, about 20%, of the military expenses for the Soviet Union. 

Someone has to pay for those costs and, as always, the task falls on the middle class which becomes poorer and poorer. On one extreme of the wealth distribution curve, former middle class citizens are losing everything and are being gradually squeezed out of the market. And here is the problem: those who have no money to spend can't buy their sweet buns. They become "non-people," aka, "deplorables." What is to be done with them? A possible solution (that I am sure some elites are contemplating), is just to let them die and cease to be a problem (it is the zombie scenario). But we are not there, yet. The elites themselves don't want the chaos that would result from starving a large fraction of the citizens. How to avoid that?

The solution is well known from ancient times: it is rationing. The Romans had already developed a system called "Annona" that distributed food to the poor. During WW2, the US had ration books, ration stamps and other forms of rationing. Food stamps were introduced at that time, and they still exist. The Soviets used a kind of funny money called "ruble." In the West, rationing seems to be a silly idea but it was done during WW2 and, if there is a serious economic crash -- as it is perfectly possible -- it can return. It must return because, without rationing, we'll have the zombie apocalypse all over simply because there is no mechanism in place to limit those who still have money from hoarding all they can, when they can. 

That explains many of the things we have seen happening: whereas the Soviet Government acted by restricting supply, the Western ones seem to find it easier to restrict demand -- it is the same thing: it means cooling the economy by reducing consumption. The lockdowns of 2020 seem to have had exactly that purpose, as argued convincingly by Fabio Vighi. Their effect was to reduce consumption, and avoid a crash of the REPO market that seemed to be imminent. 

Once you start thinking in these terms, you see how more pieces of the puzzle fall to their places. The West is moving to reorganize its economy in a more centrally controlled manner, as argued, among others, by Shoshana Zuboff. That means chocking private consumption and using the remaining resources to keep the system alive facing the twin threat of depletion and pollution, the latter also in the form of climate change.  

It is happening, we see it happening, Note that it is probable that there is no "command center" somewhere that dictated the various actions that governments took over the last two years. It was just a series of common interests among different lobbies that happened to align with each other. The financial lobby was terrified of a new financial crash, worse than that of 2008, and pushed for the control of the economy. The pharmaceutical lobby saw a chance to obtain huge profits from forcing medical treatments on everyone. And states saw their chance to gain control of their citizens at a level they couldn't have dreamed of before. The epidemic was just a trigger that led these lobbies with similar goals to act in concert. 

Lockdowns were just a temporary test. The final result was the "vaccination QR code." At present, it has been imposed as a sanitary measure, but it can be used to control all economic transactions, that is what individuals can or cannot buy. It is much better than the lines in front of shops of the old Soviet Union, so it may be used to ration essential goods before the zombies start marching. 

Does that mean that the QR code is a good thing? No, but do not forget the basic rule of the universe: for everything that happens there is a reason. Before the current crisis, the Western society had embarked on a free ride of wasteful consumption: it was good as long as it lasted. Now, it is the time of reckoning. In this sense, if the QR code were used for the good of society, it could be a fundamental instrument to avoid waste, reduce pollution, provide at least a basic supply of goods for everyone.  

But the QR can do that only if the citizens trust their government and governments trust their citizens. Here, we see the limits of the Western approach to governance. During the past decades, the Western governments couldn't do anything important without imposing it on their citizens by a shock-and-awe campaign of lies. That was the way in which governments imposed QR codes or, better said, they are trying to impose QR codes. The problem is that, over the years, the Western Governments have managed to lie to their citizens so many times that nowadays they have no credibility anymore.  

So, what's going to happen? Several scenarios are possible. The Western governments may succeed in their "sovietization" of society. That would mean a heavy crackdown on all forms of communication not directly controlled by the government and the criminalization of all dissent. The government may not necessarily need to arrive to concentration camps or to mass exterminations, but it might. In this case, after that the dust settles, we face at least a few decades of Soviet-like life. The government will use QR codes to control everything we do. If you dissent or protest, you'll risk being declared officially insane, and be subjected to mandatory psychiatric treatment in a hospital, or exiled in the Western equivalent of Siberia, or worse. Even if you are not branded as insane, you'll still be forced to submit to whatever medical treatment the pharmaceutical industry will decide is good for you. Bad, but at least you'll have something to eat and a roof under which to sleep. Don't forget that the Soviet Union survived for about 70 years and, in some periods, even prospered. 

That's not the only possible outcome. We might just sidestep the "Soviet" phase and move directly to the "post-Soviet" one. It would mean the collapse of the Western Empire, fragmenting into smaller states. That may imply severe political disturbance and civil wars are perfectly possible. The transition will be tough: it is not obvious that you'll have sweet buns for your breakfast. But after the "hot" phase, the lower governance costs of smaller state could allow them to recover and rebuild a functioning economy, at least in part, just like Russia did (but there is also the example of Ukraine). 

But history never repeats: it just rhymes. So, the Soviet system is just one of the many possible ways that a state can control the supply of goods to society. There may be other ways: after all, there was no Internet at the time of the Soviet Union. There were only the "media" which could be hijacked by the state and controlled from above: a "vertical" communication system. Instead, the Web is naturally a horizontal communication system. Controlling the Web may turn out to be difficult for states, perhaps impossible despite the unleashing of legions of those demonic creatures called "fact-checkers."  Because of the complexity and the versatility of the communication system available today, the Western society might manage to avoid the heavy top-down control that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just maybe.

The future is full of surprises and, who knows? It may even surprise us in a pleasant manner. We might perhaps escape the "Great Reset" and move to the "Great Awakening."