The Acceleration of the Age of Extinction
Feel Like Everything Is Going Crazy Lately? Society, Economy, Politics? Welcome to the Age of Extinction.
by umair haque
Do you get the feeling these days that the world is spinning out of control? That over the last decade…things have gone from not just bad bad to worse, but from bad to…what is even going on here? The feeling of crossing a threshold, into a strange new kind of uncertainty, powerlessness, even futility. What’s that about?
We’re now in the Age of Extinction. You should know this. But too few do. We don’t discuss it. We’re supposed to pretend like things are normal, when they clearly aren’t. The Age of Extinction is wreaking havoc on us. On civilization, democracy, our economies, our societies. Let’s take just a few examples.
Of these changes. I put that in italics because we scarcely recognize them — especially as a set of connected ones. But we should — or else we stay in the dark about what’s really happening to us, and why.
“Jitters,” as economists call them, are still racing through the banking system. Another set of banks is poised to fail. Why? The last few were because interest rates were raised too far, too fast. This set? Because they’re exposed to commercial property. Which is…empty. Too empty. And so all those loans for gleaming new offices — at least many of them — are turning out to be going swiftly bad.
Why is that? Because Covid changed us. It permanently altered how we work. People haven’t gone back to the office. Why would they? Most of the work we do is — as the late anthropologist David Graeber said — bullshit. It doesn’t matter. Its only real purpose is to make billionaires even more money than they can ever spend. It has no deeper purpose or reason whatsoever. Why bother going to an office to do it? So plenty of people simply aren’t.
Covid is over, say the CDC and WHO. They just said that today. They didn’t say the part that needs to be said. LOL, it’s still the fourth leading cause of death — over? But that’s not the part they left out. It’s that Covid is another change. The Age of Extinction? Pandemics are now a part of it. Covid was part of a trend of respiratory viruses proliferating. Decreased habitats for wildlife have made them flee en masse — incredibly — to the poles, at the rate of feet per day. As they do, they rub shoulders with us, and zoonotic flow increases. The effect is a new wave of pandemics, thanks to climate change.
The banking system’s exposed to all that. And people not going back to work — to their meaningless bullshit jobs — is just a tiny, tiny part of it. And yet it’s already causing the banking system to teeter. The big picture? It’s almost comical.
Way back in 2013, Trucost — a consultancy that does some of the world’s best economics — did a study. That study concluded that our economy was using up so much natural capital — trees, air, water, minerals, wildlife, and so forth — that none of it would be profitable if the true costs of all that natural capital were accounted for.
If you want to get technical, “Trucost’s analysis has estimated the unpriced natural capital costs at US$7.3 trillion relating to land use, water consumption, GHG emissions, air pollution, land and water pollution, and waste.” That turned out to be a super conservative estimate. How do we know that? Because one externality — hidden cost — that way back in 2013 even those as smart as the bright folks at Trucost couldn’t see coming was…Covid. Now, a decade later? We know that the true costs are way, way higher than we ever thought before. The true costs are extinction.
Let’s go back to that report from 2013.
Fast forward a decade. What do you see? It played out just as they said. Why is inflation soaring? Why is your pocketbook hurting? Why is the average person and household going deeper and deeper into debt? Because the prices of basics have skyrocketed. Not luxury vacations and designer watches. But food. Clean air — in the sense of hey, who knows what pandemic wave you might get hit by now, never mind, it’s over, even though it’s still one of our leading causes of death. Energy. Medicine, healthcare.
Here’s another change we’re faced with — but we’re not really reckoning with. The price of natural capital is going to go up forever. Put more formally, we now have to “internalize the externalities,” and you don’t have to worry about the jargon — it just means that we can’t pretend anymore that, well, the planet isn’t dying. Spain’s farmers? They’re saying there might not be any harvests this summer. Think of what that does to food prices. That’s “internalizing the externality” — the hard way. There aren’t crops, where there once used to be.
The price of natural capital is going to go up forever. I know that, because, well, I’m one of the better economists of my generation, and I just explained to you why. I don’t say that to brag or to score points, but to make a point. I know that, but if I say it to central bankers — the guys who run our economies? They’ll likely give me a blank stare.
Think about how baffling that is for a second. This is the biggest change that our civilization has ever faced. It’s one of the biggest changes in human history.