I clicked through the link from the OP and took a look. Eccch.
Mercantilism,
bullionism, and a dash of
physiocracy in a hodgepodge that reminded me of some of the more... enthusiastic... ideas bantered about in the 1920s.
Like many of the Doom and Gloom set, there is an implicit assumption in this sort of idea set that economics is a
zero-sum game, that is, in every trade there must be a winner and a loser, and that no economic or technological progress can be made.
Adam Smith and
John Locke addressed this some time ago, but the news has been a bit slow to get out.
Modern economies tend to be positive-sum games, with both parties to a trade gaining value in the long run. There is a tendency to seek mutual benefit in human interactions. This appears at the macro level as long term economic and, through the trade in ideas, technological growth. Why does this matter in relation to the Doom and Gloom retiree position?
Let's look at the food supply. In 1910 the US population was 91,972,266. The farm population was 32,077,000 (est.), with farmers as 31% of the labor force. There were 6,366,000 farms with an average acreage of 138.
Looking at statistics for 2010, we have a population of 313,000,000 in the US. Extrapolating from the 1910 data, we would need 109,164,440 farmers working some 21,664,770 farmsof 138 acres.
It turns out that less than 1% of the population currently claims farming as an occupation, and there are only 2,200,000 farms in the US. Great Ghu, we're trying to support over 3 times the population on only 1/3 the farms, and 1/10 the farmers that we had a century ago. This sort of insanity must surely lead to mass starvation and food riots!
OK, so somehow we got lucky and managed, in spite of ourselves, to improve economic and technological productivity to feed ourselves. Weird, that.
But, the author points out other shortfalls such as entertainment. Music halls and vaudville troupes were quite popular. With the growth in population, surely there must be many more vaudvillians and music houses to keep folks entertained. The kinetoscope craze might amuse for a few minutes, but without music, dance, and witty banter, the audience quickly grows bored. How many hundreds of thousands of vaudvillians must the modern word employ to entertain it's teeming masses?
Um. None? Kinetoscopes have sound reproduction, and are installed in every home? Insanity! Why, even the simplest kinetoscope costs more than a fine Sears home! Oh. Not any more, eh? How did
that happen?
We failed to implode as a society on
Malthus' schedule. I predict that we will also fail to meet Charles Hugh Smith's schedule.
