George Rebane
The world’s population is stabilizing, if not starting to ‘stagnate’, and will soon start declining. This argument and its impacts on humanity are presented in two newly published books – The Human Tide: How Populaton Shaped the Modern World (2019) by Paul Morland, and Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. As a result, capitalism as we know it will disappear explains Zachart Karabell who reviews the books in the Sep/Oct issue of Foreign Affairs – ‘The Population Bust – Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It’.
The crux of that striking conclusion rests on the theory that capitalism remains viable only in an environment of eternal growth; once growth stops or reverses, then capitalism, as we know it, will collapse. “If global population stops expanding and then contracts, capitalism - a system implicitly predicated on ever-burgeoning numbers of people - will likely not be able to thrive in its current form.” But I have no idea where this ominous ‘predicate’ comes from.
Capitalism is fundamentally based on human nature organizing economies in an environment of open markets in which prices effectively communicate the supply and demand for goods and services. Therefore, if demand slows down and then contracts, so long as open markets are allowed to operate, capitalists will adjust their enterprises accordingly. The only aspect of such a contraction of available services and things for sale is its impact on the value of money.
The value of any given supply of money depends on the amount of available goods and services it can command in transactions. Its value, as reflected in open market discount (i.e. interest) rates will track the size of the economies in which it is used as the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. For example, the value of a lot of fiat dollars will decline if there is less to buy or build with them. But again, such values will adjust accordingly as central banks ply their wily ways of taking money out of and injecting it into economies. Granted, if human perceptions about markets change rapidly, then there will be financial shocks as the value of monies held by governments and the public also changes rapidly – after all, we must always remember that fiat money by its very nature is strongly faith-based.
So here we are in the pre-Singularity years as birth rates all over the world are dropping and populations are aging (older folks don’t consume as much as younger ones). Advances in healthcare and productivity promoted through capitalism are making poorer countries richer, and encourage the richer countries to maintain growth through immigration. The current world population of approximately 7.6B will probably not exceed 10B by mid-century before it starts pulling back. And given the impact of accelerating technology on systemic unemployment and income inequality, global population pullback is not something to be feared, but to be managed through judicious wealth distribution so as to maintain civil societies that continue to provide an increasing quality of life. And once the Singularity does occur, all bets are off, as most then alive scramble to become trans-humans (q.v.). For an entertaining and stimulating treatment of such a plausible future, I recommend Childhood’s End (1953) by A.C Clarke.
Oh no! If capitalism goes way, the tech giant will crash and burn, with only limited personnel behavior data to collect and sell to advertisers. On the other hand, as capitalism declined the demand for behavioral insights will skyrocket as sales decline. Wither way this new form of capitalism could hasten its demise, as citizens repelled by the crass use of their behavior data seek alternatives.
According to an article published in the Harvard Gazette, “Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, warns that [the tech giants] lights, bells, and whistles have made us blind and deaf to the ways high-tech giants exploit our personal data for their own ends.
In her new book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Zuboff offers a disturbing picture of how Silicon Valley and other corporations are mining users’ information to predict and shape their behavior.”
According to Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism “is undermining personal autonomy and eroding democracy.” This attack on our capital infrastructure could hasten the demise of capitalism as we know it, and depend on it.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-professor-says-surveillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy/
Posted by: Russ | 18 August 2019 at 04:58 PM