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Episode Summary:
In this episode, Peter Joseph discusses the fundamental flaws of the market economy, particularly its built-in requirement for endless growth. He emphasizes that the system inherently pushes for expansion and innovation, not out of necessity, but as a compulsion driven by competition and profit-seeking. This cycle leads to unsustainable environmental practices and social inequality, making it impossible to create a balanced, steady-state economy that aligns with the limits of the natural world.

Joseph argues that we must rethink innovation, which has become less about solving real problems and more about creating endless consumer products for profit. This “growth for growth’s sake” mindset is destructive, fueling waste, consumerism, and a cycle of economic expansion that disregards the planet’s ecological limits. He concludes that unless we understand these dynamics and shift toward a system that values sustainability and equitable resource distribution, we will continue down a path of environmental and social degradation.

Transcript:
Speaker 1:
Employed? I suppose in the most technical sense of the word, sure. We have no systemic slavery here. No one’s coerced to submit for their basic survival. Something I suspect might be very foreign to you.

Speaker 2:
Everyone needs to do something, right? How do you network skills, organize trade and markets?

Speaker 1:
There is no trade. There are no markets. There is no currency. Those who wish to contribute, do so through collaborative design in an open source environment. What you think of as industries of production on the mainland is unified here.

Speaker 2:
Wait, I don’t understand. These people are not paid to be here? How are they motivated?

Speaker 1:
Well, how is anyone motivated? Do you need to get paid to get out of bed in the morning? Do you need to be paid to ensure your own health, the health of your family and friends? Paid to show stewardship for the habitat and society that supports you?

Speaker 2:
What about innovation?

Speaker 1:
Innovation to what end? To create something to improve life and experience, or to create something to sell? If you think about it, it has been the blind economic drive toward innovation as you know it, that continues to lead your society to destruction.

Speaker 2:
Okay. Then, so… (Fading out)

Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph. Welcome to Revolution Now! Episode 28. These episodes are usually uploaded every other Wednesday, but since this is a follow-up episode, due to the last one being a bit too incomplete for my taste, I’m uploading this one a bit more quickly. We will resume the normal schedule a Wednesday from this upcoming one.

This is part two of the discussion on economic growth, particularly how the growth expression is fundamentally destructive and inherent or built into the structure of the market system or capitalism.

Inherent, meaning it is a function of the system in and of itself to grow and expand without limit revealing a dangerous, positive reinforcing feedback loop, where all attempts to counterbalance unsustainable system-level behavior, through regulation and other management attempts, have and will continue in all probability to have little effect in collaring the inherent or endogenous problem overall here.

In order to find ecological balance with the world today, and by extension securing social stability, we must first understand the dynamics of the growth issue properly, realizing core casualties. Even more broadly and needless to say, we can’t change the system without an understanding of its properties in general, particularly its most detrimental ones.

From there, we can begin to figure out how to overcome such dynamics, allowing us to find strategic ways to transition from today’s cancerous growth-based economy into one that we would call steady state. Once again, a steady state economy is one that operates in and with the intent of homeostasis or balance with the environment. It is demanded by nature’s game board, if you will, and the rules cannot be altered.

We can only integrate with nature’s systems. We can’t reinvent or fight them, as obvious as that is, as ridiculous as it is for me to even have to say. But it has to be said because nothing about the way civilization operates is even remotely integrated or harmonized as it should be economically. Now, some may be familiar with the term resource-based economy, a phrase which has become a little diluted over the years, but at the core of a resource-based economy is a steady state economy.

In order to achieve a steady state economy, a completely different form of accounting is required when it comes to economic behavior. This accounting forges the approach logically, seeking strategic integration with nature as opposed to the strategic exploitation of it. Hence, there’s a determinism in this reasoning, which makes the foundational design of a truly sustainable economy self-evident.

The principles are fairly easy to conceive of, the rules are fairly easy to conceive of. In fact, we are overflowing with intellectual treatments on the way things should be, but of course, with virtually no commentary on new systems that need to replace the old, which is what I have been working on for this upcoming lecture for Zeitgeist 4 and is a growing transition in my own process here as an activist, because this is what we have to do.

It’s the design revolution and it has to get started. Of course that’s going to be an ongoing conversation on this podcast as we touch upon core issues simultaneously. Today, in our infinite growth cyclical consumption fueled economy, we are literally at war with nature itself. Everything is backwards. We have a Frankenstein society where we are rewarding, in the short term, the interest to use resources as fast as possible, and the more, the better. Hence, perpetual cyclical consumption and the push for growth.

Point being, this is a demand of the system, not some kind of side effect that could be, say, managed out. Of course, to add insult to injury, other parallel market dynamics guarantee poverty and socioeconomic inequality, disallowing any kind of equitable distribution of all of that wonderful overproduction coming out of the unsatiable drive for growth.

If we’re going to plunder the earth into our own demise, at least spread the wealth in the meantime, right? Why not solve poverty? Just for kicks, just for the hell of it. Even if it doesn’t matter in the long run as the economy ravages the planet and all of us into oblivion simultaneously. Remember, the entire approach to attempting to resolve poverty or unequal material conditions has been to run the global production machine as hard as possible.

First, letting the rich absorb most of the fruits while the rest of the population and the poor at large slowly have some alleviation as all boats gently rise, maybe moving their daily income from 1.75 to 1.80 a day. An extra 5 cents and then the world rejoices at the grand success of capitalism for such an amazing accomplishment, which is obviously deeply offensive.

This long downstream systemic effect that you hope will eventually alleviate some people’s suffering all based upon economic growth being the driver of such alleviation. According to some theorists, if only 7% of the wealth of the richest 10% in the world was reallocated, it would literally eradicate poverty, but we don’t do that, do we? No. We let the market god decide. That’s what underscores all of this.

Belief in the market god, the growth market god, and if the god wants to solve poverty, some magical mechanism of vast economic growth will allow that in its downstream systemic outcome. Clearly the market god is an elitist jerk with about 25 people having more wealth than the bottom 40% of the world and two people in the United States having more than the bottom 50%.

An apt analogy is say a group of giant obese gluttonous men sitting at a huge Victorian table ravenously shoving food into their mouths from an abundance cornucopia in front of them. Symbolic of the fruits of our collective scientific and technological efficiency and capacity as a species, of course, while sitting at the very base of the table at their feet is the legion of the poor of the world.

The poor are simply surviving on the random scraps that just happen to fall off the sides of this table, or just happen to fall out of the fat men’s mouths as they gorge. The table keeps growing with more food, the economic growth, and the more it grows, the higher the probability of some spillage. That’s basically what trickle-down economics is.

Now, moving on and before I jump into the system dynamics of growth, the opening audio was a scene from my 2020 avant-garde film, InterReflections, which quickly touches upon the dilemma of innovation in a market society. It’s a response to the old cliché idea that labor for income and extrinsic scarcity-pressured motivation is needed to inspire innovation.

She responds, “If you think about it, it has been the blind economic drive towards innovation as you know it that continues to lead your society to destruction.” I was proud of that line as it’s something you wouldn’t hear in public conversation. Innovation has been held up as the ultimate defense of capitalism’s inequality and competitive foundation.

Yet, if you were to ask classical economists what they are innovating toward or what society is moving toward, what exactly our goals are as a society, you would likely get a blank stare. The fact is, at the heart of economic growth is endless compulsive innovation. It’s not a choice. It is an inalterable pursuit within the competitive market game people have to conform to, to create something to sell, to update something that already exists to sell, to develop a differential skill to sell.

Innovation in capitalism is not to be confused with any true sense of the idea of progressing knowledge and material utility toward improved ends. In fact, if we really cared about the true meaning of innovation, we would have made the market system itself obsolete long ago, as it is the most uninnovative sloppy and wasteful system of design production and distribution you could possibly come up with as a system when compared to other possibilities.

Yes, there is a feedback mechanism from human preferences and naturally things sell on a certain level because needs are being met. We are meeting existing demand that is natural. That intent doesn’t define the focus or the process. As stated many times, and worth reiterating, technical efficiency is the opposite of market efficiency. The mechanics of competition fueled innovation today, even though held up as the panacea of human progress, is little more than a toxic force.

A force of destruction of our ecosystem, and to a large degree our very value systems because of how the social psychology has become perverted. I mean, how much more abstracted stuff can we come up with to waste resources on? Do we really need, say, a coffee cup that has a heating element in it tied to a smartphone so you can control the temperature? The term I would use is marginal utility or marginal convenience.

If we’re going to have a smart coffee cup, why not a smart coffee cup arm? Isn’t there a machine to move that cup from the table to my mouth for the convenience so I don’t have to use my arm anymore? What about the problem of pouring the coffee? Can they build that in somehow? Or how about a cell phone charger in the body of the cup too? That’d be convenient, wouldn’t it?

Maybe we should have a little compartment on the handle so you can put cream and sugar built into the thing, or how about a radar mechanism that measures the speed of the cup as you move it around? That’d be fun, right? Ooh, you’re going half a mile an hour as you lift that cup up to your face. You see, we can devise an infinite range of marginal conveniences and basically entertainments in any given circumstance.

That doesn’t mean we should when we realize we are a delicate species on a delicate planet that has limits. There are limits to growth and you can only be mature enough to conform to those limits, not hide behind some fantasy that everyone can live a certain way and it will always get better in a material sense and so on and so on. It really is a tricky conversation. It’s amazing how fast people get upset when you start to talk about natural limits.

They automatically translate that into some kind of totalitarian imposition. It’s very frustrating. In fact, as an aside, one of the things that really does drive me crazy on social media or in general communication when you’re describing problems inherent to the system, is if you don’t have a solution that people like they just reject the problems or the relevance of the problems, right?

You describe something that is completely unworkable and people, instead of recognizing that, willing to work on the problem, look at the possible alternatives as they know it, often invoking socialism or communism or whatever. They get alienated by that thought process so they dismiss the problem in its origin. Remember, anything that benefits human well-being through this process of capitalist-driven innovation is only a side effect.

The primary incentive is always to make money. Without that goal being met, nothing moves forward, which is why we’re not innovating to say solve homelessness because there’s no money in that because there’s no purchasing power on the part of that consumer base. Hence, they are invisible to the system of capitalism. Back on point. Here we have an economic model that demands labor for income, which means everyone has to figure out something to sell to someone else.

That is a horrible brute force innovation incentive on the population level and is far more destructive, especially now, as it continues to push economic growth, than any of the supposed positives created by this innovation process. Consider just the waste alone through the competitive ethic. I always use the example of cell phone companies. The cell phone is conceptually simple.

It’s a contained technology that continues to be subject to innovative change of course. That process happens through intra-sector competition. One company does this, another company sees it, they do it, they try to improve it. This back and forth goes on and on. If consumer preferences were actually understood, would it not be more intelligent to consolidate all cell phone technology companies into one design institution in open source, sidestepping all of this parallel duplication process we see today?

This piecemeal inch by inch, incredibly wasteful competitive feedback process of creating perpetual obsolescence in fact, is not a healthy or efficient means to forge innovation. It’s deeply wasteful. Moreover, not only do we innovate an endless supply of products that will quickly end up in landfills, we innovate to manipulate. We innovate to manipulate. Imagine for a moment a world without advertising, what would the alternative be in terms of educating the population about new good potentials?

It would return to a place where necessity actually becomes the driver of invention and not the pursuit of income to secure labor. It is truly insane from a sustainability standpoint that we engage in active persuasion, on a finite planet with finite resources, to get other people to buy something and create demand. What a deeply pathological characteristic. The very idea of an advertisement, a communicative persuasion to get someone to buy something is just so stunningly perverse.

Imagine if you did that in your normal household, right? It appears the assumption, at least on some apologist level, is that if people weren’t imposed upon, they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves or how to live. As I talk about in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, the social psychology became deliberately perverted by advertising upon the industrial revolution when surplus started to be generated.

A consumeristic value system had to be cultivated and it deliberately was, and it has taken hold as a fundamental cultural trend. Anyway, to be clear, and I’m sorry to run this into the ground, innovation in the world today is not your friend. It is not a positive future. It is a neurotic, compulsive, obsession we have manifested in order to keep the infinite growth, cyclical consumption paradigm going.

Finally, more holistically, before I move on, the very words innovation, progress and success need to be considered a bit more as they take on very different meanings in reality versus meanings we see in market culture. Now, all that considered, let’s shift gears and consider the variables of this growth. I’m going to go through five, in summation.

First, you have the issue of money and the fact money is made out of debt and interest is charged for its creation. Secondly, there is the dynamic self-regulatory nature of a competitive economy as businesses struggle to preserve and expand market share. Third, there is the foundational issue that I’ve already touched upon a few times regarding cyclical consumption.

Hence, the simple fact that in markets, it is a positive feature to increase production, distribution and consumption, and waste. Fourth is the issue of our consequential consumerist culture, an acquisitive culture that is trying to keep up with the Joneses and that neuroses has taken on a life of its own. Finally, fifth, we’re going to talk about the pattern of stimulus injections that repeat due to cyclical crises in our financial system.

Now, three of these are foundational to the system while two of them are consequential or systemically emergent, if you will, secondary, but impactful enough to mention in passing, even though not critical. Those three major drivers are the monetary system and its basis in debt, competitive self-regulation and the pursuit of market share, and the foundational need, as talked about before, of cyclical consumption to power jobs and keep society in motion.

The two emergent or secondary ones are the repeated stimulus injections that happen after periodic financial system failures and crises; contractions. Two, the rise of a global culture that has been artificially groomed into an irrational and insatiable acquisitiveness. The culture of materialism, consumer culture. Those are the five I’m going to go through.

The reason I mention those prior to as consequential, as an aside, is because they are emergent to certain defining properties. For example, consumer culture is a outgrowth of the need to have cyclical consumption, embracing the value system of wanting more and more and more. Likewise, financial system panics and required stimulus are consequential to the system’s unstable nature.

Governments for political purposes of a wide range, do not like contractions of the economy. It would be one thing if the business cycle is actually respected by nations, but it really isn’t. Once economic contraction begins, unemployment starts to rise. The injection of stimulus is almost inevitable and absolutely inevitable when the contraction turns into crises.

Speaking of the business cycle, let’s consider our first variable. Debt, interest and the monetary system itself. When you think about the basic idea of people acquiring resources to continue living, both in pure necessity and in the sense of pleasure, nowhere in the equation would you expect patterns of expansion and contraction as we see historically with the business cycle.

The only reason the business cycle fluctuates in the volatile way that it does, is because of the nature of how money is brought into the system and the dynamics surrounding it. I’ve touched upon all this many times, it’s been in my films and writings, but I’m going to go through it very quickly here for consistency. All the money in existence is made out of debt. The more money that ends up in circulation, the more debt that exists.

It’s all loaned from banks and when a loan is returned to a bank, like for a home mortgage, that money will then disappear. That’s basically the process, but only after it goes through this cycle of being leveraged over and over to create even more money, something I’m not going to go into, but anyone can look up the fractional reserve lending system and the reserve ratios and all of that stuff. All you need to know is that money is created out of debt.

Interest is charged on those loans that manifest that debt, coming in the form of credit. This pattern is deeply insidious for many reasons, including the fact that debt has been a central precondition for slavery and human exploitation across all recorded history. That’s for another conversation. Debt has been around for literally thousands of years and was the first basis of transactions, according to anthropologist, David Graeber.

As the early stages of our markets society as we know it began to rise, debt was a core aspect in accounting for transactional responsibilities thousands of years ago. Since transactions are fundamentally reciprocal, you’re dealing with two sides of the same coin. Debt and credit. Before I forget as an aside, because this always comes up in this general confusion about economic history, even when the world was on a gold standard and the basis of currency was not fiat, there was no variation of this dynamic.

Money may have been based on gold to limit inflation and so forth, but it was still produced out of debt. People today, as they have, take out the majority of money by way of loans from private banks and do so with interest fees attached. Interest charges that, as everyone should know, do not exist in the principal money supply created by the loans. The result, constant unpayable debt.

Like a game of musical chairs, failure is going to occur somewhere in the system, which explains why historically even in religious texts, they had Jubilees because it was intuitively recognized, even though I’m sure someone figured this out, that you’re going to have overload of debt through time. The only solution is to forgive it periodically, as bizarre as that is. The origin of debt is built into the reciprocal nature of trade.

Remember, it’s a myth that money loaned to you is actually somebody else’s deposit. Money is created the moment you sign a contract, such as a credit card slip at a restaurant. Literally, you sign it and the money is created out of debt. Created out of liability. The differential problem, however, is the exchange framework is not the same as exchange with actual tangible physical goods or services. The money creation process out of debt has no parallel.

The closest thing to tangibility is numbers written on a ledger. In reality, everything in life comes from something. Hence, what we have here as a sleight of hand, in fact. To produce money out of debt is to pretend it has a source. It is to pretend there are limits as well. Yes, in a contrived self-referential way, there are limits, hence the business cycle and how monetary policy revolves around keeping debt and inflation manageable.

Once again, it’s all a construct. There’s nothing related to any grounded, earthly, physical economic reality within any of this, or technical reality for that matter. You could remove money and the concepts of debt and interest and inflation, and it would change nothing in real life economic terms because you don’t need money, debt, interest, inflation, to relate to design, production, distribution, consumption, and so forth.

Obviously that’s a radical notion for many because people think markets are synonymous with economics. Now, what is interest? How is it rooted in the structure? Just as debt is rooted in the process of transaction, interest charges are simply the markup on the goods. In this case, the money product that’s been invented. The same way you markup a lamp in a store for profit, you add this service charge fee to the loan called interest. Hence, interest is very consistent with the market structure.

Now, given this problem, and people are aware of it, a common question arises, could money be released into society without the additional interest charged, making the debt to money supply ratio one to one as opposed to almost three to one, which is what it is today? Meaning, there’s roughly 80 trillion in currency outstanding in the world today and there’s about 200 trillion in debt, as insane as that is. Yes, it’s possible, but keep in mind, anything is possible in abstraction.

This is one of the fatal flaws of the activist community, as an aside. You can come up with whatever solution you want in theory, but if it’s not integrated, reinforced by the system as its structure exists, there’s a low probability of occurrence or whatever policy or shift you’re trying to make actually sticking in the long-term. This is a critical observation in the activist community.

You look at the environmental and social justice movements, and you’ll notice this long list of demands and policies and abstracted ideas for change that are basically in a void. The bottom line is a solution is only as good as its ability to be implemented. That requires an understanding of the characteristics and gravitation of the system you’re trying to affect.

The more something moves against the natural gravitation, the less likely it will succeed in terms of policy or regulation. Anyway, back on point, to remove interest from the system and hence a major source of profitability for banks, you would have to nationalize them and subsidize them. Of course, nationalization is heretical to the market religion.

Whole nations have been overthrown by Western capitalist powers because of a nation’s ill decision to nationalize its industries in favor of its general population. The bottom line of all of this with 80 trillion in actually currency, 200 trillion in outstanding debt, everyone has to struggle to get out of debt and that debt is never ever going to go away. It’s a perpetual force on the social level.

Everyone is pushing increased economic activity to save themselves and it’s never-ending. This plays out not only on the domestic stage, but also the international stage with nation state loans given through the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. Just as the individual falls into subservience due to their debts, forcing them into increased economic activity, nation states suffer the same kind of stress. It’s insidious needless to say.

I mean, think about being a smaller nation right now, and you’re in debt and you’re trying to fall in line with some kind of sustainability accord, the Paris accord to reduce CO2 emissions, yet, you’re drowning in debt. What’s your first priority? To adjust your economy for the sake of emissions or to get the machine going to try and get out of debt first and then you can try to create solutions around that problem?

In April of this year, the New York Times ran an article titled, “How Debt and Climate Change Pose Systemic Risk to World Economy.” They express this very problem, even suggesting debt relief and so forth. That’s one. The debt and interest-based monetary system, fiat or not, is a massive driver of caustic economic growth and is also a central preserver of social stratification.

While it’s secondary to the conversation here, it’s worth pointing out that there is yet another reinforcing force coming in the context of class oppression, consciously or not, as power systems are not going to roll over and alleviate a mechanism of elite self-preservation. The financial system, the use of debt and interest is a major source of making sure class relations stay fixed and social mobility is very low. Moving on.

The second structural characteristic has to do with the competitive dynamics of the system itself. Competition, not only between individuals but institutions. As much as people like to demonize massive mega-corporations, there is really no difference in strategy and incentive and procedure between a common mom and pop store with say three employees and a mega-company with 300,000.

The mom and pop store is simply at a different stage of the game and in a different place in the emergent distribution of the market share, what people have attained regulated by market dynamics. In the case of, say, amazon.com, it has become a virtual monopoly driven by the efficiency of mass production. That phrase “mass production” isn’t just those two words put together talking about mass production.

It actually references back to the industrial revolution where the networked innovation of mass production started to become the heart of efficiency. Of course, Amazon is outrageously technically efficient, despite what you may say about their moral and ethical policies, but they are absorbing the vast majority of commercial transactions on the internet as a whole, because of the efficiency that rests in high degrees of integration and of course, general streamlining.

Point being, expanding personnel and capital resources generally leads to lowering costs and hence more competitive prices and service. If your company is not pursuing that end, in all odds another company’s increased efficiency through such mass production and integration will put the complacent one out of business. It’s that simple.

Hence, all companies have an incentive to grow, to get more personnel, to expand offices, to maybe outsource to cheaper labor and so on and so on, in that interest to maintain differential advantage. Is there also an underlying greedy drive in these kinds of pursuits with expansion and attainment and more market share? Of course there is, if you want to use that word, but that isn’t the source of it.

That carries over, however, into the cultural neuroses, the consumption and materialist and acquisitive value system I’ll also talk about in a second, so there is some overlap. As a quick aside on the subject of competition, one of the more interesting things to think about in terms of system evaluation of market economics, is the degree of failure you see with companies.

Last I checked about 20% of all companies fail in the first year, while about half of all companies fail within the first five years. A traditional economist hearing that would probably jump up and say, “Well, that’s the efficiency of the market weeding out those that can’t keep up. It’s a good thing.” Yet, from a truly technical level of us living on a finite planet with finite resources that need to be strategic in what we’re doing, is it not absolutely pathetic that that kind of failure is consistent in an economic-industrial approach?

Isn’t that fundamentally a failure of the system at large? It’s like starting a company and 50% of all your products eventually fail and you celebrate that because it lets you narrow down what is working, ignoring the fact that it’s an enormous amount of waste being created. It’s deeply inefficient to have that kind of level of failure, which again is all the more reason to open source everything and stop the competitive ethic in business.

An ethic that is fundamentally destructive because it keeps motivating people to try things without achieving proper consensus. Not to mention once again, the arm of advertising, which is used to manipulate people into consumption behavior. Whereas the real drive for demand should be, once again, not persuading people to buy something because it’s insane, but to actually listen to natural demands coming from necessity. Imagine that.

Moving on. The third driver of economic growth, which has been touched upon quite a bit already, so I’m not going to run it into the ground, is cyclical consumption, the foundation of our entire economy. The market system’s fundamental structure can be summarized as the need to move money between owners, laborers, and consumers with great overlap, of course, between those three categories.

At no time in absolutely no scenario is the reduction of any activity a good thing for this kind of structure. With no incentive for contraction, it’s all about maintaining levels of employment and consumer behavior or accelerating them, hence growth. Quite simply, you can’t have an entire economy premised on the need for constant economic activity and ever consider it to be sustainable.

Finally, the last two drivers, which are more secondary in effect than the previous three, as stated, consumer culture and the economic stimulus response to inevitable economic contraction. Consumer culture, the rise of the materialist mindset and evolution of consumer culture has been touched upon a few times in this podcast series already. In fact, I’m pretty much positive I did a whole episode on this subject.

What you tend to find is most people when they think about this issue, they see it as an expression of human nature, as if it’s immutable. Yet, indigenous cultures on the outskirts of contemporary civilization historically have not, and do not have highly acquisitive materialistic tendencies.

In fact, they actively reject those tendencies quite often, proving that status-driven acquisitive consumer behavior is a cultural phenomenon and not something reducible to our immutable human nature as is often argued. It’s not to say nature isn’t involved, so to speak. In the bio-psycho-social synergy that defines us, we are being manipulated effectively through advertising to want to get something as a form of relationship to others.

As written about in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, upon the industrial revolution, there was a concerted effort to change American society and ultimately the world at large into one that always wanted more and more and was materially insatiable. This was because there was a need to compensate for the mass production surplus that was being created and that was unprecedented upon the industrial revolution through mechanization.

It worked quite well because the incentive was bonded to one’s sense of social status and esteem and connection to others. More to the point here regarding economic growth, you don’t have to be a philosophy major to realize that having values of a highly consumeristic, acquisitive, materialist, and insatiable nature, isn’t smart. It isn’t aligned with our existence on a finite planet and the need to be minimalistic.

In 1990, the global material footprint, meaning total amount of raw materials extracted to meet final consumption, was 43 billion metric tons. By 2017, almost 30 years later, it was 92 billion, 113% increase. According to studies promoted by the UN, the global material footprint is increasing at a rate faster than both population growth and economic output.

In that same period, the material footprint per capita went from 8.1 to 12.2 metric tons, a 50% increase. As noted before, it would be different if the fruits of all this were distributed even remotely evenly. In the rich nations, such as the United States, per capita material footprint was 27 metric tons in 2017, in contrast to the 12.2 global average.

In a world where all life support systems are currently in decline, these trends are very concerning, not to mention the problem of nations, such as the United States being put on a pedestal for their success and their high standard of living and ridiculous consumption habits, as if the rest of the world should follow suit. As if this is the model we hope to attain.

Long story short, the value system disorder through consumer culture is a deeply troubling trajectory, a social psychology born from the cyclical consumption requirement of our economy. There has to be some kind of revolution in our sense of values, which is going to require a system’s change, no doubt, if we expect to see any kind of balance emerge.

Finally, to wrap all this up, fifth, we have the financial system, the general boom and bust phenomenon of contraction and crisis, which is inevitably met by some kind of stimulus by government. Obviously COVID we saw stimulus left and right across the world, but this isn’t a new phenomenon.

It has been basically the general practice of all governments in order to save face and to have somewhat happy citizenry during politically-charged periods of time, elections and so forth, to make things be propped up as best they can. In the United States, almost every single contraction of the economy has been met with some kind of stimulus.

When you look at that pattern historically and globally, you see it’s just one more subtle driver of pushing economic growth, because it’s all about getting people employed again and all that stuff. I’m not going to belabor that one. It’s obvious enough.

If you want to abolish Wall Street and get rid of the derivatives market and all of this outrageous fake value that’s created on top of value, which has also massive systemic chain reactions, which will need heavy, heavy stimulus to bail these infrastructures out, meaning the banking system and so forth, yeah, I would encourage abolishing Wall Street as a side note for that problem.

All right, everybody, I really appreciate your time. I will be back in roughly two weeks. This program is brought to you by my Patreon. Lecture is still pending and I am requesting interview suggestions for Zeitgeist 4. I did that on Facebook and so forth. If anybody has anybody that hasn’t been listed yet, please feel free to suggest. All right, everybody, take care out there.