gonna be all right after the fall

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/business/economy/world-bank-lost-decade-growth.html

“World Bank Warns of ‘Lost Decade’ for Global Economic Potential”

Let’s re-interpret:

* * *

The “lost decade” is an indication of peaking. It’s not as if the following decade will then see a resumption of growth. The following decade and the decade after that and the decade after that will be loster and loster.

* * *

“Lower growth has serious implications for the world’s ability to tackle the expanding array of challenges unique to our times — stubborn poverty, diverging incomes and climate change.”

“Unique” my ass. Poverty, income inequality, and ecological disruption have characterized our civilization for five thousand years.

* * *

“Officials at the World Bank said the ‘golden era’ of development appeared to be coming to an end.”

It’s been the era of industrial capitalism and it dates to the mid-eighteenth century. It has been characterized by insanely hyperbolic and utterly unsustainable trajectories of growth in all aspects.

* * *

We’ll linger at the peak for a while. We’ll struggle to try to resume growth. We’ll fail. The human population will peak at a nice even ten billion during the 22nd century.

The trajectories go downhill from there in a reverse accelerating way over a period of many centuries. Each generation will be dealing with disparate crises and incremental unwinds.

* * *

If we arrive at a world of a billion humans living mostly locally in some thousands of bioregional commonwealths . . . we’re gonna be all right. This would be in concert with how humans lived for ninety-nine percent of our species existence prior to the aberrant rise of the problematic type of “development” associated with mega-cities, mega-states, mega-technologies, and mega-wealth-accumulation . . . in which case the recent civilizational period of five thousand years (just an eyeblink in terms of geological timespans) could be viewed as an anomalous, unsustainable, insufferable (essentially insane) phenomenon that hopefully will never be repeated.