Wealth, Income and the Deluge

I wonder why the water is colored brown?

This week I plan to take us from the stratospheric themes of planet-wide ecological catastrophe, to an issue that arises from time to time in human societies: wealth and income inequality. Did I mention that Dr. Ryan Mattson and I have a book in the works on the topic? We do, and it’s set to be published by Upriver Press in the Spring of 2025. It will be available through online retailers, as well as local bookstores. If you choose to pick it up, please use the latter. If you must buy online, please avoid buying from the behemoth. Jeff Bezos has enough money already. And that’s a nice segway back to the topic at hand.

When speaking of wealth and income inequality, some commentators fall into the trap of using the terms interchangeably. This is understandable for most Americans, because most Americans have almost no monetary wealth, so income inequality feels like the only measure that might matter. That said, they're not, strictly speaking, the same thing. Income is, of course, the amount of money or goods or services that a person can draw upon over a given time interval. Do you get paid weekly? Maybe that’s your benchmark for income. Yearly? I hope you can make that paycheck stretch. Wealth, on the other hand, includes both real goods, and all the various tokens and balance sheets we’ve created to keep track of resources owed to a person by the wider society. For that really is what wealth is; not so much a tally of dollars and cents, but a way to designate who in a society gets to control resource flows.

Now, there are computational tricks with which people can employ to make statistics say just about anything, with very little need for outright falsification. My favorite example is ‘adjusted gross income’ which means that, when looking at income, one must include all forms of income, not just hourly wages or salary. This includes the cost of health insurance, as well as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. This number intentionally inflates the income of lower percentile people, in a bid to show that income inequality isn’t really that bad. By using this one, simple trick, you can make it look like the bottom 50% of Americans aren't really that bad off, since they bring home almost 10% of national annual income. Take a moment to consider that; roughly 165 million Americans earn half of what the top 1%, that is, 3.3 million, earn in a year. It’s not the own the status-quo lovers think it is, especially considering that most of that health care insurance doesn’t really cover all the expenses of going to the doctor.

Maybe if the bottom 50% wasn't so damn poor,
they would pay more in Federal taxes.

All that said, by any metric, income and wealth inequality in the United States is already historically high. By some measures, wealth and income inequality rivals other historical examples like pre-revolutionary France, or medieval Europe before the black death. But while historical records are spotty at best, and much of that scholarship relies on equating the yearly cut a lord took of a peasants harvest with modern wage slavery, it's worth noting that the RAND corporation, which is not exactly known as a leftist think-tank, published a paper putting the wealth transfer from the bottom 99% of Americans to the top 1 % at $50 trillion since 1978. That’s ‘trillion,’ with a T, dollars, over the last 40 years. My good friend Dr. Mattosn thinks that number is probably larger, because the impact of wealth inequality compounds over time. Thus, a dollar taken from a person’s wages in 1995 and fed to the shareholders, translates into a much larger wealth transfer today, because that extra dollar could have paid debts or been put into savings by the earner 30 years ago, rather than sitting on the balance sheets of some 1%’ers accountant. Speaking of the 1%, let’s look at one of the chief methods used by the ultra-rich to keep their wealth at the top. Let’s talk about capital gains taxes.  

That old sayin' them that's got are them that gets
Is somethin' I can't see
If ya gotta have somethin'
Before you can get somethin'
How do ya get your first is still a mystery to me

- Ray Charles "Them That Got"

Just for clarity’s sake, let’s define a capital gain. When one makes money from the sale of an asset or investment, it is referred to as capital gains. Put another way, you made an investment of capital (aka money) in an asset. If you sell it at a profit, that extra money is the ‘gain.’ and the person is not taxed on the money they invested, but rather on the money made off this investment. 

Put another way, if you spent fifty dollars on a rare collectible you found at a thrift store, then turned around and sold said oddity for one hundred dollars, you would have gained fifty bucks on a capital investment of fifty bucks. As long as you earn less than $47k as a single taxpayer, or $94k for a couple filing jointly, the fifty bucks you made would not be subject to taxation as a capital gain. If you made more than that, you’d technically be liable to pay a 15% tax on the profit. But your secret is safe with me.

In fiscal year 2020, Americans reported $8.4 trillion in salaries and wages to the IRS, and $1.1 trillion in capital gains. According to the Tax Policy Center, the richest 1% of Americans, made about 79% of all capital gains in 2019, and the richest 0.1% bringing in half of that $1.1 trillion in income. Put another way, the top 0.1% of American taxpayers, or about 120,000 households, made about $600 billion in capital gains in 2019. For comparison, the poorest 1/5th of American households, totaling about 66 million people, earned about $252 billion from salaries and wages in 2022, according to the US Census Bureau. Take a moment to re-read those stats. 66 million Americans brought home less than half of what the richest 330,000 made in capital gains, in just one year.

But wait, there’s more. There’s always more, isn’t there? You may have missed it up there in the description of what constitutes capital gains, but capital gains are taxed at between 15-20%, depending on how much you made (and how uncreative your accountant is). The top rate paid by those making more than $626,000 filing singly is 37%. The lesson I take away from this simple breakdown of the tax code is make money so your money can make you money, and whatever you do, don’t earn a wage or salary. Of course, how you get the money, to invest the money, to make more of it, well, proponents of our current economic system never really talk about that. At least Ray Charles did.

Let’s take a quick look at another method by which those who already have the money, make more of it: stock buybacks. 

First off, what are they? Simply put, stock buybacks are a financial mechanism by which a company which issued stocks, buys them back from investors. This practice doesn’t seem so bad. After all, people buy and sell stocks all the time. Which is true, but they sell stocks to each other, rather than back to the company, and this is a key distinction.

 

Second, we would be remiss not to point out that these buybacks were illegal until the 1980s. The stock buyback quickly became a staple method for concentrating wealth and control in the fewest hands possible, almost entirely in the finance and investment community. 

How is this done? Stock buybacks have a pernicious, two-fold effect. One - they almost always come at the expense of retail, small scale, investors, rather than at the expense of institutional investors like big money Chads. In effect, they concentrate control of companies in the hands of the investor class, who already have disproportionate control of them. But that’s not the only effect, because stock buybacks also serve to drive up stock prices. After all, the stock is in demand, but the supply is going down, so the price goes up. This means, if the institutional investors then choose to turn round and sell their stocks at a later date, they will almost certainly fetch higher prices, thus making the institutional investors richer. 

Not only does this drive income and wealth inequality, but it has a third effect: money used in buybacks cannot be spent on reinvestment in the company. No hiring new workers, no higher wages and salaries, no capital investment in new equipment, no expansion of the business. This is no small point and should be reiterated. When that money leaves the company in the form of a stock buyback, the board or managers of the firm can then plausibly, if more than a little dishonestly, say that extra money to hire more staff, pay existing staff more, or invest in newer and better machinery or training programs, simply isn’t there.

Don't confuse a buyback with a stock paying dividends.
Uncle Moneybags certainly wouldn't.

Take, for instance, the recent case of the General Motors stock buyback. The company announce, right after concluding a deal with the United Auto Workers union, that it would immediately buy back $6.8 billion of its common stock, with further buyback of about $4 billion planned for 2024. It’s worth noting too, that GM has not spent much money buying back stocks before 2023, with the values for previous quarters counted in the low millions of dollars. And spokespeople for the company explicitly stated the buybacks were aimed squarely at offsetting the costs of the new UAW deal, and to reassure Wall Street the company was a safe investment.  Further, GM did not announce it would hold those repurchased stocks in the hopes of selling them at a later date for a higher price, but that it planned to retired the stocks. This will concentrate the holding of stocks by institutional investors and wealthy individuals.

Indeed, insiders, that is, members of its board of directors, executives and senior officers, hold nearly 7% of GM stock, with 47% held by institutional investors, and a the remaining 45% held by publicly traded companies and individual investors. These numbers alone represent a great disparity of ownership in favor of capital, but the disparity becomes even more apparent when one considers that roughly 84% of GM stocks are owned by institutions, and only 16% by the general public. To use these numbers as a rough guide, the company will fork over $9 billion to institutional investors, and about $ 1.7 billion to the general public. And wealthy individual investors dominate the category ‘general public.’ This brief examination isn’t meant to single out GM as a uniquely bad actor, but rather to illustrate the way the wealthy concentrate not just cash and assets, but control of publicly traded companies. 

But the United States is not all of North America, and as noted earlier, Canada and Mexico have lower GINI coefficients than the USA, so surely that means the rest of North America will be okay. Right? As the saying went in the 19th century, when France sneezed, all of Europe caught a cold. For context, given the regularity with which France threw a revolution (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870), the impacts of those revolutions mattered a great deal to the rulers of the rest of Europe. After all, if the French are running around talking about liberty and equality and fraternity, it might encourage some of your more uppity subjects to think they need in on some of those liberal, Enlightenment values.

You know you came here for the nudity!

 So I think when the United States has its revolutionary moment, and I believe the United States will, within my lifetime, the rest of North America is going to catch a cold. To stick with economic impacts alone, US-Mexico trade was valued last year at $855 billion, giver or take a few million. The value of US-Canada trade was actually a bit greater, at $905 billion last year. So even if the governments of the other two big North American countries could somehow seal off their nations from the US, the economic impacts of a trade disruption caused by a revolution or civil war or full-scale break up, would be immense for both Canada and Mexico.  This outcome shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. The implosion of governmental structures and political economies in one country inevitably affect the countries around them. 

Before we talk about guillotines, tumbrels and revolutionary chaos, we should at least mention what might be done to avoid the more violent outcomes linked to economic inequality. I plan to touch on that next week ***spoiler alert*** but for now, there are some political solutions economic inequality in the United States that don’t have to involve severed heads and mob violence.

Tumbril, guillotine, revolutionary chaos!
This painting has it all!!

A fairly straightforward right-of-center solution to income inequality would be an enforcement of anti-trust laws. If the federal government were to get its act together and break up all of the gigantic firms that dominate American economic life, we might see a genuine trickling down of wealth to the working classes that create that wealth. I think it's worth noting that in almost all sectors of the American economy, from finance to agriculture, to manufacturing, to media a scant few firms functionally control their respective markets. The biggest, most obvious example is Amazon, which controls somewhere around 40% of U.S. e-commerce.

But there are also less obvious oligarchies or near monopolies, think of the car industry. We used to have a literally a dozen big car makers, until they were bought out by the big three, which is now functionally a big two. Or think of the banking sector in the way in which so many large banks have been bought out by each other in the wake of the 2008 .Financial crisis and the current brewing financial crisis of smaller midsize banks failing along with the commercial real estate market teetering on the brink of failure. 

Or consider agribusiness. We have four or five firms, depending on which specific field of agriculture you're looking at, which control 80% of agricultural production in the United States. We could go down a whole laundry list of the ways in which the economic well-being of Americans are controlled by people that live in many cases hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

But the United States did not always work like this. It has literally been in my lifetime, in the last 40 years, that economic power in corporate consolidation has moved so quickly and aggressively to put the economic reigns of the country in as few hands as possible. That only does this make markets less competitive, it also disincentivizes the ownership class from sharing any of the profits or wealth with the people who work for them because they are so distant and disconnected from their very own workforces.

There are a handful of what might be deemed centrist solutions are these typically are the neo liberal grab bag of slightly higher marginal taxes maybe a little more social spending over here or over there they don't really tackle the core of the problem but might be enough maybe to head off truly revolutionary fervor.

And then there are the left of center solutions these include things like universal basic income out now expropriation or my personal favorite solution turning ownership of private industry over to the workers that actually work in those businesses. Without going into too much detail about what each solution might look like in terms of real policy I've been told that universal basic income as viable as long as the Federal Reserve agrees to go along with it. Similarly state ownership and expropriation of large businesses and industries can be done without going for communist. Nationalizing of industries to break up large firms would be similar to the anti-trust solution mentioned earlier but might go further or have more further reaching consequences in terms of permanent downward redistribution of wealth.

As a pragmatist myself I think that and all of the above approach would be ideal from a policy perspective both Bret breaking up large businesses through anti-trust laws and turning over the ownership of those businesses to the employees of the businesses would ideally create a healthy free market well at the same time resulting in the real redistribution of wealth and ownership to the people networking those businesses. But I don't think most of you reading this came here to read about Ben Johnson's ideal policy solutions to an incredibly complex topic.

So let's get on to what this implies about the future of North America. Insured as mentioned earlier what happens in the United States will spill over in affect the other countries in North America and there's nothing either side can really do about it. While it might be tempting for Canadians to say oh we can sell our manufactured goods and oil to other countries, or perhaps for Mexico to say “OK, we will become the middle manufacturer for some other advanced economy like Japan or Western Europe,” that's simply not how I think history will play out. Due both to the geographic proximity, and to the degree that international trade has bound Mexico, Canada and the United States to each other. And when the United States experiences its revolutionary crisis the other two countries will be affected, probably to a greater extent that they anticipate. 

Nothing screams "FREEEEEEDOMMM!"
quite like being an armed enforcer for the State.
But I'm sure they'll respect your civil liberties...

There are a number of events, driven by economic inequality, which could cascade into outright revolution here in the US. The most obvious would be some sort of financial crisis, likely driven by defaults as fewer and fewer people and businesses can service their debts as ever more money gets hoovered up by the top income bracket. This would look a lot like the 2008 financial crisis, which quickly transforms into wider demands, not just that policy makers address the immediate crises, but the underlying causes. There are other scenarios that could result in a revolutionary moment: some proxy war spirals out of control and disrupts global shipping could cause a finance-heavy economy like the US to experience a sharp economic contraction, or we could get a self-own. I’ve seen reliable reports that the incoming US administration is seriously considering repealing laws requiring employers to pay a minimum wage and/or overtime pay. I like to imagine that would bring a large number of people out in the streets demanding change. There are any number of ways an economically unequal society reaches a breaking point.

Cynics might argue that regimes ' buy’ civil order through bread and circuses. In modern parlance, we might say that the ruling class in the United States keeps people pacified with reality TV and microwave dinners. But what underlying cause can push a population to reject reality TV and microwave dinners, and out onto the streets in protest, which can lead to violence, which can lead to regime change?

Maybe we can finally put all these
 lifted pickups to good use?

Economist Debraj Ray of NYU, proposes two measures to consider: fractionalization and polarization. Fractionalization in this case means the degree to which any given society contains various groups which may be quite different and diverse. In contrast, a polarized society would have two main groups, each quite similar internally, but quite different from each other. In Ray’s studies, fractionalization, whether along ethnic or religious lines, showed no correlation with civil conflict. On the other hand, high polarization of society did show a significant correlation with civil conflict. That is to say that societies containing various groups: culture, religion, or ethnicity, aren’t predetermined to descend into violent conflict. However, those that are separated by class, and in particular a highly unequal class divide, tend to be associated with violent conflict.

 

This notion may seem contradicted by anecdotal evidence. Anyone even vaguely aware of the long, sorry history of ethnic violence, could easily name half a dozen conflicts in which the two, or more, sides claimed either a religious or ethnic, or other, motivations for collective violence against another group. The claim Ray makes is no direct link, statistically speaking, of ethnic or religious fractionalization, on the likelihood of the occurrence of civil conflict. He does not say it might not indirectly affect civil conflict.

Instead, Ray points to per-capita income as measured in GDP US dollars, as strongly significant both statistically and substantively. This doesn’t mean every poor country is always primed to go off like a powder keg after a book of lit matches gets tossed at it. If everyone is poor and close to the GDP per capita line, they are economically engaged, and largely egalitarian. Ray points out that polarization means that as income clusters are more and more in the hands of one group, it polarizes the ‘other’ group in society against them. People that fall further and further from the GDP per capita line are more marginalized and have less to lose. And as a larger population falls further and further from the GDP per capita engagement line, their fight becomes more existential and desperate. 

Ray, drawing on other’s research, takes care to point out that this shouldn’t be seen as the only factor. Another factor that matters is how dispersed economic and political power are within a system. In a system which is more dispersed, group loyalties remain localized, and demands of one group may be met or placated, without injuring the interests of other groups. A cynic might think of this as the technique of ‘divide and conquer’, but that somewhat misses the point. Whether they intended it or not, the framers of the US constitution built such a system, and in his own writings, Ray describes such a system as federalism. 

In the not-so-distant past, laws and economic arraignments could vary quite broadly from state to state. For an example, consider the impact of laws allowing commercial banking across state lines. Previous to the 1980s, banks were generally confined to a state or region. This “artificial” restriction balanced the potential increasing returns inherent in markets like lending and deposit services, and provided for smaller banks and credit unions to get a start and compete with their regional, older siblings. After the deregulation of the 1980s, banks were allowed to compete across state lines and take advantage of the increasing returns to scale; that they could decrease their average costs while increasing the quantity of services they provided. I'm sure you'll be shocked to find out that Federal Reserve research has found that bank consolidation is not the result of 'natural' market forces, nor does in improve outcomes for customers...

Pictured: the US banking regulatory system.

Ray contrasted federalism with a centrally focused system. Not only does such a system vest most political power in the hands of a central government, such societies can be quite susceptible to forming polarized groupings; those who hold and/or benefit from economic power, and the majority who do not. These polarized societies might possess fewer cleavages compared to a federalized society, but the cleavages that do exist run through the whole of society, and thus feel more important. Therefore, when conflict occurs, the central authorities will find it hard to placate one group without antagonizing the other. 

Ray also points out the phenomenon of ‘local compression’ vs ‘global compression’ as another key driver of civil conflict. In this case, the terms local and global do not refer to physical geography, so much as they refer to the distribution of income and/or wealth. Where people experience local compression in an economic system, populations cluster along specific segments of the income/wealth scale. In practical terms, this might mean a lot of poor people, few people in the middle income brackets, and a second, smaller cluster in the top brackets.

 

In the meantime, let's spin out a quick scenario for how it might happen and what the implications would be for the other countries of North America. In the interest of limiting the scope of the scenario I will assume that sometime next year, maybe the year after, widespread defaults in the commercial real estate market lead to a generalized banking crisis. The specifics of who defaults and who gets bailed out aren’t per se important, what's important is the optics of yet another financial crisis in which the rich get bailed out and we, ‘the poors,’ get to fend for ourselves. But let's say this time the anger of the American people can't be mollified by another general election.

So mobs take to the street, demanding the reversal of whatever policies are seen as causing the most pain. As police crackdowns on protests routinely backfire, and the political establishment seems more and more tone deaf to the moment this revolutionary moment, lines get drawn in peoples’ hearts and minds. Equally important would be the loss in value of the dollar as the crisis drags on. As the dollar loses its value, budget crunches hit municipal police departments; the police officers may no longer feel like it's worth it to put on riot gear and beat down their fellow citizens in defense of laws they might hate just as much as the protestors. 

I'm sure this won't end badly...

This collapse of economic viability in the United States would result in a shut down of supply chains in Mexico, as well as energy exports from Canada to the United States. This results in people in both countries also either losing their jobs, seeing their wages cut back, or seeing a collapse in their purchasing power. How this plays out would depend on internal factors. In Canada we might see a situation in which the western provinces demand control over how much tax revenue gets sent to Ottowa, rather than kept local to deal with the economic downturn. In Mexico, the loss of manufacturing income combined, with a government that is of dubious legitimacy and constantly embroiled in armed conflict with drug exporting cartels, might lead people into the streets to call for a dissolution of the country along regional lines. Or perhaps the forces of revolution would not be centrifugal in either case.

Snap elections in Canada might bring to power a coalition which seeks the creation of even more central authority, in order to weather the crisis. In Mexico, it could lead to the instillation of a strongman who follows a method of dealing with street gangs similar to the President of El Salvador. 

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. I will explore the interplay of all those forces in the full scenario; so for will call it a day. Next week, we will move on to our sixth, and most unpredictable factor: the national politics of the United States..

An Empty Continent

    Today's subject will cover an unpleasant topic: extinction! That’s right, we’re going to talk about the elimination of entire species from the global ecosystem. More specifically, I intend to address the impact of human pollution beyond dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because in tandem with the impacts of human climate change, there's also the impact of people using the natural world as a dumping ground for everything that is inconvenient or sometimes outright dangerous to human life. This includes all varieties of pollution from sewage, untreated runoff from agriculture, plastics trash gyres in the oceans, the micro plastics that are now show up in rainwater all over the world. And to be clear and unfortunately honest, no additional natural parks or marine reserves will get humanity out of from under our own boot-heel. 

    Once again let us get an obvious caveat out of the way; human beings have always impacted the natural environment. In fact, it's likely that since modern humans evolved approximately 400,000 years ago, no place where humans lived has been a pristine natural ecosystem since. To use a local example, the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve, in my home state of Oklahoma, explicitly seeks to restore grasslands of the central plains to the way the ecosystem functioned after the arrival of Native Americans. 

We've been doing this quite a while.

    If you really want to interrogate the idea of the ’natural world’, in the Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy, author Cixin Liu debates the idea wether nature itself can even be ‘natural’. In the book Death's End, one character runs computer simulation looking at what would happen on Earth if natural life never existed. The simulation found that such a simulation cannot produce a conclusion, because simply by existing, the natural world influences even the basic laws of physics. This is a lot to wrap your head around, so I'll simply leave a link to the story and you can read it for yourself. The whole trilogy (Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End) is fantastic, and really pushes one to think about big ideas from a whole variety of perspectives. The trilogy takes place over millions of years, but focuses on the next four hundred or so.

    This blog is focused on just the next hundred right now, so let’s get back to the task at hand. The problem today isn’t that people impact the natural world. The problem is a messy trifecta of scale, pace and the feedback loop from climate change. 

    Taking these issues in order, we should first look at the scale of the problem; human beings currently dump billions of tons of CO2 into the giant areal sewer we collectivity refer to as ‘the sky’, along with millions of tons of other problematic particles and molecules from NOX, mercury sulfates, to VOCs and micro-plastics which, as mentioned earlier, can now be found in rainwater all over the world. All these molecules make their way into the water cycle. And we haven’t even gotten to the mountains of trash we dump directly into the oceans, as well as the massive amounts of waste runoff from agricultural operations, which very often includes huge amounts of pesticides and fungicides, was well as fertilizers and animal waste. All of which flows back, eventually, to us humans. 

^Carcinogens not shown

    Not only are these pollutants building up in the world’s ecosystems, the rate of the pollution buildup can only accelerate, because the economic model we operate demands perpetual growth. With limitless growth, comes limitless pollution. There is of course another factor at play beyond the rapacious growth of capital intensive industries and the byproducts that they produce. A great many people outside of the industrial world want to join in the prosperity that is modern industrial civilization. From the outside looking in, modern (industrial) life, with its easy access to clean-ish water, sanitation, cheap food, and a smorgasbord of fashionable consumer goods, looks like an endless party. And for those in the ‘developing world’ wanting to attend, that party will end sometime over the next 150 years. For a great many of them, they will never get let in the door. I don't want to use ecological consciousness as a rhetorical tool with which to bludgeon the poor peoples of the world into accepting shorter lifespans, unhealthy environments and material poverty. The fact that there are things to life other than material prosperity, isn’t much of a consolation to someone living in a shanty town in a tropical metropolis.

    This estimate, that fossil-fueled industrial civilization has about 150 or so years left, roughly mirrors the 150 years it has existed. Prior to 1870 or so, industrialization was limited to the East Coast of North America, and a corner of Northwest Europe, from the midlands of England, down to Lyon, France, then back up to roughly Hamburg, Germany. These little slivers of humanity lived on barely 5% of the world’s landmass, and constituted maybe 5% of the population. And in five to seven generations, depending on how you count, the industrial way of living spread to every major city and decent-sized population around the world. I would estimate the percentages of land and people engaged in industrial economic activity has reversed, with only 5% of land and people NOT engaged in some step in the industrial food web.

    And this scale of change is reflected in the natural world as well. This recent study found that roughly like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. That leaves 4-5% for every other form of mammalian life. While the scale of impact by agriculture is slightly better, about 37% of Earth’s surface is used for agriculture, that figure jumps to 50% when you count only ‘habitable’ land. Yes, the Sahara desert is huge, but no people want to live or farm there. On the high seas, which make up 70% of the Earth’s surface, 40% is considered effected by human activity, with much of that activity concentrated in shallow areas where marine life is most abundant. As it is on land, so it is on the seas; no one wants to live in the desert.

Except camels. They don't mind living 
in the desert.

    Compounding the scale and pace of human pollution are the impacts from climate change, which compounds other forms of pollution. As the climate destabilizes, ecosystems must shift to accommodate a hotter planet. But the problem is twofold; first, the rate of change is so much faster than natural ecosystems can handle without devastating species loss. If we could say the current warming will to happen over the next thousand years or so, then many ecosystems might (emphasis on might), be able to move north or up on their own. The natural world has done this before, after all. 

    Second, the impacts of climate change will likely force human beings to double down on the mistakes of industrial civilization. The reason is core to the predicament in which industrial civilization finds itself; almost all humans alive to today, with very few exceptions, serve the industrial machine in one way or another.. This is true from elites who operate the systems of finance all the way down to the janitors and scavengers and trash collectors who work at what might be considered the very bottom of the economic pyramid. For example, consider the ship breakers in India whose job is, as it sounds, to break up old ships for salvage. Even groups like the Amish, who live as far outside the modern system as possible, still use modern power tools (they just can’t own them) and earn incomes outside their local communities.

    Everyone’s material livelihood depends on the maintenance of industrial civilization, and as of right now industrial civilization has only one operating imperative; the conversion of raw materials into sellable products, many of which constitute one time use products which humans immediately throw away. To some extent this is avoidable, and my family and I make a point to avoid single-serving products, but in other cases, avoidance would mean going without. Who hasn’t bought a product that DIDN’T come packaged in single-use plastic? In a morbid bit of irony, even when we find a bio-degradable form of single-use plastic, customers can reject the arguably better product because it’s too noisy to open. I wish I was joking, but this actually happened with Sun Chips.

I wish this story was some lame satire...

     But someone makes money off those plastics, and the companies whose products go into those plastics make money off of selling those products. Thus the cycle perpetuates itself. This is all a roundabout way of saying that as climate change pushes industrial civilization with compounding problems such as disasters, crop failures, famines and desertification, combined with rising sea levels and increased soil erosion from a more active water cycle, humanity will have very little choice but to double down on the existing model of operating a fossil-fueled economy.

    This all paints very bleak picture, and indeed in some sense the future is bleak, but there is, I suppose, one minor silver lining. We're talking about impacts that will only last a few thousand years. That's not much consolation to anyone reading this, or i anyone multiple generations in the future, but it is a silver lining. How is it a silver lining? Thanks to radiative adaptation, new life forms will evolve to fill the gaps and niches of the ecosystems left behind by the extinction of a great many species that exist today. Ecologists posited on and off since at least the 1990s. and probably earlier. that humanity is pushing the natural ecosystems of the planet towards a sixth great extension. This is almost certainly in progress, but it doesn't have to end up with a full-blown extinction event.

    Humanity could choose to make different choices. We could reduce, reuse and recycle. Indeed, here in the US, we almost took that path in the 1970s. While I did mock National Parks and Marine Reserves earlier, such efforts are worth making. I believe nature is worth conserving for its own sake, but there's also a self interested reason for conservation. A great number of pharmaceutical products derive directly from the natural biodiversity of our planet. A poster child for this would be the horseshoe crab. The blood harvested from the horseshoe crab is key to many (human) life-saving drugs. If we wipe out the natural habitat of the horseshoe crab, it’s not an all clear that modern pharmacology could replace the compounds produced for us for free by this amazing crustacean.

Dirty hippies, being right about something!

    I do want to take a paragraph to dispel any notion you may have that discussion of mass extinction is synonymous with the end of humanity. The Chicxulub impact, which wiped out the dinosaurs except for the avian branch that gave us delicious chickens. Modern mammals arose to fill the many of the ecological gaps left by the now extinct land dinosaurs, eventually giving rise to the great apes, and, after millions of year, anatomically modern humans. So while it was a defining event in the natural history of our planet, it was nowhere near as devastating as the Permian Extinction, which resulted in the extinction of roughly 57% of all biological families on the planet. It’s ironic that the Permian extinction was responsible for a significant amount of the fossil fuel reserves that human beings are now using to push the planet towards a sixth extinction. All that weird irony aside the point is that extinction level event does not have to be in a complete ecological collapse. A few human beings would survive an extinction level event on par with the Jurrasic extinction. Humanity would most certainly not survive an event like the Permian Extinction. 

    Speaking of dying, one of the impacts of all of this pollution ending up in our natural ecosystems and water cycles is that the rates of cancer will almost certainly skyrocket for hundreds of years. While living creatures have always had to contend with malignant tumors, the degree to which cancer has become a cause of death around the world is truly out of line with previous human experience. While written historical records are incomplete, and the archaeological record can only shed so much light on the subject, in the preindustrial context most human beings died of infectious diseases in the first few years of life. A great many died of malnutrition and famine. War, that third horsemen of the apocalypse came in a distant third. And cancer itself was, we would guess, a rare problem reserved only for people who lived an extraordinarily long life by pre-industrial standards. Granted, “extraordinarily long life” by pre-industrial standards would have meant living into one’s forties, but the point remains. Today cancer is in the top five, along with heart disease, accidents, lack of health insurance, and respiratory illnesses as a top-five killer of Americans. I would imagine that by the turn of this century, cancer will be the leading cause of death across all age brackets. 

    This predicament is best exemplified by the weed killer Roundup. Because genetic modification focused on creating plants which can survive a hefty does of the stuff, Roundup is becoming inseparable from modern agriculture. Any farmer who does not want their fields overrun by weeds must apply multiple rounds of Roundup to keep down the undesirable plants. As a result, glyphosate, the cancer-causing chemical which also makes Roundup such a potent weed killer, persists in soils for weeks to months after use. In one study, 36% of 154 tested municipal water supplies in the Midwest showed detectable amounts of glyphosate. While the detectable level is not officially considered harmful to humans, I would take that as a small consolation. And as weeds develop resistance to glyphosate, every year farmers must spray more of it just to keep the 8 billion fed. Once again we can see how the modern farming, like many aspects of industrial civilization is caught in a bind. Human beings need the calories from corn and soy, the two crops on which Roundup is primarily used for, but natural methods of weed control, while viable, are not nearly as profitable nor efficient as spraying Roundup ready crops, to keep a hungry world well fed. I suppose the one upside, is that even if weeds become completely Roundup resistant, one can always go out and pull weeds by hand. And that will require a much larger agricultural workforce. 

    To avoid setting too dark of a tone for this post I would like to circle back to the notion that the natural world isn't natural or at least the natural world always seeks to find some new form of ecological balance. Yes in the centuries of head to pollution and ecological devastation that humans are visiting upon the natural world of North America and by extension upon our selves will be devastating. Great number of species will go extinct a great number of ecosystems will collapse and will never return and the world that human beings would have it in for instance 1000 years will be an ecologically impoverished landscape. What do I mean by this well for instance the recent study found that something like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. The natural world is already tragically impoverished and I don't see any reason to think that the current trajectory will not make it even more so. Also it's worth noting that as equal ecosystems encounter disequilibriums there are often massive almost tidal wave like events where a disruptive or what we might deem invasive species will invade and ravage an ecosystem but then also experience a die-back of its own as it overshoots what the ecosystem to naturally carry. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached. Unfortunately for the natural world and for the humans dependent on it, that will involve a great deal of unpleasantness before the new equilibrium takes hold. 

    So what might an ecologically impoverish North America look like in 100 years? I think two of the best, most instructive examples, are the islands of Iceland and Rapa Nui. 

They didn't just pillage and burn Saxon towns,
they enjoyed a quiet life on the farm too!

    Iceland is a decent-sized volcanic island located between Scotland and Greenland in the North Atlantic. The first known human inhabitants, the Norse, arrived sometime in the eighth century. Based on fossil and very limited written records, the island was covered by fairly lush forests. The Norse loved keeping cattle and eating beef  (who doesn’t?) so they immediately began clearing the trees for pasture land. What the Norse did not take into account was that unlike their native Scandinavia, Iceland had very thin soils. So as they imported cattle and plows and began to practice European-style agriculture in an ecosystem that was not fit to support it, they quickly destroyed most of the topsoil of the island. The largely barren, rocky ice-covered landscape we know today did not look like it did 1,300 years ago.

    The island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island and located about 1,300 miles west of Chile in the South Pacific, suffered a similar fate. When the Polynesians arrived on Easter island approximately 1,000 years ago, they two found an island covered in trees and home to a rich marine ecosystem. And for a number of centuries they managed to live in some degree of symbiosis with the natural world. But as almost always happens, this story does not have a happy ending for the natural ecosystem of Easter island. Eventually, all the trees were cut down and in their place there was very little other than thick-stemmed grass to hold down the topsoil. But the Polynesians couldn’t eat the grasses needed to hold onto the topsoil, sot the Easter Islanders had to become very good at dry rock gardening agriculture and became even more dependent on the sea to provide them with food. By the time Europeans visited Easter island, their written records mention that Easter islanders operated canoes made of reads grasses bound together with twine, while their ancestors likely arrived piloting sturdy, large, and most importantly, wooden canoes made from trees. in the case of Rapa Nui, the worst ecological devastation took place after the arrival of Europeans. Diseases, against which the the Polynesians had no immunity, ravaged their population. In the name of ‘economic development’, the 19th century Chilean government decided that it would be a good idea to start raising sheep on Easter island. But that's a story for another time.

Seriously. Chile brought sheep here. On Purpose.

    Both the Polynesians and the Norse adapted to a more ecologically impoverished reality. Depending on how one looks at the situation, one could even argue that both peoples thrived in the face of adversity. In these two examples, I think we can glimpse the future of North America. Barring some cataclysm, the human population will survive and indeed in some places will thrive. But over the near term, they will do so on a continent with a devastated ecosystem, a host of tropical diseases and staggeringly high rates of cancer. These factors will combine with plummeting birth rates and mass migration-drive conflict, to put the human population into a steep nosedive. 

As of writing this post, the population of North America sits at 618 million people, and will grow to a projected 709 million by 2100. At this point, most projections assume the population stagnates, with the figure for 2125 being roughly the same, about 700 million people. These models rely on two variables: expected birth rates and life expectancy, and, most importantly, assume the future will look like the past. As countries urbanize and industrialize, birth rates drop, but life expectancy increases, so overall populations still grow. But as we’ve discussed over the past few posts, the future will likely not look like the past at all. Or, more accurately, the future will look like the past, only the direction of all trends, including population, will go into reverse. A modest -0.4% annual population decline gives us a 2125 population of 405 million, with populations in each sub-region coming in at 254 million for the US and Canada, 121 million for Mexico and Central America, and 29 million for the Caribbean.

While the numbers seem stark, a 0.4% increase in the death rate would only see annual deaths in the United States increase from about 3.28 million annually, to just over 3.29 million deaths annually. And this population decline rate relies solely on a slight uptick in annual deaths. I didn’t even touch expected birth rates. 

But brith and death rates do not remain static. Humans, like every other population of animals, respond to their environment. I expect the human population in North America hit a low point between 300 and 400 years from today, at between 5 to 10% of the current population, or between 31 and 62 million. Once again, it wouldn’t take a cataclysm to reach that number. If population decline accelerated from -0.4% to -0.8% annually, we would bottom out at 67 million in 2375 and 34 million by 2450. The biodiversity of the continent will be similarly impoverished, with huge tracts of land either barren desert or tropical wetlands with ecosystems dominated by the most opportunistic, aggressive forms of life. 

Just replace the column with a McDonalds sign.

    Next week, we will take a walk, as the impacts of climate change, ecosystem chaos, de-industrialization and resource scarcity push more and more people from their homes greater and greater numbers. Check back next Friday as we go on a folk-wandering.