2009: The Status Quo versus The Long Emergency
Again, stop whatever elese you were doing, like reading things I wrote about 2009, and read Jim Kunstler’s forecasts about 2009. The author of The Long Emergency is experiencing the unenviable task of seeing dire structural change ahead, change that won’t be mollified by new gadgets, and being right about its consequences.
Some highlights:
He’s not a fan of techno-solutions. (not unlike yours truly)
The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another.
He sees Dow 4000:
A consensus in the blogoshpere says that the stock markets will rebound strongly during the first Obama months. This is possible just on the basis of pure “animal spirits,” but the Obama Bounce will occur against a background of continued dismal business and financial news. It will appear to defy that news. By May of 2009, the stock markets will resume crashing with the ultimate destination of a Dow 4000 before the end of the year.
He believes that you’ll actually need positive cash flow to make a business run (old-fashioned, but radical!):
We’ll turn around early in 2009 and discover that we are a much poorer nation than we thought because from now on credit will be extremely hard to get for anyone for anything. The businesses that survive will have to keep going on the basis of accounts receivable…Giant enterprises requiring giant loans to get from quarter to quarter will tend to not make it. Borrowing from the future will become a practical impossibility as past bad debts from previous borrowings continue to unwind, cease performing, and get written off.
Real change. Not new technologies for old philosophies. Nobody will save the day. We’ll need to make workable solutions for many different types of people.
And still - people will need things. Goods and services will be required, perhaps just different types.
Business development will need to be on its toes! Are you ready?
Aging populations: you now have the right to ergonomically designed pistols!
This is now a Class I medical device. The Palm Pistol, allowing the elderly to continue to exercise their Second 
Amendment rights.
Well, I said people need to take megatrends and look for business development opportunities. Here we are!
University education: Obsolete by 2020?
Hat tip to Jon Lowder, who just suggested this interesting SlideDeck about the future of the university.
Is it too late?
And who will fill the void?
Diplomacy 2.0 - using Facebook and Twitter to tell America’s story
Steve Clemons runs The Washington Note, one of the truly essential blogs for anyone who has an interest in America’s foreign policy.
Clemons thinks like a natural futurist, always considering strategic trends in a holistic, intellectually honest manner. But he’s also is interested in new technologies like Facebook and Twitter that will connect people around the world in a way that impacts America’s diplomacy. Cutting edge stuff. Check out this speech on social media from the New America Foundation:
Considering the future of immigration (version française)
We just finished a long and satisfying film project for a French-speaking audience. Here, we consider some of the inevitability of immigration, and explore the meaning of adding three billion people to developing nations.
Warning: French language used unabashedly.
We nationalized the banks! Hooray!
You know you live in interesting times when the business press reports the BIGGEST gain ever in the Dow based on the happy news that the United States is nationalizing nine of its banks!
Mark Penn: I guess macrotrends are the new microtrends
It’s amazing how shaving a few trillion off the global economy can change things. It can even completely flip your view of the world. Just ask Mark Penn.
Penn was brought to most people’s attention as Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, for better or for worse. This 
probably isn’t a fair introduction to the man, since tenure as a campaign consultant was more due to his work as CEO for public relations giant Burston-Marsteller. There, he specializes in extremely granular market research, defining people by tiny variances in beliefs and purchasing habits. He refers to this as microtrends, saying that tiny movements within a demographic add up to real change. He points to professionals with tattoos, “pet parents,” and protestant Latinos as burgeoning interest groups who will one day cause larger changes.
Pretty reasonable stuff. The only problem has been his tendancy to declare “the era of the megatrend is over.” Penn’s last several years have been dedicated to pushing the notion that these microtrends have primacy over the megatrends, that megatrends were so 1980s.
This made me discount most of what Penn had to say, because to assert that macrotrends in society and technology wouldn’t change the future is horrible, horrible analysis. Water shortage, healthcare expense, immigration, surveillance technology, global warming, skyrocketing national debts, the list of 20 - 50 year macrotrends goes on, and all of them trump the fact that 30 year-old analysts in Mark’s office were getting back tattoos.
It’s been a long couple of weeks, of course, and the effects are readily seen. For example, now Mark Penn is trumpeting the effects of megatrends in today’s Politico. It seems the impact of a collapsing world economic system does reach as far as political campaigns. (That is, if you think that Obama’s lead in NORTH DAKOTA has any significance.) Yes, but Penn unfortunately covers his most recent view of the world with a Monty Python quote, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” meaning that nobody could have expected the world economic system to collapse.
Normally, a Python reference would warm my heart, but this is just a cover for the fact that some people would rather study what kind of Starbucks coffee people prefer instead of examining the underpinnings of our economic system.
Mark, since you’re now into megatrends ,check this out. There’s lots more where this came from:
And welcome to the club. We need a hand figuring this stuff out.
Future brightspots will result from this mess
Here at Competitive Futures we regularly tell clients, “Just because something is a disaster doesn’t mean it will be a disaster for everyone.” History is filled with stories of leaders who perceived danger early, acted appropriately, and profited.
I’m a bit fatigued of straining about this financial mess, and naturally began to ask, “OK, what’s going to be 
positive out of this?” Despite the ugliness here, there will likely be many positive developments resulting from this crisis of business and governance. One example is quite close to home for me.
My father is in his 28th year running the Rutland Agway, a store dedicated to farm, home, and garden in Central Vermont. Recent economic trends have sent both farming and manufacturing to far-flung states or countries. Giant retailers like Home Depot came to take a piece of the diminishing supply of disposable income in the state. For local stores, things got pretty tight for a moment.
Fleeing jobs and rocketing fuel oil prices are putting a massive financial strain on rural households. How are they responding? By going local - planting gardens like never before. Staying at home, avoiding pricey vacations - and sprucing up the backyard with fertilizer and lawn mowers. And suddenly, times are better in the home and garden business. (On top of it, Vermonters are back to eating their own delicious local foods!)
What else could be positive about this? Think it through - there will plenty of time to think about disaster soon enough.
Sacre Bleu! The French Have the Majority of their Babies out of Wedlock!
Social trend alert! Et ben, c’est hyper important!
We all know that our friends the French, culinary inventors of Freedom Fries, are social innovators. They pioneered the art of running a major world economy on only 35 hours a week. They were the first to assure that incompetent workers could rest easy, knowing that it was illegal for them to be fired. And I believe the average paid vacation package still stands at 43 weeks per year, though that stat could be out of date.
However, the newspaper Le Figaro does much better fact checking than I do, and they are reporting that for the first time ever in France, babies born to non-married households now outnumber those born to two parents living together.
Could it be that living with men who dress like this is too painful?
Cheap shots against the French aside, (et laissez-moi vous assurer mes amis francophones, si je rigole, c’est parce que je vous aime tellement,) this strikes me as a very important signal for social structure in the future. Already, most of Europe is bracing for the onslaught of aging populations as they weigh ever more on the welfare state’s social programs. On top of it, most of Europe has a shrinking population, less than 2.0 babies per couple. Italy, Poland, and Czech Republic are just a few examples of those nations in dire straits. Here, we have even more strain on the system - a sign that one more bond of the 20th century family contract is breaking down.
Is it all bad? Well, I’m not here to judge the morals of such a trend, but I can tell you there are complications. Our governmental systems, especially in the United States, are designed to augment the social support of families, not replace them entirely. By this I mean, who takes care of Grandma if you have only met Grandma a couple of times? Our social systems sort of assume that you’ll have an emotional bond with your elders and want to care for them. But what if that ceases to be true, because you don’t spend much time together as a family?
I can already tell you that hospitals in downtown Washington DC see families abandon their old people to the state apparatus all too often - especially since the system isn’t designed to handle it. It is designed to help young people take care of the elderly, not care for them entirely.
Eldercare is just one implication here to the single, out-of-wedlock household becoming the statistical norm. Think about all the implications for new products, services, education, workforce, housing and so on.
This is big.
-Garland
On tipping points
Markets are pretty efficient things. For a while, I’ve been wondering what everybody in the condo market
was thinking, doubling the supply every year while also doubling the price. I mean, $700,000 for some granite countertops in a neighborhood you wouldn’t have parked in five years ago?
"The Bad News on Condos: Market Beset By Declining Sales, Foreclosures"
Ah, equilibrium.
Incidentally, I’m very interested by the new book "Pop!: Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy" by Daniel Gross. So many people have been expressing chagrin about the correction that will undoubtedly visit real estate (I mean, 38% increases in value every year?) but I think it’s about the same as getting upset that your blood pressure is going down to normal.
The key is balance. Because points tip, and markets are pretty efficient.
Be social