What the Age of Extinction Means…For You

How the World Is Changing — And Will Change — As We Cross Into the Next Phase of Extinction

Ivan Nikiforov

So the other day on Twitter I asked people what they wanted to ask me, what they wanted me to talk about.

Question: Ok — so, like it or not, you haven’t been wrong about what’s happening to the world right now. I’m begging for a timeline of predictions for the next 10 years — even your wildest ones, I don’t care, I want to see all the scenarios gamed out like we’re in a war room.

Question: I would like you to address the importance of tackling all of the megathreats — eco-breakdown & extinction, resource scarcity, hothouse earth, nuclear threat, pandemics, worsening food scarcity, poisoning from human chemical emissions, uncontrolled techno-risk, and mass delusion. 

No pressure then, huh guys? Hi. Gooood morning. Predictions, predictions. OK, I’ll give you a few. They’re not really predictions — at least not in the sense of punditry. They’re more…the path we’re on. When I sit down to think about what happens next, I don’t really need to run statistical models. I reason from first principles. I say that for a reason — one of the things I try to do here is teach you how to do the same thing.

From here, the future looks…pretty simple. It goes something like this. Everything that’s happening right now just accelerates. Why is that? It’s because the first principles haven’t changed. I’ll come back to those in a second, but first, those predictions.

Democracy continues to fail. We’ve discussed recently just what dire shape it’s in — from 5–10% of the world lives in a full democracy. 10% of the world has lost its democracy within the last decade — gains which took a century to build. We’re losing centuries of progress in decades, decades of progress in years, and that trend just continues. The world shifts hard, hard right — far right. Xenophobia, hate, rage, and hostility take over. With them, conflicts erupt. More and more of the world lives in autocracy — like the transition happening right now in Florida, where any last form of democratic institution or value is being eviscerated.

Why does that happen? Well, one of the most robust findings we have from economics is that in the wake of financial crises, recessions, and so forth, people tend to swing hard right. So think about what’s happening right now. It’s not technically a recession, or a crisis. Or is it? It’s something like a permanent, slow motion one. Real incomes are falling. Living standards are plummeting. These are now becoming long-run trends. People struggle to make ends meet — even on “middle class” (there’s not really one anymore) incomes. There’s no middle class in the old sense of security, stability, and upward mobility. 

So my fellow economists look at “growth,” but fail to see the forest for the trees — sure, there’s an anemic amount of growth, but it’s all piling up in the hands of the super rich, who are now giga rich, and that leaves the rest of society…poorer. And societies going in that direction don’t tend to stay democracies for very long.

Why is that, in turn, happening? There’s a proximate cause, and an ultimate cause. The proximate cause of the death of the middle and the rise of new insecurity — even at, or far above, the median — is the way we designed our economies. The idea was that, LOL, if we let the super rich become giga rich, the wealth would trickle down. Didn’t happen, did it? Instead, the opposite did. They just got…richer and richer…while everyone else…didn’t. Through the generations, downward mobility is a scythe, ruinous, devastating. It’s final proof that the way we designed our economies failed.

But the ultimate cause is something you should know, because we talk about it all the time. This is the Age of Extinction. We’re a civilization that doesn’t know how to make a single one of our basics — not one, from food to energy to cement, glass, steel, right down to household goods — in a non or post-industrial way. A way that doesn’t accelerate the vicious cycle of killing the planet. So prices now must rise, because making all that stuff the old way is getting harder. By the day, month, year. In an accelerating way. 

Every summer, harvests fail more. Every year, there’s less fresh water. Our energy grids fail a little more. Factories struggle to find inputs, labour, distribution. Shortages ripple through the system. We’ve hit the boundaries of what we can produce as a civilization. Eking out more is ever more costly, which is why “growth” is anemic. And then its gains all pile up in the hands of the giga rich because they control these last few resources, and profiteer atop them — greedflation.

We now face a Long Crash. Living standards are falling, more or less in unison, everywhere, around the globe — that should tell you, everyone, my fellow economists, social scientists, writers, observers, that something’s badly wrong. That isn’t some kind of anomaly or glitch though. It’s the system failing. The Industrial Age ending. But the thing-that-comes-next not nearly remotely born yet. So this decline in living standards will be with us for a very long time.