4/9/22, 20:16 The End of the Age of Abundance (and the Beginning of the Age of Scarcity) | by umair haque

) | by umair haque | Aug, 2022 | Eudaimonia and Co

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The End of the Age of Abundance (and the Beginning of the Age of
Scarcity)
Why the 21st Century Is Turning Out to Be an Era of Accelerating Catastrophe

Image Credit: ABACA/PA Images

Speeches. Heads of state, luminaries, power figures — they give them every day. And mostly, they don’t count. They’re just…part of
the job, statements, announcements, bureaucracy. But some speeches are different. Some mark changes. Some rally societies. And
some? Some go down in history — even if, at the moment, nobody quite knows it yet.

Such a thing recently occurred — and you might not have even heard about it. The most crucial speech by a head of state in the
21st century so far. First let me quote from the speech — so as to blind any preconceptions you might have — and then we’ll discuss
exactly who gave it and why it matters.

What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval … we are living the end of what could have seemed
an era of abundance … the end of the abundance of products of technologies that seemed always available … the end of the abundance of
land and materials including water.
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We are living at the end of what could appear to be [an age] of abundance, of endless cash flow, for which we must now face the
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consequences in terms of state finances, of an abundance of products and technology which appeared to be perpetually available. The
teleology of our world order over the last few years has demolished some things we took for granted.

It is also the end, for those that had it, of a type of insouciance. War began again in Europe six months ago to the day. For many generations
in our country, war was a reality which no longer existed. At the same time, the climate crisis and all its effects are there, tangibly, and new
risks are appearing all the time, like cyber attacks. We are living through a huge shift.

This overview that I’m giving, the end of abundance, the end of insouciance, the end of assumptions — it’s ultimately a tipping point that we
are going through that can lead our citizens to feel a lot of anxiety. Faced with this, we have a duty, duties, the first of which is to speak
frankly and clearly without doom-mongering…

This leader also spoke about our societies being too “insouciant” regarding democracy’s enemy’s, human rights, and “the rise of
illiberal regimes and strengthening of authoritarian regimes, “ nothing that this is a “great turning point” that must bring about “the
end of carelessness.”

Did you get all that? Now. Who gave this speech? If you’re European, you probably already know: Emanuel Macron. The most unlikely
of figures, perhaps — because until he gave this speech, Macron was a died-in-the-wool of shareholder value neoliberal. A French
President in the mold of a Washington DC technocrat. But now?

This speech matters. It’s true that Macron is giving it for “political reasons” — he’s a politician, QED. But to frame the subject this
way? In terms described by commentators across the board as “apocalyptic”? And what is the subject, anyways?

A paradigm. This speech is speaking of a major, historic paradigm shift. It’s not all the way there, quite yet — but for the leader of a
rich nation, one of the world’s most successful societies, to speak in such frank, brutal terms, about a mega-paradigm shifting — from
abundance to scarcity, and all that entails, from economics to society to culture to social contracts to finances and beyond? It’s a
remarkable thing. To put it in context, in Britain, leaders are still playing the Brexit fools’ game of scapegoating Europeans, while the
nation falls into abject poverty, and in America, Biden’s suddenly woken up, but he’s not speaking remotely like this.

Macron joins a small but growing list of leaders who are converts. They’re beginning to get it. Get the 21st century — and how
everything is now changing, suddenly, catastrophically, irrevocably. He is precisely, exactly correct when he says that Age of
Abundance is over, and the Age of Scarcity is here, something I’ve said almost exactly in so many words.

(Let’s save the left-wing criticisms — “some people have always had it bad!!” — for the end.)

This paradigm shift is far, far greater, more historic, more ominous, and more calamitous than most of us yet realize, and most of our
leaders and governments are planning for. It is a Big Deal — as big as the Industrial Revolution before it. How so?

Bought a pair of jeans recently? I was about to. I surfed on over to Weekday — my lovely wife says it’s the place all the kids like these
days — and had a little browse. I clicked the “details” button, and — this is interesting, because Weekday lets you see it, openly, the
supplier, right down to the street address — guess where the jeans were made? Pakistan.

Pakistan — which has recently had mega-flooding. That its recently appointed Climate Change Minister, Sherry Rehman, has
described as a “climate catastrophe.” The death toll’s already in the thousands, and the counting’s barely begun. Here’s what Minister
Rehman had to say: “We are at the moment at the ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade
of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events and now the monster monsoon of the decade is
wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country.”

What does once-in-a-millennium flooding in Pakistan have to do with you, the rich Westerner? Am I asking you to shed a tear for some
poor drowned kids? You should. But mine isn’t (just) a moral point. Flooding in Pakistan has everything to do with you, because you
might not know it, but many of your clothes and textiles are made there.

Just like those jeans I was perusing at Weekday, Pakistan’s a major, major global textile exporter. Why is that? Because it has fields
upon fields of cotton, and cheap labour to boot. It’s a perfect recipe for becoming a global center for everything from cotton to
“cashmere,” aka…Kashmir.

But now things are changing. This once-in-a-millennium flood — this monster monsoon — is likely to hit every year, maybe every two
or three, if the country’s lucky, because of levels of global warming so rapid they’re shattering every worst forecast. And as it does,
guess what? All those cotton fields and textile mills and cheap labour — they’re in serious trouble. The extreme weather will cause

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crop failures, whether it’s the unsurvivable heat or the flooding, the cheap labour will have to migrate, and the mills will have to
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shutter, at least many of them.

And the price of all that stuff that you didn’t even know was made in Pakistan — because, well, who really looks at a label? It’s
going to skyrocket. That effect of course is already what’s behind much of the global inflationary wave rocking the world.

And all that — my little parable — is exactly what Macron was talking about. Think about how with me — not in a judgmental
way, just in a realistic one. Insouciance — who really, at least in the rich West, even looks at a label? Cares where the everyday stuff of
our lives, from clothes to plastics, is made, or how, or by whom? We don’t give it a second thought. We’re just used to having it. Having
it cheap. Having it ubiquitously. Shelves packed full of it, warehouses creaking with it, supertankers racing it all across the globe —
whether the “it” is clothes or plastic stuff or electronics or what have you.

Abundance. In the West, especially, we take it for granted so much that we’ve barely ever stopped to think about it — except in the last
year or two. It’s shocking to us when the shelves aren’t packed to groaning point with stuff. It’s surreal to us when we can’t get what we
want, when we want it, for as little as possible. We’ve taken The Age of Abundance for granted, for most of our lives. Cold? Turn on the
heat. Too hot? Flick on the AC. Hungry? Grab a snack, order some food. Bored? Do some shopping. On and on it goes, without a
second thought. That’s insouciance — the French way of saying a kind of lazy, entitled, almost deliberately rude indifference.

But now all that — all of it — is going to change. It already is. The Age of Abundance is very, very clearly coming to an end
now. The shelves aren’t always full of stuff like they used to be. Even when they are, prices are skyrocketing in ways that are shocking
to behold — especially for basics, like food, energy, water. That isn’t going to stop. It’s only going to get worse. And we are going to
have to prepare for it — just as Macron say, without doom-mongering, but being realistic about where we stand at this juncture in
human history.

Just north of Pakistan — did you know Pakistan has a border with China, right where the Karakoram mountain range towers skyward
— something else has been happening. China’s suffered a mega-heatwave. Which has sent it into a nationwide drought. It’s mightiest
rivers are running dry. And because they’re running dry, factories are having to close their doors.

See the link again? The End of Abundance. In this case, it’s far more obvious. You might now know exactly what, but you do
know that a lot of stuff in your household is made in China. And so factories in China shutting down is bad news, because prices for all
these little things — thumb drives, plastic slippers, budget cutlery, what have you — are going to rise. But just as in Pakistan, it’s not
going to magically get better. What happened this summer in China is only going to get worse — fast.

The End of the Age of Abundance. What happens as a consequence of all the above? This is the part Macron only touched upon —
because I suspect he didn’t want to alarm people even more. And yet the consequences of all the above are going to be dire — unless
we anticipate and invest to fight against them now.

Abundance ends. Prices rise, and keep rising. People get poorer — like in Britain, where the average household is going to end up
impoverished just paying for energy, choosing between heat and food. And as they get poorer, there’s less and less left over for the
public purse — and so modern social contracts shatter, the public goods they guarantee decay and fall into blight, and as a
consequence of that, fanaticism and fascism grow, and bang, before you know it, we’re Rome.

Now. The left criticized Macron’s speech — but in fact, they should be praising it. It’s true, trivially so, that “some people have
never had abundance!!” Duh. Tell it to the poor guy picking cotton in those Pakistani fields, in 120 degree heat. The point is that that
economics — built on exploitation of the planet, each other, nature, creation — is now coming to an end, a disastrous one, because it
was never built to last. The idea that we could exploit our way to infinite prosperity — at least for the 20% of the world lucky enough
to powerful and wealthy — was always a kind of delusion.

Now we have to do the hard work of reinventing everything. Or step by step, scarcity will take us to places we don’t want to go, the
dark nightmares and abysses of history.

What does scarcity do, sudden plunges into it? It sparks everything from theocracy to fascism to authoritarianism. It triggers
the panic and fear that strongmen and demagogues feed on, it ignites an atavistic craving for the security and stability of ultra
hierarchical order, it sparks the search for scapegoats. Sudden plunges into scarcity are what unleashes the demons of history — and
humanity.

This is where we are. Now we are asked to come to grips with the failures — not just the successes — of the industrial age. Carbon,
warming, exploitation, inequality, the wars all those will spark. We are now going to have to understand, fast, that we are a civilization
running out of the basics, at a planetary level, water, food, air, medicine, power — and all that flows from them.

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And we are going to have to invest, now, hard, fast, if we want to enjoy those things again, at anything remotely approaching
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Abundance ever again. Otherwise, the future is…this. More of this. More of 2022. Just harder and faster and worse.

It’s easy to be cynical. Does Macron really believe what he says? My friend — it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he said what he
said. Warned history and the world, in stark terms, of the stakes. The 21st century is here. But we’re still living in the 20th, in the
1930s, to be precise — and if we don’t change, wise up, mature, evolve, grow, we are going to find ourselves back in the 19th, and
then the 15th, and right back to the Stone Age, faster than we yet imagine.

Umair

August 2022

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