Prosper Australia

Karl Williams

July 2008

It’s one thing to calmly read statistics about climate chaos but a completely different experience to hear the frightening stories from the disaffected.

In the remote north-eastern Thai province of Nan, listening to a 60-year-old café proprietor relate how the climate has changed in her lifetime, visions of a freaky future of climate chaos hit me in a way that no peer-reviewed scientific forecast would ever do.

In this woman’s entire childhood, summer temperatures had never risen above the low thirties, but now the mercury hits 40 and beyond most summers. Moreover, whereas the monsoonal rain season used to last for a good five months, now it’s usually about three. Such changes haven’t progressed gradually, but have exhibited wild gyrations that are evident in the very landscape.

While wealthier residents of Bangkok can today still mask these unsettling climate changes with a casual adjustment of their air conditioner, those in the countryside are forced into a personal concern with what they’re suspecting is just the beginning of climate chaos spinning out of control.

Yet the economic reason why we’re rushing headlong into the abyss is not hard to fathom. Without fully costing the consequences of our use of fossil fuels, we effectively provide a set of subsidies to keep on wreaking environmental destruction.

Looking on the positive side, we have real hope in the form of the elegantly straightforward geoist principles of applying natural resource charges which would force each polluter to pay for the consequences of their actions and hence provide a stiff disincentive against further polluting.
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photo credit: mtbdeano

Professor Mason Gaffney

Get yourself comfortable – this is Must Read!

This crash is The Big One; it has the signs of becoming a Category 5. How do we know? We’ve “been there and done that” so many times before, roughly every 18 years over the last 800 or more. Major wars and, rarely, plagues have broken the rhythm, along with the little ice age, reformation and counter-reformation, political revolutions and reactions, the rise of nation-states, the enclosure movement, the age of exploration, massive European imports of stolen American gold, the scientific and industrial revolutions, the Crusades, Mongol and Turkish invasions, and other upheavals.

Yet, the endogenous cycle keeps returning, as soon as we find peace, and economic life returns to its even tenors. What President Warren Harding famously called “normalcy” soon evolved into another boom and a shocking bust, as so often before. Calm and routine prosperity has never been man’s lot for long: it somehow leads to its own downfall, cycle after cycle.

Homer Hoyt published his classic 100 Years of Land Values in Chicago, 1833-1933, in December, 1933. He covered in fine detail the 5 major cycles that crested and crashed in 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1926-29. At the end he generalized “The Chicago Real Estate Cycle”, a regular rhythm of boom and bust with the same features in the same sequence. The boom sets us up for the bust. He could have omitted the limiting word “Chicago”, its cycles were synchronized with national waves recorded by other scholars like Arthur H. Cole, Philip Cornick, Lewis Maverick, Frederick Lewis Allen, Harry Scherman, Carter Goodrich, Ernest Fisher, Homer Vanderblue, Herbert Simpson, and others – surprisingly few others, in fact.
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