How the world has changed
Running one of those programs designed to catch plagiarism, i ran an analysis of my own writings over the last 25 years. One idea appears more frequently than i would have first thought. it is embodied in a phrase i used in an editorial yesterday: “Just as you think you have it all figured out, everything changes.”
I am sure that it has something to do with age. You will get there someday if you are lucky as I am. Behind your eyes you are still 22 years old. But in front is a world that has changed since you first saw it 72 years ago.
Two books with ideas that became global “religions” were Silent Spring in 1962 and The Population Bomb in 1968. The first said that all the birds and many humans were going to die because of the use of the pesticide DDT. The world banned DDT. The only remaining legal use of DDT is to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Malaria kills more than 800,000 people every year.
It was a necessary wake-up call on the unchallenged use of agricultural chemicals. But it also created a cult-like hysteria that has nearly destroyed rational and objective discussion on a variety of topics.
The Population Bomb predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. Being completely wrong about that, the authors have since shifted to saying that what they really meant was overconsumption and inequality were the real problem and that “too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future.”
Except that the greatest positive increase in all measures of human quality of existence—life expectancy, hunger and thirst, literacy and education, child mortality, general health—paid for with wealth, happened in the poor countries, not the rich.
Everyone has stories—both good and bad—of what changed in their lives in the past two years. During the first lockdown, I taught my granddaughters how to bake a cake. Having been the same body weight for 50 years, I gained 25 pounds. And the changes keep on coming. On June 5, 1933, the US went off the gold standard in which currency was backed by the amount of gold/ silver the government held and at a universal fixed exchange rate to currency. President Richard Nixon ended dollar convertibility to gold in 1971. The Plaza Accord joint-agreement in 1985 artificially depreciated the US dollar.
All these actions and more, in over 50 years, changed currency— money—from gold and silver asset backed to a dollar-based global economy underwritten by financial assets, primarily government debt. Government borrowings provided the security, stability, and value of the US dollar (and the yen, euro, etc.), which then provided the value for the minor currencies. That is until the minor currency governments screwed up their own political and economic stability.
The world now faces a change from currency “collateral” being purely financial in nature to becoming commodity based. “Useful” consumer commodities like foodstuffs, industrial minerals and metals, fuel sources, and even consumables like water will be the collateral that underwrites the whole currency/financial system.
And guess what? The US dollar and major Western currencies, not the ruble or the renminbi, will have the greatest difficulty dealing with the end of 50 years of economic “financialization.”
Honestly, I tend to view my own pesos in terms of conversion to a kilo of pork and certainly not in terms of conversion to US dollars. Sounds weird? Not at all. I bought new shoes for my son’s wedding thinking, “These cost me the equivalent of seven kilos of pigue (P400); these cost the same as 10 kilos.” I don’t “need” shoes. I do need food on the table.
With money changing to be valued by the amount of consumables it can buy and not the amount of US dollars it can be exchanged for, we may all soon be thinking of “pesos to pork” and “pesos to a barrel of oil.”