On the weekends my wife and I sometimes turn off our brains and watch hour after hour of disaster porn. As the giant comet, asteroid or alien ship appears in the skies, Americans look up from their handheld devices and people around the world run in panic. The Japanese are still in good shape thanks to Gojira. Naked self-interest prevails as the hero drives, boats or flies his family just fast enough to avoid the flood, gaping crevasses, or zombies that are killing everyone else just off screen.

Eventually one learns the value of having a rogue scientist in the family, because rogue scientists always know exactly what is going wrong, even though no one ever listens to them until it is too late. Instead people listen to the comforting, establishment scientists who wear suits and never work on the bench anymore. The establishment suits assure everyone that if they remain calm and follow orders, that the authorities will make all the tremors, firestorms or Triffids go away. The suits don't really believe that, but they do believe in maintaining order.

Oil geologists say that the world probably passed the peak of oil production several years ago, and that we are on the downslope, but they are the rogue scientists that no one believes. In his ASPO article Politics in the Great Transition, retired CIA analyst Tom Whipple channels the rogue scientist:

Here in America, which reached the zenith of the oil age (with an annual consumption of 1000 gallons per capita) a few years back, we are already starting to feel the early shockwaves of the great transition - and it is not pretty. The next 5 -10 years will likely be divided into two distinct periods, and maybe more. In the first period few will have any understanding of what is happening to them. A good guess would be that 95+ percent of the people living to earth today do not understand that the oil age has started drawing to a close and that massive change stemming there from are already underway. So far the major manifestations of this transition is that the price of oil has moved up from $10 to $20 a barrel at the beginning of the decade to $70 to $80 today, and of course the "Great Recession" which was triggered by an excess of borrowing but with significantly higher oil prices not helping the situation. That the oil price spike of 2008 was almost universally believed to be caused by speculators, greedy oil companies, or OPEC and not supply/demand getting out of balance is evidence of the misinformation which abounds.

Jeez, that ain't much of a disaster flick. It's more like a bad day at the office - if you still have a job. Meanwhile, in his NY Times OpEd The Genteel Nation, David Brooks channels the establishment position. Brooks assures us that our troubles are easily fixable if we go back to being hard-nosed and productive. Yes, bad stuff has happened but only because, "the crucial change was in people’s minds."

Britain soon dominated the world. But then it declined. Again, the crucial change was in people’s minds. As the historian Correlli Barnett chronicled, the great-great-grandchildren of the empire builders withdrew from commerce, tried to rise above practical knowledge and had more genteel attitudes about how to live.

This history is relevant today because 65 percent of Americans believe their nation is now in decline, according to this week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. And it is true: Today’s economic problems are structural, not cyclical. We are in the middle of yet another jobless recovery. Wages have been lagging for decades. Our labor market woes are deep and intractable.

First off, Brooks doesn't go easy on the rich. They are soft-minded, and too humane for words:

After decades of affluence, the U.S. has drifted away from the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation’s wealth in the first place. The shift is evident at all levels of society. First, the elites. America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.

It would be embarrassing or at least countercultural for an Ivy League grad to go to Akron and work for a small manufacturing company. By contrast, in 2007, 58 percent of male Harvard graduates and 43 percent of female graduates went into finance and consulting.

The shift away from commercial values has been expressed well by Michelle Obama in a series of speeches. “Don’t go into corporate America,” she told a group of women in Ohio. “You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. ... Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry.” As talented people adopt those priorities, America may become more humane, but it will be less prosperous.

So the rich should go back to the factories and crack the whips. After all, that middle class has become lazy and non-productive. They act like they are rich or something:

Then there’s the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of “The Cosby Show,” not the Kramden family of “The Honeymooners.” As these information workers tried to build lifestyles that fit their station, consumption and debt levels soared. The trade deficit exploded. The economy adjusted to meet their demand — underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.

These office workers did not want their children regressing back to the working class, so you saw an explosion of communications majors and a shortage of high-skill technical workers. One of the perversities of this recession is that as the unemployment rate has risen, the job vacancy rate has risen, too. Manufacturing firms can’t find skilled machinists. Narayana Kocherlakota of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank calculates that if we had a normal match between the skills workers possess and the skills employers require, then the unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, not 9.6 percent.

There are several factors contributing to this mismatch (people are finding it hard to sell their homes and move to new opportunities), but one problem is that we have too many mortgage brokers and not enough mechanics.

Brooks briefly mentions the depravity of the working poor:

Finally, there’s the lower class. The problem here is social breakdown. Something like a quarter to a third of American children are living with one or no parents, in chaotic neighborhoods with failing schools. A gigantic slice of America’s human capital is vastly underused, and it has been that way for a generation.

 

Personally, I’m not convinced we’re in decline. There are strengths to counter these weaknesses. But the value shifts are real. Up and down society, people are moving away from commercial, productive activities and toward pleasant, enlightened but less productive ones.

No doubt Brooks will devote his next column to his new career smelting iron.