Too Much Magic

Americans incessantly motor from home to work to mall to soccer field to burger barn in lives devoid of repose and tranquillity, the necessary conditions for reflection. A few wary citizens may sense that something feels increasingly wrong with the picture, but they’re apt to draw the wrong conclusions, for instance, that a conspiracy exists involving some fantasized elite scheming to deprive middle-class Americans of their natural entitlements to a life of comfort and convenience

Now suburbia’s time is over. We’re done building any more of it. The stuff that already exists will increasingly lose value and usefulness. Most Americans don’t know this yet.

Pouring the vast accumulated capital treasure of the United States into building an infrastructure for daily life with no future is self-evidently a tragic misallocation of resources.

Tainter’s model plainly applies to the energy resource limits we face, but we are running so many interdependent complex systems at the same time that the public remains baffled by the interplay of mutually reinforcing diminishing returns between them

We will also soon see the failure of the road system itself.

This amounts to taking a huge chunk of our dwindling financial resources and investing it in a transportation system that has no future.

We’ve done a terrible job of managing contraction so far. We can’t face it. We pretend it’s not happening. We’re doing everything possible to defy it as a practical matter. But contraction is the essence of our reality right now. Faced with the likelihood that peak oil has already occurred, along with upheavals in finance, all we’ve done is mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, to attempt to reflate the deflating money supply, to try and ramp back up an orgy of borrowing that was insane in the first place and has already ended in tears once,