[wordup] Best Practices for Social Collapse

[Adam Shand]

I've been looking for collapse "how to" manuals for a while.  This is  
a fascinating article on one mans comparison between the Russian  
collapse and the pending US collapse that he foresees.

Regardless of whether you agree it's an interesting take on the whole  
thing.

Adam.

Via: Rebecca Downes <rebecca at wetafx...>
Source: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2009
Social Collapse Best Practices

The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre  
in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people.  
Audio and video of the talk will be available on Long Now Foundation  
web site.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It's  
certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American  
continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the occasion  
isn't a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk about social  
collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with  
everything else that's gone wrong. I know it's a lot to ask of you,  
because why wouldn't you instead want to go and eat, drink, and be  
merry? Well, perhaps there will still be time left for that after my  
talk.

I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and I  
feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious,  
professional people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in May,  
or some of the previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or Brian Eno –  
some of my favorite people, really. I am just a tourist. I flew over  
here to give this talk and to take in the sights, and then I'll fly  
back to Boston and go back to my day job. Well, I am also a blogger.  
And I also wrote a book. But then everyone has a book, or so it would  
seem.

You might ask yourself, then, Why on earth did he get invited to speak  
here tonight? It seems that I am enjoying my moment in the limelight,  
because I am one of the very few people who several years ago  
unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States as a global  
superpower. The idea that the USA will go the way of the USSR seemed  
preposterous at the time. It doesn't seem so preposterous any more. I  
take it some of you are still hedging your bets. How is that hedge  
fund doing, by the way?

I think I prefer remaining just a tourist, because I have learned from  
experience – luckily, from other people's experience – that being a  
superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. I learned  
that by observing what happened to the people who successfully  
predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is?  
See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the  
USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable  
lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA  
will turn into FUSA ("F" is for "Former"). But even if someone could  
choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn't make for much of a  
career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more  
important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful  
predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.

I hope that I have made it clear that I am not here in any sort of  
professional capacity. I consider what I am doing a kind of community  
service. So, if you don't like my talk, don't worry about me. There  
are plenty of other things I can do. But I would like my insights to  
be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic  
reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get  
really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of  
people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle- 
aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially  
vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very  
tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation,  
psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a  
bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.

Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have  
less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps  
their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them  
and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always  
seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do  
something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the  
Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost. And when  
they do that, they become very tedious company. And so, without a bit  
of mental preparation, the men are all liable to end up very lonely  
and very drunk. So that's my little intervention.

If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the  
comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a  
theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The  
theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have  
collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall  
in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of  
industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a  
runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. I call this  
particular list of ingredients "The Superpower Collapse Soup." Other  
factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of  
life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system  
incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not  
automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on  
a collision course with reality. Please don't be too concerned,  
though, because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory.

I've been working on this theory since about 1995, when it occurred to  
me that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. As so  
often is the case, having this realization was largely a matter of  
being in the right place at the right time. The two most important  
methods of solving problems are: 1. by knowing the solution ahead of  
time, and 2. by guessing it correctly. I learned this in engineering  
school – from a certain professor. I am not that good at guesswork,  
but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of time.

I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew up  
straddling the two worlds – the USSR and the US. I grew up in Russia,  
and moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am fluent in Russian,  
and I understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a  
native Russian can. But I went through high school and university in  
the US .I had careers in several industries here, I traveled widely  
around the country, and so I also have a very good understanding of  
the US with all of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to  
Russia in 1989, when things there still seemed more or less in line  
with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when the economy was at a  
standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I went back there  
3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet  
collapse first-hand.

By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a  
sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect  
eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty  
shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of  
social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries  
between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to  
mention, and they have been growing more obvious ever since.

The superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and  
history buffs and various skeptics, but they tell us nothing that  
would be useful in our daily lives. It is the asymmetries, the  
differences between the two superpowers, that I believe to be most  
instructive. When the Soviet system went away, many people lost their  
jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back  
for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there  
shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a  
large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian society did not  
collapse. Somehow, the Russians found ways to muddle through. How was  
that possible? It turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system  
were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse, many  
institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was  
such that people did not lose access to food, shelter or  
transportation, and could survive even without an income. The Soviet  
economic system failed to thrive, and the Communist experiment at  
constructing a worker's paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure.  
But as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of  
collapse-preparedness. In comparison, the American system could  
produce significantly better results, for time, but at the cost of  
creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile,  
and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable  
crash. Even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government  
largely shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work  
with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that  
we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then turn  
around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living  
arrangement here in the United States – one that is more likely to be  
survivable.

The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such  
ideas. The United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War  
victory, getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to the  
Stone Age, and the foreign policy wonks coined the term "hyperpower"  
and were jabbering on about full-spectrum dominance. All sorts of  
silly things were happening. Professor Fukuyama told us that history  
had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese  
made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer  
support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all  
just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of  
money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. Alan  
Greenspan chided us about "irrational exuberance" while consistently  
low-balling interest rates. It was the "Goldilocks economy" – not to  
hot, not too cold. Remember that? And now it turns out that it was  
actually more of a "Tinker-bell" economy, because the last five or so  
years of economic growth was more or less a hallucination, based on  
various debt pyramids, the "whole house of cards" as President Bush  
once referred to it during one of his lucid moments. And now we can  
look back on all of that with a funny, queasy feeling, or we can look  
forward and feel nothing but vertigo.

While all of these silly things were going on, I thought it best to  
keep my comparative theory of superpower collapse to myself. During  
that time, I was watching the action in the oil industry, because I  
understood that oil imports are the Achilles' heel of the US economy.  
In the mid-1990s the all-time peak in global oil production was  
scheduled for the turn of the century. But then a lot of things  
happened that delayed it by at least half a decade. Perhaps you’ve  
noticed this too, there is a sort of refrain here: people who try to  
predict big historical shifts always turn to be off by about half a  
decade. Unsuccessful predictions, on the other hand are always spot on  
as far as timing: the world as we know it failed to end precisely at  
midnight on January 1, 2000. Perhaps there is a physical principal  
involved: information spreads at the speed of light, while ignorance  
is instantaneous at all points in the known universe. So please make a  
mental note: whenever it seems to you that I am making a specific  
prediction as to when I think something is likely to happen, just  
silently add “plus or minus half a decade.”

In any case, about half a decade ago, I finally thought that the time  
was ripe, and, as it has turned out, I wasn’t too far off. In June of  
2005 I published an article on the subject, titled "Post-Soviet  
Lessons for a Post-American Century," which was quite popular, even to  
the extent that I got paid for it. It is available at various places  
on the Internet. A little while later I formalized my thinking  
somewhat into the "Collapse Gap" concept, which I presented at a  
conference in Manhattan in April of 2006. The slide show from that  
presentation, titled "Closing the Collapse Gap," was posted on the  
Internet and has been downloaded a few million times since then. Then,  
in January of 2008, when it became apparent to me that financial  
collapse was well underway, and that other stages of collapse were to  
follow, I published a short article titled “The Five Stages of  
Collapse,” which I later expanded into a talk I gave at a conference  
in Michigan in October of 2008. Finally, at the end of 2008, I  
announced on my blog that I am getting out of the prognosticating  
business. I have made enough predictions, they all seem very well on  
track (give or take half a decade, please remember that), collapse is  
well underway, and now I am just an observer.

But this talk is about something else, something other than making  
dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You  
see, there is nothing more useless than predictions, once they have  
come true. It’s like looking at last year’s amazingly successful stock  
picks: what are you going to do about them this year? What we need are  
examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange,  
unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all likely to have  
to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk – “Social  
Collapse Best Practices” – and I thought that it was an excellent  
idea. Although the term “best practices” has been diluted over time to  
sometimes mean little more than “good ideas,” initially it stood for  
the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has  
worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to  
control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive  
outcome. It’s a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and  
deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works.

In organizations, especially large organizations, “best practices”  
also offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues  
trying to “think outside the box” whenever they are confronted with a  
new problem. If your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the  
box, they probably wouldn’t feel so compelled to spend their whole  
working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm. If they  
were any good at thinking outside the box, they would have by now  
thought of a way to escape from that box. So perhaps what would make  
them feel happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave  
them a different box inside of which to think – a box better suited to  
the post-collapse environment.

Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens,  
nothing works. That’s just not the case. The old ways of doing things  
don’t work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated,  
conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a  
different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be  
brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough  
generalities, let’s go through some specifics. We’ll start with some  
generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very  
specific rather quickly.

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are  
positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of  
context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives  
prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and  
vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having high inventory in a  
business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance  
it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high  
inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for  
the things they need, and they can’t easily get more because they  
don’t have any credit. Prior to collapse, it’s good for a business to  
have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After  
collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can’t  
unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer  
bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an  
effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse,  
you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and  
long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn  
to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for  
somebody to come and feed them.

If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any bearing  
on what is commonly understood as “economic health.” Prior to  
collapse, the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy.  
After collapse, economic contraction is a given, and the overall  
macroeconomic positive becomes something of an imponderable, so we are  
forced to listen to a lot of nonsense. The situation is either  
slightly better than expected or slightly worse than expected. We are  
always either months or years away from economic recovery. Business as  
usual will resume sooner or later, because some television bobble-head  
said so.

But let’s take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the  
current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming  
out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the  
economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in  
commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic  
stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up  
this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation.  
Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending –  
that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet,  
that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We  
need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high- 
wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and  
replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without  
any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow  
down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit  
their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals  
as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much  
more of that, and quickly!

So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising,  
and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to  
Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert  
your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you  
thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion,  
globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I  
predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at  
macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what  
is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and  
institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend  
passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to  
have a death wish.

Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their  
Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way  
to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but  
in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all  
their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and  
they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,”  
forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new  
objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and  
security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these  
necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning  
economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to  
imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely  
penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will  
be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition,  
and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing  
economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized  
by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that  
are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be  
gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a  
defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its  
largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing  
infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the  
territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady  
degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying  
these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable  
lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives  
become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in  
turn.

The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent  
underperformance. In many ways, this was the legacy of the disastrous  
collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s, which destroyed  
many of the more prosperous farming households and herded people into  
collective farms. Collectivization undermined the ancient village- 
based agricultural traditions that had made pre-revolutionary Russia a  
well-fed place that was also the breadbasket of Western Europe. A  
great deal of further damage was caused by the introduction of  
industrial agriculture. The heavy farm machinery alternately compacted  
and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with chemicals, depleting it  
and killing the biota. Eventually, the Soviet government had to turn  
to importing grain from countries hostile to its interests – United  
States and Canada – and eventually expanded this to include other  
foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and  
other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used to  
raise livestock to try to address this problem.

Although it was generally possible to survive on the foods available  
at the government stores, the resulting diet would have been rather  
poor, and so people tried to supplement it with food they gathered,  
raised, or caught, or purchased at farmers’ markets. Kitchen gardens  
were always common, and, once the economy collapsed, a lot of families  
took to growing food in earnest. The kitchen gardens, by themselves,  
were never sufficient, but they made a huge difference.

The year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to score  
something edible. I remember one particular joke from that period.  
Black humor has always been one of Russia’s main psychological coping  
mechanisms. A man walks into a food store, goes to the meat counter,  
and he sees that it is completely empty. So he asks the butcher:  
“Don’t you have any fish?” And the butcher answers: “No, here is where  
we don’t have any meat. Fish is what they don’t have over at the  
seafood counter.”

Poor though it was, the Soviet food distribution system never  
collapsed completely. In particular, the deliveries of bread continued  
even during the worst of times, partly because has always been such an  
important part of the Russian diet, and partly because access to bread  
symbolized the pact between the people and the Communist government,  
enshrined in oft-repeated revolutionary slogans. Also, it is important  
to remember that in Russia most people have lived within walking  
distance of food shops, and used public transportation to get out to  
their kitchen gardens, which were often located in the countryside  
immediately surrounding the relatively dense, compact cities. This  
combination of factors made for some lean times, but very little  
malnutrition and no starvation.

In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily  
industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical  
fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing.  
In the current financial climate, the farmers’ access to financing is  
not at all assured. This agricultural system is efficient, but only if  
you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it is a way to  
transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from  
sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being  
embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food  
distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks,  
transforming food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets. The  
food pipeline is long and thin, and it takes only a couple of days of  
interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare. Many people  
live in places that are not within walking distance of stores, not  
served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food sources  
once they are no longer able to drive.

Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation’s nutrition needs  
are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience  
stores. In fact, in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and  
towns, fast food and convenience store food is all that is available.  
In the near future, this trend is likely to extend to the more  
prosperous parts of town and the suburbs.

Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and  
so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse  
than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for food security,  
because they too depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs,  
such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes,  
various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and  
so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as  
well as fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in  
business longer, supplying food-that-isn’t-really-food, but eventually  
they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain.  
Before they do, they may for a time sell burgers that aren’t really  
burgers, like the bread that wasn’t really bread that the Soviet  
government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade. It was  
mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor.

Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario? The Russian  
example may give us a clue. Many Russian families could gauge how fast  
the economy was crashing, and, based on that, decide how many rows of  
potatoes to plant. Could we perhaps do something similar? There is  
already a healthy gardening movement in the United States; can it be  
scaled up? The trick is to make small patches of farmland available  
for non-mechanical cultivation by individuals and families, in  
increments as small as 1000 square feet. The ideal spots would be  
fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams for irrigation.  
Provisions would have to be made for campsites and for transportation,  
allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to  
grow food during the growing season, and haul the produce back to the  
population centers after taking in the harvest.

An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba:  
converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised- 
bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and  
other food, it is much easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch  
just once a season. Raised highways can be closed to traffic (since  
there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case) and used to catch  
rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and balconies can be used for  
hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other agricultural uses.

How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were actually  
helped by their government, but the Russians managed to do it in more  
or less in spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so we might be able to  
do it in spite of the American ones. The government could  
theoretically head up such an effort, purely hypothetically speaking,  
of course, because I see no evidence that such an effort is being  
considered. For our fearless national leaders, such initiatives are  
too low-level: if they stimulate the economy and get the banks lending  
again, the potatoes will simply grow themselves. All they need to do  
is print some more money, right?

Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to  
muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of  
residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded  
in a person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from  
their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most  
people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an  
apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and  
kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often  
doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments  
were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted  
to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would  
want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long  
waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married,  
and had children before receiving a place of their own.

These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this:  
the high population density made this living arrangement quite  
affordable. With several generations living together, families were on  
hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up  
their children’s time to do other things. The apartment buildings were  
always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely  
on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively  
cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain  
because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly,  
after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people  
lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid  
for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed  
by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions,  
municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water  
continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by.  
Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed  
in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the  
people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large  
spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded  
by people who weren’t strangers, and who could keep an eye on things.  
Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement  
delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these  
apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly  
became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear.

Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many  
people here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is  
not an ATM machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already know that they  
will not be able to comfortably retire by selling it, or get rich by  
fixing it up and flipping it, and quite a few people have acquiesced  
to the fact that real estate prices are going to continue heading  
lower. The question is, How much lower? A lot of people still think  
that there must be a lower limit, a “realistic” price. This thought is  
connected to the notion that housing is a necessity. After all,  
everybody needs a place to live.

Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a necessity,  
be it an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a barrack, a boat, a  
camper, or a tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a shipping container... The  
list is virtually endless. But there is no reason at all to think that  
a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is  
little more than a cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at  
that. Most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool,  
inaccessible by public transportation, expensive to hook up to public  
utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a  
great deal of additional public expenditure on road, bridge and  
highway maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other  
nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural land.  
They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of urban  
environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families  
that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and  
expect others to bail them out.

As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it  
will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will  
not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and  
bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline,  
natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings will become both  
inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result will be a mass  
migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable, more  
densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones will find friends  
or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very helpful to  
improvise some solution.

One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office  
buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is  
quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and  
bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are  
really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult.  
The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large  
surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large  
population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these  
offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better  
uses for them.

Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that  
can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses. The  
American 4-year college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists  
because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian  
public schools manage to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become  
able to afford college, which is likely to happen, because meager  
career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student  
loans, perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the  
public education system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start  
small, but eventually build something a bit more on par with world  
standards.

College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories  
for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled  
residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a  
variety of uses. A college campus normally contains the usual  
wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food, or, at  
the very least, hay, and to graze cattle. Perhaps some enlightened  
administrators, trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea  
once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero,  
without any need for government involvement. So here we have a ray of  
hope, don’t we.

Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that people  
don’t get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then we have to  
provide for seasonal migrations to places where people can grow,  
catch, or gather their own food, and then back to places where they  
can survive the winter without freezing to death or going stir-crazy  
from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount of freight will have to be  
moved, to transport food to population centers, as well as enough coal  
and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the remaining  
habitable dwellings.

All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all hinges  
on the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems very  
probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in  
short supply before too long. From about 2005 and until the middle of  
2008 the global oil has been holding steady, unable to grow materially  
beyond a level that has been characterized as a “bumpy plateau.” An  
all-time record was set in 2005, and then, after a period of record- 
high oil prices, again only in 2008. Then, as the financial collapse  
gathered speed, oil and other commodity prices crashed, along with oil  
production. More recently, the oil markets have come to rest on an  
altogether different “bumpy plateau”: the oil prices are bumping along  
at around $40 a barrel and can’t seem to go any lower. It would appear  
that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does not make  
economic sense to sell oil at below this price.

Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment, but  
there is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the money-printing  
extravaganza currently underway in Washington, and $40 could easily  
become $400 and then $4000 a barrel, swiftly pricing US consumers out  
of the international oil market. On top of that, exporting countries  
would balk at the idea of trading their oil for an increasingly  
worthless currency, and would start insisting on payment in kind – in  
some sort of tangible export commodity, which the US, in its current  
economic state, would be hard-pressed to provide in any great  
quantity. Domestic oil production is in permanent decline, and can  
provide only about a third of current needs. This is still quite a lot  
of oil, but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of  
widespread oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding, quite a  
lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented from  
various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will  
disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted driving  
around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that’s  
needed for some small but critical mission.

I am quite familiar with this scenario, because I happened to be in  
Russia during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I found  
out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and  
distributing 10 liters apiece. I brought along my uncle’s wife, who at  
the time was 8 months pregnant, and we tried use her huge belly to  
convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10 liters with  
which to drive her to the hospital when the time came. No dice. The  
pat answer was: “Everybody is 8 months pregnant!” How can you argue  
with that logic? So 10 liters was it for us too, belly or no belly.

So, what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in  
spite of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious idea, of course, is  
to not use any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes in particular, are an  
excellent adaptation. Sailboats are a good idea too: not only do they  
hold large amounts of cargo, but they can cover huge distances, all  
without the use of fossil fuels. Of course, they are restricted to the  
coastlines and the navigable waterways. They will be hampered by the  
lack of dredging due to the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by  
bridges that refuse to open, again, due to lack of maintenance funds,  
but here ancient maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought  
to bear to solve such problems, all very low-tech and reasonably priced.

Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here, again,  
some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear. In my book, I  
advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during  
World War II. The benefits are numerous. First, older cars are overall  
more energy-efficient than new cars, because the massive amount of  
energy that went into manufacturing them is more highly amortized.  
Second, large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire  
industry devoted to designing, building, marketing, and financing new  
cars. Third, older cars require more maintenance, reinvigorating the  
local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers, and  
helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage  
of cars, translating automatically into fewer, shorter car trips,  
higher passenger occupancy per trip, and more bicycling and use of  
public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would  
allow the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as  
the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars just  
as we run out of gas.

Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see  
that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the process of  
shutting down. On the other hand, the government’s actions continue to  
disappoint. Instead of trying to solve problems, they would rather  
continue to create boondoggles. The latest one is the idea of  
subsidizing the sales of new cars. The idea of making cars more  
efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly. I can take any  
pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand  
percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen  
people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines.  
Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any  
faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people in  
the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased  
by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive  
research in this area, with excellent results.

Another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not to  
pick up hitchhikers. Cars with vacant seats are flagged down and  
matched up with people who need a lift. Yet another idea: since  
passenger rail service is in such a sad shape, and since it is  
unlikely that funds will be found to improve it, why not bring back  
the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring rail  
freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the hobos. The  
energy cost of the additional weight is negligible, the hobos don’t  
require stops because they can jump on and off, and only a couple of  
cars per train would ever be needed, because hobos are almost  
infinitely compressible, and can even ride on the roof if needed. One  
final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky  
and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good  
pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in  
Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much  
for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my  
grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party  
newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can  
digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist  
propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.

And so we come to the subject of security. Post-collapse Russia  
suffered from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant,  
veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for themselves,  
there were numerous contract killings, muggings, murders went unsolved  
left and right, and, in general, the place just wasn’t safe. Russians  
living in the US would hear that I am heading back there for a visit,  
and would give me a wide-eyed stare: how could I think of doing such a  
thing. I came through unscathed, somehow. I made a lot of interesting  
observations along the way.

One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes  
possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or  
generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a  
soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands.  
Not only is it possible to do such things, it’s often a very good  
idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you  
don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford their services, then you  
should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in  
various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times,  
it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side.  
For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family  
move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may  
be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you  
to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men  
running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in  
your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to  
maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood.

A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political solution to  
collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the so-called  
Collapse Party. I published it with the caveat that I didn’t think  
there was much of a chance of my proposals becoming part of the  
national agenda. Much to my surprise, I turned out to be wrong. For  
instance, I proposed that we stop making new cars, and, lo and behold,  
the auto industry shuts down. I also proposed that we start granting  
amnesties to prisoners, because the US has the world’s largest prison  
population, and will not be able to afford to keep so many people  
locked up. It is better to release prisoners gradually, over time,  
rather than in a single large general amnesty, the way Saddam Hussein  
did it right before the US invaded. And, lo and behold, many states  
are starting to implement my proposal. It looks like California in  
particular will be forced to release some 60 thousand of the 170  
thousand people it keeps locked up. That is a good start. I also  
proposed that we dismantle all overseas military bases (there are over  
a thousand of them) and repatriate all the troops. And it looks like  
that is starting to happen as well, except for the currently planned  
little side-trip to Afghanistan. I also proposed a Biblical jubilee –  
forgiveness of all debts, public and private. Let’s give that one…  
half a decade?

But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just  
the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and  
the state governments all go broke, will transform American society in  
rather predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police  
protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will  
find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis.  
Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers  
will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into  
civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same  
predicament.

And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former  
prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent  
tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with various  
categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them  
borderline psychotic. The police in the United States are a troubled  
group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not "on the  
force" and most of them develop an us-versus-them mentality. The  
soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post- 
traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety  
of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later  
realize that their problems are not medical but rather political. This  
will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control  
over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons  
training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need  
to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they  
will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to  
do be doing them.

I said it before and I will say it again: very few things are good or  
bad per se; everything has to be considered within a context. And, in  
a post-collapse context, not having to worry whether or not something  
is legal may be a very good thing. In the midst of a collapse, we will  
not have time to deliberate, legislate, interpret, set precedents and  
so on. Having to worry about pleasing a complex and expensive legal  
system is the last thing we should have to worry about.

Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be  
quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners’ association might, say,  
want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not  
mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that  
nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don’t own, without first  
getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to  
get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it  
was interfering with boat traffic – you know, little things like that.  
Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well  
armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and  
police uniforms, for old time’s sake, then they probably won’t give  
you that ticket or seek that court order.

Or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make and  
distribute, a new agricultural implement. It's a sort of flail studded  
with sharp blades. It has a hundred and one uses and is highly cost- 
effective, and reasonably safe provided you don’t lose your head while  
using it, although people have taken to calling the “flying  
guillotine.” You think that this is an acceptable risk, but you are  
concerned about the issues of consumer safety and liability insurance  
and possibly even criminal liability. Once again, it is very helpful  
to have a large number of influential, physically impressive, mildly  
psychotic friends who, whenever some legal matter comes up, can just  
can go and see the lawyers, have a friendly chat, demonstrate the  
proper use of the flying guillotine, and generally do whatever they  
have to do to settle the matter amicably, without any money changing  
hands, and without signing any legal documents.

Or, say, the government starts being difficult about moving things and  
people in and out of the country, or it wants to take too much of a  
cut from commercial transactions. Or perhaps your state or your town  
decides to conduct its own foreign policy, and the federal government  
sees it fit to interfere. Then it may turn out to be a good thing if  
someone else has the firepower to bring the government, or what  
remains of it, to its senses, and convince it to be reasonable and to  
play nice.

Or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic, so that you  
can provide some relief to people who wouldn’t otherwise have any  
health care. You don’t dare call yourself a doctor, because these  
people are suspicious of doctors, because doctors were always trying  
to rob them of their life’s savings. But suppose you have some medical  
training that you got in, say, Cuba, and you are quite able to handle  
a Caesarean or an appendectomy, to suture wounds, to treat infections,  
to set bones and so on. You also want to be able to distribute opiates  
that your friends in Afghanistan periodically send you, to ease the  
pain of hard post-collapse life. Well, going through the various  
licensing boards and getting the certifications and the permits and  
the malpractice insurance is all completely unnecessary, provided you  
can surround yourself with a lot of well-armed, well-trained, mentally  
unstable friends.

Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important.  
Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and  
maintaining discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of  
force. This means that people must be ready to come to each other’s  
defense, take responsibility for each other, and do what’s right.  
Right now, security is provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic,  
ineffectual institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency  
than discipline, and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment.  
That is why we have the world’s highest prison population. They are  
supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality  
their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard  
property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out of  
resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people  
will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and  
Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal  
department.

I’ve covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and  
what I think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot of  
you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if in  
fact it ever gets that bad. You should certainly feel free to think  
that way. The danger there is that you will miss the opportunity to  
adapt to the new reality ahead of time, and then you will get trapped.  
As I see it, there is a choice to be made: you can accept the failure  
of the system now and change your course accordingly, or you can  
decide that you must try to stay the course, and then you will  
probably have to accept your own individual failure later.

So how do you prepare? Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of high- 
powered, successful people about their various high-powered,  
successful associates. Usually, the story goes something like this:  
“My a. financial advisor, b. investment banker, or c. commanding  
officer has recently a. put all his money in gold, b. bought a log  
cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a bunker under his house  
stocked with six months of food and water. Is this normal?” And I tell  
them, yes, of course, that’s perfectly harmless. He’s just having a  
mid-collapse crisis. But that’s not really preparation. That’s just  
someone being colorful in an offbeat, countercultural sort of way.

So, how do you prepare, really? Let’s go through a list of questions  
that people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly respond to  
each of them.

OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles? What on  
earth is going on? People are losing their jobs left and right, and if  
we calculate unemployment the same way it was done during the Great  
Depression, instead of looking at the cooked numbers the government is  
trying to feed us now, then we are heading toward 20% unemployment.  
And is there any reason to think it’ll stop there? Do you happen to  
believe that prosperity is around the corner? Not only jobs and  
housing equity, but retirement savings are also evaporating. The  
federal government is broke, state governments are broke, some more  
than others, and the best they can do is print money, which will  
quickly lose value. So, how can we get the basics if we don’t have any  
money? How is that done? Good question.

As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter, transportation,  
and security. Shelter poses a particularly interesting problem at the  
moment. It is still very much overpriced, with many people paying  
mortgages and rents that they can no longer afford while numerous  
properties stand vacant. The solution, of course, is to cut your  
losses and stop paying. But then you might soon have to relocate. That  
is OK, because, as I mentioned, there is no shortage of vacant  
properties around. Finding a good place to live will become less and  
less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and  
get foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant properties  
will only increase. The best course of action is to become a property  
caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free, and  
keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you can’t find a  
position as a property caretaker? Well, then you might have to become  
a squatter, maintain a list of other vacant properties that you can go  
to next, and keep your camping gear handy just in case. If you do get  
tossed out, chances are, the people who tossed you out will then think  
about hiring a property caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what  
do you do if you become property caretaker? Well, you take care of the  
property, but you also look out for all the squatters, because they  
are the reason you have a legitimate place to live. A squatter in hand  
is worth three absentee landlords in the bush. The absentee landlord  
might eventually cut his losses and go away, but your squatter friends  
will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors is so much better  
than living in a ghost town.

What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious  
answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any  
moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to  
be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process.  
Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as  
little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has  
to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this  
economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just  
gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do  
you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory.  
The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a  
box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff  
that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for  
growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you  
don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile  
stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years  
forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is  
something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened  
by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any  
of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with  
tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to  
change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves,  
and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences,  
and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some  
last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning  
yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to  
the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to  
others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.

POSTED BY KOLLAPSNIK AT 3:30 AM 
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