A reply to many comments by John Michael Greer 

John M. Greer: "The gross primary product or GPP might be the value of all unprocessed natural products at the moment they enter the economy – oil as it reaches the wellhead, coal as it leaves the mine, grain as it tumbles into the silo, and so on – minus all the costs incurred in drilling, mining, growing, and so on. (Those belong to the secondary economy.)

The gross secondary product or GSP might be the value of all goods and services in the economy, except for raw materials from nature and financial goods and services.

The gross tertiary product or GTP might be the value of all financial goods and services, and all money or money equivalents, produced by the economy."
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This resembles my own thoughts on linking and connecting EROEI to the economy theories that we use.


John Michael Greer: "It remains true, though, that all the many methods of reality testing we’ve evolved down through the millennia, from the most basic integration of sense inputs hardwired into the human brain right on up to the subtleties of propositional logic and the experimental method, share one central flaw. None of them will work if their messages are ignored—and that’s what’s going on right now, as a vast majority of people across the modern industrial world scramble to find reasons to cling to a range of popular but failed predictions about the future, and do their level best to ignore the evidence that a rather more unpopular set of predictions about the future is coming true around them".

--- This is very true. and also, the reason why such matters are still a problem is that humans are not Bayesian...! Not on a macro level. If we were, the world would look vastly different.


John Michael Greer: "A modern American climbing into the driver’s seat of a large SUV has more sheer physical energy under his direct control than your average Southern plantation owner had before the Civil War. Talk of "energy slaves" isn’t simply a metaphor; the one difference between power exerted by dominating machines and power exerted by dominating human slaves is again that the machines don’t have an inner life; they won’t slack off when the overseer isn’t looking, head north on the Underground Railroad, or join Nat Turner’s rebellion and cut your throat some fine Virginia night".
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How many see the conceptual similarity? But the food stamp program is still going strong and that makes a case for no violent uprising, as long as the neo feudal plutocrats keep the EBT going.

John Michael Greer's lack of simple arithmetic accounting. why is it that John Michael Greer, who is a knowledgeable blogger/author, who actually mentions the concept of thermodynamic economics, can not grasp even the simple accounting identities that decides what would cause a default, what could cause a default, and not the least, the difference between statistical economy and political economy. That  John Michael Greer mention spending in the same manner as running a deficit and/or increasing the balance sheets is evidence of extreme erroneous reasoning.


John Michael Greer: "If you, dear reader, earned US$50,000 a year and spent US$100,000 a year, and made up the difference by taking out loans and running up your credit cards, you could count on a few years of very comfortable living, followed by bankruptcy and a sharply reduced standard of living; the same rule applies on the level of nations".
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No, absolutely not. In this matter,John Michael Greer  is really extremely categorically wrong. If John Michael Greer, earned 50,000 a year in a currency that  John Michael Greer owns, and increased his balance sheet by 100,000 in the same currency that John Michael Greer himself owns and prints, and made up the difference by taking loans to/from himself, and running up his credit cards which are denominated in the same currency that  John Michael Greer owns, would  John Michael Greer face bankruptcy and a sharped reduced living standard, when the real economy, that is the thermodynamic economy + the financial parts dear readers, is mostly unaffected by this sophisticated monetary instrumental increase in the balance sheets?

John Michael Greer: "These days the US government spends about twice as much each year as it takes in from taxes, user fees, and all other revenue sources, and makes up the difference by borrowing money".
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Well, the US government transfers money that the US itself prints, and borrows money from itself...!!! lolz. :-] And to confuse and/or to conflate spending with an increase in the balance sheets is utterly ridiculous. That is obviously a detachment from the thermodynamic economy.

John Michael Greer: "A variety of gimmicks, culminating in the current frenzy of “quantitative easing”—that is to say, printing money at a frantic pace—has forced interest rates down to historically low levels, in order to keep the federal government’s debt payments down to an annual sum that we can pretend to afford."
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No, not even slightly close. The US' "money printing" scheme does not force interest rates down. And the federal government's debt payment is an annual sum that it can afford, because, again and again and again...: the US prints its own money, its own currency and has debt to itself.

John Michael Greer: "Even a fairly modest increase in interest rates would be enough to push the US government into crisis; an increase on the same scale as those that have clobbered debt-burdened European countries in recent years would force an inevitable default."
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Excessive error in a repeated pattern here. Several European countries have debt denominated in another currency and they also have a currency which is priced to high in relevance to the real economy. 

John Michael Greer: "To understand how this works, it’s going to be necessary to spend a little time talking about catabolic collapse, the theory referenced earlier. The basis of that theory is the uncontroversial fact that human societies routinely build more infrastructure than they can afford to maintain. During periods of prosperity, societies invest available resources in major projects—temples, fortifications, canal or road systems, space programs, or whatever else happens to appeal to the collective imagination of the age. As infrastructure increases in scale and complexity, the costs of maintenance rise to equal and exceed the available economic surplus; the period of prosperity ends in political and economic failure, and infrastructure falls into ruin as its maintenance costs are no longer paid".
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"that human societies build more infrastructure than they can afford to maintain". This varies. When a period of prosperity ends in economic failure, it is always because of the political economy, at least from 1800 and until today. The ultimate reason when infrastructure falls into ruin is the political economy. The US has the resources, it has the technology, and it has industrial knowledge. but it does not have the knowledge or culture of a high minimum welfare level, and it does not have the culture of what it takes to achieve a high societal economic EROEI, like the social capitalistic countries.

If it is unpleasant to live somewhere caused by cubic issues it is both an absolute advantage and a comparative advantage to know if the rectangle is too small/big or if it is the height that is too low or too high. Lest we think it is opaque when it is not, or we conflate the height with the rectangle, and continue to reason within the obscurantism of holistic and the parts in the system.

During the later centuries leading to the fall of the Roman Empire, there was a significant and essential reduction of EROEI. to some extent could this be compensated by societal improvements, a reduction in the class divisions would help the societal EROEI which would help the economy.
But not much. Marginal improvements could be made, but this would hardly have any effect that could be measured by economists. There were other organizational factors that could have been improved upon and rationalized, if they could somewhat adapt into modern ideas that flourishes inside the HR departments in big companies. This would not have made a big difference anyhow.
Asymmetrical economic and cultural issues was not an important drag on the economy, as it was not an important drag/disadvantage on the Egyptian economy during the reign of the Pharaoh's. But from late in the 1700's, it was mostly and increasingly more the political economy which was at play. An agricultural economy is not mostly a political economy, an industrial or even semi-industrial economy is highly political.

John Michael Greer: "One of the core reasons for the failure of climate activism in the US is that a great many Americans know that an expert opinion from a distinguished researcher can be bought for the price of a research grant, and have seen scare tactics used to push political agendas so many times that another round of dire warnings from experts doesn’t impress them any more".
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Maybe we should consider to make a contribution to the critique on political "scientific" research of AGW, but more than that, is this also a general problem?
A contribution to the critique on political research by pharmaceutical firms on pharmaceutical drugs? Can we combine this with a contribution to the critique on political psychiatry? I think we can, but what do we get then?

John Michael Greer: " It might seem odd to portray humanity as the Chosen Species while denying that there’s anybody to do the choosing, but such is the nature of the return of the repressed."
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One can always put in "destiny" instead of "god" or "deity", but it is still teleological reasoning.
And instead of this kind of thinking, we should listen to Jared Diamond, humans choose. We humans choose.
On a binary level we choose to collapse or to survive. On a quantitative level, we choose between different empirical-economy and political-economy scenarios and destiny's. Our
Choices will decide the future paths that we will be walking on. 

John Michael Greer: "Meanwhile there are at least half a dozen contenders for the role of abstract representation of the human race, and none of them is a clear favorite. It may be a long time before all the consequences are sorted out.”
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My suggestions are: Homo egalitarian or homo socialis capitalsmus.

John Michael Greer: "Even a fairly modest increase in interest rates would be enough to push the US government into crisis; an increase on the same scale as those that have clobbered debt-burdened European countries in recent years would force an inevitable default".
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A country that has debt denominated in its own currency cannot default unless it chooses deliberately to do so. It is also very easy to make payments in full, according to past inflation rates. All this is at least 97% political economic issues and mechanisms.

And no, absolutely not, the US government cannot be forced into a default or a crisis by outside forces! The FED/authorities "prints" money because they will not use fiscal methods. The interest would be even lower if it were not for the QE projects. and most of the debt is money that the government owes to itself!!

John Michael Greer: "At some point in the years ahead, equally, the US government is going to have to default on its $8 trillion dollars of unpayable debt, plus however much more gets added as we proceed".
--- Absolutely nonsense!! What is it with political economy and statistical economy that you do not understand?? if we have an issue/question of cubic/m3 at hand, can you differentiate and manage to see the difference between the rectangle and the height???

John Michael Greer: "If you actually value the information, then you can go to the very minor trouble and the very modest expense of buying the book. If you don't value the information enough to do that, I question whether you value the information."
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We can never know whether we value information until after we get to know what it is. Besides,
information should be free of charge because it has been so for hundreds of thousands of years.

John Michael Greer: "What isn’t speculative is that all the trends that have been driving the industrial world down the arc of the Long Descent are still in play, and so are all the parallel trends that are pushing America’s global empire along its own trajectory toward history’s dustbin  Those things haven’t changed; even if anything could be done about them, which is far from certain, nothing is being done about them; indeed, outside of a handful of us on the fringes of contemporary culture, nobody is even talking about the possibility that something might need to be done about them".

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Again, John Michael Greer shows he is an epistemological anarchist, on a creationist level. What John Michael Greer sees is the effect of the current political economy in the US, including the rust belt. "even if anything could be done about them". What is it that John Michael Greer does not grasp when it comes to understanding the difference between the political economy and the statistical economy??
Is John Michael Greer blind to anthropogenic factors?

John Michael Greer: "As Joseph Tainter pointed out in The Collapse of Complex Societies, social complexity correlates precisely with social hierarchy; one of the functions of complexity, in the workplace as elsewhere, is thus to maintain existing social pecking orders".
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What if in a country, the pecking level&intensity are significantly comparatively less than in other countries? Or between non-sovereign states?






John Michael Greer: "Industrial civilization is a complicated thing, and its decline and fall bids fair to be more complicated still, but both rest on the refreshingly simple foundations of physical law. That’s crucial to keep in mind, because the raw emotional impact of the unwelcome future breathing down our necks just now can make it far too easy to retreat into one form or another of self-deception."

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Everything rests on physical law. :-}
Any perception/notion/opinion that the 90%-95% of the economic issues in the US is not the political economy, is on par with creationism. John Michael Greer or any reader of his blog should not need any physicist or chemist or biologist to tell them what is natural law, and what is anthropogenic, including the political economy. Everything is the thermodynamic economy, but the thermodynamic economy is both how we lived 13.000 years ago and how we will live however far into the future. The political economy can be explained as whatever distribution and allocation properties and tendencies an economy have after the agricultural revolution and especially after 1800 AD and into the foreseeable future.

Both the US, Norway, Nigeria, Lichtenstein and Afghanistan and China and Monaco is mostly the political economy, because it is anthropogenic mechanisms why and how people are rich or poor or in the middle, or working as doctors or mechanics or politicians or drug salesmen, or bus drivers, or prostitutes or stock brokers or... etc. etc. etc. you get the picture if you want to. And do you believe in Say's law mr. Greer?

To speak of the thermodynamic economy as the main dimension in industrial economies, is like speaking of the biological economy, because we are biological beings, right? But biologists cannot tell us the important issues on agricultural economics during old China or the Roman Empire, or the slave economy in the US, or whether Marx was mostly wrong, or if Keynesian economics are sound and/or valid without diving into accounting identities and the financial numbers therein.
But to analyze the difference between Nigeria and Norway and the US and Saudi-Arabia and Switzerland, one has to look at the political and cultural sides of things. The proximate cultural variables, and the political economy + accounting that is practiced in different countries. 

John Michael Greer: "this isn’t because the subject is overly complicated. The reason why perpetual motion won’t work is breathtakingly simple; the problem is that the way most people nowadays think about energy makes it almost impossible to grasp the logic involved."
--- The political economy is also breathtakingly simple, the way many people think about the "debt ceiling" has extremely little connection to the thermodynamic economy and the statistical economy outside the political realm of economics. The debt ceiling is an accounting identity that makes the private sector owe less to the public sector, than if it were not for the debt ceiling. Or the US could tax the wealthy and give to the poor and the poor would spend it and voila
we have economic dynamics and spending, production and transactions would increased etc. But that is not to be with the current political economy profile in the Congress.

A free advice to you J.M. Greer. although he's too rightist for my political economy, Cullen Roche will probably be patient enough to explain the basics to you if you ask him some questions on his blog or you send an email to him on his web page: pragcap.com. He is a true (albeit rightist) pragmatic capitalist. and by the way, did you read Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st century" yet? The book is filled with empirical data, but it is not physics, and it doesn't even mention the laws of the thermodynamics so John Michael Greer will not even try to read it... says a lot about John Michael Greer. And by the way, Thomas Piketty actually has a future prediction or assumption wrong because he couldn't couple the laws of thermodynamics to his economic theorizing...! 

John Michael Greer: "Most people nowadays think that since energy can be defined as the capacity to do work, if you have a certain amount of energy, you can do a certain amount of work with it. That seems very logical; the problem is that the real world doesn’t work that way."

--- I'd never thought of energy like that, it is because that would be like thinking/believing that the map is the terrain. And I have never made that conflation. And it would be extremely non logical and counter intuitive. I never thought that humans would have a Dyson sphere anytime soon, or in 1400 years, I didn't have to read the essay by Assistant professor Tom Murphy on galactic scale energy.

John Michael Greer: " The amount of work you get out of a given energy source depends, not on the amount of energy, but on the difference in energy concentration between the energy source and the environment."
--- If this is the case, then this theory should apply also for economic efficiency. IF so, this means that social democracy will win the race between different economic models in the foreseeable future. This is quite a higher abstraction level (theory) than the energy density equation in different environments, and so there is uncertainties in this theory.

John Michael Greer: "what you have is a shortage of the difference between energy concentrations that will allow the energy to do useful work. (The technical term for this is exergy)".

--- Then perhaps we could coin a new term, namely "exonomy", it is the economic (productive) concentration that will allow the economy to do useful work, aka utility. And social democratic countries have a lot more exonomy that the US, I would say it is mostly a mismatch.

John Michael Greer: "No nation has been able to run a nuclear power industry without huge government subsidies, and that suggests to me that the net energy from nuclear power is very low, quite possibly negative.",
John Michael Greer: "no nation on earth has been able to run a nuclear power program without vast government subsidies. No matter how much electricity costs, nuclear power still fails to break even. This suggests to me -- and to a lot of other people in the peak oil scene -- that nuclear power produces very little net energy, and may well be a net energy sink rather than a source. "

--- No nation has been able to run the police, the law system, the prison system, the school system, the military, the roads&bridges, etc, on other finance than huge government subsidies, and that suggests to me that the net energy (or net utility?) from the police, law, prison, school, military, and roads&bridges -systems is very low, quite possibly negative. If we exempt the US and non western countries we can add the health care system to that list. All western nations except the US has poured vast amounts of government subsidies into universal healthcare and the healthcare system in general. Should we abandon all this because the net energy is suggested to be less than zero??
John Michael Greer, you are really a epistemological anarchist, aren't you?

John Michael Greer: "Every group of social primates has an inner core of members who have more access to the resources controlled by the group, and more influence over the decisions made by the group, than other members".
--- Entirely wrong! Humans on a tribal level/in-group level are in equilibrium, and there is no member of such a group who would bother to make a contribution to the critique of political economy, or asymmetric power relations because in the in-group social-environment, there is also a horizontal hierarchy.

John Michael Greer: "Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been a recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations throughout history.  Its political and religious institutions, its arts and architecture, and all the other details of its daily life take on distinctive forms, so that as it nears maturity, even the briefest glance at one of its creations is often enough to identify its source.
Once the peak is past and the long road down begins, though, that pattern of divergence shifts into reverse, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. A curious sort of homogenization takes place: distinctive features are lost, and common patterns emerge in their place.  That doesn’t happen all at once, and different cultural forms lose their distinctive outlines at different rates, but the further down the trajectory of decline and fall a civilization proceeds, the more it resembles every other civilization in decline."

--- That is because the people or the leaders/power elite chose to do so in the past...! But from the 1900s (20th century), most countries have general suffrage and most citizens can read and write. And the EROEI that can be sustained is substantially higher than any pre-industrial economies, even without hydrocarbons. It is no longer just the power elite who are to blame. It is not even mostly the power elite which is to blame. It is the people, the voters, they choose to do this against themselves. They choose to indulge themselves to a catabolic(?) collapse. They choose to walk down a trajectory of decline. By their voting ballots they are committing econocide.

John Michael Greer: "The part of history that can be guessed in advance is a matter of broad trends and overall patterns, not the sort of specific incidents that make up so much of history as it happens.  Exactly how the pressures bearing down on late industrial America will work out in the day-by-day realities of politics, economics, and society will be determined by the usual interplay of individual choices and pure dumb luck."
--- No more pure dumb luck than what made the Icelandic population choose to survive and the inhabitants on the Eastern Island chose to collapse.
No more pure dumb luck than that the Nordic nations choose to adapt within the limits of semi-equality, and Greece choose to descent, to walk down a trajectory of decline. But Greece isn't done yet...! They make it excessively harder for themselves when they keep the Euro, but for the time being, it seems that their decline is coming to a halt, though Greece is predicted to have some  negative economic growth in the years ahead mostly because of sticky prices + excessive high unemployment rates. 

John Michael Greer: "I’ve discussed in previous posts how people in today’s America have taken to using thought-stoppers such as "but it’s different this time!" to protect themselves from learning anything from history"
--- Most of all, it's industry and technology this time...! And literacy this time, and democracy this time...! We can have a decent EROEI level in general, and a good societal and economic EROEI (Finance capital-ish Economic Return On Economic Input) level if we decide to.

John Michael Greer: "That said, the broad trends and overall patterns are worth tracking in their own right, and some things that look as though they ought to belong to the realm of the unpredictable—for example, the political and military dynamics of border regions, or the relations among the imperial society’s political class, its increasingly disenfranchised lower classes, and the peoples outside its borders—follow predictable patterns in case after case in history, and show every sign of doing the same thing this time around too."

--- The broad trends are the result of choices of citizens and politicians, the overall patterns are the result of the political culture that exists in times and places, both this phenomenons are decided upon and decided by the people, indirectly by the ballots. The societal downward trajectories that often follow from falling EROEI levels is not mostly caused by the falling EROEI levels, it is mostly caused by the political economy...!!! Lest we should bother natural scientists of their time and ask them if efficient economies are an anthropogenic factor or not...?
"show every sign of doing the same thing this time around too", maybe so, but it is extensively more of a choice this time around then in the pre industrial times.

John Michael Greer: "The economic sphere of a society in decline undergoes a parallel fragmentation for different reasons. In ages of economic expansion, the labor of the working classes yields enough profit to cover the costs of a more or less complex superstructure, whether that superstructure consists of the pharaohs and priesthoods of ancient Egypt or the bureaucrats and investment bankers of late industrial America."
--- To which extent could the peoples of Egypt use the ballots to re-allocate the economy, and which total/average economic EROEI level was Egypt at during the pharaohs? And compared to contemporary US economy? And the literacy rates etc. are not relevant??

John Michael Greer: "As expansion gives way to contraction, the production of goods and services no longer yields the profit it once did, but the members of the political class, whose power and wealth depend on the superstructure, are predictably unwilling to lose their privileged status and have the power to keep themselves fed at everyone else’s expense. The reliable result is a squeeze on productive economic activity that drives a declining civilization into one convulsive financial crisis after another, and ends by shredding its capacity to produce even the most necessary goods and services."
--- The only reason that the political class have the power is because the American voters let them keep their schemes and the asymmetric power&economic distribution policies. 

John Michael Greer: "In response, people begin dropping out of the economic mainstream altogether, because scrabbling for subsistence on the economic fringes is less futile than trying to get by in a system increasingly rigged against them. Rising taxes, declining government services, and systematic privatization of public goods by the rich compete to alienate more and more people from the established order, and the debasement of the money system in an attempt to make up for faltering tax revenues drives more and more economic activity into forms of exchange that don’t involve money at all.  As the monetary system fails, in turn, economies of scale become impossible to exploit; the economy fragments and simplifies until bare economic subsistence on local resources, occasionally supplemented by plunder, becomes the sole surviving form of economic activity"

--- Which is by deliberate cultural, proximate and political choice. The people, the voters, the citizens etc, choose to decline by their voting ballots instead of reaching for the level of the best countries in the world.

John Michael Greer: "I’ve come to think that’s what lies behind the steady drumbeat of emails and comments I field week after week insisting that it’s different this time, that it has to be different this time, and clutching at the most remarkable assortment of straws in an attempt to get me to agree with them that it’s different this time. That increasingly frantic chorus has many sources, but much of it is, I believe, a response to a simple fact:  most of the promises made by authoritative voices in contemporary industrial society about the future we’re supposed to get have turned out to be dead wrong."
--- What is different this time is that the consciousness and the general conditions for people and the economic statistical facts are so that it is extremely more of a political choice if, or that the US and/or other countries choose to decline now, compared to pre-industrial times and economies. 

John Michael Greer: "And with that, I’ll set aside my archdruid’s hat again and return to the ordinary business of chronicling the decline and fall of industrial civilization."
--- Which John Michael Greer think is caused by the thermodynamic laws, and not by the Congress or other national political power assemblies, and is not a political economy?? 

John Michael Greer: "It’s dangerous enough for elites to lose track of the contextual and contingent nature of their power when the mechanisms through which power is enforced can be expected to remain in place—as it was in the American colonies in 1776, France in 1789, and Russia in 1917. It’s far more dangerous if the mechanisms of power themselves are in flux. That can happen for any number of reasons, but the one that’s of central importance to the theme of this series of posts is the catabolic collapse of a declining civilization, in which the existing mechanisms of power come apart because their maintenance costs can no longer be met."

--- The maintenance costs of current income per capita can not not only be kept, but can increase if it is done efficiently. And it is not the power mechanisms (or power mechanism costs) in the bureaucracy per se that is the problem, but the causes and the result of current political economy in the US. 

John Michael Greer: "An astonishing number of people these days seem unable to imagine the possibility that such wholly impersonal factors as the laws of economics, geology, and thermodynamics could make things happen all by themselves."

---  John Michael Greer seem unable to imagine and grasp the fact that such factors as the amounts and numbers in the accounting identities makes things happen, and they are proximately decided by the very anthropogenic economy, the political economy which is wielded by the members of the Congress and the presidential administration.  John Michael Greer is truly extremely categorically wrong by detaching the obvious anthropogenic factors from the economy.

John Michael Greer: "That latter point, I think, sums up the tragedy of William Catton’s career. He knew, and could explain with great clarity, why industrialism would bring about its own downfall."
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Industrial-ism cannot bring its own downfall, as much as alcohol-ism cannot be dangerous/unhealthy, only over-consumption of alcohol can be unhealthy, as alcoholism and "addiction" is a tautology and not explanatory and not a function term. Industrial-ISM or even capital-ISM will never bring its own downfall, only the political economy can bring down industry or industrial economic environments.  And the political economy is decided if not by the 99% per se, it is decided by the 51% per se... both in theory and as it is applied!