[One Degree]

I see the world on the verge of a unprecedented change. All solutions have been based upon growth which ultimately means population growth. Many countries have controlled their birthrate and now are looking at immigration control. We are seeing the end of growth as a solution for many countries, imo.
Personally, I think the changes will be extremely beneficial, but the transition will be tough because no one seems to realize what is about to happen. Therefore, there is no preparation.

I am interested in your views about the likelihood of this happening as well as the repercussions we can expect. Debt obviously will be a huge problem since it is always assumed growth will effectively reduce it.

[Thomasmariel]

Frighteningly. With greater and greater communication, people worldwide are now imbued with the awareness of satire. Because of the internet, people worldwide now know that satire applies to everything in the universe and that because of this no one has a right to expect from other people. Why should people treat something as serious if they know that other people can take the piss out of it? It's from this awareness that economy will cease, and certainly capitalist economy

Because of the internet, the world's population is aware that everyone is just a Facebook user, or just a YouTube user, and so what's the logic in a chain of command?

[One Degree]

Frighteningly. With greater and greater communication, people worldwide are now imbued with the awareness of satire. Because of the internet, people worldwide now know that satire applies to everything in the universe and that because of this no one has a right to expect from other people. Why should people treat something as serious if they know that other people can take the piss out of it? It's from this awareness that economy will cease, and certainly capitalist economy

Because of the internet, the world's population is aware that everyone is just a Facebook user, or just a YouTube user, and so what's the logic in a chain of command?

Interesting. The internet has made us see everyone as equal and we are losing the 'hero worship' that is necessary for us to follow our leaders. Is this what you mean?

[Thomasmariel]

Interesting. The internet has made us see everyone as equal and we are losing the 'hero worship' that is necessary for us to follow our leaders. Is this what you mean?

100%. The visual outcome of YouTube contradicts the visual outcome of a press conference or the visual outcome of a podium for a public speaker, and the visual outcome of a statue and a biography. If movie stars in the 1960's and the 1970's had been using YouTube in those decades, it hardly seems rational that the 90's and 80's would've still been the 90's and 80's. Seeing people as a YouTube user has a devastating affect on ideology, and seeing as how the internet is getting more and more users, it feels realistic that the global status quo is soon about to end

[SolarCross]

I see the world on the verge of a unprecedented change. All solutions have been based upon growth which ultimately means population growth. Many countries have controlled their birthrate and now are looking at immigration control. We are seeing the end of growth as a solution for many countries, imo.
Personally, I think the changes will be extremely beneficial, but the transition will be tough because no one seems to realize what is about to happen. Therefore, there is no preparation.

I am interested in your views about the likelihood of this happening as well as the repercussions we can expect. Debt obviously will be a huge problem since it is always assumed growth will effectively reduce it.

The world has been on the verge of unprecendented change for a few hundred years at least. It has been quite a ride so far but aren't we getting a little blase about it now? As a child of the 70s I am more than a little disappointed in how little things have changed since then, mobile phones + internet pretty much sums it up, but where are the jet packs, personal space ships, moon bases and immortality pills?

Growth won't stop I guess because of an absence of population growth, not with AI poised to greatly expand production powers. A declining (human) population may paradoxically help growth in a situation where all the work is done by machines, as increasingly humans will consume more than they produce...

[quetzalcoatl]

Get ready for the Age of War and Revolution. Sounds kind of doomy, like one of those gold bug screeds that pop up on facebook - sorry about that. I believe this to be a reasonable and conservative extrapolation. Many (far too many) intersecting forces are coming together, and we are being carried forward on one heck of a downwave.

The proximate cause will be the "end" of the fossil fuel era. I'm using scare quotes because most people don't understand what this actually entails. It's not that we will run out of oil and gas (we won't for a century or longer). The problem is that the net energy return, which was extravagant during most of the industrial revolution, has been consistently narrowing for decades. The energy required to extract fossil fuels is now approaching parity with its energy output. It's the cheapness, compactness, and portability of fossil fuels that leveraged the excess growth of modern capitalism (for 'capitalism' you could substitute 'industrial revolution.' They are contiguous and mostly indistinguishable). Notably, by subsidizing fossil fuel's environmental costs, the taxpayer has assumed the burden of propping up this system. However, unless you want to live in the kind of industrial wasteland that haunted Warsaw Pact nations, this subsidy can't be sustained. The era of double digit growth is over, barring some revolutionary advance not currently on the horizon.

Renewable energy sources are necessary, but they don't yield the kind of concentrated, portable energy that leveraged the industrial revolution. At best, they can sustain a steady-state or no growth economy. The structural imperatives of capitalism do not sit well with a steady-state economy, so there's that as well.

If that were all, we could just sit easy and see what upheaval and revolution bring us. But unfortunately there's more.

* Population overshoot has passed a critical threshold. We're at a teetering, critically balanced point awaiting a triggering event (metastable, like a pencil balanced on its sharp end). Such an event could be most any stressor: flooding, drought, food stock collapses, etc. Once we reach the point of food hoarding at the national level, a fairly rapid sequence of events leading to a large-scale human die off would follow.

* Environmental degradation looms on numerous fronts. Planetary heating, ocean acidification, death of coral reefs, fish stocks rapidly falling.

* The western industrial nations have squandered their human capital to an insanely self-destructive degree. Representative democracy has been stymied as a viable force for progress, and serves only as a tool of the oligarchy. We are creating a large and growing mass of the radically dissaffected.

Only a fool could predict the end result of this perfect storm. But whatever happens will be subject to some hard boundary conditions.

1) Sharp negative population growth. I don't want to put a number on it, but it will be big.
2) War. Desperate people are going to fight. Period.
3) Authoritarian states everywhere, with or without the pretense of civil rights or representative government.
4) Nationalism will emerge as the defining international force, as food and energy hoarding become standard and floods of refugees overwhelm all but the most ruthless of western nations.
5) Very high likelihood of detonation of nuclear devices on population centers.

[One Degree]

With the emotionalism overtaking the world, it is easy to see how even minor problems could generate the momentum needed to create the results you describe. As I mentioned in my arguments on immigration, we have reached a point where it is insane to not start putting your own first. It may be considered heartless, but it is the only hope of escaping most of the destruction. There is no sense in destroying yourself for altruism. We not only need to accept net zero immigration, but voluntarily reduce our population before it is done for us.

[kuu]

If we wish to hold on to calmness and peaceful exsistence here in the west and 1st world, we have to be ready to let go from most of our comforts.
If we want to truly make a better world, preserve the environment for the generations to come, we must act right away. That would essentially mean that first we should give up eating meat, which is quite simply the easiest way for a person to minimalize his or hers carbon footprint with very little effort.
That is not enough though, we should be prepared for life with a lot less comfort, without all these gadgets, electronics, stuff in genereal. We cannot keep consuming this way if we wish to preserve the world. We can't go get new winter clothing every winter, it's these very simple, almost fundamental aspects of our lives, that we have to be ready to give up.
And that is going to be so difficult, and I think, impossible, because most of us here in the west, don't even think twice about these things, we're grown up in a world that encourages us to buy more, and buying more is making us happy, and buying is pretty much our only purpose here.
Also the status quo doesn't want us to stop the consumption of useless goods. So to preserve the world, we must get rid of the establishment that is keeping it's positions by having us polluting and consuming the planet.

The "Great Change" that is coming, it could be the one where people can put aside the meaningless problems between themselves and go all out preserving the environment, the coral reefs, oceans, fresh water reservers, widllife and forests. Implementing universal basic income which will liberate us from the perpetual competion between ourselves, taking down the ladders that help people to climb over others and so on.
Or the great change could be the one where we're too busy being mad at immigrants, looking for someone to blame because deep down, we don't want to give up the luxury of having hot, drinkable water coming from our taps instantly or being able to just sit down on our asses while moving 80km/h in our vehicles, or having that bloody steak and having shop shelves full of stuff 24/7 which is preserved so that it will last there for years.
Nationalism will rise in some places, other places will just try to hide the horrors of the world and just keep on consuming and hoping it will all go away. The war will come, the horros will come and there will be panic and the screams of rape and murder will echo in the streets of our cities because we didn't do anything, we were too busy buying more stuff, decorating our homes and having fucking goat cheese salad for lunch.

Refugee crisis showed how unprepared even a massive institution like EU was. And how we all have been just fine with all the war and terror and horror in so many places, and now, that kettle is boiling over and we're having a little taste of all that panic, and we can't handle it. What happens when in 40-60 years there will be hundreds of millions of refugees on our borders if we can't even take care of this.
We slowly realize how helpless our institutions are, how clueless our governments and leaders are.
And everyone just keep on buying, keep on browsing each others online, keep buying more clothes to feel more identity, to decorate our homes with the same stuff as everyone else to feel different.

I live in Finland, a place of absolutely fantastic quality of life. People are so wealthy, we have everything we need, life here is so, so good. And what does Finalnd have to show for all this prosperity?
What does this country produce, or give to the rest of the world to sort of, justify all this abundance?
Absolutely nothing, we don't produce energy, we don't have natural resources, I have no idea why we're so "succesfull" besides that our politicians have made sure that things are this way.
And what do people do here? When I walk the streets I start feeling ill. No one is stopping to appreciate all this, the clean air, the drinkable water, those almost un-noticable things that instantly puts everyone here on top of the pyramid. The social welfare, free universitys, free education in general, there isn't even a chance for rich people to put their kids to "better schools" they have only the one option, which everyone, immigrants, poor and rich alike have to attend.
And what do people do? They just consume fiercly, with acceleration. No one is willing to give out a piece of their cake. People here think they've somehow "earned" this quality of life, and others in less fortunate countries, just haven't, I don't know, worked enough? It's ridicolous!

Sorry for ranting, I think I'm quickly losing my mind.

[Paradigm]

Well, we never fully recovered from the global financial crisis of 2007/8. Sure, the stock market bounced back, and employment grew, but mostly low-wage and part-time jobs. What little financial regulation occurred in the wake of the crisis is a joke, the powers that be have been busy stripping away what's left of a social safety net, so the fundamentals of the economy are weaker than ever. Which means that when the next crisis hits (which I predict will be somewhere between 2022-26, and will start in China), we'll be woefully unprepared for it. Combine this with the ecological limits we're likely to hit with fossil fuels, water shortages, and climate change, and we're talking about major global crisis. Capitalism has shown a remarkable ability to adapt to each crisis and evolve into new forms, but I'm not sure if it can weather this storm. Unfortunately, it will probably take a big chunk of the world population down with it, and the survivors will have to deal with a world that is much less hospitable to human life.

On the other hand, I think those who survive the crisis will have a great opportunity to build a new world. The ability to share resources and distribute them equitably will be a matter of survival, so new socio-economic systems will have to develop around that ethos. I think the situation can be somewhat likened to Europe in the wake of the Black Plague. After a third of Europe's population was destroyed, many peasants found an ample supply of free land available, and the feudal aristocracy was no longer able to keep them tightly under their control.

[Sivad]

"It's all just the same thing over and over; we can't help ourselves. And you and I can't control it or stop it, or even slow it, or even ever-so-slightly alter it ... there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers, happy fucks and sad sacks, fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there's ever been. But the percentages-they stay exactly the same."