Chart of the Week: 2012 Revisited

[Cue scary music.]The Mayans were excellent astronomers. Their mythology centered on the cosmic dance in the night sky. So they built stone observatories that marked significant cosmic events.  Their written charts of Venus, an important god, rival modern position calculations.  As you know by now--unless you have had been hiding under the covers--the solstice of December 21, 2012 is the end of an age on the Mayan long count calendar {4.6.09; The Maya Did the Math}. [End scary music.] Some television producers and assorted seers have interpreted this fact as a prediction of imminent doom, citing the contents of the Popol Vol, a post-conquest codex, as evidence.  But the Mayan predictions could also mean that 2012 will be the beginning of a paradigm shift, not the end of human civilization.  The first chart below suggests how this paradigm shift in the way Homo sapiens lives on Earth could come about.

It is a chart of peak oil, and it shows that we are living at the top of the exponential curve in terms of oil available for consumption.  Cleaner fuel sources will have to be developed and discovered, if our species is not to revert to a hunter-gathering existence or worse, go extinct as the result of an anthropogenic environmental catastrophe.  We are beginning to see the first stumbling efforts to begin the shift from fossil fuel burning.  The next chart concerns what the predominant economic system has wrought.

The S&P 500 is one generally accepted measure for the performance of the US economy, still the world's largest.  Earnings per share used to be strongly correlated to stock price, but not any more.  The decline in annual earnings per share is the largest on record, yet the apparent paradox is the stock market has not crashed. That is because the stock market has become a casino where price fluctuations mean more than absolute value.  Finance capitalism is a late--Marx would say decadent--stage of capitalism that is not concerned with producing things, but in manipulating money to produce more money.  Thus, earnings per share, a measure of value is not necessarily determinative of the value of a company, whereas transitory demand for its intangible share is.  Neither is finance capitalism concerned with the welfare of non-capitalists.  This chart shows the conditions of the current labor market.

In comparison to previous recessions the labor market is in the worst slump since the Great Depression. Clearly the social dislocations caused by such severe wage contraction will generate demands in a democratic society for rebalancing of the economy in favor of non-capitalists. The wealthy elites will counter the demands for social equity by claiming that diverting money to social programs and taxing accumulated wealth will hamper a nation's ability to compete in a highly complex global economy. The last chart suggests this is a false dichotomy. The five countries with the fastest broadband speeds are all social welfare democracies.

Perhaps 2012 will see a change to the better for a greater number of Earth's inhabitants, and not the beginning of a new dark age. Stayed tune.