Dmitry Orlov: Predictions for the next decade

You have to love this guy. He goes out on a limb and predicts the next ten years. Sobering in the extreme. Here is a partial exerpt:

Distressed municipalities throughout the country will resort to charging exorbitant fees for such things as dog licenses. Many will experiment with imprisoning those unable to pay these fees in state and county jails, only to release them again as the jails continuously overflow and resources run low. The citizenry will come to regard jails as conveniently combining the features of a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter. Some towns will abandon the idea of having a fire department and decide that it is more cost-effective to just let house fires run their course, to save on demolitions. In an effort to plug up ever larger holes in their budgets, states will raise taxes, driving ever more economic activity underground. In particular, state liquor tax revenues will drop for the first time in many decades as more and more Americans find that they can no longer afford beer and switch to cheap and plentiful Afghan heroin and other illegal but very affordable drugs. Marijuana smoke will edge out car exhaust as America’s most prevalent smell.

Are we beginning the big collapse?

That is, are we at the cusp of a truly calamitous collapse of the entire economic and social order of the past couple of hundred years. Our economy has developed based, in large part, on the availability of relatively cheap energy in the form of petroleum. Some believe, with good reason, that the days of cheap oil are actually behind us. If cheap oil is over, how can we continue to support our highly decentralized life styles?

One of the best known proponents of this view is Dmitry Orlov, software engineer from Leningrad, who is to some the quintessential doom-and-gloomer. Whether he is right or wrong, he is always interesting to listen to and it is worthwhile to hear him out.

You can watch a talk he gave to the Long Now Foundation, entitled Social Collapse Best Practices.  His website is here and you can watch a more recent talk he gave at the Feasta Conference here. (Warning: The last link is a very slow download. Be patient.)