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“People will have to give up worthless, easy fantasy jobs and put their shoulder to the plow, maybe literally. People will have to give up leisure time and spend any time not engaged in paid employment producing for their own use in their household economy.”

Oh, I don’t know. As more and more 50+ hrs/week paper-pushing jobs go away, people are likely to have more, rather than less, free time. Now add some blackouts to that (i.e. no TV and no Internet), and most people are likely to wind up with more free time than then will know what to do with.

Yeah, we’ll have to make more stuff again. The other side of that coin is that we’ll never be able to make all the stuff that we are consuming now, so we’ll also have to learn to make do with less stuff. I have been saying that the 21st century is going to be one long exercise in giving up things, and this is part of what I mean by that. People will have to give up worthless, easy fantasy jobs and put their shoulder to the plow, maybe literally. People will have to give up leisure time and spend any time not engaged in paid employment producing for their own use in their household economy. People will have to give up simply having as much stuff and as high a standard of living as we have been accustomed to, and learn to live on a lot less.

As a very rough rule of thumb, I am suggesting that people think in terms of a US median per capita GDP of somewhere in the area of $10,000 per year, in real 2009 dollars. That is about 1/4 of what it is now. Of course, “median” suggests that there will be people above that level – and people below it. How lucky do you think you will be? I am not saying how soon we will reach that level, or how we will get there, or whether or not we will level out there. I do very much doubt that we can sustain anything much above that level, which means that circumstances will force us down to at least that level sooner or later, and probably sooner. I don’t know what things will be like for people a century from now, but this is something that people living right now might have to look forward to, and not all that far into the future.

One thing that I am doing, while I have the money to do it: I am trying to acquire good, sturdy, reliable tools and equipment, and good “how to” or “DIY” books. As I said, a lot of that production that is going to have to be done will be in the homestead economy. The better equipped one is, the wider the range of things that one might be able to produce for oneself. Some might find later that they can’t put every tool to good use, but that is OK – good quality tools will make very, very good trade goods. One of the most stupidist things of all we have done here in the US is to offshore our tool production capability. We apparently don’t even have the capability to produce drill bits anymore – they are ALL made in China!!! When those imported drill bits are only available at a price of $100 each, people are going to be wishing that they have stocked up. Drill bits are not the hardest things in the world to make, but neither are they the easiest; it will take us quite a while to rebuild our capacity to produce basic things like that. In the meantime. . .

In the meantime, I come here for reassurance that I am not as crazy as family and friends think I am! Thanks for being there for all of us:)