Peak Iron?

[Spoonist]

And why would not the invisible hand of market not know?

Are not oil producers motivated by profit? Does it not make sense for them to know how much oil there is left, and offer the appropriate price?

Because most of them don't? There are speculation and bubbles in almost all markets.

It would make sense for the producers to know their market, but it's usually not the producers who set prices at commodoties markets it's rather in the hands of the buyers. So how much do the usual buyer know of the market - not that much necessarily for a good reason, they are usually not in the oil business but rather do something with it so most of them buy their intel from the same companies. So whenever those intel companies are wrong lots of transactions happen on flawed data. Take Iranian sabre rattling as an easy to understand example. How much should empty threats be valued, really? What if they are not empty threats?
Then you have related markets, just because your market does great doesn't necessarily translate into "correct" pricing. If a commodity close to another is increasing rapidly in price its more than likely that yours increase with it, just out of sheer speculation and/or fear driven market trends.
For instance There were a couple of years with really good tea crops which predicts lower prices, but those years were bad for coffee. So tea prices went up. With hindsight one could see that tea was overpriced because of overproduction vs consumption. But since coffee prices drove things up the market was willing to pay more for tea as well.
Same thing with gold and silver nowadays.

Now for your question regarding adjusting to how much is left - doesn't really work like that either. If you were to take that argument to its conclusion it would be better as an oil producer to produce less right now so that you can wait for better prices down the line. Off course the producers do none of that, instead we have more investment in oil production than ever - because short term profit is predictibly high.
So a commodity that is "almost" running out will have pressure from the market to not increase pricing as fast as one would think - because since the price is higher than it used to it makes lot of short term business sense to produce more right now, so oil production is increased which "artificially" keeps pricing down.

Becuase of the nature of business for profit it dictates a lot of game theory situations where you can make mathematical assumptions about trends and markets etc. However that doesn't mean that people make informed desitions, at least the info is not necesarily on the commodity/market itself but rather on how for profit traders will act and react.
Depending on the exchange some has as much as 60% of all transactions are mathematical speculation based on the trend alone and nothing on the reality of the market. So the bot has "no" information but the price graf itself (its history, its actors etc).

This is not necessarily a bad thing mind you, it's just how it works.

So anyone who claims that the market is "in control" and will reach equilibrium etc are only talking about mathematical theories that are 'usually' true but have all been disproven. Yupp, it doesn't make sense. But here is the rundown, by using stuff like game theory you can 'game' the system to make a lot of profit on market speculation. Predictably so. But for each individual market you'd be wrong because there are lots of exceptions that "disprove" the rules given. This means that sometimes you are dead wrong and lose a lot of money.

As a sidenote if you play it right such losses can be sunk to someone else. For instance, through loaning money from a bank or getting a pension fund or something else to back you - if you make a big profit you get the bonus and the big salary - if you lose big you don't get the bonus but you are not stuck with losses either.

So when they claim that the market adjusts they usually rely on governements or similar to back them up.

What scenarios would require martial law?

food riots, like were actually quite common across the world just before the great recession?

During and after as well depending on where on the globe.

Fun stuff that relates to both the two above, markets & food riots, was during the great depression the starving masses didn't have enough money, so lots of farmers went't bankrupt because none would buy their food.
Yupp, another example of the buyer setting the prices. Starving poor people don't set prices high enough so it's better not to produce food to them. Now if the market really did adjust like people claim it would be then predicted that if those starving masses had the decensy to die off in huge numbers than the market would adjust accordingly to price & demand...
Fortunately for them the social contract was stronger back then and the gov did what it did.

Which is why you should never let markets run themselves without regulation, checks and balances.

[Blayne]

The funny thing about martial law and food riots, there seems to be a 50-50 chance that it backfires and the government gets toppled. Like what we saw in Egypt when you had a lot of unemployed young people in on the problem as well.

[Spoonist]

The funny thing about martial law and food riots, there seems to be a 50-50 chance that it backfires and the government gets toppled. Like what we saw in Egypt when you had a lot of unemployed young people in on the problem as well.

This does not follow.
50-50 is flawed.
If a food shortage results in a riot it has already backfired.
Give examples of govs who got toppled because of food riots and not of other causes.
Egypt did not go through food riots. It was an anti-corruption and pro-democracy movement.

[Blayne]

Which got was partially because of the rising cost of food?

http://www.thenewage.co.za/8894-1007-53 ... b_Analysts

Egyptians have long shared the grievances that drove Tunisians to revolt. Unemployment, low wages and sky-rocketing food prices have all contributed to the rumbling wave of popular discontent, strikes and demonstrations

I'm presuming "food riots" to be a short hand for the above, which seems to have some basis. Though the "food riot" bit isn't really the point, any large riot period that has gained a certain critical mass threatens government stability regardless of the cause when the government actively tries to suppress it with excessive violence.

Because if you have a large riot of tens of thousands of people, over long standing social and economic problems that aren't going away and the government cracks down on it, at some point it just gets larger and more radical as you solidify and unify populace discontent against you as a result.

50-50 is just meant to mean that when we're looking at the riots we discussing here as a result of chronic resource shortages and a careening economy, there's a good chance martial law will just make things worse unless your willing to use overwhelming force and quickly.

[Simon_Jester]

The funny thing about martial law and food riots, there seems to be a 50-50 chance that it backfires and the government gets toppled. Like what we saw in Egypt when you had a lot of unemployed young people in on the problem as well.

This does not follow.
50-50 is flawed.
If a food shortage results in a riot it has already backfired.
Give examples of govs who got toppled because of food riots and not of other causes.
Egypt did not go through food riots. It was an anti-corruption and pro-democracy movement.

Food shortages are infamously associated with revolutions. Not every revolution is associated with a food shortage, and not every food shortage leads to a revolution, but food shortages make political unrest much, much worse.

The French and Russian revolutions are both excellent examples of this- an explosion in the price of bread coincided with the revolution of 1789, and was the proximate cause of some of the great events of the revolution, such as the Women's March on Versailles. The Russian revolution occured in the context of the collapsing Russian economy and a long string of military failures in World War One- but the lack of stable, reliable food supply contributed; not for nothing did Lenin conquer Russia on the slogan of "Peace, Land, Bread."

Did the revolutions happen "because of food riots?" Not necessarily. But saying the French Revolution occurred "because of food riots" may be little less valid than saying it happened "because of pro-democracy political sentiment." Food riots got a lot of people angry, afraid for their lives, and into the streets. You need that for a revolution to work.

Now, arbitrarily slapping a number like 50/50 on that is pointless. But it's still significant, governments do run a real risk if they allow the country's food supply to become unstable. If they're blamed for mass starvation, they're very likely to get thrown out and replaced by a government that feeds people. People will put up with the loss of civil liberties, the jailing of dissidents, defeats on the battlefield... any of them, because you can live through those. You can't live through a long famine.

[Spoonist]

Ah, agreed and conceded to both of you re food riots. I think I was downplaying the starving part as sympton of the problem, while you are quite right that it aggravates it.

[Broomstick]

That only works in affluent suburbs. Crowding the wealthy (relatively speaking) into highrise boxes doesn't seem to cause social problems. Crowding the poor into highrise boxes, even those a mere 4-5 stories tall, does, as proven by the disastrous housing projects in the US in the 1960's and 1970's, leading to most major cities tearing a lot of those same projects down in the 1990's and early 2000's

Broomy, you could greatly concentrate housing in modern America just by making the transition from single-family suburban homes on big lots toward three-story rowhouses. That's really all that would be necessary to shift the paradigm from a uniform blob of suburbs into 'microcity' nuclei.

You are discounting the cultural problems involved. Americans highly value the single-family residence with a lot around it. It's a status symbol. Renting is for poor people. Living without your own yard is for poor people. Granted, the condo crowd somewhat swims against the tide on that, but owning a single-family home is still a brass ring in the US.

HOW are you going to convince Americans to give up the “American Dream” of a family home, a lot, and a white picket fence around it all?

Also, crowded public housing is mostly problematic when all the inhabitants are poor. If we cared to fix this it would not be that hard- there's plenty of room for housing that's affordable on middle and upper working-class salaries (30 to 50 thousand a year) which can be mixed with modest housing subsidies to make it affordable at the low end.

Again, HOW are you going to convince Americans to rub shoulders with their social/economic inferiors? Sure, the physical aspects of building 3-story rowhouses are no problem, the problem is the social barriers.

It's not unfixable- but it requires an outside force to fix it; the housing market won't do the job because it's not on the radar for capitalism. Indeed, the housing market prefers to segregate people strongly by income, into categories like 'filthy rich,' 'dirt poor,' and several shades in between. Breaking up that segregation is very much possible, given the desire and willingness to organize it.

HOW are you going to generate that desire? WHAT “outside force”? Are you going to coerce this change at the point of a gun?

just a side note - I've come across some discussion about suburban infill and densificaton that notes that older people seem to prefer living in a denser pattern then young familys. The babyboomers are retiring, have no kids in the house any more and are getting to the point where having close neighbours feels like a nice thing.

It's an intresting social thesis in isolation, but it ties in intrestingly with the stuff in this thread - we might be seeing grey haired new centers (villages) with relatively dense pops across a carpet of suburbia, with new rngs of townhouses and affulent apartment blocks spreading out from around big city centers.

The pattern of giving up the single-family residence after the children are grown and gone isn't entirely new – the much older pattern was for the parents to leave the large main family home when the grandkids arrived and move to a small, nearby residence on the property to be close to family but allow everyone some privacy. An alternative to that is the “mother-in-law” apartment, a semi-detacted few rooms attached to the main house (my own father is living in just such an arrangement).

There are also the “senior residence” and “assisted living” arrangements, which combine denser housing for senior citizens along with shuttle bus service for those who no longer drive, or choose not to. The larger problem is, however, that these are not as a rule charitable institutions. They're only open to the upper-middle class and above. All too many poor seniors, and there are a lot of poor old folks, live in deteriorating, sub-standard conditions. In Chicago – and presumably other locations – there were senior-only public housing projects and while they had some problems they never became the cesspits that the more general projects became. No doubt this is due in part to the fact that even elderly crooks tend to become less anti-social as they age. Old folks can commit crimes but it's not a common activity for that demographic. That still stratified the elderly into poor and rich communities.

I'm of the opinion that it's still likely not an insurmountable problem. We know that there are alternative technologies, we know there's still massive scope for shifting away from oil-intensive transportation and manufacturing, and we don't know what technology still lies in store. Give the market plenty of flexibility to adapt to the problem, subsidize research, and be prepared to implement martial law and ration food if you absolutely have to.

I'm having trouble with the notion that peak oil is going to result in martial law and food rationing in the first world. Sure, not impossible, but places like Europe and the US have nowhere near the population density of, say, African nations where famine is still present. There might be localized problems – if the water ever stops flowing to Las Vegas, for example, I could envision riots before the more sensible types pull up stakes and move elsewhere – but those would be transient problems.

Food rationing? More like food distribution. In actual fact, such a system is already in place in the US, it's called “food stamps” or more accurately EBT, which is essentially a food ration card in its present form. Instead of having a separate government infrastructure for distribution, though, it utilizes the private systems already in place. It is, in fact, as much, if not more, an agricultural subsidy as a feed the poor system. It keeps food prices from crashing during periods when many can't afford to buy food, and as a pleasant side effect keeps the poor fed. In some cases, fed to the point of corpulence. It also keeps the farmers, transporters, and grocers in business. A fuckton of infrastructure and government would have to entirely collapse before that system breaks down into food riots. As transportation costs rise the government could increase the monthly allotment. Transportation vehicles could convert to biodiesel or even ethanol, and systems that run on natural gas have been around since the early 20th Century. If we really had to we could go back to burning coal and steam to run the railroads.

There has also been a movement in recent years both to utilize empty lots in cities for gardens, and gardening out in suburbia. A substantial amount of food can be grown in a very small space in much of North America, which decreases the food insecurity in a population. Many municipalities are relaxing laws that, until recently, prevented keeping of small livestock like chickens, rabbits, and goats. For all that agribusiness has centralized in the US there is a counter movement towards decentralization, local production, and individual control.

Short of being unable to farm at all, places like North America are not going to deteriorate to the point of government destabilizing food riots. Circumstances here are very different than in some of the nations where food riots recently occurred, and I strongly suspect that if you look into the situation more deeply food issues weren't the only trigger for the riots.

[Zaune]

You are discounting the cultural problems involved. Americans highly value the single-family residence with a lot around it. It's a status symbol. Renting is for poor people. Living without your own yard is for poor people. Granted, the condo crowd somewhat swims against the tide on that, but owning a single-family home is still a brass ring in the US.

HOW are you going to convince Americans to give up the “American Dream” of a family home, a lot, and a white picket fence around it all?

Culture can change, and surprisingly quickly, once the benefits of the old ideal cease to outweigh the drawbacks. Petrol prices aren't likely to go down any time soon and it takes a hell of a lot of valour minus discretion to take out a mortagage in today's climate, and white-picket-fence suburban idyll was never all it was cracked up to be anyway. I should know, I spent my whole adult life trying to get away from it.

[Simon_Jester]

You are discounting the cultural problems involved. Americans highly value the single-family residence with a lot around it. It's a status symbol. Renting is for poor people. Living without your own yard is for poor people. Granted, the condo crowd somewhat swims against the tide on that, but owning a single-family home is still a brass ring in the US.

HOW are you going to convince Americans to give up the “American Dream” of a family home, a lot, and a white picket fence around it all?

Broomstick? I think this is going to evolve over time- or at least that it might, given fifty years' time. I'm not sure how attitudes about homeownership among my own generation are going to evolve, but I ask you to at least consider that maybe you shouldn't be sure either.

A changing sense of the economically possible, a changing definition of "normal," changing ability to afford single family houses with a big yard... the context is changing. The "American Dream" of single family suburban home ownership didn't even exist until the late 1940s in anything like its current form. You could argue that it evolved out of things as blatantly circumstantial and artificial as the postwar housing shortage and government subsidy programs for veterans trying to buy homes.

It's not a permanent eternal truth the way "people breathe oxygen" is. And I think that it will change, simply because the existing economic order is very unfriendly to the majority of people under forty or fifty trying to buy their own large houses. Growth in house prices have decisively outpaced per capita income, and the recession didn't really fix that as far as I can tell.

Also, crowded public housing is mostly problematic when all the inhabitants are poor. If we cared to fix this it would not be that hard- there's plenty of room for housing that's affordable on middle and upper working-class salaries (30 to 50 thousand a year) which can be mixed with modest housing subsidies to make it affordable at the low end.

Again, HOW are you going to convince Americans to rub shoulders with their social/economic inferiors? Sure, the physical aspects of building 3-story rowhouses are no problem, the problem is the social barriers.

Since a growing fraction of the American people are in this "poor" category and are honestly not going to be able to afford big single-family homes, except on ridiculous loan terms of the sort that triggered the subprime mortgage bubble... so what? People already do live in rowhouses in America, you know- and there are certainly people out there who'd rather live in a rowhouse with an upkeep of 1200 dollars a month than in a free-standing building with an upkeep of 1500 dollars a month.

It's not unfixable- but it requires an outside force to fix it; the housing market won't do the job because it's not on the radar for capitalism. Indeed, the housing market prefers to segregate people strongly by income, into categories like 'filthy rich,' 'dirt poor,' and several shades in between. Breaking up that segregation is very much possible, given the desire and willingness to organize it.

HOW are you going to generate that desire? WHAT “outside force”? Are you going to coerce this change at the point of a gun?

Would you kindly calm down?

Look, I have two separate points here.

One is that housing patterns can change in response to a changing economic and social climate. That already happened in the 20th century to give us the modern American fondness for single family homes. If the conditions that made that fondness possible (cheap fuel, rising family incomes, access to credit often subsidized by the state or the banks) go away, the fondness is going to go away too. People can learn lessons from things like the mortgage bubble. Even polling people about their expectations right now won't tell you how they feel in twenty years.

The other point is that I'm pointing to the very sharp, almost caste-like segregation by income we have in America and saying "we can fix this if we want to." It's not foreordained, it's not a divine commandment. We could subsidize housing among the poor so that people currently without jobs can live among people who at least have them, so that the bottom 10% of the income distribution aren't all stuck in the same little bits of real estate fighting each other and pulling each other down like crabs in a bucket.

Getting all all-capsy at me about WHERE we are going to find the desire to change this is kind of pointless. I don't actually know- the grandchild of the Occupy Wall Street movement might do it; anticapitalism is more politically acceptable among the young and dispossessed than it has been in some time. Is that just youth radicalism being the default state? Maybe. But again, I don't think we should assume that present conditions will continue indefinitely, even if they managed to hang around for several decades in the past.

We always knew the 21st century was going to be different than the 20th. We are only just beginning to find out how.

There has also been a movement in recent years both to utilize empty lots in cities for gardens, and gardening out in suburbia. A substantial amount of food can be grown in a very small space in much of North America, which decreases the food insecurity in a population. Many municipalities are relaxing laws that, until recently, prevented keeping of small livestock like chickens, rabbits, and goats. For all that agribusiness has centralized in the US there is a counter movement towards decentralization, local production, and individual control.

I have the sudden image of our "solving" three problems in one- the food shortages, the systematic unemployment, and the highly dispersed population- by turning all those big spacious backyards into potato plots; potatoes have the great virtue of being something you can grow a lot of on a really small space.

No, I'm not very serious, please don't scream at me.

[amigocabal]

And why would not the invisible hand of market not know?

If we have a common space, of limited size and value.

And there are 15 of us with our own flocks of sheep, and we all decide to do what is in our economic best interest to simply let the sheep get fat and eat all of the good grass.

Then we run out of grass, it is true that over there on that other hill there's more grass, but its brown grass and it doesn't give as much nutrients, going going there and back is very strenuous the weaker sheep slowly starve and die to health complications as they can't compete with the other sheep of our own flock, no less than the dozen other sheep herders and their flocks.

The invisible hand of the LORD dictated that each sheep should graze to his content, for did the LORD not giveth the land to be grazed? And grazed it was, and so on, and so forth until all the grass was gone.

True some herders made good money, and were prudent and invested in new grass, replacement grass, but it doesnt grow as fast, it doesn't give as much nutrients than even the brown grass next door, it doesn't even support all of the sheep in his own flock; dare not speaketh of the sheep in the other herds!

And so before the season was out 3 out of 4 sheep had starved in all herdes, the prudent herders provided their new type of grass.... for a price, the price that was fairly worth what the purchaser would pay for it, and pay dearly they did, until the other herders, the ones that had nothing left to hold dearly thus had nothing to sell were all that remained.

But they were the 12 of the 15 herders, and they got angry and wraithful at their lot in life, "It's not fair!" they cried out to the LORD, why the 3/15 should have the grass for their sheep, while the 12/15 loss even their paltry remaining sheep?

But the LORD was silent, for he did not exist. And the 13/15 grew angry, and hanged the 3/15, and took their grass that they had stockpiled and hoarded and refused to sell before it was too late.

What is the moral of this story?

If something is free, people will take as much as it as they can. There is little incentive to conserve what is free.

[amigocabal]

Culture can change, and surprisingly quickly, once the benefits of the old ideal cease to outweigh the drawbacks. Petrol prices aren't likely to go down any time soon and it takes a hell of a lot of valour minus discretion to take out a mortagage in today's climate, and white-picket-fence suburban idyll was never all it was cracked up to be anyway. I should know, I spent my whole adult life trying to get away from it.

One nitpick.

In the summer of 2008, a lot of people were saying that petrol prices were not going down soon. And yet, people lost money betting that petrol prices will only drop by one-third (instead of two-thirds like what actually happened)

Fun stuff that relates to both the two above, markets & food riots, was during the great depression the starving masses didn't have enough money, so lots of farmers went't bankrupt because none would buy their food.
Yupp, another example of the buyer setting the prices. Starving poor people don't set prices high enough so it's better not to produce food to them. Now if the market really did adjust like people claim it would be then predicted that if those starving masses had the decensy to die off in huge numbers than the market would adjust accordingly to price & demand...
Fortunately for them the social contract was stronger back then and the gov did what it did.

Which is why you should never let markets run themselves without regulation, checks and balances.

If I remember correctly, some governments, like the U.S., have agricultural price support programs. In fact, the government buys food and destroys it to keep food prices from falling too low.

How would such "checks and balances" helped those starving masses?

[Blayne]

If something is free, people will take as much as it as they can. There is little incentive to conserve what is free.

Which is the point, they each individually did what they felt was in their rational economic best interest; result? Death.

[Zaune]

One nitpick.

In the summer of 2008, a lot of people were saying that petrol prices were not going down soon. And yet, people lost money betting that petrol prices will only drop by one-third (instead of two-thirds like what actually happened)

Fair point, but barring a major breakthrough in biofuel technology, the long-term trend is only going in one direction.

[Guardsman Bass]

Fun stuff that relates to both the two above, markets & food riots, was during the great depression the starving masses didn't have enough money, so lots of farmers went't bankrupt because none would buy their food.

Farmers didn't go bankrupt because of that. They went bankrupt (in the US) because of the ecological disaster that was the "Dust Bowl", and because crop prices dropped so low that most farmers were selling their crops at a loss.

Now if the market really did adjust like people claim it would be then predicted that if those starving masses had the decensy to die off in huge numbers than the market would adjust accordingly to price & demand...

No, it would be predicted that tons of farmers, and particularly farmers on less productive lands, would go bankrupt and have to move. Those that stay afloat would be those farmers who could either adjust to make a profit at the lower price levels, or who would last long enough for prices to rise again once all the bankrupt farmers ending their farming caused the total amount of crops being sold to drop off.

The government's response to the collapse in prices was pretty perverse, by the way. They decided that the problem was that prices were too low, so they deliberately undermined production to jack food prices up. In the middle of a depression, with millions of people un-employed and millions more reduced to poverty.

You are discounting the cultural problems involved. Americans highly value the single-family residence with a lot around it. It's a status symbol. Renting is for poor people. Living without your own yard is for poor people. Granted, the condo crowd somewhat swims against the tide on that, but owning a single-family home is still a brass ring in the US.

HOW are you going to convince Americans to give up the “American Dream” of a family home, a lot, and a white picket fence around it all?

We don't need to "convince" them to give that up. The economics of higher transportation costs will do that for us, with people moving into denser neighborhoods when they can't afford the gas costs of living in a standard suburban or exurban set-up. Besides, those don't necessarily mean that "single-family" homes are gone - just that they'll be built in denser developments, like row houses and more traditional suburban neighborhoods (look at Georgetown for an example of what I'm talking about).

Fair point, but barring a major breakthrough in biofuel technology, the long-term trend is only going in one direction.

What kinds of biofuels are we talking about? Corn ethanol currently depends on subsidies in the US, but that might change with higher gas prices. We could probably import a lot of sugarcane-derived ethanol for cheaper from places like Brazil, if it weren't for tariff barriers.

It's not that I think those could completely replace oil (particularly with the land requirements), but they could serve as a fuel source for situations where you absolutely have to have liquid fuels.

[Surlethe]

Speaking of farmers in the Depression, as a rule of thumb, about half of FDR's policies worked brilliantly (bank holiday, go off gold, devalue the dollar, etc.) and half did more damage than good (cartelization, unionization, buying food and destroying it to drive up prices). The administration was correct in its assessment that the proximate problem was falling prices (in fact, falling nominal income), and they tried a lot of things to fix it. The monetary policy worked, the regulatory policy didn't. (Usual disclaimer about tentative claims, yadda yadda yadda.)

[Bakustra]

Glass-Steagall didn't work?

[Surlethe]

Was it passed to try to raise the price level?

[Broomstick]

You are discounting the cultural problems involved. Americans highly value the single-family residence with a lot around it. It's a status symbol. Renting is for poor people. Living without your own yard is for poor people. Granted, the condo crowd somewhat swims against the tide on that, but owning a single-family home is still a brass ring in the US.

HOW are you going to convince Americans to give up the “American Dream” of a family home, a lot, and a white picket fence around it all?

Broomstick? I think this is going to evolve over time- or at least that it might, given fifty years' time. I'm not sure how attitudes about homeownership among my own generation are going to evolve, but I ask you to at least consider that maybe you shouldn't be sure either.

Of course I'm not certain, but I am considering history. I mean, it's possible in the future Spanish will become the de facto language of the US, there's no regulatory bar to it (at least on the national level), but historically most of the US has been English speaking and betting on continued English dominance isn't irrational.

True, the single-family suburban house dream was largely a post-WWII meme, but prior to that the ideal was owning a family farm, which goes back hundreds of years to initial colonization where land ownership was held out as a carrot to people who wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of acquiring any substantial amount of land in Europe.

Sure, cultural values can change, but the cultural value of land ownership is, in the US, nearly 500 years old. That's a lot of momentum.

Since a growing fraction of the American people are in this "poor" category and are honestly not going to be able to afford big single-family homes, except on ridiculous loan terms of the sort that triggered the subprime mortgage bubble... so what? People already do live in rowhouses in America, you know- and there are certainly people out there who'd rather live in a rowhouse with an upkeep of 1200 dollars a month than in a free-standing building with an upkeep of 1500 dollars a month.

While that is true (myself being one of them) they are a distinct minority at present. A lot of Americans will do without many other things in order to have that free-standing building, leading to the term “house poor” meaning they have a big house but can't afford furniture to put in it.

The other point is that I'm pointing to the very sharp, almost caste-like segregation by income we have in America and saying "we can fix this if we want to." It's not foreordained, it's not a divine commandment.

Sure, it's fixable, but I question if there's the social will to do so. Segregation by income is as long standing as segregation by race in the US.

We could subsidize housing among the poor so that people currently without jobs can live among people who at least have them, so that the bottom 10% of the income distribution aren't all stuck in the same little bits of real estate fighting each other and pulling each other down like crabs in a bucket.

We could but to date that hasn't happened. With the current “the poor deserve to be poor, they bring it on themselves” mentality, the view that the poor are either criminals or just a hair above criminals, I don't see that changing for at least a generation no matter how many Americans fall out of the middle class. Of course, I'd be deliriously happy to be proved wrong on that, I just don't expect to be proven wrong.

There has also been a movement in recent years both to utilize empty lots in cities for gardens, and gardening out in suburbia. A substantial amount of food can be grown in a very small space in much of North America, which decreases the food insecurity in a population. Many municipalities are relaxing laws that, until recently, prevented keeping of small livestock like chickens, rabbits, and goats. For all that agribusiness has centralized in the US there is a counter movement towards decentralization, local production, and individual control.

I have the sudden image of our "solving" three problems in one- the food shortages, the systematic unemployment, and the highly dispersed population- by turning all those big spacious backyards into potato plots; potatoes have the great virtue of being something you can grow a lot of on a really small space.

No, I'm not very serious, please don't scream at me.

I'm totally on board with that concept – remember, I'm the one with the backyard mini-farm who used to also have a year-round hydroponics set up

You are discounting the cultural problems involved. Americans highly value the single-family residence with a lot around it. It's a status symbol. Renting is for poor people. Living without your own yard is for poor people. Granted, the condo crowd somewhat swims against the tide on that, but owning a single-family home is still a brass ring in the US.

HOW are you going to convince Americans to give up the “American Dream” of a family home, a lot, and a white picket fence around it all?

We don't need to "convince" them to give that up. The economics of higher transportation costs will do that for us, with people moving into denser neighborhoods when they can't afford the gas costs of living in a standard suburban or exurban set-up. Besides, those don't necessarily mean that "single-family" homes are gone - just that they'll be built in denser developments, like row houses and more traditional suburban neighborhoods (look at Georgetown for an example of what I'm talking about).

The folks that will bankrupt themselves attempting to purchase a single-family home on a lot will never regard an urban row house as sufficient substitute. We may have to simply wait for all those old farts to die off. In the US “single-family home” means stand-alone building on a separate lot. Anything in any way connected to anything else is a “multi-occupany building” or some variant of the term.

Fair point, but barring a major breakthrough in biofuel technology, the long-term trend is only going in one direction.

What kinds of biofuels are we talking about? Corn ethanol currently depends on subsidies in the US, but that might change with higher gas prices. We could probably import a lot of sugarcane-derived ethanol for cheaper from places like Brazil, if it weren't for tariff barriers.

It's not that I think those could completely replace oil (particularly with the land requirements), but they could serve as a fuel source for situations where you absolutely have to have liquid fuels.

You don't need liquid fuels – we've had perfectly adequate natural-gas driven vehicles for decades. And the already existing landfills produce methane on their own.

No one thing is going to replace petroleum... and that's a good thing, because part of the world's current problems stem from being just too damn dependent on one particular energy source for so much.

[Bakustra]

Was it passed to try to raise the price level?

That wasn't exactly clear from your post, since the Wagner Act wasn't primarily aimed at raising prices, either, but at ensuring broader effects of recovery through unionization. So I don't think that unionization can be treated as a failure to raise prices because the roots of the NLRB lay in the idea unions as a good thing in and of themselves. In other words, if Wagner was a failure, so was Glass-Steagall.

[Surlethe]

I am pretty sure that the reason FDR tried to encourage unionization was to increase the price of labor, i.e., wages. (Edit: Oh, and I'm sure unionization did raise prices, but was destructive to the broader goal of full employment and economic recovery.) Anyway, we're on a tangent here, so let's wrap it up. You can have the last word.

[Guardsman Bass]

The folks that will bankrupt themselves attempting to purchase a single-family home on a lot will never regard an urban row house as sufficient substitute. We may have to simply wait for all those old farts to die off. In the US “single-family home” means stand-alone building on a separate lot. Anything in any way connected to anything else is a “multi-occupany building” or some variant of the term.

If it's a choice between that or something worse because of their budget, they'll choose it. It doesn't matter that they'd rather have the exurban stand-alone house - I'd much prefer to live in a mansion, but I'll make do with the house I can afford (or borrow money to afford).

[Pendleton]

John Michael Greer addresses the flaws in the peak oil camp. Thought this relevant.