All Dressed-Up, But Nowhere to Go...

I just swiped this story from Urban Survival: China set to build a "truly awesome" new airport in Beijing.

"The scale is truly awesome," he said in an interview with Hong Kong's Sunday Morning Post. "Hong Kong airport is currently the biggest of its kind. But that will be eclipsed by Beijing."

China is already building the longest bridge in the world, from Ningbo to Shanghai, the biggest dam, at the Three Gorges, and a contender for the highest building, also in Shanghai.

I have to wonder, exactly what kind of future are they envisioning? One that involves an expansion of air travel...!?! Yes, they are awash in money...money which needs to be put to work employing people. So perhaps this is just part of their own version of our depression-era WPA projects. But certainly this money would be better spent upgrading and cleaning-up their utilities infrastructure or creating residential housing or something.

It occurs to me that China's leaders, like most of the people in the world, seem to operate under the unquestioned assumption that human progress is somehow a "given"...that it's a sustainable, "upward and onward", ever-building movement. As such, they appear to view the impending economic crisis in the world is nothing more than a shift of fortunes toward an even larger explosion of economic and consumptive growth, this time with China at the helm.

But this cannot be.

The growth of enterprise that culminated in the modern emergence and economic dominance of the United States was a special occurance, and the result of very special conditions. Its roots go as far back as the 14th Century, predicated on the European "discovery" that the North American and South American continents held vast supplies of untapped resources--chief among them gold and silver--all just waiting patiently for a dynamic new racial-stock to sieze them and fully exploit them. The resulting European "gold rush" into South and Central America resulted in an almost complete cultural decimation of the native populations (although evidence suggests these civilizations were already past their energetic prime). But it also created a torrential gush of precious metals into Spain and Portugal initially, and on through to the rest of European civilization (c.f. The History of Money by Jack Weatherford).

Interestingly, this "liquidity explosion" parallels the current explosion of Dollar-printing by the Federal Reserve, with the possible difference being that "precious metals" are real while "Dollars" are only illusory. But nevertheless, both then and now, with the spigots of money turned on full-blast, an explosion of human Enterprise had been ignited.

But then something even more unusual happened. This already phenomenal rise went absolutely parabolic with the "discovery" of fossil fuels, which existed in seemingly abundant supply and contained unparalleled potential energy. To cut to the chase: thus was born our Modern Industrial Age, with its further development into the Age of Technology.

But what is important to realize is that it was only because of this one-two punch of resource exploitation that our world was propelled toward its apogee of "modern progress". Absent the discovery of yet another new resource, we've already passed that apogee and begun our decent. And there is are no known resources which will adequately meet these needs (I'm not willing to entertain the nuclear fusion argument...).

China is an old country, certainly, and is already filled to the brim with people. Their modern economic growth has been the result of nothing other than their success at leveraging the last few bucks out of the Industrial revolution. What China has to its credit is cheap labor. That's the "resource" they've efficiently exploited during this last gasp of Industrialism. But they won't have the fossil-fuels needed to support the future they seem to be building toward. In fact they won't even have the "resource of money" they'd need, since the Dollar explosion is already fizzling and its not going to be replaced by the Euro or Yuan (and there is certainly not enough gold in the world to fund their future). The Chinese are undoubtedly having fun getting all dressed up, but they've really got nowhere to go....