The issue seems to be that the Apex Predators (largest Corporations / Governments) have out-grown (or at least, severely depleted) their ecologies (SME / middle classes of developed countries), and we're left without any of the complexity between them and the lowest levels (the proletariat, to approximate Marx, or worse still, the destroyed fragments left in Iraq, Libya or failed states and extractive colonialist behaviors): to harp about the state of global fish stocks, I see a lot of similarity between the state of the oceans and the state of modern Capitalism (as human agency is at the bottom of both of them). Being an Apex Predator is useless if you starve (and the question then becomes: the only logical reason for current behaviors is deliberate genocide; both in the oceans and in global terms; if the behavior is emergent, then you have to change the agents).
"The most immediate, dramatic, and humbling revelation flowing from the ACE modeling of macroeconomic systems is the difficulty of constructing economic agents capable of surviving over time, let alone prospering. When firms with fixed costs to cover are responsible for setting their own production and price levels, they risk insolvency. When consumers with physical requirements for food and other essentials must engage in a search process in an attempt to secure these essentials, they risk death. Every other objective pales relative to survival; it is lexicographically prior to almost every other consideration."
Barring the 0.1%, most of the system is kept going by greed, bullshit, stupidity and repetitious non-thinking, coupled with social peer pressure. Even the so-called "experts" in the field, regularly make huge business cock-ups.
Vast amounts of energy are spent in the following ways:
1. Making people want to buy products that have no intrinsic value or difference over their market contemporaries
2. Producing products that have designed obsolescence built-in to guarantee re-purchase
3. Transport that is never figured into price [shipping costs largely] which results in products being outsourced globally and transported two, three, four times.
4. Being unable to rationalize long term benefits to short / medium term projects due to shareholder's expectations on return.
And so on, and so forth.
Bottom line: the system is corrupt. The system is so corrupt and inefficient and dangerously blinkered that vast amounts of time, energy and money are wasted trying to make the boat float. People bang their heads against entry to market issues, bureaucracy and all the old barriers to entry (the 'old' being education, welfare within upbringing, social structures and so on). The problem is that the real power brokers are stuck with the same old issues, and have been for about 100 years now. "Boom and Bust" cycles are a dangerous thing when everyone has nukes; "Uplift" doesn't happen when the difference between 'socialism' (i.e. communitarian-ism) and 'Communism' (i.e. totalitarian communitarian-ism) results in enforced regime change. Corporations don't function sanely when their only rationale is 'profit > all' which necessarily results in a moral double bind in the non-Sociopathic employees, with loss of function (which is why the highest realms of CEOs are statistically much more likely to be sociopaths than in a normal population), but more damagingly, means they can only function in partnership with despotic regimes with ease (i.e. Regulation to protect anything but the profit margin is against their constitution, and so counter their aims, however much their employees may still want to not pollute etc).
The current 'solution' to the issue is Disaster Capitalism, via the IMF; I think originally to get some kind of global meta-social recognition (i.e. The "McDonald's hypothesis" - that countries with McDonald's in them never go to war, which was sadly proven wrong in the Balkans, btw) to give a framework of human experience that would preclude violence.
Now, I've seen it argued that there's no "conspiracy", there's nothing behind the scenes, there's not a separate class who are more 'in the know' than the majority. This is patently false. Governments and Corporations regularly, and with no compunction to ever not to, lie to the world. They lie to the public, their shareholders, their bosses, you name it.
The usual problem cited is that the more you attempt to educate people in reality, the less they want to know, because they either lack the cognition to process the huge amounts of data or are too lazy. People are placing a lot of faith on white knights such as Google & Facebook, and new drugs, to essentially provide those who do not naturally have high levels of social organization / 'will power / focus' with tools to do it for them, without admitting the issues to everyone. (Note: This is a misunderstanding.)
The real issue is stagnation, lack of challenge and lack of new ideas being acted on. The 1960's are labeled as a hugely disruptive and massive social change, especially within America: however, at least they were acted upon. This resulted in a massive reactionary pull back. Add to this that the average ability to process that future is diminishing year on, year out. New social media is not really new, it is merely faster, because you can't eat an Ipad. Texting your friends / updating your web of friends is exactly the same model as gossiping (hello Tweet) which means they succeed (because they are merely the old sped up into the new, time frame by time frame) but are not game changers in their own rights.
In the last 30 years, we've not seen a massive upturn in BRICs like we should, because we've been draining them dry and keeping poverty real to make i-Devices. Shall we remember how many regime changes we manufactured? (i.e., Russia going from "one man takes a gun, next man takes a clip, one man takes a gun, next man takes a clip, if a man dies with a gun, pick it up" to "Here's our new line in modern tanks that beat everything but Panzer IVs and we just made 50 times the amount you've made"... in three years. Or, we could cite the India garments trade where cotton production [subsidized to the tune of ~ $2 billion a year in the USA] is locked into product buying by the majors?
That's not Capitalism, that's state enforced mafia work. Empire at play. And people point to India and claim... "Growing economy". Yep, because call centers and garments for the West are a functioning economy. Not to mention code farming. And that's to a country with nukes - the rest are merely resources waiting to get their infrastructure and cities bombed back into the third world. If you want a hint: name a country that succeeded in the Industrial Revolution without Empire - it is called Germany, and look where the last two attempts to break out & join the club lead.
All this B$ about countries unable to get out of poverty - hint: 1.3 billion people living in the West, getting fat, and making sure their slice of the pie isn't harmed. There's 7 billion people, and the "best minds" of the "the powers that be" are coming up with gems such as "Well, Africa is a write off, we should encourage Asia to educate women and increase birth control."
And they're hungry now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L50OJ3iIkw
