aedens: What the blothering heck are you talking about? Nothing you post ever seems to make sense. Is English, like, your first language? Syntax? wtf mate?
Higgenbotham and Trevor - this is an interesting discussion, but you two have yet to put your finger on the primary physical mechanism behind the centuries-long economic trends you're discussing. It's actually pretty simple when you think about it. The root of these phenomena is *energy*.
Sorry if this is a bit long! But after lurking on this forum for quite a long time, I respect your intelligence and I'd like to bring you two over to my point of view. It's pretty simple after you see things from a wide enough perspective. If you're going to try to understand human history from a centuries-long planetary perspective, look at the world as an alien might - look at the heat signatures, the energy usage, and the energy sources, and think about the effects of that energy usage on the biosphere.
For a civillization to increase in size and complexity - that is, for its economy to grow - takes energy. Entropy being what it is and energy being finite, the only way to release energy is to absorb it from the elements or burn fuel. For most of human history people burned what biomass grew in their area, used animals that survived off of that biomass ("burning" it to run their metabolisms), or else used their own muscles, which of course survived off of that local biomass, too. And so that was how things stood for nearly the entirety of human history - your civilization could only grow as big, complex, and organized as the local biospheres it spanned allowed it to. Sometimes empires could unite many broad areas under a 'single' flag, but empires obey the laws of entropy, too - they always eventually run down and consume themselves over time, and they can only get so big.
But! In late 18th-century England, having used up all the easily-available firewood resources, some among the aristocracy realized they'd have to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Usually when humans exhaust a resource, they switch to a more marginal or less desirable resource to fill the same needs, and this is what coal was. Since it was dirtier and harder to come by than firewood, it had been used preindustrially only sparingly, by those with no other choice, then discarded when better options became available again. But as the large-scale deforestation caused by the expansion of English (and Western) society and Empire forced a broad switch to coal, people, educated in the burgeoning scientific tradition, began to realize that you could burn coal not just for heat but for *steam*, which could then be used to do other useful work.
So man created machine. But remember - the key thing about a machine is that it runs by burning a fuel source! The ONLY reason western economies expanded so drastically during each of the pulses mentioned above is that they increased the amount of joules they were harvesting from burning fuel. Specifically, fossil fuels. The first-phase industrial revolution ran off coal and wood. The economy got bigger because we burned shit! That is the whole phenomena. The second phase ran off of coal and then switched definitively to oil. The third phase has always been entirely dependent on oil, and by now the productivity gains of that third innovation wave are largely realized already, so there's no further revolutions waiting to save us.
Now, oil isn't made of dinosaurs at all. It's made of algae. During two specific period of global warming millions of years ago, huge patches of algae accumulated over centuries in the wide, shallow river delta areas that persisted over the hot planet. When those algae patches died off and the sea levels fell again, their microbial bodies were buried and compressed by heat and earth for millions of years. Each algae cell contains an oil vacuole as an energy storage system; it creates this oil by harvesting sunlight and biochemically 'burning' nitrogen sources like animal waste. Over millions of years underground everything is pressed out but the oil, which remains in pockets. If you look at the big global oil pockets, notice that they're often near the big river deltas or bodies of water. That's because when those deltas were much higher and the seas penetrated hundreds of miles further inland, those areas were shallow seas filled with miles and miles of algae, creating and storing energy by absorbing sunlight and 'burning' the biochemical waste in the water runoff of an entire continent. This is last is true of at least the Texas / Gulf of Mexico patches and the Persian Gulf oil patches. But all the oil deposits are the remains of cynobacteria or algae.
And they're finite. Those animals only stored so much energy, and we've already used up most of it just growing to our current size of civilization.
So we have a problem - we're running out of oil, and there's really no replacement. That's why the economy is slowing down and that's why it'll keep slowing down no matter what. Modern economies are like fire. They can exist because they burn fuel, but the fuel is running out, so the economies have to run down.
If you haven't had a chance to already, look up Hubert Peak theory and peak oil in general. Global peak oil hit in 2008, according to most scientific, corporate, and military studies, including those by the oil supermajors themselves. Ever since then, the total amount of energy available from fossil fuels has been constantly going down.
Since 2008 we've been stagnating, barely. Bernanke made a big difference by printing so much money, but really the thing that has kept the economy even as afloat as it's been has been that we made a huge investment in more marginal sources of fossil fuels, like offshore drilling, bioethanol, methane gas fracking, mountaintop removal coal mining, tar sands drilling, and similar extreme energy sources. For the most part, these sources barely break even in terms of energy gained per unit energy spent, so the economic stimulus we've managed because of them is definitely illusory. The other thing that kept the economy somewhat afloat this year is that they dramatically ramped up oil production in Saudi Arabia well beyond the sustainable output of those major fields. That's why gas prices went down this summer! That means that all of the major Saudi oil fields - which is where a huge percentage of US and world oil comes from - are going to be damaged, and will deplete even faster in the years ahead. They're basically sucking the oil out with the hugest straw they can find, as fast as they can, to keep everyone quiescent and hypnotized for a few more years. But that means it'll run out, and VERY soon.
In 2008 the human race used more energy than it will ever have available again. We'll never be able to produce and burn fossil fuels at that rate again, because we've already used up most of what's there! Every year we will inexorably have fewer megajoules of energy to burn and thus our economy will inexorably shrivel. What energy we can find will be harder to get, more dangerous, and more expensive, which will further eat into the economy. Forever.
Notice that the Romney campaign has only one real proposal to get the economy going again - lifting all environmental restrictions on dirty energy and allowing fracking/drilling in protected national parks. That's all they've got. There's not much else you can do to 'stimulate' an economy like we've got other than pump in more dirty fuel to give it another hit. If/when Romney steals the election this fact will become extremely stark...
The only way out of this is to fundamentally restructure civilization so that it does not depend on indefinite growth. Doing that is way harder than going to the moon was, especially as the climate changes around our heads, so we will most likely fail. We can never, ever, grow the economy again the way we did before peak oil hit, because we just don't have the energy anymore. Most likely what will happen is that all the overlapping systems of civilization will progressively fail over a period of several years to a couple of decades. Get ready folks!
So yeah, there will be a dark age, but it isn't caused by cycles exactly. It's just because the period of human history where we had hugenourmous amounts of energy available for growth is finite, capped on either end, and now it's about to be over. On, burn it up, off. The idea of a dark age implies that there can be another renaissance after - but if there can be, it won't look anything like the industrial civillization we've all known. It'll have to subsist off of local biomass, but given the likelihood that we're in the midst of an abrupt climate shift, in a lot of places there might not be much biomass to live off of anyway.
Anyway have a nice days guys lol!
