Tag Archives: future

We are at an important juncture as a global society: either we immediately prioritize a new trajectory focused on creating a positive, functional future or — by continuing the consumptive, extractive, exploitative status quo — we will default into a nasty nightmare.

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Chapter 25 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below.

Here at the penultimate chapter of The Crash Course, everything we've learned comes together into a single narrow range of time we'll call the twenty-teens. 

What this chapter offers is a comprehensive view of how all of our problems are actually interrelated and need to be viewed as such, or solutions will continue to elude us.

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We may not feel prepared for what lies ahead, yet it is clearly our responsibility to help lead our children in the “right direction” as we head into the future with them. That might seem like a frighteningly impossible task, but we are obligated to try our best. It doesn’t matter how old our kids are – it is our job to guide their growth and support them through many stages of understanding. You might note that this is nothing more than what we’d be doing anyway. But if we first do the work of identifying our values and priorities, and shifting our own thinking and actions in the direction we’d like our family and loved ones to follow, we can ensure that our parenting path is aligned with the resource-challenged future that we anticipate.

If you haven’t yet read Part I of this series, please click here and take a few minutes to read it now.

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• A New Declaration
• Q1 2013 US Silver Eagle Sales Beats All Records
• Where’s the public outrage over sky-high CEO pay?
• In pictures: Syrian refugees' most important things
• Your Visions Of The Future
• U.S. Dollar: Ring-Fenced & Checkmat
• How Resource Limits Lead to Financial Collapse
• How Oil Sands Workers Use Karaoke to Cope

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That the American and global economies are being transformed by the forces of globalization, demographics, and over-indebtedness is self-evident. What is less self-evident is the impact this transformation will have on the future of work, earned income, and financial security.

The key question an increasingly vulnerable workforce is asking is: What skills will be in demand once this transition occurs?

In order to answer this question, it’s necessary to understand the macro trends that will shape the nature of employment in this new era. In our previous look at The Future of Work, we focused on the US economy’s dependence on debt as a driver of growth and found that debt saturation was correlated with declining employment. But there are many other long-term dynamics influencing the economy, and no survey of the future job market would be complete without considering these other factors.

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A new Martenson Report is ready for enrolled members.

Link The Future Has Arrived

Executive Summary

• The future has arrived.
• The “Broken Windows Theory” explains a lack of media coverage.
• Detroit is falling apart.
• Refugees are leaving urban centers.
• North Dakota’s homeless numbers are increasing.
• Food stamps use rises sharply.
• State of distress – the public vs. private battle intensifies.
• We need to change our stories.

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Last night (Tuesday, January 26th, 2010) I gave a talk to a sold-out audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The crowd was excellent, and I was thrilled to have the chance to deliver our message at this venue.

I say ‘our message’ because so many of you helped to shape the talk, and, most importantly, practically forbade me from doing anything but delivering a no-holds-barred message.  So that’s what I did.

Here are a couple of observations.  Five years ago I was delivering a version of this message in the basement community room in a local bank in Brattleboro, VT to very small audiences.  Yesterday, a half hour before the talk began, there were ~30 people waiting in a side room for a small chance at one standby ticket.

Five years ago, the audiences were all ‘of an age.’  Now they include many more younger people and represent a much broader cross section of society, beliefs, professions, and income levels.

My impression is that the tide is shifting, powerfully, and yesterday’s response proved to me that ideas matter, that people care, and that getting our collective act together is a rapidly-ascending priority for a growing group of people.  Whoever says that there’s no interest anymore in big ideas is flat-out wrong. 

So thank you to everyone that came, and, if you couldn’t make it in, I’m sorry, and I hope that we get a chance to meet soon elsewhere.  If you can make it to the Sonora event, tomorrow night (Thursday, 6-9:30), I’d love to see you there.

Below is the speech I gave (not an exact transcript, but very close).

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