Bad News Books

“Making predictions is hard, especially about the future” – attributed in various forms to Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr, a folk proverb,  and other sources

Some doom and gloom books can be interesting and informative – the sort that draw their conclusions from situations and trends in the real world, as distinct from  those that rely on  mystical prophecy, secret knowledge from space aliens or the pyramids, astrology,  numerology,  or whatever other nonsense an author might think of.  In the last few days, perhaps inspired by the things going on in the last month or so, I reread  a few from years ago. 

The late 1970s were a good time for books in the genre, and it is easy to see why.  The economy was in  an inflationary depression.   Some cities seemed to be becoming unlivable.  The Soviets were winning the cold war. Terrorists were hijacking airplanes, murdering people, and even killing athletes at the olympics.   The Vietnam war and its peace settlement had been a  total failure.  The last three elected presidents were name Johnson, Nixon, and Carter.  It was a mess.

A man named John Pugsley wrote a very popular book called The Alpha Strategy. In it he observed correctly that the dollar had lost much of its purchasing power since World War II, that government actions cause monetary  inflation, that stocks and bonds had performed badly since the late 1960s, that taxation and regulation  were harming the economy and making people’s lives worse, and that the country was in bad shape. His solution was for people to abandon investing in stocks and bonds and put their money into stockpiles of goods  - razor blades, wine, linens, hand tools, food, all sorts of things that would store well – they could consume in the future and not have to buy at inflated prices with depreciated dollars and also into stockpiles of raw commodities held for purposes of investment.  He concluded “the next decade promises to be the most turbulent decade in this century. The plunder is mounting. The die is case. The economic storms are unavoidable, and the outcome for most individuals will be the destruction of their wealth.”

Mel Tappan, who was probably the most famous of the survivalist authors,  went farther than writers such as Pugsley.  He correctly saw increased crime and terrorism, serious  inflation, the decline of the cities, the failures of government schools, the threat of nuclear war, the cold war going against the United States, risks of breakdowns of social order, the threat of a grasping and over reaching government , the decline of respect for citizens’ rights, and the general malaise in society. He decided it was too late to save the country, and  that it was  time literally to head for  the hills. (The main text of his book Tappan on Survival begins with Yeats’s famous blood-dimmed tide passage.)  His solution was to move to a small town far away from any big city, military base, or nuclear power plant, purchase a plot of land nearby,  become a self-sufficient farmer/rancher,  arm oneself appropriately, and hope that  one could avoid  or together with one’s neighbors could fend off  the gangs of looters (governmental or freelance) that  would pour out of the cities when society collapsed.  His book is full of practical advice on the skills, tools,  and attitudes one would need to make the move successfully.

Pugsley, Tappan, and others writing at the time were completely wrong about what was to come. The next decade, the 1980s, was one of remarkable peace, prosperity, and security.  The United States won the cold war. Inflation was brought under control. The economy was strong and growing. Stocks and bonds did well over the decade, while gold and silver did poorly.  There was no need to head for the hills. 

There were still people at the end of the 1980s who were afraid big trouble was coming despite the end of the cold war and the general prosperity.  James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg  correctly saw the rise of radical Islam as a geopolitical force,  the economic power and growth of Japan, problems of crime  and unrest in big cities, the looming danger from  politically correct multiculturalism, and other problems  in the world. In their 1991 book the Great Reckoning they predicted that that the United States would suffer a great depression in the 1990s and be replaced by Japan as the world’s leading economic power. They were spectacularly wrong. The 1990s were a second decade of peace, prosperity, and security with technological innovations driving a vigorous American economy.  Japan endured a lost decade of economic stagnation.

These authors and various others who wrote in the genre were not fools. Many of the things they saw as dangers were (and still are) real, and some of the things they predicted could have happened.  They were just wrong in allowing their disgust and pessimism over some  things in the country to cause them to miss or ignore things which could have led to better outcomes than those they predicted over confidently. I wonder if the danger for us now is not the reverse. The two decades since Y2K have not been a match for the 80s or 90s, but for those of us who avoided fighting in futile wars in  Iraq or Afghanistan,  didn’t lose our shirts in  one of the three big financial panics, and didn’t have our jobs or businesses outsourced overseas, things have been pretty good.  Technological advances have continued. There is no  serious foreign military threat, though the Chinese are working on it.  The country has been generally prosperous.  We may be too complacent. Forty years are a long time.  Reading these books or some like them might help correct that.  There are things to worry about, and, after all, Yogi or whoever really said it was right.