Am I alone in thinking we will all get poorer and poorer over the next few years?

[kissmyheathenass]

Most people I speak to assume this period of stagflation will soon come to an end and we will then resume 'normal life' when our salaries catch up with inflation. The only possible scenario as far as i can see is that we will all become increasingly poor as fuel costs rise (therefore heating, petrol, food in shops and everything else we take for granted today) will rise.

I am not looking to blame any one political party (they all bastards). I am just wondering if there is a magical solution to our current problems or if, as dh wants, we should buy a small-holding and become self-sufficient.

Is anyone confident that there is a way out of this?

this thread is depressing. I can't bear the thought that my children will have a worse quality of life than me

Of course it will go back. Those of you old enough, think back to the early 90s. That was really shit too. Capitalist economies work on boom & bust & have been doing so in cycles for a long time. We have a higher standard of living than human kind has ever seen. I think some of us will have to lower our standards for a while - but I don't forsee a breakdown in society coming about any time soon.

PBB, genuinly interested in how we will recover. I rememebr the 90s and even the 70s - I am THAT old!!! The 70s were bad, I remember the powercuts, 3-day weeks etc. However, we still had some manufacturing,, a smaller population to support, a less aged population, and as a nation we werent bankrupt. I think the outlokk is much worse this time round but I am open to listening .

SPB, yes it depresses me too.

Forgot to add the church to list of those I dont trust.

unfortunately postbellum i fear that those who will be forced to lower their standards are those who are already choosing between food and heating. i currently have no heating. it's ok, right now, we wear lots of layers and the weather is not dangerously cold. i'm not sure when i will have enoungh money to get oil. probably not before the better weather comes in anyway so there would be no point by then, but what happens to people who are in this situation in december? when they have people telling them to lower their standards? there was a thread yesterday discussing edwina currie's response to a woman who called a radio phone-in saying she regularly misses meals to feed her children. for many people it isn't a case of people have too high standards.

Aslo in the 70s we werent so hellbent on bailing out the EU.

IamB, I consider us lucky because we have had room to manouever financially (from Waitrose to Asda, buying and selling on ebay etc). Each time I buy the basics (butter, bread, pasta) each item is a few pennies more. Our energy bills were the same this quarter despite me makeing big changes in what I use (no more tumble-drying, heating down ect). Prices arent going to come down and we can only make a finite amount of cutbacks. So do we all starve? Or freeze? How will we work when we cant afford petrol to get there?

no man is an island.

is self sufficiency really possible? make sure you do some research!

just imagining that if you have chickens, you will need to get them vaccinated, fed (buy chicken food?), that sort of thing.

buying seeds, tools, clothes (will you grow your own cotton? Have your own sheep ? again, vets needed)

you will need drinking water, electricity or power (solar an option, but requires hefty investment).

Also, land is not cheap, is it? And you need to insure it (in case someone has an accident on your land) etc. etc. etc.

Don't mean to be negative, it used to be my fantasy to be self sufficient having read all the little house on the prairy books!

picturing you now, by a river, washing the sheets!

i agree kiss. there is only so much people can cut back.

I think there will be a massive change, fuelled by oil shortages, but I think it's a way off yet so we'll probably be okay - it's our grandchildren who'll have to deal with the very painful readjustment .

Lol Chandon, doing without the tumbledrier is bad enough. Good points re self-sufficiency tho, thanks. Dh is thinking partial self-sufficiency (sounds like an oxymoron to me) not totally self-reliant.

Bramshott, do you think its that far away? Some predict peak oil within the next few years.

Don't know the answer to when it will recover, but unless the whole globe ceases to trade, I am fairly sure it will recover.

I don't know the answer to what will happen to those in really desperate need either. I guess, the minimum safety net will drop lower. I would hate to think that anyone in this country would actually starve to death.

Whilst I don't wish poverty on anyone, we forget how far our expectations have moved. My granny was one of 13. She lived in a house with no heating - other than the stove for cooking on & had an outdoor loo. The house had 4 rooms in total - a typical 2 up 2 down. She thought they were well off, because they had running water to the kitchen - just cold of course!!!! Obviously, there was no TV, but there weren't even enough chairs for them all to sit on & only just enough crockery. All clothes were stitched & darned, handed down, re-made etc. Fairly often her diet largely consisted of potatoes. Yet, she still thought that when she was growing up she was well off, compared to others. Nowadays, that would be considered abject poverty! Somehow, I doubt we will return to that.

Even in the boom years, there were still people / families who were much, much worse off than everyone else. Yes, that group grows bigger in the down times, but solving that issue is a different matter to just a general tightening of belts (sometimes much tighter than we would like) whilst the economic downturn is weathered.

theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/a-warning-sign-for-the-world

I know its a blog but it seems very plausible to me.

PBB, you're right, we have become accustomed to far more materially and comfort-wise than our grandparents and parents. Now we are exposed to so much through the media though, I feel very angry at the bankers and politicans getting richer and richer while we are all supposed to revert to victorian living standards. I wonder if people will carry on belt-tightening or if at some point we are tipped over the edge into chaos/riots etc.

I know KMHA, but there have always been people at the top of the pyramid getting richer. Look at when the UK did have a manufacturing industry - the workers weren't the ones getting rich, it was the owners.

Nowadays, we don't have much manufacturing, so it is the financiers who appear to be doing best.

Worth remembering, that with education available to every child & all workplace legislation we have today, there has never been a better time to pick a profession & go for it.

Yes, there are cases of genuine poverty in the UK, but I don't see a widespread return to victorian living standards. The roads are still packed with cars & SUVs that cost an absolute fortune to buy & run. The high streets are still trading, ebay is turning over a fortune. The wheels are still turning. Maybe a bit slower, but they are still turning.

If I'm being hopeful, I think there will be a fairly fundamental shift from GDP being the measure of society and everyone engaged in buying from and selling to each other, to a much more ecofriendly form of living: govt/banks/investors investing in doing up housing stock so energy requirements become minimal, massively encouraging working from home for anyone remotely capable of doing so; micro power generation so a village decides how they want to be powered (energy from waste for eg) and puts it in, rather than being hostage to the energy companies.

I think this could work, and if it does work would overcome a lot of the peak oil problems. I heard Peter Head from this organisation speak at a conference and it was very compelling.

On that basis though, an ability to garden, cook and sew will be the important skills to teach children.

Given that we all have food in our bellies and a roof over our heads I'm not sure poor is a word that springs to mind.
We've all been spolit rotten and now normal service is resuming from what I can see.

I agree that the global economy will pick up, but I think many European countries (incl us) could well be in terminal decline. It's just the natural cycle of things I think. If anything , the fluke is that such a small island ended up being a) so densely populated and b) so hugely influential in global affairs.

Now I think we will just sort of fade away with a minimum of fuss ( how very British of us )

Heswall, perhaps we have been spoilt rotten. But how are we going to cope in the future? My parents cant keep their heating on and their house is freezing when the temperature drops. I really worry about them. They have no open fires or log burners so how can they keep warm while fuel costs keep rising?

I agree the global economy will pick up but not for the EU, UK or US. I think those economies are fucked. I dont mind fading away from the global arena but I do mind not being able to feed my family .

i guess we do what the rest of the world does. We live with extended family. We support our parents and they provide our childcare whilst we go overseas or to "the cities" to work.

Ok, so thats quite a big shift in the way we do things right now. I suppose I am just in the proccess of coming to terms with the fact that big changes are inevitable.

I actually don't think the US is as fucked as us tbh. They have quite a lot of natural resources, a far lower minimum wage and they've had a housing crash so housing is far more affordable than ours. They also have a younger population, so overall, they're probably in a better position to turn it around.

Also in the "probably not that terminally fucked" category is Germany as they still have a lot of high end manufacturing and they can sell loads of Mercs to the Chinese

Yes, I think big changes are inevitable, but I think these changes are more likely than complete civil breakdown and a return to a subsistence economy.

KMHA, could you parents move to a flat? Would be cheaper than trying to heat a house. In times gone by extended families lived together. Maybe that will start happening again?

My parents (in their late 70s) can't heat the whole house either, so they try to ensure that the kitchen and living room are kept heated, when the weather is very cold. They use an electric blanket in the bed and if they need to use another room they take a hot water bottle with them & have heavy fleece wraps. They both grew up in houses with no central heating & they think that "young people" are very wasteful. They also think that they are lucky now, because of all the really great cheap warm clothes that can be bought - unlike when they grew up. Not wishing to be pollyanna - but so much of it depends on perspective.

When people are sitting in empty rooms, unable to feed themselves that is when it is really bad. As long as people are still running mobiles, land lines, TVs, satellite TV, cars etc - IMO they can still feed themselves.

I think people need to save as much as they can this year.

I wouldn't save because inflation is making savings worthless.
Buy a woodburner to heat the house, invest in tinned food from places like costco. I saved 16% on food price inflation, who's bank account is offering them that rate ?

People do always trade as do countries. However when you are starting from a position of huge debt the income is hugely swallowed by that and I think that is why many see no end to it. expectations for future generations will shift they will have to.