I challenged him to put his

I challenged him to put his money where his mouth was and to bet that massive deflation (falling prices, yet higher unemployment, food and other shortages, debtors prisons, etc) would happen within the 2-5 years he predicted against my bet that it wouldn’t. Some of the ZMers in the audience were shocked as, after all, Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph argue that technologically we could have a world of abundance now. I’ve since emailed the organisers offering to debate him at next year’s Z-Day in Cardiff  on “Why the economic system will not collapse” and in 5 years time on “Why the economic system did not collapse”.He was mixing up two things: so-called peak oil and the economic collapse of capitalism through some flaw in its monetary and banking side. The second is not going to happen because the supposed flaw doesn’t exist.  As to peak oil, if this is the case, as it becomes more and more difficult to extract oil then its price will rise. This will have two consequences. It will make it profitable to exploit previously unprofitable sources including tar sands, shale and deposits under the North Pole. And it will accelerate the search for substitutes such as renewable energies and nuclear power. He claimed this wouldn’t work because it would cost more energy to use these than the energy they would produce (I’m not competent to comment on this but maybe there’s an engineer in the house?), but he himself admitted that there was enough coal to last for centuries.So, don’t be alarmed. It’s not going to happen (even if nothing is going to go smoothly and without undesirable side effects as long as we have capitalism). No need to stock up tins of food or convert your savings into gold.