Kunstler: What Peak Oil inescapably does is introduce the very sobering idea of discontinuity -- that is, that the game has changed radically, especially where all our assumptions about continued "growth" are concerned

Kunstler: All of it begs the question not only whether you or I will have two nickels to rub together, or two gold eagles, or a bundle of six month US Treasury bills, or a zillion shares of Apple, or a gainful vocation, or a roof over our heads, or a hot meal at the end of the day, or a safe place to sleep, or a country we can recognize. I've done my share of forecasting, with some episodes of notably bad timing. I don't do it for grandstanding effect but to provide some basis for knowing what to do in the years directly ahead, so we can hope to construct lives worth living. I'm impatient with models, charts, and statistical analysis. Perhaps this is childish. I'd rather tell a story or paint a picture.

SHOOT: Interesting that gym and I are wrestling with the same issues. Whether to invest ourselves and our audiences in facts, or fiction. Right now they appear interchangeable.

clipped from kunstler.com Personally, I am not at all sure that the Peak Oil story, or its associated general resource scarcity story, will shed a whole lot of light on the question of inflation-or-deflation. I say this because I think it is a short way down the road of depletion-and-scarcity before the major complex systems we depend on for daily life become so unstable that general socio-economic collapse ensues. After all, capital finance is only one of these many complex systems -- some other biggies being food production, trade and manufacture, transportation, electric power distribution, infrastructure maintenance, the military, and governance. Inflation-or-deflation will only be symptomatic of larger failures and instabilities in these systems necessary for modern, civilized life.