Recently I read a book called “The coming economic collapse”. This book mainly discusses the effect of oil supply on the future world economy. The author views that there will be a severe oil shortage if the world leaders are not urgent on developing alternate energy. In that time, oil price will go up higher than 200USD per barrel, and the consequence will be grave.
Because now we have sufficient energy, we are able to support the present complex civilization. But when the days of cheap oil are over and we don’t have alternate energy, our civilization will collapse and we will be forced to go back to “stone age”. Reason is very simple: when the oil price is skyrocketed without control due to supply shortages, we will not drive our cars to the city to work due to expensive petrol price. We will rather work near our home. In that time, we probably don’t need very specialized jobs such as finance, banking, etc...Instead, we will work the land to produce crops for our basic needs such as food and shelter.
The other interesting point the author wrote is about “collective blindness”. It happened during the dotcom bubble in 2001 and American War in Iraq 2003.
During the dotcom boom, almost all the investors speculated dotcom stocks had limitless potential for growth. Hundreds of thousand investors lost their investment and retirement fund when the bubble burst.
In 2003 when America decided to wage war against Iraq, all the intelligence was pointing the evidence that Iraq have WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction), but did not attempt hard to find the evidence that Iraq does not have WMD. In 2004, officials announced there was no WMD in Iraq and the decision to go to war in Iraq because of WMD was wrong.
According to study, we will naturally respect the power (or leader) above us and we do not voice out our disagreement easily when we work in the team. It is important the people follow and respect the leader to create unity to complete certain task successfully. However, we may easily fall into a trap that we do not look at things objectively. The leader may make wrong judgment and the team may collectively head to the wrong direction.
Learning: In order to succeed, we have to assess the fact and info by ourselves to make sound judgment rather than following people blindly.
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