Charles Hugh Smith

Let’s start with a household analogy. A married couple have four fine children, and since expenses are higher than income, they borrow money in…

I’ve been referencing historian Peter Turchin’s 50-year cycles of integration and disintegration for the past eight years, along with Howe and Strauss’s 80-year cycle…

I often wonder if others feel the precarity of this era, or is it just me? It’s hard to tell, as economic statistics don’t…

Tube of toothpaste: $4. Tube of toothpaste with cap: $5. You may reckon this is an exaggeration of the trend to coercing us to…

The Chinese culture has a rich trove of apt, often humorous expressions that summarize a situation with imaginative metaphors. For example, let it rot…

To connect multiple threads into a coherent understanding, let’s start with a real-life story. We’re handy but some breakdowns require outside assistance. The fridge…

I considered using the phrase “the decline we accept without a whimper” but concluded that “decline” was sugarcoating the reality that what we’re experiencing…