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So the devolution of credit led to the devolution of asset valuations/collateral, income, profits and thus tax revenues. All those dominoes are now toppling the one with the greatest impact on households: jobs. Add in the structural causes covered in Chapter Fourteen: The End of (Paying) Work and the devolution of household finances and the high-cost, energy-profligate American lifestyle is not just predictable but inevitable.

The Devolution of the U.S. Economy and State

Devolution is both the process of degeneration and the surrender of governmental powers from central authorities to local authorities.

Devolution will take many forms.

The key driver behind devolution is simple: there's no longer enough money to fund the status quo, so something has to be cut, axed, trimmed or devolved. Examples already abound: the number of school days in the year is reduced to shave expenses, two-times-a-week trash pickup is cut to once a week, etc.

The key constraint on devolution is also simple: the status quo power structure must be left intact.

Nobody will willingly surrender their power, so devolution means services and front-end expenses will be cut in order to protect back-end administrative powers.

Thus public union bosses won't be suffering any big cuts in pay or benefits, and neither will their municipal and state administration counterparts. (Of course there will be minor symbolic cuts for PR purposes.) What will be cut is part-time librarians, custodians, county park staff, etc.--the powerless people who actually serve the public.

As the states run out of money, they will surrender some limited powers to local authorities as a mechanism for ridding their budgets of certain costs. As cities and counties go broke, then they will devolve some modest authority to non-profit groups or volunteers.

As laid off workers' unemployment insurance runs out (yes, even the extensions run out as the states' UI funds drain to zero) then their lifestyles devolve/degrade: first, eating out and vacations go, then new clothing, then the second car, then college, then the house, and so on.

Devolution is a painful process, but the State (all government at all levels) and the Plutocracy (owners of capital and productive assets) vastly prefer devolution to revolution because devolution doesn't threaten the status quo.

Devolution depends on humanity's innate ability to habituate to nearly anything. Humans somehow adapt to concentration camps, bitter cold, intolerable heat, mind-numbing work, etc., especially if the new environment is introduced over time in stages.

Thus the middle class household might actually respond with an anger deep and hot enough to become political if their middle-class lifestyle was taken away in one swoop. But devolution insures that the process is akin to the famous analogy of the boiled frog: if the temperature of the water is increased slowly enough, the frog never notices (or so the story goes) that he is being boiled alive.

The formerly middle class household forced to sell everything and move (surreptitiously) into a storage locker or into an RV will feel a shock of recognition that all has been lost, and that perhaps forces beyond their own personal decisions might be at work: forces which benefited from Federal bailouts, for instance, in a way they can never hope to. (That $150 billion transferred through AIG to Goldman Sachs could have funded a very large national unemployment insurance pool.)

But if their middle class life is taken away from them over time, in pieces, they will habituate to each loss without any political enlightenment; they have fully internalized the propaganda (and recall the mass media is owned by less than 10 global corporations) that the "problem" is their own, not "the system's."

A revolution occurs when great numbers of people realize that the system benefits the Powers That Be, not the citizenry, despite the status quo's constant assurances that this is the very best system on Earth.

So the surest way to secure one's lofty privileges and powers is to convince