late wrote:I will see your Calm and raise you the Rise and Fall of American Growth:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rise+and+fal ... doa-p_4_13
Done. I probably won't get to it fully until the week of April 4th.
late wrote:The elderly are a problem for every developed economy.
Yet, they could be an opportunity. Most medical spending, for example, is on elderly people. However, it's so often used to treat symptoms.
Without having cracked it yet, I can already tell you some of why I think I may disagree with aspects of Rise and Fall of American Growth is that so much of the economy now is information and not industrial goods. Computing is cheap, and distributing apps globally is very cheap now. On a computing power basis, it is in fact deflationary.
The big problems as I see them are that we don't seem to have any goals towards big economic breakthroughs in the delivery of medical services. See, the reason I complain about something like the lack of replacement organs is that it's technically, but not yet economically feasible. Using stem cells, we could grow you a new liver, pancreas or kidneys. Lots of elderly people are on dialysis for example. We can replace knees and hips, but not organs except from donors at this point. We don't even need to use 100% your own DNA. We just need to figure out what your system is not going to reject.
We do have some really cool nascent technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 for gene editing. For example, they cured a gal with sickle cell anemia with gene therapy.
The limits to that kind of growth are people smart enough to build a system like that so that you don't need the smartest people in the world to staff such a system--that you make it available to people of ordinary intelligence. There is a reason that JavaScript is the most popular programming language, followed by Python, right? It takes quite a bit more brainpower to work in statically typed languages, deal with concurrency, memory management, etc. It takes much more skill to be a surgeon than to be a lab technician. Yet, we could really take some serious leaps if we had substantially more thoughtful politicians than we have.
late wrote:While Friedman is optimistic, Zeihan is pessimistic. So which is it?
Both. What I think Zeihan hits on is that consumption-led growth isn't going to do well in the future, except in places with stable or growing demographies. So that's places like the US, Mexico, maybe Argentina, and some African countries. However, as I'm pointing out above, major medical breakthroughs that counteract some of the negatives of aging would be a fairly natural market opportunity.
George Friedman actually kicked a bunch of people like me off his erstwhile board at Stratfor, because while we subscribed to his service, we also sometimes disagreed with him. For example, before the Iraq War was launched I had said that the US could invade Iraq from Kuwait without the 4th ID and without a significant air campaign. His retort to me was, "logistics is not a stock on NASDAQ." Since that time, his analysis has incorporated a lot more of an economic input. So he clearly boned up on it quite a bit.
Both he and Zeihan point out that China and Germany have export led economies. Any significant decline in consumption of the products they export necessarily leads to a significant recession. Both are aging economies selling into a largely aging world.
late wrote:Speaking of Rise and Fall, I may need to buy it, it's going to take months to read, and no library is going to let me have it that long.
I thought you had. I just bought it. We'll see how it goes.
late wrote:Trump massively screwed up Asia, that was horrible, but then most of what he did was. You need to do some homework on this stuff.
What specifically do you think he should have done? He recrafted a trade deal with South Korea. Obviously, that's not going to make them happy. However, under Trump both the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Theodore Roosevelt have docked at Da Nang. 84% of the Vietnamese have a favorable view of the United States. The Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia have all conducted joint military exercises with the United States. Japan is buying F-35Bs and reconfiguring helicopter ships to make light carriers with F-35Bs. There's no doubt that Trump's tone and demeanor alienated people, but I don't think quite to the extent of Xi Jinping's tone. For example, the recent violence in the Himalayas between India and China is something not widely covered in the US press, but it sure is felt in New Delhi.
The reality is that the US cannot continue to boost China's economy and contain it too. China was a backwater until the US invited them into the WTO. Do you remember who was raising all the human rights and labor union questions? Nancy Pelosi. The US will have to disengage and rely a lot less on imports from China if it is to contain China's aggression.
Remember why Nixon worked to open China? To thwart the Soviet Union. China is the bigger threat, and we will likely need Russia in a containment relationship as well. So alienating them is not without opportunity cost.
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