Skip to content

Comment on The Tradeoffs Facing Japan's Economyparent

Comments

What's the crisis? I mean, what makes you feel there is a crisis? I know social media can make anyone feel extremely anxious these days, but for real?

Fair question, we are more on a edge (which who can say when truly til after the fact) but what I see as someone who has privilged position and data into global trade, GDP mandates, and monetary policy and its effects on the private sector is this:

We are locked in a GDP fight globally between powers, triggering real world trade wars and hot wars based on a few hidden factors:

1) A far worse fertiltiy crisis than is publicly known (including timelines to its real effects being far closer)

2) An overabbundance of currency needing to find return in increasingly speculative arenas, an a levered debt system built that REQUIRES that return or risks catastrophic failure

3) A GDP fight globally where in the first to falter triggers a hot war

4) A collapse in social contract between workers and capital class, where in capital class have now publically stated they believe workers are no longer a neccesarry class (contradicting the real terms of point 1)

5) A set of economic rules that are being broken, sending us into the 'no playbook' zone of global stability

This is an ultra toxic mix that is showing up all at once.

can you say more about 1?

Unsure if you’ll see this.

1) demographics are collapsing worse than expected for high value cohorts (working and fighting age men and child bearing women) because older numbers didn’t cohort ages eg real numbers can linearly decline supported but large older cohorts while younger cohorts can collapse much faster.

2) The UN failed to do math in the cohort trap (each generation of women is smaller making less children) that bends down the curve even more steeply faster

3) china is undergoing strategic compression and Russia is already in it. Russia seeks to have chosen to “go out in a flame rather than slowly decline”

4) the third and developing world was widely assumed to be our demographic bailout, latest numbers show they are collapsing faster than the developed non Asian world.

But this is not some "hard" problem, let's say in a way "peak oil" was seen as a "hard" problem 20-25 years ago: a resource limitation you can't just wish away. There's no problem with having as many babies as needed, it can be solved at a flip of a switch with only a minor readjustment of political expectations with almost no physical cost to anyone.

I'll just say that over 2 decades of trying and billions of dollars spent by the Nordics, Singapore, China, Japan, and Korea say otherwise.

Changing human motivations is significantly harder than drilling a new hole or putting up a solar panel.

No, it's a lot simpler. Governments should just have babies of their own, using donor eggs and sperm of people they consider to be high-value, using cheaply hired foreign women of any race for gestation, and raising them in specialised institutions - and funding it by abandoning all (indeed terribly inefficient) family-stimulating policies like childcare, tax benefits, etc.

To avoid political problems, make sure these new people do not become citizens so they don't vote, let them just be workers and consumers.

How is that simple? it seems like the massive cultural and political challenges are just being handwaved away

Chill out there Tyrell.

Thanks, 4 is totally news to me and had also been assuming that was the bailout

I mean, what makes you feel there is a crisis?

U.S. M2 money supply tripling in 15 years. US gov public debt more than tripling over the same period.

People from the middle class being unable to buy a house.

The money printer has been going brrrrrr since a very long time and everything got badly distorted.

My bet is that when the next financial crisis hits, we'll see helicopter Ben and hear the brrrrr again.

The crisis in one webpage:

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

P.S: that's not talking about a country like France, where the IMF shall have to intervene soon as public spendings are totally out of control and the public debt is running wild.

Debt to GDP ratio only increased by 1/3 in 15 years, not 3x. And this is a natural consequence of population ageing and is less pronounced than in almost any other developed country. Money supply to GDP is only 1/4 up from 1950s when interest rates were a lot higher. Homeownership is at nearly all-time high except a short stretch of speculative housing bubble ~20 years ago when a lot of people who couldn't afford homes, bought them to speculate, being financially illiterate and tricked by the banks to do to. Do i need to continue?

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.