I like the "inverse loot crate" meme, like Schroedinger's cat in Pandora's box.
Where does wealth come from? How does it get service-with-a-smile?
Marx didn't study much physics, mostly law, so he didn't realize that wealth comes from energy, which drives transformative processes, like growing vegetables, ginning cotton and smelting aluminum.
My Grandmother Day grew up in China during the Boxer Rebellion times, and considered the early death from stomach cancer of Sun Yat-sen to be one of the tragedies of the 20th century.
Neither of his lieutenants, Chiang or Mao had the big picture, so they fought the Japanese, yes, then each other, and failed to advance China at all.
China did not get back on track until Deng Xiaopeng, who did not have neurosyphilis, was intelligent, not an egoist, was well educated, marched the long march, and somehow survived Chairman Mao.
Chinese study Chinese history, world-history, same thing, thousands of years of it. China is the center of world civilization, the "middle kingdom", so they just need to get it back to that normal state of affairs after the recent bad patch. Chinese rulers take a long view.
Deng Xiaopeng had to figure how to get China to the front of the industrialized world by about 2015 or so, based on his reading of The Limits To Growth, which estimated that global industrial economy would probably peak out somewhere around then. https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
Xi Jinpeng is pretty smart, but he is somewhat narcissistic, and is politically smart, but still has a 50 year plan where China is #1. Right now he needs to let #3 beat the declining #1, which is just good game-theory. That's going to be the focus, but Xi does not have as reliable of a capitalist-with-Chinese-characteristics captains-of-industry on the current long march as would be really reliable. Germans or Japanese would be better, but that's not what he's got and he's just dealig with it.
What I see as the conundrum is how to step down any economy from growth, when net-energy-after-extraction is in terminal-decline, as it seems to be since the second half of 2019. TPTB have arranged "Going-Direct" through the miracle of COVID-emergency-measures, giving the banks and Blackrock lots of financial capital, while all the retail people were locked down and locked out, so there was not retail inflation ... until later, but the banks were saved ... Growth stopped, at least in the physical economy, after being lame for decades, and peaking around the time of the 2019 repo-crisis, when the big banks couldn't trust each other overnight.
I think The Limits To Growth is playing out, just as the non-financial systems analysis computer model graphed it in 1972.
Global economy is not even though. Global industrial output has been in decline since 2020, but Russian industrial output, and even prosperity-per-capita are still growing. US prosperity per capita peaked around 2001, and in the UK it peaked around 2005. I'm not sure about India. Dr Tim Morgan at Surplus Energy Economics may not have had reliable enough data for India. I suspect it's close to China and Russia.
The game is to grow if your economy still can, and to cut risks and losses going forward. The US needs to re-industrialize at a lower consumption baseline, which is do-able. It will be a massive restructuring, hopefully more orderly than Russia and China had. We shall see.
Next step is massive global defauts, and the battle of currencies.
Rumor is that Christine Lagarde got phone pranked, thinking she was talking to V. Zelensky, and said the CBDC rollout was going to be 10/23/23 ... Who knows?
I'm familiar with the 1970s limits of growth talk and I think these are the same people who disregarded space travel as a solution to resource scarcity, while also diverting many more times the resources into failed welfare programs. The space program did way more than welfare ever did for wealth creation. I think the US has slowed its rate of growth since 2001 due to socialism. The growth of the government worker-millionaire. The corrosive effects of welfare. Repurposing the military-industrial economy to a socialist economy has not yielded the promised profits and it's going to take more than the mass destruction of nail salons and low end sandwich shops to correct that. And the unfortunate part is I don't consider things like a functional civil service, military, education system, and social safety net very 'socialist' because they used to be incredibly cheap to run.
The US is just extracting everybody else's energy via trade to convert into wealth, which has made up the shortfall since 2001. Once that stops, massive energy investment continues. Nuclear power and Near Earth Asteroids are a powerful combo. My story Zero Jumpers (in 9 Other Dangers) envisions that world. Nuclear energy will drive down costs per kilowatt hour (Rosatom is a leader). And Russia better hope its abiotic theory of fossil fuel creation isn't true, otherwise there might be coal asteroids. Point being, there are plenty of exploitable resources and it is a lack of political will and vision that prevents their deployment.
On top of that, unlike capital goods, humans can learn new skills which speaks to your reduced energy per GDP point. Thomas Kuhn wrote about paradigm shifts: this dedollarization era is an example. All the imported geniuses will come up with energy solutions and this time, everybody outside the dollar zone will not be able to trade their way into the supply chain. After all, it's not like India is suddenly going to become a better place to do business, which means they have to choose between the US and Europe. The next wave of components will be centered on the dollar zone and we will see technology zones re-emerge.
"I think these are the same people who disregarded space travel as a solution to resource scarcity, while also diverting many more times the resources into failed welfare programs."
Not the same people at all. They did not prescribe anything, just ran some materials and consumption based systems analysis. It was considered conventional wisdom unti Reagan renounced it politically. Carter, as a Rickover acolyte and nuke sub commander was well aware of peaks and declines in oil.
I agree with the principles of economy you present. It seems that the big shift in production by globalists was to countries that burned coal, had cheap labor, and lax environmental rules. This increased profits.
The US got a vast growth in middle-managers, "compliance officers", which is a jobs program, but it reduces economic efficiency.
Owners/rulers like it, because it enforces their will. However, it reduces the efficiency of the economy through excess heirarchy and destruction of local-problem-solving at the site of the problem, so "solutions" are typically bad, but nobody can say so.
India and China are ancient societies with very different approaches. China is top-down hierarchy and India is a morass of teeming activity, hard to understand, and very hard to extract value from.
India holds on to value internally, and it is hard to change that, so hard to set up a profitable factory to export products and profits. Indians can sometimes do it...
I like India, but it is not for the casual traveler.
Thailand is good for the novice traveler, but don't engage anybody who comes up to you with any proposition...
In the long run, India is quite resilient, but China, under a wise dynasty, can do what we have just witnessed since 1980 or so. Chinese power is structurally fragile. Revolt in the streets is a recurring Chinese theme, when the "mandate-of-heaven" is lost.
I wonder what is ahead for india and for China often.
I would like to see America return to being a free-country. I think the world can coordinate withoout a ruling empire. Let's try.
Mining helium-3 on the moon is something NASA wants to do. Space-X is part of that plan.
I don't think miracle-energy-surces will be for "us" I think there is oil sequestered in Alaska.
I also think that's not for "us", but for power elites and the military.
That's just my take on the flow of human history.
How are "we" going to shed bureaucratic layers and systemic skim to regain a healthy "Political Economy", which is a good term, I think. Growing a vegetable garden has been a good move in previous transitions of this sort
I like the "inverse loot crate" meme, like Schroedinger's cat in Pandora's box.
Where does wealth come from? How does it get service-with-a-smile?
Marx didn't study much physics, mostly law, so he didn't realize that wealth comes from energy, which drives transformative processes, like growing vegetables, ginning cotton and smelting aluminum.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
My Grandmother Day grew up in China during the Boxer Rebellion times, and considered the early death from stomach cancer of Sun Yat-sen to be one of the tragedies of the 20th century.
Neither of his lieutenants, Chiang or Mao had the big picture, so they fought the Japanese, yes, then each other, and failed to advance China at all.
China did not get back on track until Deng Xiaopeng, who did not have neurosyphilis, was intelligent, not an egoist, was well educated, marched the long march, and somehow survived Chairman Mao.
Chinese study Chinese history, world-history, same thing, thousands of years of it. China is the center of world civilization, the "middle kingdom", so they just need to get it back to that normal state of affairs after the recent bad patch. Chinese rulers take a long view.
Deng Xiaopeng had to figure how to get China to the front of the industrialized world by about 2015 or so, based on his reading of The Limits To Growth, which estimated that global industrial economy would probably peak out somewhere around then. https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
Xi Jinpeng is pretty smart, but he is somewhat narcissistic, and is politically smart, but still has a 50 year plan where China is #1. Right now he needs to let #3 beat the declining #1, which is just good game-theory. That's going to be the focus, but Xi does not have as reliable of a capitalist-with-Chinese-characteristics captains-of-industry on the current long march as would be really reliable. Germans or Japanese would be better, but that's not what he's got and he's just dealig with it.
What I see as the conundrum is how to step down any economy from growth, when net-energy-after-extraction is in terminal-decline, as it seems to be since the second half of 2019. TPTB have arranged "Going-Direct" through the miracle of COVID-emergency-measures, giving the banks and Blackrock lots of financial capital, while all the retail people were locked down and locked out, so there was not retail inflation ... until later, but the banks were saved ... Growth stopped, at least in the physical economy, after being lame for decades, and peaking around the time of the 2019 repo-crisis, when the big banks couldn't trust each other overnight.
I think The Limits To Growth is playing out, just as the non-financial systems analysis computer model graphed it in 1972.
The "BAU" graph is the famous "business-as-usual" graph from 1972 https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-08-16/revisiting-the-limits-to-growth/
Global economy is not even though. Global industrial output has been in decline since 2020, but Russian industrial output, and even prosperity-per-capita are still growing. US prosperity per capita peaked around 2001, and in the UK it peaked around 2005. I'm not sure about India. Dr Tim Morgan at Surplus Energy Economics may not have had reliable enough data for India. I suspect it's close to China and Russia.
The game is to grow if your economy still can, and to cut risks and losses going forward. The US needs to re-industrialize at a lower consumption baseline, which is do-able. It will be a massive restructuring, hopefully more orderly than Russia and China had. We shall see.
Next step is massive global defauts, and the battle of currencies.
Rumor is that Christine Lagarde got phone pranked, thinking she was talking to V. Zelensky, and said the CBDC rollout was going to be 10/23/23 ... Who knows?
I'm familiar with the 1970s limits of growth talk and I think these are the same people who disregarded space travel as a solution to resource scarcity, while also diverting many more times the resources into failed welfare programs. The space program did way more than welfare ever did for wealth creation. I think the US has slowed its rate of growth since 2001 due to socialism. The growth of the government worker-millionaire. The corrosive effects of welfare. Repurposing the military-industrial economy to a socialist economy has not yielded the promised profits and it's going to take more than the mass destruction of nail salons and low end sandwich shops to correct that. And the unfortunate part is I don't consider things like a functional civil service, military, education system, and social safety net very 'socialist' because they used to be incredibly cheap to run.
The US is just extracting everybody else's energy via trade to convert into wealth, which has made up the shortfall since 2001. Once that stops, massive energy investment continues. Nuclear power and Near Earth Asteroids are a powerful combo. My story Zero Jumpers (in 9 Other Dangers) envisions that world. Nuclear energy will drive down costs per kilowatt hour (Rosatom is a leader). And Russia better hope its abiotic theory of fossil fuel creation isn't true, otherwise there might be coal asteroids. Point being, there are plenty of exploitable resources and it is a lack of political will and vision that prevents their deployment.
On top of that, unlike capital goods, humans can learn new skills which speaks to your reduced energy per GDP point. Thomas Kuhn wrote about paradigm shifts: this dedollarization era is an example. All the imported geniuses will come up with energy solutions and this time, everybody outside the dollar zone will not be able to trade their way into the supply chain. After all, it's not like India is suddenly going to become a better place to do business, which means they have to choose between the US and Europe. The next wave of components will be centered on the dollar zone and we will see technology zones re-emerge.
"I think these are the same people who disregarded space travel as a solution to resource scarcity, while also diverting many more times the resources into failed welfare programs."
Not the same people at all. They did not prescribe anything, just ran some materials and consumption based systems analysis. It was considered conventional wisdom unti Reagan renounced it politically. Carter, as a Rickover acolyte and nuke sub commander was well aware of peaks and declines in oil.
I agree with the principles of economy you present. It seems that the big shift in production by globalists was to countries that burned coal, had cheap labor, and lax environmental rules. This increased profits.
The US got a vast growth in middle-managers, "compliance officers", which is a jobs program, but it reduces economic efficiency.
Owners/rulers like it, because it enforces their will. However, it reduces the efficiency of the economy through excess heirarchy and destruction of local-problem-solving at the site of the problem, so "solutions" are typically bad, but nobody can say so.
India and China are ancient societies with very different approaches. China is top-down hierarchy and India is a morass of teeming activity, hard to understand, and very hard to extract value from.
India holds on to value internally, and it is hard to change that, so hard to set up a profitable factory to export products and profits. Indians can sometimes do it...
I like India, but it is not for the casual traveler.
Thailand is good for the novice traveler, but don't engage anybody who comes up to you with any proposition...
In the long run, India is quite resilient, but China, under a wise dynasty, can do what we have just witnessed since 1980 or so. Chinese power is structurally fragile. Revolt in the streets is a recurring Chinese theme, when the "mandate-of-heaven" is lost.
I wonder what is ahead for india and for China often.
I would like to see America return to being a free-country. I think the world can coordinate withoout a ruling empire. Let's try.
Mining helium-3 on the moon is something NASA wants to do. Space-X is part of that plan.
I don't think miracle-energy-surces will be for "us" I think there is oil sequestered in Alaska.
I also think that's not for "us", but for power elites and the military.
That's just my take on the flow of human history.
How are "we" going to shed bureaucratic layers and systemic skim to regain a healthy "Political Economy", which is a good term, I think. Growing a vegetable garden has been a good move in previous transitions of this sort
Constructively Yours...
Here is more analysis of LaGarde's speech and hints at CBDC this year... critckets from the MSM.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/it-wasnt-mistake-or-slip-lagarde-hints-raising-central-bank-inflation-target