Tag: demographics

The Three Main Forces Shaping the World: Demographics, Inequality, and Access to Information

~ cafebedouin

“The greatest innovation of the last generation has been the destruction of information barriers that used to keep strangers isolated from one another…

…What’s happened over the last 20 years – and especially the last 10 – has no historical precedent. The telephone eliminated the information gap between you and a distant relative, but the internet has closed the gap between you and literally every stranger in the world.”

—Morgan Housel, “Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World.” CollaborativeFund.com. October 4, 2019.

Obvious, but sometimes stating the obvious and looking at data and likely implications is a useful exercise.

The Population Bust: Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It

~ cafebedouin

“The mismatch between expectations of a rapidly growing global population (and all the attendant effects on climate, capitalism, and geopolitics) and the reality of both slowing growth rates and absolute contraction is so great that it will pose a considerable threat in the decades
ahead. Governments worldwide have evolved to meet the challenge of managing more people, not fewer and not older. Capitalism as a system is particularly vulnerable to a world of less population expansion; a significant portion of the economic growth that has driven capitalism over the past several centuries may have been simply a derivative of more people and younger people consuming
more stuff. If the world ahead has fewer people, will there be any real economic growth? We are not only unprepared to answer that question; we are not even starting to ask it.”

—Zachary Karabell, “The Population Bust Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It.” Foreign Affairs. September/October 2019.

Take that, Karl! Workers end up destroying capitalism by not reproducing themselves. There’s no extracting surplus value from people that don’t exist!