Home » Posts tagged 'birth rate'
Tag Archives: birth rate
If Geography and Demographics Are Destiny, Who Will Be the Winners and Losers in 2025?
If Geography and Demographics Are Destiny, Who Will Be the Winners and Losers in 2025?
Owning any asset in poorly positioned nations is an inherently risky bet going forward.
The dictum “demographics is destiny” proposes that all the complexities of finance, society and politics are ultimately guided by demographics: the relative size of each generation, birth rates, death rates, etc.
For example, an oversized generation of retirees and an undersized generation of workers to support them has far-reaching consequences that can’t be legislated away.
The influence of demographics isn’t limited to pension costs. Some analysts have made the case that oversized generations of young men align all too well with the launching of wars.
The point is that birth/death rates—low and high–have consequences that impact national destinies for decades.
Another school holds that geography is destiny: if a nation’s geography is favorable, the barriers to prosperity and stability are low, while the barrier is high for nations with unfavorable geography.
Peter Zeihan, author of the 2014 book, The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, lists the core geographic attributes that are either favorable or unfavorable in ways that influence a nation’s long-term prosperity and built-in geopolitical challenges.
What does geography have to do with prosperity, stability and geopolitical risks?
Navigable rivers that reach deep into productive interior regions lower costs of transport dramatically, while natural harbors enable low-cost access to international markets via ships.
Natural barriers to invasion such as oceans, deserts and mountain ranges dictate whether a nation must spend heavily on military defense of the homeland or whether the cost of defense is lightened by favorable geography.
Zeihan extends geography into the political realm, noting that nations with difficult-to-defend borders require a strong central government to organize taxation and defense, while nations with few contiguous threats (for example, the U.S.) can be governed in a more decentralized fashion.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What Keeps Neil Howe Up At Night: An Interview With The Author Of “The Fourth Turning”
What Keeps Neil Howe Up At Night: An Interview With The Author Of “The Fourth Turning”
“Underproduction, undercapacity, deflation, currency wars, demographics, falling birth rates” – those are the biggest fears which Fourth Turning author, and head of Saeculum Research Neil Howe, lays out in this interview excerpt courtesy of RealVision TV.
While Howe goes on an interesting tangent on the one topic that will surely be absent from all presidential debates, namely the fact that migration into the US is “actually in huge decline“, and that the largest immigrant group into the US is Asian (after all someone has to buy those luxury NYC condos), what is more interesting are Howe’s parallels of the current economic situation to the Great Depression: “whole areas of the world no longer having a global superpower, no longer having global institutions that enforce orders so you have these huge areas of failed states and power vacuums and regional authoritarian governments – that’s exactly what people saw in the 1930s and we’re seeing it now in Russia, China, Iran doing whatever they want.”
He continues:
“Another interesting economic parallel is the crisis of overvaluation: in the 1930s it was the gold standard, for southern Europe it’s the Euro, and for China they have a fixed rate regime that they’re attending to too little too late. It’s the nature of an authoritarian regime to always to do too little and too late. Everyone is too timid to tell the person in power “this is what you need to do.” I think China faces an absolute choice between a huge devaluation to restimulate its economy, because becoming competitive I think the carry trade is going to go and I think even domestic savings are going to flee. If they don’t do that they have very few options left at this point. They have $3.5 trillion of reserves – you’ll be amazed how quickly that goes. So that’s another parallel.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
