Category Archives: Economics

Barnacles

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There’s an interesting thread on Marginal Revolution about software patents. In recent years “patent trolls” have become a parasitic industry all to themselves. Companies are created to acquire patents from the holders so they can then shake down whoever may be using them in their product. The patent troll buys a patent and then seeks out who may be using something like it. The user may not even know they are using a technology that is patented by another. Their choice is fight in court or pay up. It’s a form of green mail.

This form of business goes back a long time to when travelers would take over an inn or a private home and you had to pay them to leave. Imagine a town suddenly infested with appear to be gypsies and carny folk. The choice is to get a gang of men to drive them off or pay them to go infest the next town. Of course, just as gypsies target the weak and stupid, the patent trolls tend to pick on little guys lacking the means and sophistication to fight back. This from EFF is a good example.

The idea of a patent or license is to encourage and direct the behavior of the creative into practical things. Instead of offering a prize, the inventor is granted exclusive rights to his invention for a fixed period of time. The world gets the invention and the inventor gets money, maybe lots of money. Otherwise, the smart and creative would have every reason to conceal their cleverness. The farmer with a better plow would not sell his idea, as that would work against his interests. Patents, in theory, increase human knowledge.

The assertion that patents are necessary to spur invention is a new idea. In fact, the idea of patents for intellectual property came under heavy assault in the 19th century.  That was an age of industrial growth and an explosion of innovation. For most of the last 500 years, starting from the advent of the patent system in Venice, patents were limited and temporary. There was an understanding that no idea remains hidden forever. If the first discoverer did not publish it, others would discover it in time and publish it.

What we see today with patent trolls is how the law is easily turned into a weapon by the parasite class. In a prior age, the landlord had to actually own real property, before he could extract rents. Today, you get rich by finding a way to freeload off the system in some way. The better you are at it, the richer you get. Perhaps you get so rich you can buy land and rent it out. The modern economy, thanks to technology and complex financial instruments, is highwaymen shaking down everyone in the normal economy.

The current morass is just another example of why schemes to correct some aspect of the human condition always fail. There’s a fraction of every human society that seeks out ways to live on the labor of others. It is their one skill and their sole focus. Some become salesman or lawyers. Others go into banditry or illicit trades. They are always with us. Try to protect the rights of the honest with patent laws, for example and the parasites will find a way to use that as way to lever money from the honest. Since they are really good at being parasites, they can never be out foxed by new laws. They always win in the end.

The Problem With Health Care

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Friday I went to the doctor for an evaluation. The reason for this is the dentist saw a tiny little bump on my tongue that she said was probably nothing. Since I have insurance, she said I should get it checked out by a specialist. She gave me a referral to someone she knows. With some worry, I made the appointment. Unless I have the slowest growing tumor in history, it is a nothing issue, but you never know and the hygienist is right about having it checked out to make sure. Who knows? This could be my last post here.

I made the appointment and was told to show up 30 minutes early to do paperwork. I was given a clipboard and five forms. Half of it was the basic data a doctor would need in order to get a general history of the patient and get paid for services. The rest was data to defend him against future lawsuits. Liberals have argued for years that litigation is a tiny part of health costs, but they have a conflict of interest as most are lawyers abusing the court system. The rial lawyer lobby is very powerful in America.

Even objective studies cannot account for the millions of hours wasted filling out forms forced on us by the plaintiff’s bar.  A partner in a law firm filling out forms at a doctor’s office is a $1000 of waste. Multiply that over tens of millions of people and you have billions squandered in the morass of paperwork alone. That’s before you consider how many times you fill out the same form. Every visit to the doctor seems to require a new form, with the same data, but in a slightly different order with a new date.

I finish the forms and the whatever you call the people at the front desk took a copy of my insurance cards and driver’s license. Again, the scan of the license is about money. If they have to chase me, they now have my photo ID. This was something truck hijackers would do in the 50’s and 60’s. They would take the truck driver’s license and tell him to claim it was two black guys or two Mexicans. Since they had his license, he was under obvious pressure to cooperate. It’s an interesting comparison.

Then I wait and wait and wait. I had 12:30 appointment but did not get to see the doctor until 1:00. He was with me for 132 seconds. I know because I timed the great event. I then spent fifteen minutes checking out and paying my bill. That part was an issue because I learned they did not take insurance, but would submit the claim to my carrier for reimbursement. I tried to use my HSA VISA card, but that was declined for some reason. I then used my regular credit card to pay the $150 for the 132 second consultation.

The consultation resulted in another appointment. He will remove the bump and send it out for examination. He says it is unlikely to be anything but I will have peace of mind knowing for sure. He will also have $650 for the service. If I want my HSA to cover it, I will have to spend hours working that process. There’s a cost there as my time is worth something to me. I could pay out of pocket, but I have insurance for this stuff. They ain’t giving me a discount for not using it. It is another hassle for a service that is probably unneeded.

This is the problem with health care in a nutshell. It is something we all need, so it has attracted a special class of highwaymen. They stand between you and the product or service you need, demanding a toll. Unlike a stickup man, they force you to fill out forms and wait in line to be robbed. This is also why American health care will collapse before it is reformed. Those highwaymen have powerful lobbies to prevent laws curtailing their activities. We’ll just have to wait until we’re all bled dry, before there is reform.

Those Damned Sick People

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In the fullness of time, this age will be described as one where the people in charge had to re-learn everything about human nature, that people had known for thousands of years, but somehow been forgotten. Maybe forgotten is not the right term. It’s as if people have un-learned things. A deliberate effort has been made to deny basic parts of reality, in an effort to prove crackpot theories about human nature and human organization. This story about health care costs in the Washington Post is a good example.

The bottom 72 percent of Illinois Medicaid recipients account for 10 percent of total program spending. Average annual expenditures in this group were about $564, virtually invisible on the chart. We can’t save much money through any incentive system aimed at the typical Medicaid recipient.

We spend too little on the bottom 80 percent to get much back from that. We probably spend too little on most of these people, anyway. For the bulk of Medicaid beneficiaries, cost control is less important than improved prevention, health maintenance and access to basic medical and dental services.

The real financial action unfolds on the right side of the graph, where expenditures are concentrated within a small and incredibly complicated patient group. The top 3.2 percent of recipients account for half of total Medicaid spending, with average expenditures exceeding $30,000 annually.

Many of these men and women face life-ending or life-threatening illnesses, as well as cognitive or psychiatric limitations. These patients cannot cover co-payments or assume financial risk. In theory, one might impose patient cost-sharing with some complicated risk-adjustment system.

In practice, that is far beyond current technologies and administrative capabilities. Even if such a system were available, we couldn’t push the burden of medical case management onto these patients or their families.

Decade of analysis has revealed the shocking truth behind medical costs. It turns out that what drives costs are sick people. No kidding. This is why the word “wonk” has become a synonym for sophist or a grifter. Harold Pollack seems like a decent fellow and his credentials suggest he may even know a few things about the medical business, but you have to wonder what he was doing before he made this discovery. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be shocked to learn that sick people drive health costs.

People have always known that the young feel like they are indestructible, because they are healthy and vibrant. As a result, they don’t need to see the doctor, take a bunch of pills or use various health services. On the other hand, old people have all sorts of things going wrong, so they need emergency services, doctors, pills and treatments. In modern societies like ours, old people organize their lives around regular trips to the doctor. Most of it is preventative and low cost, but it adds up as the population grows older.

That’s why the basic question, regarding public health, is how to pay for the old people and the sick poor people. The former need lots of care, often more than they can afford. The latter needs less care, but they have no money. People used to know this. One option is to rely on private charity and market forces to address the problem. Another option is to have the state pay for health care. A third option is a mix, where the state operates as the insurer of last resort, but otherwise private arrangements prevail.

Look at these discussions a century ago, when the notion of the welfare state first gained traction in the West. People understood these truths. No matter what sort of system you adopt, it means some form of rationing, as all goods and services are rationed. That means some people are told they can only have so much while others get more. In some cases, the person gets nothing at all. This is in every part of life. There are no goods that are not rationed by price or by some control over supply.

Rationing is a part of life, yet somehow our rulers have decided that health care is an exception, so there must be a way to arrange things so everyone gets all the health care they want, without having to pay for it. Guys who insist on calling themselves wonks keep working on their perpetual motion machines so that one day, if we arrange things just the right way, we can have plenty. It’s a form of alchemy. Instead of turning base metals into gold, the modern alchemists seek to conjure plenty from scarcity.

A Big Hoax

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The Left can believe things that are obviously wrong. So much so, they can convince people who should know better that up is down and down is up. Health care is a great example. For example, the ObamaCare debacle is turning into the greatest public works failure in the history of man. If the Hoover Damn had cracked open on the first day and crumbled into a pile of stones, it would not be as big a failure as ObamaCare.

Every day brings another hilarious failure of the website or some aspect of it. What has gained less attention is the fact few people have bothered to even try to sign up. Of those, almost all should have been on Medicaid all along. The Left claimed 20 million Americans were without insurance and would buy it if it were cheaper. They claimed another 20 million or so were young people who should be paying into the system, but are not.

The Left believed the 40 million uninsured myth with the intensity of a fanatic. As the numbers come in, they hold to it. Even non-Liberals still accept the claim. Never mind that the figures never held up to experience or reason. If you are young, you don’t need insurance. If you are poor or old, you can go on the dole. If you have a job, you most likely have a policy from work. Small business people have private plans.

Of course, a trip to the local ER shows it is full of illegal aliens who should not be here in the first place. The great uninsured never existed in numbers worthy of this initiative. The uninsured, those who legitimately exist, are like the unemployed. They are a temporary class, a shifting, dynamic cohort that is transitioning from one job state or life state to another. There was never a great emergency to be addressed, but the Left believed it.

The great uninsured was a big fat hoax. They never really existed in numbers warranting state action. Instead of asking to look behind the curtain, everyone went along with the claims made by the Left. So much so we have a multi-trillion dollar disaster on our hands that will end up helping a handful of people, who probably never needed the help in the first place. Those who did need help could have relied on existing programs.

Even now, the debate still focuses on how to replace it or how to fix it. No one is bothering to ask why the premise of the thing is not holding up to empirical fact. You can be sure that if anyone publicly challenges the claim they will be called a monster. Obama will keep wheeling out white people supposedly helped by his program and the liberal press will yammer about the lack of an alternative. No one will question the premise.

The Never Ending Madness

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Way back in the before times, I was involved in a unionization effort at the company I was with at the time. The Teamsters were trying to organize some part-time drivers and other similar sorts of labor. Most were guys working in these jobs were just doing it to pick up some extra money. It was a piece work deal. A man showed up and he was put to work on whatever was needed at the time. A small percentage tried to make a full-time job of it, but the hours were limited to 25 a week in order to discourage it.

Of course, a group of guys trying to make a career of washing cars or shuttling them to and from a location would always try hard to get more hours. When the company held the line, they contacted the union and the result was a union campaign. The Teamsters won by one vote, mostly by threatening the guys who were not interested. The result was they got a bunch of rules and new pay rates. The truly part-time wanted nothing to do with it and the original organizers were washed out one by one. It was a disaster.

It’s not hard to see something similar happening to fast food workers if they try to form a union. The companies will simply start automating the work and the result will be fewer people making slightly less, while the SEIU gets a piece of the action. Unions are not bad per se, but service worker unions prove little in the way of services to their members, while siphoning off a piece of their check. The SEIU is pretty much just a money racket for the Democratic Party, not a genuine labor movement.

The mathematics of fast food means it can never work. McDonald’s has about 25% of their costs in retail labor. That $7 meal you get in the drive through is a $1.75 in human costs. Doubling the wages does more than double the labor cost. It jacks up taxes and benefit costs. These franchises will have legal and personal costs associated with dealing with a union workforce. Since no one is buying a $10 union meal from McDonalds when they can get a $7 meal from some other option, the result will be ruinous.

Of course, what never gets mentioned is the fact that these jobs were never intended to be careers. They were originally for kids and adults looking for part-time work. The manager would make a career of it, but the front-line people were always intended to be temporary workers in a homogeneous society. That is, your kid got a job at McDonalds, working for someone who lived in the community. The franchise was locally owned, so it was like going to work for a neighbor. That was the point of franchising.

That meant a different relationship between the owners, customer and workers than we see today. Go into a McDonalds now and the staff are weird little brown people from another land. They barely speak English. The manager is just a employee from somewhere, working for a company that has twenty franchises. As the customer, you have no emotional attachment to the place, as it is run by strangers and owned by some out of town interest. The workers peasants with no better options.

It is something to watch in the coming years. Chick-fil-A relies on the old model of hiring locals needing part-time work. They pay better, but expect more. The experience is vastly better for the customer, as the people are pleasant, speak English and seem to care about doing a good job. No one talks about unions and the customers have no reason to think the workers need representation. McDonalds relies on indentured servants and illegals and their reputation has declined as a result. Which model will prevail?

Lesson From The Market: Software

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I go to an upscale grocery store that is like Whole Foods, but without the preachy liberal nonsense. They sell all the fashionable stuff and they make sure to create an atmosphere that flatters their clientele. It has a coffee shop and bakery, so shoppers can have a latte and a muffin while they browse the organic food items. Of course, everyone uses the silly canvas sacks that are supposed to be good for the earth. It’s all pretentious and silly, but unlike Whole Foods, the prices are great so i tolerate the other stuff.

Anyway, I was at the checkout and I noticed they still use a character based computer software. Judging from the interface, I’m going to say it is written in COBOL. You can sort of tell by the blue screen with red highlights. It could be some form of business basic or maybe even Clipper/Foxpro. Regardless, it is old stuff, probably written for them two decades ago. They have scanners and scales, but that’s not revolutionary. Integration to these items was done long before the graphical user interface.

Checkout is fast and efficient. The clerks never struggle to price an item or look up some obscure code for a weird item. For the grocery chain owners, the point-of-sale system is perfectly adequate and they obviously see no reason to “modernize it.” From their perspective, this tools does the job that needs doing, so there is no reason to replace with a new tool. In the grocery business, margins are small, so anywhere they can reduce costs, they will, even if it means using a twenty year old software system.

I know of at least a dozen goodly sized companies that use legacy system for their business. In one case, they use a system written by a firm long defunct in a language long abandoned. The other use systems that are a decade or more out of date and no longer supported by the developer. I know of a large importer using character based software written in the 80’s. Most banks in this country rely on software written in the 1970’s, patched up over the last few decades. There’s lots of old code out there.

The point here is that good enough is good enough. As much as we think technology is a constant driver of innovation and change, it does run its course. The lesson from the market is that we may have picked all of the low hanging fruit from the computer revolution. While automation will continue, it will be much slower than the futurist would like us to believe. That growing pile of legacy code that is out there in the world will only make the process slower. We are quickly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Our Most Dangerous President

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The argument for forcing Nixon out of office was that he was an imperial president, who violated the norms of democracy. That is, he had no respect for the law and as a result a lawless environment evolved in the White House. It was, of course, a justification intended to hide the truth. Nixon was hated by the Left because he was an aggressive anti-communist in the 1950’s. The Left could never forgive him for his attacks on the Left, so they could never accept him as a legitimate president. He had to go.

The charges against Nixon were always nonsense, even on the dubious moral grounds promoted by the Left. Woodrow Wilson was recklessly used his power to suppress the media. He jailed 10,000 Americans for opposing his war. FDR trampled all over the concept of republic, promoting a program that looked a like Italian fascism. Compared to those two, Nixon was a piker. Most of the stuff Nixon was doing was done under his predecessors. Kennedy and Johnson loved spying on people.

That said, a healthy self-governing society should have a fair amount of transparency and the political class should be deeply invested in the rules. Once the people in office lose respect for the rules, the road to authoritarianism opens, as the rules lose their moral power. In other words, adherence to the rules is purely practical, rather than a matter of status within the ruling class itself. People obey the rules if they benefit them and violate the rules if that works. No one is ashamed of breaking the rules.

We’re seeing this with Team Obama. They figured out how to use the IRS as a political weapon, stocking the upper ranks with their people who set about harassing the political enemies of Obama. Today brings word that the Census Bureau has come in for similar treatment. They faked the unemployment numbers leading up to the election. That naturally calls into question all of the other economic reports. It may also explain how the regional reports never seem to square with the national statistics.

This is very serious stuff. In a modern economy, information is currency. Like money, it can be debased. When people lose faith in the currency, they lose faith in the entity issuing it. Trust in government is near record lows and that’s with a national media out waving pom-poms for the ruling class. Imagine where things go if the press throws in the towel on these people. It may not matter as no one trusts the press anymore anyway.

Of course, that same poll shows that the people no longer trust the most democratic institution in the nation – Congress. Fifty years ago, the alleged culture of lawlessness in the Nixon White House was enough to force out the president. Here we have actual corruption, real violations of the basic trust. Yet, the political class cannot bring itself to even discuss it, much less act on it. The old line about silence being consent is overused, but it applies here. Lawlessness is now the law of the land.

Of course, you have to wonder what else they are doing. if they are willing to abuse the IRS, are they willing to abuse the FBI or the CIA? They corrupted the FBI by installing true believers into the leadership layer. What happens if they do the same with the FBI? What are the chances the media would look into it? If they are willing to excuse the abuse of the IRS, why would they raise an alarm over other abuse? This sounds far-fetched, but ten years ago the IRA stuff seemed far-fetched, but here we are anyway.

Econometrics is not Science

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Alex Tabarrok has posted a bit of troll bait on firearms and suicide. It’s troll bait because these studies are created to get attention. They do that by confirming some aspect of the narrative and decorating it with the veneer of science. A PhD, claiming a correlation between something lefty sees as a great evil and something that is bad, will get the the usual suspects buzzing about the author. Often, the authors of the paper will put together a cover letter for the media, so they don’t have to read the actual study.

In this case, guns and suicide is the issue. If it were a paper claiming to prove that religion makes you a bigot or lead in the water makes you hate socialized medicine, it would have a better chance of landing on TV, but guns still work in certain quarters of the Left. The paper itself is not worth reading, but the on-line debate is worth a read. The content of the debate is not all that interesting. It’s the nature of the debate. It reveals a lot about the sorts of people who are prone to accepting these sorts of studies at face value.

Everything from the soft sciences starts with statistical correlation between one thing and some other thing. The idea is to create the belief that a causal relationship exists, where only (maybe) a correlation exists. The most famous of which is the claim that marijuana use leads to hard drug use. The fact that people prone to drug addiction would use the most common drugs first is hardly surprising. Claims that weed causes heroine use are easily disproved by the tens of millions of weed smokers who never use heroine.

The statistical methodology in this paper is sound and it is hardly shocking that more guns would mean more successful suicides. Guns are a great tool for killing yourself. It is exceedingly rare for someone to survive a gun shot to the head. People often panic and call for help when taking pills or slashing their wrists. They have ample time to contemplate their act before and during its commission. That and they can always call for help after committing the act. That’s not happening after the hammer goes click.

That said, it does not show that guns cause suicide. That would mean forming metal into a particular shape has some influence over the psychological well being of humans. Only a lunatic would think such a thing. Instead, they modify the claim to, “well the availability of the gun can lead some people to rashly elect suicide when they otherwise would have time to be talked out of it.” That assumes legal gun make gun more available. If you are planning to shoot yourself, you still have to buy the gun and that takes time.

In real science, cause and effect are tested. In fake science like this, cause and effect are inferred or implied, depending on the claim. In this case, the implication is guns cause suicide as the author goes out of his way to make the claim that other forms of suicide declined in his study. Even if the observation is accurate, the way it is framed is intended to lead people to a causal relationship. It’s not an outright lie, but it is dishonest, because the intent is to convince people of soemthing that is false.

That’s the issue with the soft sciences. They are too prone to these sorts of shenanigans by the Left. Much of it never replicates and much of it is politically motivated. The result is nutty ideas are lacquered with the respectability of science, despite being ridiculously wrong or misleading. That’s not to say there is no value in discovering statistical correlations. It’s just that it is a starting point to begin thinking about causal relationships and more complex statistical relationships.

Collapse Takes Time

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One costly side effect of spread of mass media is that likable stupid people have the opportunity to spread nutty ideas. Walter Cronkite was a hugely popular because he perfected the avuncular style that people naturally trust. He seemed like a nice, thoughtful older man who was only there to inform the viewers. We now know he was a pathological liar and willfully misinformed his viewers on behalf of the Left

The cable news channels and network news operations are always looking for that person who can gain the trust of the viewer. If they can peddle the old time religion at the same time, that person is getting very rich on TV. A good example on the Right is financial pundit Larry Kudlow. On TV and radio he comes off as a super-nice, old financial hand, whose wealth of experience makes him uniquely qualified to assess the economy. He gets treated as a sage, despite being wrong about most of the things he discusses.

For all his wrongness, he is a good bellwether. He can be counted on to pitch the company line. In his case, the company is the GOP and the go along to get along gang of Conservative Inc. Seeing this today, we can assume that the GOP will be satisfied to say they are right, but otherwise do nothing to claw back some of the last five years. The signals are being sent to the party and its cheerleaders that the cost is clear. No one will expect them to actually do anything once they have some power.

The usual suspects will churn out some books about how to repeal this or reform that liberal policy. The GOP will offer up candidates long on complaints about the welfare state, but short on desire to do anything about it. The GOP will soon offer up a laundry list of things to fix it. The dynamic of the next 15 years as the boomers age off will be one where one party promises to fix it and the other promises to expand it. The logic of it is now off-limits. Instead, we are looking at a long losing fight against mathematics.

The line now from Conservative Inc is, “it will collapse under its own weight.” That’s true, but it will take 15 years. In a business, pushing off bankruptcy for fifteen years is a good thing. Most businesses don’t last that long. For government, the longer reform is delayed, the worse the cost of collapse is when it comes. In fifteen years, there will be a lot of white people expecting their checks and a lot of brown people expecting their free stuff. When the money runs out, things will get ugly in a hurry.

That’s the insidiousness of social democracy. You get the benefits up front, but push the cost way past the point when current office holders are gone. Whatever the structure, democracy ends up as a some type of tragedy of the commons. All of the incentives are for living in the moment and pushing the costs off to the next generation. It’s why every democracy ends in dictatorship. It’s also why the so-called conservatives are just fraudsters. They know this, yet they go along with it because it pays well.

We’re Doomed – Again

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In every time and every place there have been those predicting doom just over the horizon. Eventually, one of them is right and is often remembered long after by future prophets of doom. No one remembers the millions who were wrong, unless they flamed out in a particularly spectacular fashion or a psychologist wrote a book about them. It’s why predicting the end of the world is much more popular than predicting everything will be just fine. It’s all upside and no downside.

The HBD blogger JayMan has a post up predicting the end of the world. Those inclined to this sort of thinking will surely find plenty to recommend it. That’s the other thing about doom-saying. There’s a big audience for it. People really seem to like hearing that it is all going to come crashing down. maybe it is a form of class grievance that is acceptable, because it lacks the vengeful quality of Marxism.

I have not read the whole thing or had much time to mull over his arguments, but what jumps out to me immediately is the Great Depression Syndrome. This is a cognitive bias I just made up to describe the myopic view of economics history. The field seems to be entirely warped by that one event.  I suspect it is because it is the big economic event that gave birth to their profession. That and they don’t have reliable data for prior events.

Still, you would think someone would notice that the world was buggering along for a few thousand years before Keynes. The other issue is the cultural overhang. The story of the American empire starts with the Great Depression and World War II. The Boomers grew up hearing tales about their parents making it through the Depression to then beating the Nazis. Jews, of course, dominate the economics field, so they bring their cultural biases to the table. For them, economics is all that matters.

The Great Depression is not the standard we should be applying today. For starters, the Great Depression was not what romantics of today claim. It was bad for a lot of people, but it was not catastrophic for most people. In fact, most people did well enough and some people did really well. That and it was relatively short compared to other economic downturns. The Long Depression was worse and it lasted much longer.

It is probably fair to say that the Long Depression is a better analogue to today than the Great Depression. Instead of one big dive over the cliff, followed by a period of adjustment, there were a series of shocks around the world that fed on one another, leading to a global depression. Today, Europe has different troubles than the US, which has different problems than Japan, but all of these systemic problems are influencing one another, threatening the global economy.

Even so, it is not a great analogue. There are lessons to be drawn, but policy makers never learn from the past so it is left to history buffs. Read Currency Wars and you can get a nice easy to read on the history of the Long Depression as well as the Great Depression. Again, the main issue we have with drawing lessons from previous economic turmoil is we don’t have a lot of useful data from those eras. That and the modern nation is demographically different from anything in the past.

Then we have the this. He too suffers from Great Depression Syndrome. In his case, no pics of bread lines today means it is better than the 30’s, because he remembers seeing all of those pics of breadlines back in school. The 1930’s did not have sprawling black ghettos either. They did not have trailer parks full of meth labs. They did not millions of foreign peasants crossing in the country. It’s what makes comparisons between now and 80 years ago incomplete. These are two different countries.

Anyway, plenty of good stuff for the doom and gloom types. The most likely outcome is we stagger from crisis to crisis as the world emerges from the post-Cold War delusions and comes to terms with the technological and demographic realities. There will be a slow winding down of the American Empire and rapid change in American politics, as we descend into tribal multiculturalism. All transitions come with a price, so maybe it is a slow decline or a quick on, the good economic days are probably over.