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Patrick O'Neil's avatar

My biggest question is the extent to which demographics will play any role in China's further development. Some suggest robotics and AI will continue to drive development forward; others note that the dependency ratio and weak social safety net will be a drag on the country, and that it will undergo a Japan-style stagnation before it gets wealthy. That, of course, could also create instability--note the past writing on "bare branches" in China, meaning unmarried men, and the suggestion that that would lead to social unrest and perhaps a more aggressive foreign policy. I'm not a demographer or an economist so I can't speak to these with any insight.

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Sunshine's avatar

Please continue to dig deeper into the financial and economic elements of our global upheaval.

"In Dalio's telling the most recent round of this cycle is the story of what happened in the period from 1930-1945."

I have been often telling my wife over the past 5 years that it looks more and more likely that we will now have the "delightful" opportunity to probably experience some new configuration of those previous 15 years of chaos/instability/war that ran from 1930 to 1945.

On this economic/financial front also keep an eye on the writings of Adam Tooze--especially his now ongoing weekly chartbook series.

I would call Tooze (a brilliant historian) an emerging Keynesian political/economic reformer, who seems to be hopeful that some type of new global financial/economic package similar to Bretton Woods might still be fashioned, through U.S. leadership, using a a more dramatic mobilization of state-sponsored government spending as the major tool in bringing about national and international political stability.

Also on the economic/financial/political front don't ignore the anthropological/economic analysis of the late David Graeber. From my perspective he offers an extremely articulate critique of more traditional left state-centricity that is implicit in some of the ideas of Tooze.

And finally, as I have previously mentioned, keep on eye on the Paul Kingsnorth series on the mega-machine--especially his ideas on technology, culture, and the use of the covid crisis to accelerate authoritarian tendencies.

Kingsnorth also offered a powerful critique of Keynes in his "What is the Acid," essay where he notes how naive Keynes was in his assumption that when a society cores itself around avarice and usury it could suddenly drop such vices when some plateau of Keynesian economic perfection might be reached.

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