re: Current demographics imply one (secular bear) may begin later this decade
I lived for 6 years in a rural Alaska village of 4000 people. It was as isolated as anywhere on the planet. We got our first paved road, out first ATM machine, and internet access, while I was living there. But, the jobs were filled, and the goods consumed, by people from all over the planet. One of the doctors working there was a former Boat Person, born in Vietnam. When there was a nursing shortage, we recruited from Australia and Scotland. The locals weren't meeting the demand for restaurants, so we had a migration of Koreans, who set up several restaurants. And so on. My point is, that our labor pool was the whole planet. The Global Village is real. Movements of labor, capital, and goods, are so fluid now, that it is pointless to make predictions based on the demographics of a country in isolation, because there is no such thing (isolation, that is).
All of the Gorillas are, or are rapidly becoming, global corporations. If Japan is becoming a nation of pensioners, then the nimble Gorilla simply shifts sales, production, and R&D, to whatever nations have large cohorts at prime producing-and-consuming ages. And, in the U.S., any unfilled job niche, from software engineers to fruit-pickers, gets filled by legal or illegal immigration.
I haven't read Dent's books, because, after hearing the initial premise, it didn't seem plausible, from what I've seen in my own life. If he found patterns in the past, and if those patterns show causation (rather than just correlation), I still don't think it tells us anything about the future. It is different now. |
