Sorry, I should have simply ignored these posts.
If you will type "y2k" into the field for subjects at the bottom of your screen, you will find there are six threads on SI that concern this issue.
What is interesting on this thread is the extreme politico-economic complexity of the the Asian countries--and what the effect of this may be on the United States economy.
Clearly these are powerful and well-organized societies that are unfortunately at the moment producing too many things of the same sort, tailor-made, for the most part, for the United States consumer of three years ago. The United States is now submerged in cheap clothing, cheap TV sets, cheap memory chips, cheap disk drives, --have you priced vacuum cleaners in the last year? They are almost giving some of them away. It is a global version of the problems in the United States at the end of the 1920s. In some ways--nothing every repeats exactly.
I certainly do hope that there are intelligent people who can see a way out of this. I can't. Looks like global depression ahead to me from a huge glut of goods. In the United States, thrift shops are full of perfectly good, hardly-worn, clothing. At one time families gathered around the single radio set--then around the single TV. Now, when thieves break into a mountain cabin they don't even bother to steal a black-and-white TV.
But perhaps lessons learned from the developed countries in the 1930s can be applied now. |
