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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AC Flyer who wrote (45097)	1/22/2004 7:00:31 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hang on there ACF: <A good approximation of the size of the US economy is a simple integral of the area under the population x per capita spending curve.> census.gov Even the low series shows population growth for the USA until 2040, which as far as I'm concerned is so far away it's not worth thinking much about. 35 years!! That's half a lifetime. A lot changes in half a lifetime. Unexpected events have a big impact in that time, for good or ill [usually for good]. I'm all for panicking and worrying. I love it. But I have to have at least some realistic basis to start worrying. I'm good for fear over meteors and terror over the resulting tsunamis. I'm too scared to live anywhere where a volcano could pop up at short notice, though I have spent a few days skiing on an active volcano and have stayed overnight several times inside a caldera at Taupo and Rotorua [I feel like a real high-wire dare devil doing that]. I take fright at all sorts of scary things. I just can't get much of a tingle from looking at demographics, either in the USA alone or global populations. A decade ago I used to look at Africa's absurdly booming population and knew sickeningly that it was going to end in one of history's major catastrophes, though I had no idea what would be the mechanism. With 25% and even higher AIDS infection rates, one mechanism for population reduction has become clear. Even India's vast population growth didn't worry me like the African one did. I thought they'd get by okay and their population could become a huge advantage. Many hands make light work, provided governments don't tie one hand, or both, behind their backs. So, back to your integral of the population and their spending. For every old baby boomer geezer who goes off to the golf club or rocking chair there will be somebody waiting to take over their job or business. That's already built into the population curve. There is no population reduction in the offing. Not in the next 30 years anyway unless sars goes nuts or something major happens. The people who take over from the old geezers will be earning as much as the boomers. They'll do as good a job or better, having a higher average IQ [as shown per Flynn Effect] and motivation as good and maybe better. Like the boomers, they'll have houses, mortgages, wives, children, cars, loans and will sing the old song, "I owe, I owe, it's off to work we go." I can do that maths in my head. No need to look for 4th or even 2nd significant figures in a spreadsheet. The main reason for the huge USA growth since 1980 is that oil prices came way down after huge price increases in the 1970s, computers took off and a lot of things were going right, including globalisation. The 1970s was a hiatus in a much longer story of rapid growth. People in the USA worry about loss of jobs to China, India and elsewhere, but people don't really want a job. They want an income. If the USA can live off exports of things to China, which have been developed in India, using capital from New Zealanders, then the Americans can rest on their laurels. The tax take from QUALCOMM will pay for a lot of federal government activity. American shareholders can go shopping using their dividends from their investments. They can sell more shares to and borrow more money from overseas investors, who realize that the USA is a great place to invest. The USA economy is like the British economy during the industrial revolution and the British Empire. It doesn't matter than the colonials and trading partners don't go and live in the USA. They are part of the economy wherever they are. Americans will buy houses, cars, and all the other stuff as much as ever and they'll have even more money to do it thanks to their overseas investments and taxes on overseas investors [I pay a lot of tax via QUALCOMM's tax payments]. Apart from the USA, China and India have got a couple of billion people who will all be wanting to buy lots of stuff too. USA companies will be producing a lot of stuff which they want to buy. More and more will be outsourced to India and China, but that will still leave lots for USA producers to do. Global demand is huge and growing and will be growing for half a century before the global population starts to drop. Maybe it won't take half a century because Japan, Germany, Italy and other countries are already into declining populations. If there's a decline in the USA, it'll be for political reasons, such as people like me abandoning the USA in favour of places like China if the USA starts doing too many stupid things, and other places improve their ways. So, there are some quantitative comments. Count the crowds. Come back to the light side ACF. Don't be sucked into the black hole of doomster despair. The end of the world has never yet arrived and won't any time soon [unless we get bowled by a meteor, decimated by a sars-type bug or maybe something else, such as perhaps a flip over to an ice-age]. Mqurice

To: AC Flyer who wrote (45097)	1/22/2004 7:06:51 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

When I brought the issue of immigration -a.ka. population replenishment and tax-payer importation- here there were a few reactions. Most of people thinking their kindergarten countries would changed forever and they missed the point miserably. AC picked it and threw it on its equation and changed the his whole perspective. Mq, when the facts change, the intelegent man chnages his mind. Same as when Elmat brought here his concept of Abracadabras. Which are those bright spots and dark outlook. The technologies that propels creative Schumpter's Creative Destruction. I even, said that they can be measured as we measure Earthquakes and me and Jay have created a range of technolgies or human factor induced changes in society and in economy to show how it works. You did it nicely with population factor, AC.