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That is inevitable. Save an absolute travesty of human rights, China cannot avoid its swelling middle class. Economically, they have options to farm out their
by oliwarner 8y ago
That is inevitable.
Save an absolute travesty of human rights, China cannot avoid its swelling middle class. Economically, they have options to farm out their primary and secondary industries to their African interests but that is only a temporary stay on price.
Underwriting economic growth on a mythical endless future of exploiting consumerism seems plain absurd to me.
I know we're nowhere near post-scarcity but we have to start finding and testing better models of wealth. Globalisation isn't working.
Edit: That is not to say we cannot pre-empt the movement of China's existing industries, and do as they have, and heavily invest in the poorest parts of the planet. This is better but still not sustainable. As soon as you run out of people poor enough to make your crap for the price you need, you get massive inflation. We need to change ourselves.
- cmurf 8y agoGlobalization is working precisely as intended, and it was inevitable. The question is what comes next, and what will its bias and imperfections be, and does it inhibit warfare? It's an unsolved problem how any closed system, whether it's a nation with restricted trade, or a planet with unrestricted trade, transitions off a consumption based economy. Even in the U.S. it's 80% who live paycheck to paycheck, some live right at their means, some are massively in debt, some engage in way more conspicuous consumption because they can and the like the social reward and have no concern of the future. It wouldn't take even half of those people to bring down the current economic order if they were to instantly start saving what they should, rather than consume. And it would likewise be terrible for the whole system if there were a significant recession, because there's simply no savings slack available to tolerate it.