Recently in Geography Category

Genocide against the white farmers in South Africa--the ANC taking the cue provided by Robert Mugabe's murderous and disastrous regime in nearby Zimbabwe--is amping up. It's already happening.

Rhodesia, the former name of Zimbabwe, used to be the bread basket of southern Africa. But Mugabe has engaged in the racist practice of targeting white farmers, who tend to have the most productive and largest farms, and giving the land away to supporters of his who lack the skills and resources to continue the work.

So the shelves have been bare and the hyper inflation has been solved by using the U.S. dollar as the currency.

I remember in 1984 going to Hanover, where Dartmouth College is located, and seeing all these shanties built on the village green, in violation of school rules, to protest apartheid.

It was the equivalent of driving a Chevy Volt today: one knew he was among the anointed by engaging in such activity.

But now that the criminal polygamous South African president Jacob Zuma gets away with singing notorious "kill whitey" songs to jubilant racist black mobs, the movement to protest injustice has become thirty-year-old newscopy. No story here, folks. Just white people living in fear, having to hire private gangs for protection in an increasingly lawless place.

One of the options for a new car in South Africa, which has been around for fifteen years, is the flame thrower defense. Astonishing! Bend down as if you're going to reach for your wallet in the widespread practice of car muggings, and depress the button for the flames to be fired off both sides of the vehicle.

Homework, gentle readers: read J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Coetzee, one of the most important living authors, has wisely emigrated to Australia.

Another California municipality has collapsed financially, with the city of Stockton filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 9.

This is merely the latest in a series of municipal bankruptcies plaguing the Golden State. Far too many of the municipalities believed the good times would never end and promised things to their citizens and employees based upon that belief. However reality has proved them wrong, the bills have come due, and their coffers are empty.

State finances aren't in any better shape, with a projected $16 billion budget deficit in the offing. Unfortunately, unlike the cities and towns in California, the state cannot declare bankruptcy, meaning the taxpayers (what's left of them) are obligated to pay off the state's deficiencies. But as the state assembly and the governor are learning the hard way, raising taxes any more than they already have will not raise more revenue because the state is already on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. The last round of tax hikes caused revenues to fall, leaving the state even deeper in debt.

How they believe yet another round of tax hikes will solve their problem makes me wonder if there is anyone sane left in the upper echelons of state government. Unfortunately the answer appears to be 'no'.

In a post by Matt Patterson, he tries to make the case for jobs that have been lost during this deep recession never returning. While it may be true that some types jobs may be gone forever, it is not inevitable that the total number of jobs will decline from here on out. Through the process of "creative destruction", one kind of job was replaced by a different one. But as Patterson writes, at least one economist thinks this pattern will no longer be true.

In his penetrating new book The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen warns that this may have been a temporary and anomalous phenomenon. Cowen calls the period from roughly the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries the era of "low hanging fruit." According to Cowen, technological advances in this period were relatively easy to produce and exploit, resulting in a staggering explosion of living standards.

But by around 1970, most of this low hanging fruit had been plucked and growth rates began to slow. Indeed, growth rates are "lower today than before 1973, no matter what exact numbers you settle on for the absolute living standard." Cowen sees this fact directly tied to the innovation plateau that was reached around the same time: "The United States produced more patents in 1966 (54,600) than in 1993 (53,200)," he notes. "Meaningful innovation has become harder, and so we must spend more money to accomplish real innovations, which means a lower and declining rate of return on technology."

--snip--

This digital depressant trickles all the way down to old fashioned companies. McDonald's recently announced it will do away with cashiers in many of its European restaurants, replacing them with touch-screen ordering systems. This innovation may (or may not) make ordering your Big Mac a faster experience, but it will definitely eliminate countless opportunities for young and low-skilled workers.

On his last point, couldn't it be the cost of labor in Europe is artificially high due to government mandates and labor laws that replacing expensive humans with less expensive technology makes economic sense? When government and labor laws make it more expensive to hire people for what would otherwise be minimum wage jobs, then how can it be a surprise to anyone that businesses like McDonald's won't hire them? (It's not all that different than what we see happening here every time the Leftists in Congress beholden to the labor unions raise the minimum wage. Each time that happens, joblessness among those seeking entry level jobs goes up because small businesses have a tougher time justifying the added expense, particularly during times of economic hardship.)

One commenter hit the nail on the head, detailing why Cowen's claim about the decline of the American economy is inevitable is absurd.

We are inventing more things, faster than ever before. The past innovations "destroyed jobs" -- and made society wealthier and created new jobs, different jobs, to replace those that had gone before. This is nothing but the song of the Luddites.

HOWEVER...

For that process of creative destruction to work, it is necessary to ALLOW the new jobs and new industries to be created. And THAT, not some illusory "low hanging fruit", is what has been changing over the last generation or two. The regulatory burden on new industries has climbed ever higher.

Right now, in laboratories around the U.S. people are working on fusion power, cheap space travel, synthetic fuel from algae, sensors for automated medical diagnosis, and so on, and on, and on.

And if we lived in a free country, sooner than you think, some of those would be part of our everyday lives. The decision to decline is a CHOICE -- not a fate.

Unfortunately our fate is in the hands of people within government who really don't like America all that much and are working as hard as they can to cripple its innovative and robust economy in an effort to make it more egalitarian (at least by their definition). Unfortunately we've seen the results of such socio-economic experiments before, and they've always turned out poorly for everyone involved...except the ruling class, of course. (And even then, some have seen their fiefdoms crumble away and leave them as destitute as the rest of their fellow countrymen.)

Unless we can break the government imposed malaise on our economy, we will indeed see those jobs lost over the past few years gone for good, with no new jobs to replace them, and we will indeed decline as a nation.

...within twenty thousand people the population of...Trinidad and Tobago. Are you kidding me? 1,315,809 versus 1,229,953. Aren't those two tiny little islands in the Caribbean?