by JOHN MEYER
Staring the reality of population stabilization/decline in the face, The Economist has grudgingly acknowledged it might not be that bad. Not because of any social health reasons mind you, but because its prescribed growth-forever diet of ever higher consumption and mass immigration (effectively 3 meals a day of cheeseburgers, fries and Cokes) which they have promoted for the past 50 years, may no longer be on the menu.
The predictable resultant morbid obesity of big growth generated the intractable structural problems of low productivity increase, housing unaffordability and massive transfer of wealth from productive people to the unproductive finance cult. These problems have proven immune to the “power of markets” ability to solve them despite the hopium spun by Century Initiative supporter Mark Carney.
What does solve these issues though is a healthy diet of shifting the menu from growth junk food of more housing/infrastructure and endless cheap labour to investing in people, their training and the tools they use. P-R-O-D-U-C-T-I-V-T-Y is the basis of social, fiscal and health.
Housing becomes affordable, productivity and wages go up and the beltsize of ballooning deficits shrinks. All key improvements for social health but a disaster for the finance cult. So much for those juicy directorships, Mark.
The now corpulent nations which followed the Economist’s advice are beset by massive debt, narrow house-of-cards economic bases, declining living standards and social unrest. How bad has it gotten? Most of the elites and their media now recognize there are severe structural problems which the traditional cure-all of more growth may not solve.
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