• 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

help-circle
  • The pace of technological change and innovation was always going to slow down this decade. But Covid, Ukraine and a decoupling from Russia/China has further slowed it.

    You need three things in abundance to create tech. First an advanced economy, which narrows down most of the world. Second you need lots of capital to burn while you make said advances. Finally you need lots of 20 and thirty something’s who will invent and develop the tech.

    For the last 20 years we’ve had all of those conditions in the Western world. Boomers were at the height of their earnings potential and their kids were leaving home in droves letting them pour money into investments. Low interest rates abound because capital was looking for places to be utilized. China was the workshop of the world building low to mid range stuff allowing the West to focus its excess Millennials age workforce on value added and tech work.

    Now in the USA boomers are retiring and there aren’t enough GenX to make up the difference. Millennials and finally getting down to household creation or their oldest cohorts (Xennials) just now entering into their mid 40s and starting to move up in their careers but they probably still have kids to support. So it will be some time before capital becomes plentiful again. Gen Z is large but they aren’t enough to back fill the loss of Millennials.

    Ohh I made a point to highlight that this was a US demographic phenomena. Europe and Japan do not have a large Millennial or GenZ populations to replace their aging boomers. We have no modern economic model to map out what will happen to them.

    China is going through a demographic collapse worse than what you see in Europe or Japan. Only they aren’t rich to compensate add in the fact that they decided to antagonize their largest trading partners in the West causing the decoupling we are now seeing.

    The loss of their labor means the West has to reshore or find alternative low wage markets for production and expend a lot of capital to build out the plant in those markets to do so.

    Add on top geopolitical instability of the Ukraine and you have a recipe for slower tech growth.
















  • The CCP strategically cornered the market in more than a few critical areas for EV production. Individual Western firms are not able to compete with a well funded and coordinated effort by a state actor to control every stage of the production process.

    On top of that the real estate crisis China has caused local consumption to crater. The means that China is looking to the West for markets to dump their over capacity.

    No country is going to sit idly by while their industrial base is directly threatened especially in a critical area such as green tech. Especially by an openly hostile power such as China.