More Light Blogging for a While Longer

Things have been busy at work, and weekends and holidays have become rare and valuable time to spend with my family, so I’m going to slow the tempo here for a while.  How long?  Depends on events, I suppose, but at time when everyone’s attention is on other events here at home seems like a good time for that.  The kids are young.  They won’t be young forever.  We had a great weekend out seeing things together.
One interesting story I will leave you with is this one:

The latest batch of macro data from China are mixed, but all point toward a sharp deceleration of economic growth. Official gross domestic product (GDP) data show growth down to 9% from the 12% of a couple of years ago; spending on consumer durables (autos) is falling sharply; home sales and construction activity are dropping; and leading indicators of the manufacturing sector (the Chinese Purchasing Managers’ Index) show an outright contraction.  [Forbes, Nouriel Roubini]

Related video here.
To put in context why a 6% growth rate could be so disastrous for China, consider the demographic implications of a society where decades of the one-child policy means that a declining number of young workers will have to support a large number of workers who are about to retire:

China’s economy will need a new growth formula over the next generation because the demographic situation over the previous twenty-five years, over the twenty-five years up to now, is not going to be there to support that same growth formula. What do I mean by that? As you already noted, China’s working-age population is going to peak and then decline as far as the eye can see. Not only is labor-force size going to peak, but there’s going to be a big change in labor-force composition. Traditionally, it’s the youngest people, the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, who have the highest level of educational attainment in Chinese society and other places. There’s going to be a really sharp fall-off of these fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the future. All of China’s labor-force growth and all of the growth that’s going to keep it from shrinking even more is going to come in the category of workers fifty and older. It’s far from ideal for a modernizing society. With zero labor-force growth, it’s also going to be much more difficult to keep savings at the remarkably high levels that China has had, so you’re not going to have the same labor-force growth, you’re probably not going to have the same growth in capital investment, and with both of those factors in play, productivity may also be affected. So you see a lot of downward pressure on economic performance in the future.  [Nicholas Eberstadt on VOA]

I’m simplistic enough to understand that what’s bad for China’s stable economic growth is bad for its political stability and good for the world.  If China is struggling to find the yuan to appease restive pensioners and crack down on dissenters, it should have less money to expend on odious regimes in Burma, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and North Korea.

There’s a cutting-off-one’s-own-nose aspect to seeing the positive side of what looks like a deep recession, but economies are cyclical, and periodic recessions are one of their natural features.  The Chinese will soon learn what Republicans and Democrats should have learned here:  politics can only warp an economy and society so much before the economy fractures.