dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Household formation was dullishly ordinary before it became the Australian 'dream'.

TLDR: Copying is the fast track to immortality. Why go to college? Why get a good job? Why have kids, then send those kids to college? 🥅 Your default reason for those time-consuming and costly endeavours may be, 'because I want to'. But does that express true desire, or is it rationalisation after-the-fact? Was a concerted effort made to explore alternatives? After all, the virtue of conventional goals are taken as givens, such that non-pursuit - rather than pursuit - must be defended. Parents need not justify their choice to procreate, while the childless are expected to explain not having children. Arthur Schopenhauer enters the chat:

Australian houses have gotten larger while Australian families have gotten smaller.

Which industries are ripest for technological disruption? Australia labour productivity and value-add by industry.

Versus robots. "No! Demo-GRAPH-y!" The flood of low cost Chinese labour will ebb, according to Goodhart and Pradhan in "The Great Demographic Reversal", leading to: higher inflation. manufacturing elsewhere becoming more competitive. ( un-paywalled from Nikkei Shimbun ) Apparently good news for those in developed nations who have long clamoured for fair prices and fair wages, and who blame globalisation for undercutting them. But when? And for how long? Well, not right now . China labour costs are stagnant, not rising. source: tradingeconomics.com Even as China's working age population loses 5 million a year, assuming the baseline scenario. (Source: Reserve Bank of Australia .) One may scoff at the suggestion that these lost workers could be - or are being - replaced with robots or other automation, such as AI. Robots have been around for decades but opinion on how they impact workers vary, from ' a little ' to 'responsible for  50-70% of i...

Q: How can you tell if someone has an investment property? A: Don't worry, they'll tell you.