dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Is having children to care for you in old age a good strategy? The social contract, particularly in Confucian societies, is that adults are expected to care for their elderly, reciprocating the care received as children. But how well is this expectation played out in fact?

It's not the size, it's the growth. As the world ages, it's worth wondering if retiree benefits will increasingly drive inflation through supporting elderly buying power and enabling them to exit the labour supply. Let's plot pension replacement rates , a measure of pension generosity, against 2023 inflation for the G20, the world's largest economies. In short, countries' circumstances and systems are too diverse for a strong relationship between pension generosity and inflation, but let's break it down further.

TLDR: Individuals pay the most tax, followed by large enterprises (Government-owned and publicly listed). 📊  Code generated by Gemini. Figures from FY 2023-2024. Company tax breakdown (Into large corporates and other) estimated from FY 2022-2023.

Invaders don't win. Defenders lose. If we're fretting about our own Golden Age falling to usurpers, let us remember that barbarians don't operate in a vacuum. The Khwarazmian (Persian) Empire was corrupt and rife with elite infighting before the Mongols arrived. 

It’s claimed that Australia’s stagnant productivity is due to a lack of business investment . That's an easy argument: if companies aren’t investing in better technology and equipment, workers can’t become more efficient .  In fact, business investment has paced the overall economy for decades . The real issue isn't lack of investment, but where that investment is going, and what's driving the rest of the economy.

Help stop the spread of social anxiety. A fact sheet.  FOMO (fear of missing out) and status anxiety are highly contagious social anxieties. 😨 What are they? The fear of being excluded from knowledge, experiences, and interactions (FOMO), and consequentially being considered unsuccessful by society (status anxiety). What Are the Symptoms?

9 years on, Britain is not a smoking crater, so Brexit - and de-globalisation by extension - wasn't all that bad, right? Wrong. And this chart proves it.

"Tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter, dummy." And just like that, the trade war is over, everyone stands down, and resumes filling their online baskets. LOL, no.

Australia's Productivity Commission estimates that the baby boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964, aged 56 - 74 in 2020) will pass $3.5 trillion dollars in wealth to their heirs by 2050. The distribution will not be even.

The British Empire hit peak size in 1919, gaining Axis territories through the Treaty of Versailles. Over the coming decades it ceded cultural, military, and economic power to the United States. How did this play out for Britain's investors?

(Yeah, you know me.) "All presidential terms that coincided with negative average annual returns occurred under Republican leadership." ( Nightlife Finance 26-Nov-2024  on US politics and the stock market). Trump is ... (checks notes) ... uh oh.

Can game theory explain 2024's year of elections? Political losers sneer at voters who seemingly ousted well-meaning, if hapless, incumbents to install villains who actively campaigned to lower their living standards. via GIPHY "Face-eating leopards prepare for a record year." However, people may not vote in their future interests, but to further a strategy that is equally rational.

Cheap labour may no longer come to you.  Rich western nations may be souring on immigration . Longer term, the global supply of working-age people will shrink . Services inflation outstrips goods inflation , particularly in areas which are hard to automate.

Arnhem Land, Australia, 1650: expat Makassans run trepang processing plants with their local joint venture partners. Even after white settlement, during Australia's supposedly 'pure' settler period, you had Chinese on the gold fields and in veggie gardens, and blackbirded Islanders on sugar plantations. Even the most remote societies have always been multicultural, to varying degrees. Tribes since the dawn of humanity have bumped and mingled. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Steppe people, no! The notion that multiculturalism erodes social cohesion is therefore false. So what actually does?

Eastern and Western humanism has lost to Capitalism. Representative democracy promised ... representation. Neo-Confucianism promised stability through progress. Both seem to have stalled. Gloom now surrounds these humanist ideologies from the East and the West. Capital markets are like, "number go up". What gives?

 ... not a human guarantee. When someone sanctimoniously claims something is a "Human Right", they often mean that they should get it for free. So what does it mean that housing is a human right?

How do you fund a nation? British PM Clement Attlee said, If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly.

Did a lack of trust in governments exacerbate COVID-19 deaths? 'Hogwash', is my first response.

I used to agree with the mainstream view that an aging population was deflationary. The logic: old people don't buy new stuff. Real world examples: Japan, Singapore, Germany, etc. If inflation did pop its head up, governments would reflexively smash it with higher interest rates, never mind the resultant unemployment. Why? Well, the US did it in the 1970s. Since then, much of the neo-liberal project has been to transfer power from workers to consumers. Voters were happy with that trade-off then, so they probably would be again. The numbers stack up politically. Inflation affects everyone. Unemployment only affects workers. I don't work. I'm team higher unemployment. Anticipating a future of stable or falling prices, I relaxed going into the COVID pandemic.

Inflation in Australia may be driven by corporate profiteers, but not who you think.