Demand Limited Economics

(Updated to Remove Missing Links)

From an article no longer on the web:

What has changed in recent decades is that the mobility and automation of productive processes, combined with a glut of the supply of financial capital, results in a macroeconomic production function that is demand-constrained rather than supply constrained.

I have walked through empty malls with miles and miles of goods stacked to the ceiling, and no one around to buy.  We have global over capacity, and for the economy to run (or at least not break down) governments have to get more people to soak up this excess capacity.  So we have these perverse effects:

• The need for mass immigration, to create more consumers to buy crap
• The push for broken households, who spend more and save less 
• The push for more welfare and income distribution programs to create more buying
• The push for ever increasing amounts of consumer debt
• The push for ever more student loans
• The push for people to buy houses who shouldn't (yes, it's happening again)
• Ever increasing levels of government debt and monetary devaluation

The global economy is in a giant debt trap.  If consumers stopped buying the whole house of cards would come down. 

Let's Ban Gas Leaf Blowers

One of the fun side effects of tinnitus for a large portion of suffers is hyperacusis, which is increased sensitivity to sound.  It's not bad enough that there is constant ringing or whooshing in the ear, what sounds you do hear seem louder than they are and can actually be physically painful.

And one of the most annoying, painful sounds is gas leaf blowers.  There are no house walls or windows thick enough that can block the sound.  I am a climate skeptic, but like most who push it, I am willing to sign on in order to push an agenda (and ignore it for stuff that I like to do).

According to the State of California, gas powered leaf blowers and hedgers will pass cars to become the number one polluter in 2020.  Politicians rail on everything from cars to planes to cut down pollution, but for some reason no one ever talks about leaf blowers and other 2-stroke gardening tools (which mix oil with gas for fuel), all of which have quieter electric counter-parts. 

If we are in a 12 year crisis, as claimed by many, how come nothing is being done with these devices that generate not only the most pollution, but unwanted noise?  How come politicians are pushing regulations for more electric cars but not more electric gardening tools, which would provide more bang for the regulatory buck?

Several California cities have banned gas leaf blowers, and I hope the trend picks up, but it is infuriating to hear "green, green, green" but no one has suggested this very simple, big solution. Instead you have the idiot Deblaseo talking about banning skyscrapers or the FAA "NextGen" rules creating noise nightmares in order to save a few pennies of jetfuel per flight.

It goes to show that "climate change" is BS.

Americans Don't Have Savings by Choice

These stories come out every few months: Almost 40% of Americans Would Struggle to Cover a $400 Emergency

What Americans don't have to struggle to pay for: big screen TVs, ipads, expensive tennis shoes, Starbucks, streaming TV services, cellphone service, legalized marijuana, and everything else in this mass consumer society.

No one is saying "Hey, we should cut off our cable and Netflix, which cost $100 a month, and check out free library books for the next four months so we can save $400 for an emergency".

Few people live below their means, or are willing to sacrifice to do so.  Mass debt shoveled at everyone means relatively poor families max out the cards for that Disney vacation.  Gratification now, and worry about paying later.

The lack of savings is just a reflection of debt-fueled mass consumption encouraged not only by corporations, but by the government.

Goodby Rice University

My kid who has straight As, a 1530 SAT, speaks two languages fluently, plays sports, and did summer internships in Japan and Ukraine was rejected from my alma mater Rice University.  Worse than that, it was also my mother’s alma mater.  My mother was one of only 100 women at the whole university when she attended in the late 1950s, and was the first in her family ever to attend college. She was a major reason I attended Rice for both a bachelors and an MBA, and this rejection was a spit in both of our faces.  It shows the admissions office is divorced from Rice’s own history and driving their own agenda.

This along with the college bribery scandal shows college admissions is irreparably broken.  Kids who shouldn’t get in are admitted.  Kids who should be admitted are not, in this case probably due to an anti-legacy effort, or because my daughter is not “diverse” enough.  I have no doubt at all she would have been accepted if the ethnicity box were checked differently. She is an honor student, and I was not some alum hoping for “legacy” to dump my C-student onto my old school.

Over the years I have gotten fellow alumni jobs.  Not job leads, but jobs.  Students often reached out to me over LinkedIn for internship leads since I am one of very few alumni working in Silicon Valley.  In the early 2000s I did a marketing project for a group of professors who were trying to spin out a technology.  A few years earlier I had connected my father’s company to hire a Rice professor for a consulting project.  

Despite over 50 years of family connection and my staying involved, Rice decided to cut ties with me while at the same time letting in dozens of foreign students with no ties at all, and who will all drop all ties to Rice once they return home.

Rice has a frighteningly small number of alumni – they graduate in ten years what or Texas A&M or UCLA does in two years – and should be nurturing their network, not alienating it. But like the foreign students will do once they are out, I will now be cutting all ties with Rice.  No job leads.  No internship leads.  Applications or resumes listing Rice go to the bottom of the pile.  Students can’t find me on LinkedIn since Rice is deleted from my profile. My own networking efforts will not be hindered since there are so few Rice alumni in my field.  I was a pathfinder. 

And after all, why would I help a university that wouldn’t accept me as a student if I were applying today?

WSJ Not Understanding What the "Crisis in Democracy" Is All About

It's more than a little ironic that an article lamenting about a crisis of democracy turned off commenting.

Unfortunately the author was not talking about democracy here in the US.  No, he is worried that it is not being exported enough throughout the world.  I don't particularly care about that as I watch our own democracy crumble (like the author I am using "democracy" interchangeably with "republic").

One of the problems is that an increasing number of people believe no one is listening to them, like the comment section above.  And if no one is listening, people will go to greater and greater lengths to be heard.

Of course Western "democracies" are cracking down ever more on speech, a result of multiculturalism.  The more MC there is, the more the population and its speech has to be controlled.

In New Zealand, it is illegal to even possess the manifesto of the recent mass shooter, and they are activity prosecuting several who distributed the video.  In England, criticizing the make-up or religion of immigrants can lead to fines and jail time.   The idea of using the state to enforce and prosecute “hate speech” was signed on by most Western democracies just last week.

And with increasing control of speech in "democracies", aided and abetted by Google, Twitter and Facebook, why would anyone think "democracy", as it is developing today, is better than other forms of government?