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Musings Report 2022-52 12-24-22 Under-Appreciated Factors That Might Matter in 2023
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they're a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Under-Appreciated Factors That Might Matter in 2023
Things can bubble beneath the surface of public awareness for years or even decades before they become consequential enough to become visible.
There may a catalyzing event that brings things to a head, or there may be an accumulation of factors that together affect the public consciousness.
Here are some systemic issues that might matter, despite their low visibility, in 2023.
1. The poor health of the Chinese public. There is relatively little reliable data on the health of the general public in China.
What is known does not reflect a healthy general populace.
With Covid spreading quickly in China, poor health matters because Covid's severity depends at least in part on the health and age of the infected individual. (This can be said of all viral and bacterial infections.)
The immune-compromised, the elderly and those with impaired respiratory function fair poorly as Covid harms the immune system as well as endothelial cells, brain function, etc.
Lifestyle illnesses (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.) increase the odds of a poor outcome from Covid.
For a variety of reasons, China's populace is especially prone to diabetes as their diet has Westernized and physical activity has diminished. See links in the From Left Field section below)
Over 12% of the populace is diabetic (roughly 170 million), the largest cohort of diabetics on the planet.
By at least one estimate, an astounding 490 million Chinese are prediabetic, i.e. suffering from metabolic disorder, with odds of developing diabetes running from 65% to 88%.
When I first visited China in the summer of 2000, the standard mode of transport outside of the inner rings of Tier One cities was a single-speed bicycle.
The few cars on the road were either Santana VW taxis or official vehicles.
Now all that's changed completely.
One public-health result of China's massive industrialization is significant air and water pollution. The effects of exposure to this level of pollution takes decades to manifest, but manifest they do.
Respiratory diseases are the unavoidable result of air pollution. Polluted water can cause an array of maladies.
Twenty years of heavy industrial pollution has had a consequence on public health that is not measurable with any precision. We know there has been a negative effect, we just don't know how negative.
Since the government earns revenues from the sale of tobacco, cigarette smoking is still common in China. The negative effects of smoking are well-known.
China's healthcare system is like many around the world (including the US): the wealthy get good care, the poor, not so much.
China has relatively few (measured per capita) acute-care beds, so even a relatively modest wave of hospitalizations will overload the system, and everyone seeking care from an overflowing facility will get little in the way of care.
Poor public health could exacerbate the Covid repercussions in ways few anticipate, including a reduction in lifespans and the workforce.
The economic consequences of poor public health are rarely discussed or measured. But that doesn't mean they're not consequential.
The poor health of much of the US populace is well-known and consequential. The poor health of much of China's populace is less well-known but just as consequential.
2. Jevons Paradox: all the alternative energy being added to the system isn't replacing hydrocarbons, it's fueling the expansion of energy consumption.
The prime directive of the status quo is "growth at any cost." Given this mythology / mindset, the current "energy solution" is to start manufacturing pickup trucks and SUVs which consume even more of the planet's resources because they're heavier and contain scarce, costly metals in their massive batteries.
That there won't be enough minerals for this resource-intensive electrification is already well-established, despite claims to the contrary that ignore the energy inputs and the enormous infrastructure required to get the source rock to mills, refineries and transport hubs.
The solution is obvious: consume less by radically improving efficiencies at every scale and changing the incentives to reward consuming less and making things last much, much longer.
But this doesn't fit the mythology of "growth is progress" so it is dismissed as defeatist and "unprogressive."
3. The high cost of parasitic elites and the need for massive investments in energy and re-industrialization. Every ruling elite must reward its core supporters, and these subsidies become ever-more costly as the demands of supporters never diminish, they only increase.
The "solution" for the past 40 years was to create as much currency / credit as was needed to fund these subsidies, investment and the vast structures of governance: pensions, healthcare, education, defense, etc.
Now there are limits on how much currency / credit can be created out of thin air, as structural inflation has the potential to bring down the entire status quo.
At the same time, the need for much larger investments in energy, infrastructure and re-industrialization are now pressing.
There won't be enough funds / resources available to satiate all the insiders / supporters and fund the essentials of government and the enormous investments.
Slashing Social Security, healthcare, education, defense etc. is politically dangerous. If investment is watered down, the nation will eventually fail.
That leaves cutting the subsidies of the parasitic elites. This will set off a political frenzy of infighting as each elite seeks to push the cuts onto some other core insider constituency.
Political infighting distracts the elite and the nation from the critical tasks at hand. Infighting is an indirect cause of the collapse of nations and empires.
4. The decay of social cohesion resulting from extremes of inequality and unfairness. Social cohesion is the overlooked and under-appreciated glue that holds a society together.
The decay of social cohesion is mostly invisible. It's not a transparent process. People start feeling negative emotions as fairness declines and the social order becomes a two-tier system of haves and have-nots, a system where the wealthy, connected insiders (the few) evade the taxes and legal consequences heaped on the many.
This unfairness eats away at social cohesion. As long as people feel the status quo is still working for them, they express their disapproval in small ways.
But when they realize the status quo no longer works for them, it only works for the few, they eventually rebel by either dropping out or actively protesting the corrupt, self-serving insiders' hold on wealth and power.
The realization that the status quo no longer works for them takes time. It may take a catalyzing event to crystallize this awareness, or it may just reach a critical mass and detonate into a social criticality.
The timeline on all these factors maturing is somewhere between 5 and 10 years, if history is any guide. The years between 2025 and 2032 may well be more "interesting" than most anticipate.
Highlights of the Blog
What's Your Line in the Sand? The $25 Burger? 12/21/22
Time to Get Out of Dodge? 12/20/22
A Great Madness Sweeps the Land 12/18/22
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
The household is fine with a no-gift low-key holiday. No guilt, no stress, no frenzy, celebrate our health and good cheer--it's all good.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Estimating lifetime risk of diabetes in the Chinese population--Their findings showed a lifetime risk of 65.9% and 12.7 years of life living with diabetes for an average 20-year old with normoglycaemia. For an average 20-year old with prediabetes the corresponding estimates were 88.0% and 32.5 years, respectively. In other words, 6 out of 10 20-year olds with normoglycaemia and 9 out of 10 with prediabetes would be expected to develop diabetes in their lifetime.
Significant Increase in Diabetes Prevalence Observed in China
China’s Diabetes Epidemic (2013)
China’s COVID vaccines have been crucial — now immunity is waning (Nature.com)
* * *
The Rules for Rulers (video, via T.D.)
Global warming in the pipeline (academic paper)
The economy is moving from a tailwind pushing it along to a headwind holding it back (Gail Tverberg)
MSG defends using facial recognition to kick lawyer out of Rockettes show (via C.A.) -- the surveillance state goes private-sector....
Japan warns of China's COVID situation, cuts view on factory output
Food for Thought: Why Auntie Anne’s Pretzels Failed in China (2013)
Why The Age Of American Progress Ended -- it's not this simple, but worth a read as the conventional view....
The 747: When Getting There Was Half the Fun--Luftansa flies 25 of the 44 passenger 747s still in service.
"You can have problems and still feel good." Philosophicus
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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