[ExI] Two Japanese reactors on red alert

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> On Mar 12, 2011, at 12:44 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> Japan is the most indebted successful economy on the planet.  They have been running
>national debt over 200% of GDP for some time.  Fortunately they have a tremendously strong
>balance of trade.   The recovery will be painful.

Thankfully, Tokyo was not severely damaged. While the damage is
significant, it could have been much worse had the capital been
severely damaged. Japan's society is nearly uniquely suited to
recovering from things of this sort. In 1923, Japan suffered an even
greater set back in the earthquake and subsequent fires that killed
around 140,000 people, and destroyed their capital city (also the
economic center of the nation). On September 18, 1931, around eight
years later, Japan had recovered sufficiently to successfully invade
Manchuria.

> Calling savings "hoarding" is counter-productive and borders on evil.  We in the US would be
>much better off if we had done a great deal more of this "hoarding".

Agreed. Just to be clear, it wasn't I who said that. We need a lot
more savings in the US for a healthy economy IMHO. Without savings,
all we can do to keep the capital system running is print money. Not a
good plan.

>> Japan's real long term economic difficulty is partially in the
>> demographic of it's aging populace. They aren't having children, and
>> they aren't allowing many people to immigrate. This leads to more and
>> more young people taking care of more and more old people. The old
>> people aren't as productive as the young, and the overall economy
>> suffers terribly.
>
> This is not their primary problem.

It is, however, a big problem. China has similar difficulties, but
doesn't care for their elderly to the extent that the Japanese do.
Looking at age demographics around the world is extremely interesting,
and I believe there is a lot to learn from such things. The important
thing for a healthy economy is to have a large number of people in the
20-60 age group, where the people are highly productive. A lot of
countries are having problems with this. Europe, China and Japan due
to the low reproductive rates. Many African countries due to AIDs. The
United States has avoided this problem with immigration, even though
the birth rate has dropped some. We still have a smaller issue with
the baby boomers beginning to retire. The variation of age
demographics between different countries is very interesting. South
America has lots of young people, so things should be interesting
there too. There was a very interesting article on all this in
National Geographic a few years back.

I've heard that the low birth rate in China has been helpful to their
growth. I've also heard that the low birth rate in Japan is a big
problem. It is a complex issue that I would like to understand better.
I do believe it has a pretty big impact on societies. For one, Japan
leads the world in robots to care for the elderly, since it's a
problem they are highly focused on.

> They over-stimulate in the 80s including a huge housing/land bubble then suffered a crash from it in the early 90s.  They have not to date fully recovered.  They are strong enough in some aspects to not get sucked under by their huge debt and the amount of centralized meddling in the economic ecology that they "enjoy".  But the cost of losing a lot of productive capacity and the costly infrastructure that supported it is going to be a blow.  It is too early to have a reasonable guess as to how much of a blow.
>

I suspect that they'll recover much faster than Sumatra. :-)

>> If the earthquake leads to more births, then it will help. :-)
>
> Children are not a great deal cheaper to support than the elderly much of the time.

But they do grow up to be productive citizens. Elderly people rarely
become productive again, although transhumanism COULD change that
eventually.

-Kelly