[ExI] Repudiating the national debt

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2016-05-16 07:32, Dan TheBookMan wrote:
>  What actions can we take? Anders brought up, for raising the 
> likelihood of nuclear war, moving to Tasmania. Is there a Tasmania for 
> something like world economic collapse?

The reason for Tasmania in the case of nuclear war is that it is (1) far 
away from any primary target, (2) the bad effects in nuclear winter 
scenarios look like they are attenuated down there, (3) looks like it is 
self-sufficient enough to have a good chance.

The economic counterpart would be an economy (1) not directly involved 
in the triggering damage (Chinese banking, Greek government debt, US 
national debt default...), (2) not strongly linked to the systemic risk, 
and (3) able to run when the rest of the world is a mess.

The tricky thing is that if you want to be a part of the efficient, 
globalized market you will have to give up on (2). There is a premium to 
be paid for independence.

Looking at the world bank data and running a correlation on the GDP 
growth, the most decoupled (correlation -0.51 with the world economy) 
is... Afghanistan. Second place, -0.29: Libanon. Followed by Sudan, 
Haiti and Myanmar. Lovely places.

But in a global economic meltdown I suspect they would be robust since 
their miserableness makes losses smaller and local resiliency more 
likely. Still, much depends on if they have dependencies not covered by 
this.