Didn’t know whether to put this in GQ or here, but as the answers are likely to be speculative I settled for here.
My question/point is: What can we do given the current financial situation that the western world is experiencing to make sure it doesn’t recur?
House prices are sky high, but falling slightly, oil is at an all time high, food production is not all it could be and banks are going bust, to name but a few problems.
Is there a solution? Is greed the driving force in the west and if so can we overcome this and adopt a saner financial system?
There are a couple of basic issues with business/the economy:
There is a lot of pressure to create profits now, which often stifles the ability to make long term plans. This is largely due to the mass public which is, frankly, stupid and impatient but is also your investor and very demanding. They’d rather you cut corners to make a bigger profit this quarter than lay the foundation for impending future changes like the move to different energy sources.
Solution? No idea. A stronger focus on dividends instead of the dollar value of a stock would probably be a step but that seems difficult to accomplish.
The guy who cuts corners the most wins. Most customers are, like investors, stupid and uncaring. They just look at the price and choose what they’re going to take off the shelf based on that. Even when you run big advertising schemes like “Buy American!” most people will still go for the cheapest deal and buy Chinese. And if customers don’t buy your products, you go out of business. So regardless of whether you would rather have well engineered, well tested, non-polluting products made by skilled workers without helping to finance a Communist regime, the first company that moves to China/figures out a way to not have to deal with pollution/figures out a way to cut down the quality of products to the barest minimum, is going to steal all your customers. So you either have to do the same thing or lay off all your people and close your doors.
Solution? Government measures that make it possible to compete with people who cut corners too much. Tax breaks for using clean factories, higher tarrifs on products that come from countries which don’t have minimum standards of life and environmental care, etc.
But ultimately, the customers are getting what they asked for. Government intervention is always going to be hurting the consumer and the economy in the short term. So the big issue is picking which battles seem worth fighting. You don’t want to screw the future so you do want to intervene to some extent, but as a politician, you’re going to be voted in or out of office based on what is happening now so you can’t do it if it’s going to have any chance of hurting the economy in the slightest in the short term.
Longer terms for politicians might help, though of course government intervention being necessary or no, that doesn’t mean that they’re bright enough to make the right choices. So you are perhaps best to just let the market be.
Sage Rat, I completely, utterly, and wholly disagree with your post. But don’t worry, I love rats and think they’re great fun, so no hard feelings, kay?
The current problems with the economy are multi-fold. Years of real estate over-investment have crashed the market in several countries. Over-regulation and ill-thought-out regulation increase the burden on new or small companies. High spot oil prices increase energy costs (and no, there’s not a damn thing “Green” technology can do about it).
But this is, frankly, hardly the worst crisis to come down the lin.e In fact, this is pretty mild.
We don’t know how bad this crisis is. It could be just about over, or it could be just the beginning of something terrible. We won’t know until we’re on the other side, and I, for one, think that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
That’s possible, but assuming it’s some horrific economic meltdown is not really sensible or honest. And I see people doing jsut that quite frequently.
First of all, I suspect Europeans will come in here and say “what do you mean ‘we’, paleface?”
I don’t know what you mean by real estate over investment. We have had a bubble in the US, driven by cheap interest rates driven by the Feds desire to keep the economy going for the Administration, and bad mortgage lending driven by under regulation, if anything. Given that the US has hardly gone through a flurry or regulating things in the past seven years, blaming over-regulation for our woes shows faith in the joys of deregulation in the face of evidence.
Green technology can of course help oil prices by reducing consumption and thus demand. I’ve seen articles claiming that one reason for low oil prices in the '80s was the benefit of the increased fuel economy from the regulations of the '70s. We’ve stalled out on that, thanks to SUVs and resistance to improving guidelines, and thus we’re screwed. Many people have said that Detroit’s resistance to higher mileage standard was going to come back and bite them, and it has. They can be excused for not anticipating this in the '70s, but not today.
To answer the OP, it seems that the best way of reducing the chance of a crisis is to avoid electing Republican presidents with faith based economic agendas.
I’ve been watching Europe, and they have some deep troubles of their own.
The Real Estate “Bubble” is what I mean by over-investment. Likewise, Sarbanes-Oxley is a titanic disaster.
Energy prices are vastly wider than just fuel oil. Green tecnnology doesn’t make more energy available, and there are significant possibility limits on making most things more efficient.
If people hadn’t over borrowed, the impact would have been much less. Sure, people wanting to move with negative equity get screwed in either case, but anyone not assuming they can handle an impossible mortgage by getting a new loan with a new teaser could ride it out.
Why is Sarb-Ox a disaster? Sure it costs money to implement, but isn’t it nice that execs who sign off on financial statements have to actually read what they’re signing? And believe in it? It exists because of the cluelessness of our highly paid C class execs. Just like with airport screening, good people suffer from the acts of bad ones.
Solar and wind technology do. Plus conservation gives us some more time to find better energy sources before things get really bad. In most cases we have a long way to go before we even hit economic limits, which are more of a problem than physical ones, and rising prices will allow us to better cost justify more expensive green technologies.
True, we have almost the same problems with the housing market that you do.
For years it seems that the housing market in the UK has been held artificially high when it should have crashed, or at least reduced, due to the fact that first time buyers just can’t afford to get on the ladder.
IMHO the only viable option is to develop alternative fuel sources to oil to break the strangle hold the ME has on the world. How we can do this without the co-operation of the oil companies is another question.
We have not reached the bottom of the real estate fiasco. There are a lot of banks that bought up the loans. They are at risk. Estimates are for 90 to 300 more bank failures. It has spread to loans of higher scrutiny. Housing values are dropping and equities are evaporating.
Sage Rat, I have the utmost respect for you, but I would like to introduce another facet of this situation. I am a customer. I am neither stupid nor uncaring. I read labels, am well-informed, have political opinions and definite preferences related to quality, sustainability, healthfulness and etc.
I am, however, also very poor. Despite my mad skills and fierce altruism, there are just too many people on earth now, and not enough jobs paying an actual living wage to go around. Moreover, many, many people “look at the price and choose” because their employer does not pay them enough to, say, buy the things which they work hard all day to produce.
I know a working mother of one who works at a veterinary clinic, whose entire first-of-the-month paycheck (she’s paid twice a month) goes to her rent. And she makes eight times what she pays me per hour to care for her daughter three days a week.
I understand that paying a living wage makes it much harder to “cut corners.” I have come to believe that ONLY a “two parents, one child” kind of effort will reduce population enough to solve any of these problems.
Don’t hold your breath — we’ll do it, if ever, at the very last possible second.
Brujaja I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, there are just too many people in the world. According to the Optimum Population Trust world population currently exceeds 6.7 billion and is heading towards 9.5 billion by the middle of the century. They also state that the sustainable world population is of the order 2-3 billion depending upon lifestyle choices.
Less people solves so many of the worlds problems, less demand for energy, less pollution, less carbon, less food. Unfortunately no one is power is willing to suggest reduction in population as a way to save the planet.
It wouldn’t have to involve any harm, just limit the number of future births and let the population find a new level. I think it’s the ideal solution, but I bet it won’t happen until it’s too late.
I think this requires more explanation. Is there a shortage of land? Of arable land? Are first world countries starving? Are we running out of raw materials? Are we running out of energy? I think the answers to the first two are clearly no, and and the answers to the last two are no, though I will concede that cheap and easy versions of the two are indeed dwindling.
If anything, you want more people and more markets, so that there are more opportunities for employment and more chances and more opportunities to build wealth. If you want to say that we grew too fast as a population given the resources we have now, I might see a point. Though, I would argue that the advancements of today’s technology means that we don’t have to suffer the population shocks as our ancestors did.
Can’t afford to care or doesn’t care amount to the same thing in terms of World Financial Policy. Overall, as the people providing the money to business via either investment or through buying the products, the general populace is fairly sociopathic. On the individual level, each and every one of those people might be saints, but we aren’t talking about them at that level.
Employers pay employees the minimum they can to bribe them to fill the job description. If a job is popular and easily filled–like many acting positions–the wage will be insanely low until you get fairly high up the ladder. If a job is unpopular and requires very specific knowledge, the wage will rise high enough to fill demand–even perhaps paying college tuition for anyone who would agree to seek employment with the company–so long as a profit can still be made (or else the industry will of course die.)
Employers have to hire people at the minimum wage they can get them for, as ultimately, the more people you hire, the more you get done. A 10% raise to all of your 1000 employees won’t increase production more than a 10% increase to the employee head count. Society wants business to hire more people than hire fewer people for more, because industry is at heart a social welfare scheme–the only one we’ve found that is self-sustaining. Not to mention that as investors we want growth of the company, not self-indulgence. Any company that patted itself on the back for a good quarter rather than reinvesting the increase into new initiatives, would have its stock plummet and support dwindle.
I do agree that there is no clear benefit to expanding the world population. I don’t know that we necessarily need to shrink it, but maintaining it at its current level would be nice. Having lived in Tokyo for near a decade, it’s pretty clear that once you’ve bulldozed half of your land area, you’re stuck with a concrete forest for the next few centuries regardless of whether your population shrinks or not.
That’s because it’s not a problem in developed countries. If anything, Europe has to worry about maintaining birth rates. China has long had population control policies but that has led to an unusual side effect of too many men per women. And Africa has appeared to have found their own solution to population control.
As mazinger_z pointed out, the issue isn’t so much population, it’s that modern infrastructure doesn’t reach the entire population.
Also, it is n’t as if there is a finite amount of work to do and once all the jobs are filled, the rest of the population does without. More people means more work to be done - more houses, more farms, more products, etc. The problem is that in many places like Africa, the population is increasing faster than their economy can support leading to conflict.
My point is if the infrastructure did reach the whole world and we did all have the same standard of living the energy requirements would be massive, we would therefore use up the resources faster and accelerate global warming.
This is one problem that cannot be solved by increasing the size of the market.
The faster we use resources the more likely it is that there will be a catastrophic collapse, leading to widespread death, it is therefore better to manage the reduction in population responsibly and limit the damage.
mazinger_z in answer to your question, we are running out of energy to a certain extent. Oil, according to some accounts, has passed its peak production, thus it is in decline. Exactly how much is left is debatable, but supplies will run out.
As far as I can see, no single government on the planet has a plan for that eventuality. There are nowhere near enough nuclear power stations planned or under construction to compensate for power generation alone. Let alone the problem of replacing the internal combustion engine. Wind power is a massive joke and a complete red herring. There are other alternatives, but non currently capable of producing power in sufficient quantities.
I don’t know about where you are, but the UK imports a great deal of food and I suspect that we are no longer self sufficient in this regard. If the countries we buy from increase their populations as you suggest our food supply will be cut back to feed the population there. So food supplies **will ** get scarcer as populations increase.
First of all, the mass public is certainly not stupid. One of the foundations of economics is that people generally act rationally, and that market prices very closely reflect the information known about a product and how well it meets the needs of the buying public in comparison to other products.
Sure, there are stupid individuals. There are enough of them to sustain a certain level of quackery and snake oil. But in the aggregate, the decisions of the public are rational - the car you buy fairly closely approximates our best understanding of how to build a car with the features you want for the price you’re willing to pay. The computer you are using is pretty close to being the best computer we know how to make for the price you are willing to pay and for the uses you put to it.
Yeah, those corner-cutting American car companies just killed the Japanese, with their foolish insistence on quality, didn’t they?
Which would explain, of course, why we’re all driving Yugos. Oh, wait… we’re not.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about. China has been trying to enter the U.S. car market for a long time. They’ve utterly failed, because their cars are crap. For the longest time, Hyundai tried to compete in the U.S. on price alone, making very cheap vehicles that weren’t very good. They failed. It wasn’t until they embraced quality that they started to sell in large numbers.
What people do is trade off the relative value of quality against price. This is a rational thing to do. I don’t need a pair of uber-skin socks for $100, when I can just buy cheap cotton ones for $5 and replace them every few months.
For some goods, quality is more important, and for those goods we tend to focus on quality. But for other goods, price is paramount. If I’m buying a T-shirt for my kid, I don’t need a double-stitched, high-quality, $25 American shirt. My kid’s just going to wreck it anyway, or grow out of it in a year. So I’ll go to Wal-Mart and buy some $2.99 T-shirt made in Vietnam, because it’s good enough.
Also the quality/price curve is different for everyone. Rich people can afford to buy high quality goods and avoid the hassle of replacement or the degredation of the product, because the amount of money they spend on that quality has a minor effect on their lives. Poor people who have to make hard tradeoffs on every purchase will tend to accept less quality in their goods, because they value the dollars more.
Again, this is completely rational, and totally at odds with your belief that the path to success is to make junk because the American people are too stupid to know the difference.
Uh huh. So now you’re going to take the choice away from those poor people. Can’t buy $2.99 T-shirts any more, because Sage Rat has decided for you that quality is more important than price, so you’re just going to have to cough up $25. Thanks a bunch.
I think you just contradicted yourself.
Right, because if the government is good at anything, it’s good at predicting our needs in the future. Governments have a tremendous track record of forward-thinking and planning or the long haul.
Oh, wait - they don’t. I don’t know government managed to get this reputation for being the go-to guys for long-range thinking and planning. They are utterly horrible at it. Governments look exactly as far as the next election.
I also don’t understand why business gets this rap as only thinking in the short term. In my company, we routinely plan for 5-10 years into the future - Our current product development cycle, plus the early development research of the next development cycle, plus the feasibility stages for the one after that. In addition, big projects often have timelines that stretch out 20-30 years. The product I’m working on right now has been in development for over five years now (and in planning for a couple of years before that), and won’t be shpped for another year.
Pharmaceutical companies are all doing research today for products which will not earn a nickel of revenue for at least 15 years, and will not break even for a generation. Hell, Boeing bet the entire company on the 747, a plane for which there was no market at the time they started building it. And they had to invest money for more than two decades before they turned a profit. And they look even further than that - Boeing was spending its own money on research into SST designs back in the 1960’s - knowing that if they ever flew they wouldn’t be in service for 30 years.
You do know that we have a pretty much limitless source of energy shining over our heads, right? The only reason we don’t use more is cost. But we know for certain that if other energy sources became more expensive, we could make solar power. We even know how much it would cost, and it won’t be so high that it will destroy society - maybe two or three times as high as energy costs today, but since we only spend about 7-8% of GDP on energy today, and have spent as much as 14% in the past, it’s pretty clear that society can survive a doubling of energy prices.
But the fact is, once we transitioned to solar, we would expend great effort in reducing its cost, so it probably wouldn’t even cost us that much.
No, it’s problem for which the size of the market is irrelevant. But you do get economies of scale, and a more development world means more scientists and engineers to work the problem. A more populous and wealthy world means more geniuses, and more resources for them to have an effect. People are resources too, you know.
Or maybe the more people we have, and the wealthier we all are, the better we’ll be able to handle such shocks. When there’s a heatwave, it’s not Americans who die - they have air conditioning. It’s the poor people in poor countries. Wealth brings options.
To be more accurate, we are running out of certain kinds of energy, maybe. But since we know how to collect energy in many other ways, that’s not the end of the world.
Maybe that’s because there’s not the kind of agreement that you seem to think there is on what we need to do. Or it could be that governments really suck at this kind of thing. Which they do. Which brings us to…
You haven’t been paying attention, then. The auto companies are all working feverishly on replacements for the internal combustion engine, and they aren’t very far away from a very good solution - the plug-in hybrid. The first ones will be on the market in a year or two. For commuters in cities, these vehicles will get as much as 500 mpg. Over the life of the typical plug-in hybrid vehicle it could achieve close to 100 mpg. That’s a low enough figure that we can use bio-diesel or ethanol to power them if we have to. Pure electric cars are also on the way.
Are you kidding? A massive joke? My province gets about 2% of its power from wind. That’s not a joke. Texas just approved a 5 billion dollar infrastructure project for wind.
Wind clearly isn’t the sole solution. It’s not even going to make a majority of our power, or anything near that. But it may be that our future energy infrastructure will be very diversified, with a dozen or more different types of energy all contributing to the grid. In that case, wind is a very important component.
Nuclear power certainly is, and if we were faced with a true crisis situation, we could fast-track the construction of nuclear power plants and move a significant proportion of energy to nuclear within a decade.
Funny then that food supplies are constantly exceeding all-time highs even as the population has grown dramatically, and that the amount of labor and money that we spend on food production has been declining during the period of fastest population growth in the earth’s history.
Would you mind reconciling that uncomfortable fact with the notion that increased population necessarily means less food for everyone?
You should read some behavioral economics. People do not act rationally. People hold stocks long past the time they should sell them, people go for the default even when it makes no sense (signing up for 401Ks) and more choice in the market is considered bad.
Were the mass of people getting subprime mortgages acting rationally? Were the lenders eager to sell them to people who couldn’t repay?
Did you know that the discount rate people implicitly use in making decisions varies wildly with delay in getting the reward and penalty and with the amount? Far more than can be explained by the natural increase in return needed for long term investments.
You are right about this assumption being the basis of classical economics, and this is no doubt one reason classical economics (micro mostly) can’t explain some real world events.
Yes, I happen to work in solar energy, but until we have a reliable method of storage or a global transmission network (preferably HVDC) it isn’t going to solve the problem. I think, from memory, that an area the size of Texas could supply all of the worlds energy needs, but until we crack the storage/transmission problems it’s not likely to happen on anything but a local scale.
That’s basically what I do at the moment, the majority of the most efficient cells are made form silicon, which while inexpensive in itself has to go through a number of processes that are expensive. One possible alternative is to use carbon based polymers to replace silicon. These are unlikely to ever be as efficient as silicon, but could be produced cheaper by methods such as printing solar celsl onto flexible substrates. Although at present the source materials are quite pricey as well.
Only up to a point, there are limited resources, no matter how clever or technologically advanced we are there is a physical limit to the amount of people the planet can sustain. Not sure what it is, but I’m sure it can be calculated. Probably just down to the amount of Ha of land it takes to feed a person.
Only up to a point, as someone once said “we are only three meals from anarchy”, cut off the food, water pr power for a few days and see what happens.
True, it’s just that the one we are running out of is the one we are most reliant upon.
I don’t think there is an agreement, I think there should be, but it’s unlikely as everyone is guided by self interest. For example the developing world now wants the standard of living currently enjoyed by the west and are building the coal and gas power stations to achieve it and the cars etc. No-one is saying they shouldn’t have these things, but the price is more energy consumption and faster global warming
I’ve heard of it, hope it will catch on, but I have my doubts, plus even if this were to be introduced tomorrow it would take a decade or two at least to transition over to this type of vehicle.
Nope, not kidding. Maybe there are parts of the world where there is a constant (or semi constant wind flow), don’t know I’m not a climatologist, but in the UK we have to have sufficient conventional power generation capability to cover for when the wind is not blowing. Therefore it is no real use.
Certain forms of alternative power have possibilities, tidal power, we are guaranteed two tides a day every day. Solar, as discussed above to name but two, but no-one is seriously investing the amounts of money necessary to achieve these things.
Personally I love the idea of fusion, but unfortunately a working (by which I mean capable of generating power rather than just self sustaining reaction) fusion reactor has been 20-30 years away for as long as I can remember.
For example the ITER will cost about 9.3Bn US$, which given the money available to the members of the consortium is tiny, but the project has still been beset by quibbles over who pays for what and where it was going to be.
I hope you’re right, but it would still take time.
Cite for this assertion, I don’t think it can be true globally, maybe in the US, but certainly not worldwide.
