fatlever wrote:I
And of course China's course of demographic suicide is well known.
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Oh the presuppositions in what you write.
'China's course of demographic suicide'. Actually, anything but. The 'demographic dividend' is why they have had the most explosive economic growth (sustained) in human history over the last 2 decades. And there are 1.4 billion let's write that ONE POINT FOUR BILLION Chinese people. They are not running out anytime soon. Granted the one child policy was probably extreme. But they had real concerns about resource availability and food scarcity, and they did something about it. And with 1.4 billion of them, Mandarin is going to remain the world's most popular language for a long time to come.
To top this off it appears that that a greater and greater segment of the population will be senior citizenship who will be curbing consumption.
And the fastest growing sector of the US economy for the last 15 years? Healthcare. And the major consumers of healthcare are? Seniors.
Also travel. Senior friendly leisure and housing.
There probably is some correlation between declining consumption of, for example, cars and furniture etc, and an older population. But there are other ways to spend money. The world is in any case a long way from the scenario of declining population, although that may, as in the case of Japan, cause a reduction in economic growth.
Depending on immigration one can be pessmistic about Germany, Spain, Italy, a few other western countries (the US will likely have something like 450 million people in 2050 assuming a continuation of 1% pa population growth, say 50% by natural accumulation and 50% by immigration). The world as a whole? Well not this side of 2050. Just raising the standard of living of the other 6 billion who don't have anything resembling a developed country standard of living is an enormous task.
The African continent looks like it will surge population wise but this probably means more political and humanitarian crises than investing opportunities.
Ghana is on breakthru to being a middle income country. Nigeria? The place looks ever so much like India 40 years ago. One can see what is so very wrong with Nigeria (corruption, poverty, infrastructure, crime etc.) and yet, and yet, the people are amazing in their entrepreneurship and their drive.
Kenya. 15 years ago they had something like 20,000 mobile phones. Now? Over 10 million. The impact of things like cheap solar power in Africa hasn't even begun to be fully felt.
Lots could go wrong in Africa. It has before. But the place is transforming at a phenomenal rate. Roads are being built. People have bicycles. Internet access. Mobile phones. Farmers checking market prices via their phones, and banking via their phones.
I know we got a lot of smart people here and some that have been investing for a looong time but unless you lived through the black plague in Europe, you can't have experienced this in your investing lifetime so please it'd be great to have something other than "stay the course" responses.
Well efficient markets says 'stay the course'. So if you believe in efficient markets then all of this is already priced in.
"
lived through the Black plague [sic: you mean the Black Death or the bubonic plague]
in Europe". Actually the 2 events are nothing like. One is a long slow thing, visible decades ahead. The other killed 30-40% of Europeans in 2 years. 50% in some countries. The closest event in modern history (other than WW2 and the Great Leap Forward in China (1958-60) and the Famine in Stalin's Russia (early 1930s)) was the Spanish Flu of 1919. Probably c. 2% of the world population died.
So really it's a completely different story. With very different consequences.
Quite frankly, the real issue with 10 billion people is that if they all consume like Americans, or even Western Europeans, then we've finished the planet off for human habitability (at these levels of consumption and emissions). So just to raise everyone up to say the level of Costa Rica, we are going to have to be very clever about what we do and how we do it.