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- China Threat, Interest Expense Panic, & Climate-based Family Planning
China Threat, Interest Expense Panic, & Climate-based Family Planning
What I’m reading, watching, and listening to
Alan Pentz
October 23, 2024
Welcome back to The New Rules
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Let’s dive in…
It’s almost like Walter Russel Mead read my Wrath of Xi column. Hey, good writers copy and great writers steal as Picasso said. I’m kidding of course. I have my problems with Mead but it’s clear he’s seen the same need to prioritize China’s economic aggression and not just its military threat.
Xi Jinping and his aides are not stupid…. But Shifting China’s economic model onto a more sustainable path is, they fear, too economically expensive and politically risky.
For Mr. Xi and his colleagues, the supreme goal of statecraft is the maintenance of Communist Party control…. Unable to address its structural economic problems, the Communist Party is returning to its comfort zone: its abilities to repress and to play the nationalism card….
Meanwhile, Beijing is looking to green tech and information technology for another round of export-led economic development. It already dominates the global solar-panel market and is well on its way to similar success in electric vehicles. Replacing Taiwan as the producer of the world’s most advanced semiconductors would, Beijing hopes, cement China’s position as a global military and economic superpower.
Econbrowser did a good post on the panic mongers who show growing US interest expense and claim that the sky is falling.
As I point out repeatedly on this blog, you can’t compare the growth of a number by itself. You have to look at it against some kind of total. I could show you the price of a Big Mac in 1960 and today and the line would go up. Just like the bars on this chart from Statista on interest payments.
But when you look at interest payments as a percentage of GDP, it looks a lot less bad. Sure it’s going up and we will need to focus on getting it back down over time but the world will keep spinning. We paid much higher interest as a percentage of GDP in the 1980s and 90s and Seinfeld was on national tv so how bad could it have been.
Young people are worried about the climate:
The overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about the climate crisis, and more than half say their concerns about the environment will affect where they decide to live and whether to have children, new research finds. “One of the most striking findings of the survey was that this was across the political spectrum,” said the lead author, Eric Lewandowski, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “There was no state sample where the endorsement of climate anxiety came in less than 75%.” The study was conducted by researchers from NYU School of Medicine, Stanford University, Utah State University, the University of Washington and George Washington University, among others. An overwhelming majority of young people said they were worried about the climate crisis – 85% said they were at least moderately worried, and more than half (57%) said they were “very or extremely” worried. Nearly two-thirds endorsed the statement: “Humanity is doomed,” and more than half of the sample (52%) endorsed: “I’m hesitant to have children.” (Sources: thelancet.com, theguardian.com)
In my view these concerns are overblown. Global warming is an issue. However, the impacts and in particular the extreme extrapolations many make from limited data are very uncertain.
Read your Bjorn Lomborg before you lose it. Maybe don’t live on the Florida cost or in some Texas desert but people should definitely not be factoring climate into whether or not to have kids. After all, how are your grandkids going to carry you out of the hellscape that the world will become if you don’t ever have any kids?
Keep learning,
Alan
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