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Excerpt: Someone has taken a chill pill and examined whether the idea of an “Asian century” has any bearings to reality. The way those arguments go, not so much. It turns out that advantages accumulated over centuries will not disappear over night, or even decades, for that matter. As much as the Asian economies have shocked and awed the rest of the world in their speed of growth, a rapidly aging population, wealth disparity, income inequality, political turmoil, and the lack of any kind of “Asian consensus” will make the emergence of a united Asian block highly unlikely. Whether measured by military prowess, education…
Get the Facts
Sometimes, you need, you know, just the facts.
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Excerpt: Two arguments on why it won’t happen, and eve it does to a certain degree, it won’t matter. Apparently, severe population decline is very limited to certain regions, also mentioned here last week. There will be countries and regions that will suffer long-term depopulation due to low fertility and emigration – but a combination of the two phenomena is mostly concentrated in eastern Europe, particularly in eastern Germany, Bulgaria and Ukraine. But the European population will also continue to age, and some demographers predict that babies born in the first decade of this century will live to an average age of 100. And…
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Excerpt: For the last couple of weeks, Australia has been trading barbs with India, on a series of what were deemed racially motivated attacks on Indian students studying in the country. So who are those Indian students getting attacked? Melbourne has been attracting Indian students in large numbers, but they are mostly enrolled in vocational courses—like cookery or hair-dressing and hospitality—offered by colleges operating from a few rooms in buildings located in the central business district or suburbs. The students in these institutions are from rural Punjab or small towns from other parts of north India. Their principal motivation isn’t education. They are here…
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Excerpt: The World Cup is coming to South Africa. A lot of beers will be drank, and a lot of illegal sex will be had. This is a country where young girls and women (and no doubt boys and men as well) walk the street, a major sporting event the like of World Cup will add a not-so-welcomed boost to its sex industry. Unlike the last World Cup held in Germany, where prostitution was legal, and thus controlled, South Africa is the wild wild west. And business is booming for human traffickers. From a recent Time report: While South Africa invests billions to prepare its…
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Excerpt: I’m a bit late here, but finally got to watch this today. This was not some run-of-the-mill documentary that over-promise and under-deliver on implied shocking footage, with disclaimers of violence and language plastered all over the blandness. This was genuinely shocking, disturbing, and at times, revolting. Location: Monrovia, Liberia. In the first ten minutes, you see corrugated shacks with no sanitation, with people shitting along the beaches, 10-year-old boy hooked on crack and talking about raping pregnant women, the most abysmal looking brothel with blood splatters on the wall. You hear about the massive amounts of weapons still scattered around the city, with…
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Excerpt: Image via Wikipedia Two years ago, I spent a few week scratching the surfaces of post-Soviet Central Asian states. The most populous one, Uzbekistan, came out of the Soviet Union richest, and the most well-equipped country of the region. In the 90s, however, ill-advised forex controls, poor import-substitution policies led to an over-valued currency, and subsequent fall in standard of living. I’m bringing it up now because Uzbekistan made the news recently, when the government decided those pictures taken by an Uzbek photographer give a negative image of the country. I’d say those are pretty flattering, no? Consider Robert Kaplan’s unforgiving portrait…
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Excerpt: I don’t know much about Tibet except when Bjork and Richard Gere make me perk up. But this account of Tibetan military history, starring British generals, Tibetan warriors, and Red China, is a pretty entertaining read. The military history of Tibet divides pretty clearly into two parts: the glory days of the 7th-9th century, when Tibet actually challenged China for dominance in south-central Asia, and the sad, slow decline ever since, where the slogan would be: “Tibet, where old meets new and loses.” Read the whole thing, also because it’s told in a narrative fitting for a voice-over on Sita Sings the…
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Excerpt: Alibaba.com is a popular trading platform in that allows the buying and selling of goods in and out of China. Just to give you an idea of its reach, it’s very popular with small and medium-sized import/export companies, and boasts 150 million users in China, 1.9 million in the US, and 1.4 million in Europe. When discussing the patterns of trade, the company says a couple of interesting things. Comparing its US with its UK users. “If you look at the US, we have 1.9 million users, but more than 96% of them register as buyers only. Compare that with the UK where…
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Excerpt:
Image via Wikipedia
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Excerpt: The world is bracing for a pretty white winter by the look of it, no doubt vexing the climatologist and throwing the curve off a little bit with the cold. India is unaccustomed to, but dealing with and extreme cold across the north, where temperature’s dropped below zero. In north east China and South Korea, particularly around the capital Beijing and port city of Tianjin, as well as Seoul, were blanketed in up to 30 centimetres of snow, temperature has dropped to minus 32 degrees Celcius, and 90% of all flights were cancelled. Eastern US is also expecting more snow in the coming…
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Excerpt: Very rich article from TNR that critiques various aspect of the mass environmentalist movement, and its infiltration and subsequent influence on upper middle class Americans. Point one: environmentalism is as much of a reaction against social discordance as it is about environmental disasters. Much like the most recent episode, each of these past bursts of environmentalism waxed and waned with the rise and fall of the economy. But, perhaps more significantly, the green bubbles inflated during highly polarized periods in American society and politics, often fueled by disastrously violent episodes in foreign policy. At the same time that liberal professionals were feeling estranged…
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Excerpt: When I first moved to Calgary to work in the oil and gas industry in early 2006, it was right around the top of the property boom, and affordable housing was next to impossible to find. Not wanting to shell out half my salary for an apartment, and spending months to fill it up with furniture, I decided to go the room rental route. Little did we know at the time, but towards the end of 2006, the market was slowly but surely moving from sellers’ to one that favoured buyers. Ones in the know, i.e. people with family members…
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Excerpt: Once the economists ascertained that the economy has in fact been contracting since November 2007, heated discussion started brewing as to whether we are heading towards a deflationary period akin to the 1930s and current-day Japan, or whether the over-eager Fed and other Central Banks around the world will over-simulate the money supply, leading us towards a potential inflationary period similar to the 1980s. There are generally three camps. There’s the camp of deflation, headed by big names like Nouriel Roubini and bloggers like the “Mish”, coining new vocabulary by predicting an economic decent into stag-deflation. An overwhelming number…
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Excerpt: On an ABC interview aired February 10th, President Obama acknowledges that America has a thing or two to learn from two previous sufferers of financial crisis brought on by housing bubbles. TERRY MORAN: There are a lot of economists who look at these banks and they say all that garbage that’s in them renders them essentially insolvent. Why not just nationalize the banks? PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, you know, it’s interesting. There are two countries who have gone through some big financial crises over the last decade or two. One was Japan, which never really acknowledged the scale and magnitude of the…
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Excerpt: Nouriel Roubini has quite the reputation. A Turkish-born Iranian-Jew that was educated in Italy and the US, Roubini’s name recognition shot through the roof after his stubbornly bearish outlook on the US economy turned out to be true. Since 2008, the head of RBE Monitor has made countless appearances on most of the network business news channels, pushing his gloomy views of the US, and the world economy in general. But this self-proclaimed Dr Doom (not to be confused with the original Dr Doom) has quite another side to him. It all started when a leaked email which Roubini invited his friends to…
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