Monday 4 May 2009

How Australia will become a superpower with no innovation

British economist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has here shown clearly why the economies of Europe and East Asia really are doomed to collapse in a really serious way - far beyond what I had imagined even with the demographic knowledge.

Evans-Pritchard's point that Europe's labour force will decline whilst that of Australia continues to increase for the foreseeable future shows that the future world economy will be very different from what we know today, with Europe and Asia peripheral - though who knows whether or where further major centres will develop outside of Australia and Red America?? The way in which Australia and Red America have bucked fertility trends in recent years suggests there will be no such place: it is entirely possible that the hedonistic cultural characteristics will be enhanced with each smaller and smaller generation, especially if "wilderness" tourism keeps growing so that more and more farmland is returned to the "hedgerow" (as it was described by a critic of EU farm subsidies).

In this circumstance, Australia's former problem of high labour costs due to a small population will no longer be present, and it is easy to imagine that as Latin America and Asia age Australia will remain as a possible place to go for low labour costs and pacified unions. With the tradition of light industry in the outer suburbs, it is easy to see how the populace there could easily accept industrial development without becoming more militant - which as Thomas Woods says was a factor in the US' rise to producing 34 percent of world output by 1929. As Melbourne's sprawl is accelerated by desertification of what will by 2035 be former National Parks too arid to support the species they were established to protect, a domestic market and labour force necessary for a superpower will be created. Moreover, Australia will do this without moving an inch beyond new technologies as the gap in land prices between it and the enriched world rises and rises.

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