Further to my last posting, "228. Appropriate sizes and shapes of governance", Anil Kumar Nauriya has replied:
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Yet the European Union appears to find advantages in large size. I think some of the small countries are rich for reasons related also to their formation: eg. Kuwait because it was sitting on a lot of oil which Britain perhaps wished to sequestrate. A better conclusion might be reached if one looked at the top 20 countries instead of the top 10.
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My reply has been:
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I haven't seen the full list in the original paper, but I suspect you're right. The next 10 would include quite populous countries such as Germany. There are very special circumstances in most of the very small, very prosperous countries. What worries me is that a modern developed economy militates against family life. The birth rate in all developed countries is going steeply downwards. In the one small country which has moved fastest towards the "post-industrial" society -- Singapore -- young people are increasingly not deciding to get married at all. The government is actually spending money in encouraging conversation-tuition clubs between males and females, and trying to start marriage agencies! But they're not very successful from what I'm reading.
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The above phenomenon has worried me increasingly in the last few years. What worries me also is that few others seem to be worried about it! It's mentioned briefly by some economic journalists from time to time and then forgotten. Certainly, politicians are not talking about it much -- though controversies about how future state pensions are to be paid for erupt from time to time (though without any workable solution emerging). The indigenous populations of the most developed countries are declining very fast and the number of workers will not be sufficient to support the health and pension needs of the old from about 10 to 20 years and onwards. It's no use looking to substantial immigration from the less developed countries as the answer. They could help as regards supporting old people's pensions in the nearer future, but once the immigrants reach are culturally acclimatised and reach our standard of living they, too, will also reduce their family size to less than replacement levels. The health and pensions problem will only have been delayed.
What worries me also is that, generally, economists have little comprehension of the scale of the economic bonanza that's been given by the discovery of oil and gas fields of the last century. They're aware of the bonanza, of course, but not of one of the prime reasons for it -- the amazing cheapness of the energy that we use. They also have little comprehension of the deeper consequences of way that the built environment has affected our daily lives. We are now in the situation where the average couple can't afford to survive without both of them working, both of them spending large amounts of time commuting to jobs, both of them (in America and the UK anyway) with credit card debts that amount to more than year's disposable income. The average couple these days hasn't the time, energy or money to afford more than somewhat more than one child per "family" (but does that word mean anything anymore?).
It's no one'sfault. I see no conspiracy. Most of us have been carried away by the surge of consumerist prosperity, but the price we've already paid is the loss of meaningful local community and we're now close to losing meaningful family. I believe that the needs and satisfactions of both of these are powerfully installed in our genes but I don't see how community and family are going to re-emerge. I'm not despairing -- because I think they will re-emerge -- and, if anything, I'm optimistic -- but it's a complex problem!
I think that the classic economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and I would include Thorstein Veblen and Joseph Schumpeter in this pantheon also) described many features of the unfolding industrial revolution very presciently, but they couldn't possiubly have had anything to say about an era in which energy supplies will be declining and becoming more expensive.
Most present-day economists are still entranced by the consumerist era. Most of them are hardly aware that opinion polls of the last 20 years are clearly showing that most people in the developed world are less happy and far more stressed than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Almost all of present-day economists (who mostly have had little scientific training) have little idea about the basic importance of the thermodynamics that supports an industrial civilisation and of the size and supply of our energy resources. We badly need economists who can weigh these different types of trends trends in a balanced way and suggest the direction in which we ought to go now.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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