Underrated long-term trends & developments
What are macro trends & developments that you believe are underrated by the media and mainstream, with respect to its disruptive impact? This can span across all areas: business, tech, finance, politics, culture, etc.
A few that come to mind for me:
-Declining fertility rate in the U.S.
-Declining religiosity in the U.S.
-Young people not having sex
-Increased usage of dating apps to meet partners
-Rising alliance of China+Russia+Iran+Saudi Arabia
-Drop in academic performance amongst American students due to COVID lockdowns
Declining birth rates for sure. There’s a book that came out recently titled “The End of the World is just the beginning” and a lot of it revolves around how declining demographics in a large number of countries will end the globalization trend that has been occurring for many decades and will eventually lead to declining standards of living.
I find all of these to be pretty mainstream positions. Important? Yes. Unorthodox? No.
EDIT: I also think one should be cautious about putting basically the Sunni and Shia caliphates in the same bucket. This is not buddy buddy stuff. We’re talking real tension.
everybody talks about declining fertility rate in the US but nobody's talking about declining population in china and india. all I hear about is how we need to invest in EM and china will eat the world, the yuan will replace USD, I say bullshit. china's pop declined by 850k in a single year and it will only continue to get worse (I'm looking at you ray dalio). the USA can save its population issues with immigration but china is not a place people clamor to move to so I doubt that will change over there. much less educated on india but they're having similar issues despite having a very young average population.
(https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/large-population-decline-expecte…)
also if you think iran and saudi arabia have an alliance please tell me where you get your weed
It's worse than that. The big theme of the China/India population theory are the opportunities that come with a "young, educated workforce". That does not factor two things - quality of the "educated" part, and availability of employment opportunities for this workforce. The second one is particularly particularly important and great Bloomberg article about it recently.
You have young 'uns busting their asses to pay tuition, families selling land/possessions to get their kids a degree for a better life. They'll go to diploma mills and come out with worthless degrees. Or they underestimate the sheer volume of applicants and how competitive good jobs are. The disillusionment and anger that builds up from something like this is what IMO is driving the nationalism/populism in India.
Following
- Declining affordability of homes
I tend to think you don't have a serious opinion on any of the other things you mentioned, if you also believe this to be true. There are few combinations of nation-states you could name that have a more fraught and hostile relationship than Iran and Saudi Arabia. As for China and Russia... personally, I think it's pretty clear that China is interested in using Russia as a distraction for the West, forcing them to concentrate attention and resources there, instead of countering Chinese aggression around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. The invasion of Ukraine is also a nice trial balloon and safe practice run to see how an invasion of Taiwan would fare and what the challenges would be, and what the US's response would look like.
These points aren't interesting without accompanying analysis. Birth rates are falling in the US. Ok. That's true everywhere on earth basically and has been known to be the natural result of high standards of living. What of it?
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