[RD] Daily Graphs and Charts

[Monsterzuma]

The economic effect of demographic changes tends to get overstated. Dean Baker explains:

In reality, the demographic story is silly. The alleged problem is a decline in the ratio of workers to retirees. (The correct measure is the ratio of workers to non-workers, the latter would include children.) In a healthy economy, the rise in productivity growth swamps the impact of even very negative demographic trends.

For example, going from 3 workers to retiree to 2 workers per retiree over a 20 year period (an extremely fast rate of decline) would imply that the share of workers' wages going to support retirees would have to increase by 0.6 percentage points annually, assuming a 70 percent replacement rate for retirees. This is 40 percent of the 1.5 percent annual productivity growth in the years of the productivity slowdown (1973-1995) and 24 percent of the 2.5 percent annual productivity growth in the years since 1995.

This means that in a healthy economy workers can continue to enjoy substantial increases in living standards even during years in which the demographic trend leads to a sharp increase in dependency ratios. Insofar as this is associated with a declining population, there are many gains associated with less crowding and less pollution that will not show up in GDP statistics.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs...suffers-from-both-too-many-and-too-few-people

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Luiz, what you are saying about Barzil's demographic issues is truly fascinating for its bizarre clash with common conceptions. How quick things can change.
IMO if the outlook really is as dire as you portray it the government should just go ahead and tell the people that they better start having more children if they want a secured retirement arrangement - arranged by their children rather than by an overburdened state just like in old times.
Which though in turn may mean such a demographic shift that the state will be able to cover. And until the next prognosticated demographic crisis, maybe you are rich enough to endure in an acceptable manner. (while I am not sure that Germany actually is - our retirement homes can already be quit undignified - somebody should call our constitutional court)

@Monsterzuma
This theory may be all rocking and sound in a world where real wages rise in accordance with productivity. But the 60s are well over.

 

[Winner]

What I find interesting about this graph (from 2010, IIRC) is how different it is from the ones I saw in school in the early 90's, which goes to show two things: how projections far into the future are unreliable and how malthusian fears of overpopulation are overhyped.

It's not about the population, it's about resources. Plus, there are countries which may very well be in a demographic trap - their populations are growing faster than their economies can absorb all these new people and at the same time the resources needed to sustain them are being exhausted. I'll be very surprised if Africa doesn't go to hell (I mean, deeper hell) in the next 30-40 years.

On the other hand, if there are any overhyped fears, it's the meme that "aging population" will cause an "economic collapse". Oh for heavens sake, let's get rid of it.

It sounds bizarre to say it, but Brazil needs immigrants. And we might get them, it seems that since the earthquake 50 thousand haitians arrived. We should import bolivians too, and ideally unemployed europeans.

So, instead of adjusting your pension system so that it can cope with ageing population, you propose to perpetuate the pyramid scheme by importing more people? We hear the same arguments in Europe, but none of the proponents of this approach has ever been able to say "when will it end?" Population can't grow forever, get over it.

 

[luiz]

The economic effect of demographic changes tends to get overstated. Dean Baker explains:

The big unmentioned premise here is that productivity can grow at high rates forever. While I do believe it can grow forever, the rate is likely to remain at a lower level. Typically the huge growth in productivity happens exactly in countries undergoing rapid industrialisations, and those are precisely the ones with big populational growth.

Luiz, what you are saying about Barzil's demographic issues is truly fascinating for its bizarre clash with common conceptions. How quick things can change.
IMO if the outlook really is as dire as you portray it the government should just go ahead and tell the people that they better start having more children if they want a secured retirement arrangement - arranged by their children rather than by an overburdened state just like in old times.
Which though in turn may mean such a demographic shift that the state will be able to cover. And until the next prognosticated demographic crisis, maybe you are rich enough to endure in an acceptable manner. (while I am not sure that Germany actually is - our retirement homes can already be quit undignified - somebody should call our constitutional court)

Yep, we either need more children (not too many, though!), or completely change the pension system.

As it stands, most Brazilians don't save anything for retirement, being entirely dependant on the state. This is in sharp contrast to East Asians, who consume little and save a lot. Brazilians live from paycheck to paycheck, taking debt, and can never resist buying the latest LED TV. This is why a pension crisis in Brazil would be terrible news indeed.

It's not about the population, it's about resources. Plus, there are countries which may very well be in a demographic trap - their populations are growing faster than their economies can absorb all these new people and at the same time the resources needed to sustain them are being exhausted. I'll be very surprised if Africa doesn't go to hell (I mean, deeper hell) in the next 30-40 years.

And I'll be very surprised if African population growth does not suffer the same halt as the Brazilian one did. 40 years ago the Brazilian population was growing faster than the African...

On the other hand, if there are any overhyped fears, it's the meme that "aging population" will cause an "economic collapse". Oh for heavens sake, let's get rid of it.

I absolutely agree it doesn't have to, but will we have the stomach to do the necessary adjustments in time?

So, instead of adjusting your pension system so that it can cope with ageing population, you propose to perpetuate the pyramid scheme by importing more people? We hear the same arguments in Europe, but none of the proponents of this approach has ever been able to say "when will it end?" Population can't grow forever, get over it.

Adjusting the pension system is the most thorny political subject in Brazil. Everybody knows it must be done, as the deficit - that's right, deficit is of tens of billions of dollars per years, and predicted to grow to hundreds of billions. The system has been deficitary even with a robust population growth and sharp increase in productivity. It will utterly collapse with a stagnat or decreasing population and more modest gains in productivity. As I mentioned to Sill, we have a vast contingent of our retired population with near zero net worth, entirely dependant on government pensions to survive. Reforming the system is an absolute necessity, but I don't see how it will get done on time under a democratic regime.

Immigrants are a temporary fix but they may buy us time to reform the system over a longer period without having to resort to a Pinochet-like regime. So hopefully when the population finally starts to sink we'll be as rich as europeans.

And of course unemployed european immigrants are a huge opportunity that even the braindead Brazilian government acknowledges. There is a huge shortage of qualified workforce in Brazil and a surplus in several European countries. The government should make it extremely easy for Spaniards, Portuguese and co. with technical backgrounds to immigrate. The number of qualified immigrants is increasing fastly (over 30% in 2011 face 2010), but is still way too low.

 

[holy king]

What's the minimum amount to get high anyway?

greatly depends on thc amount and your tolerance, which goes up with regular consummation.
over 40%, like some of the newest high-tech breeds have, smoking for the first time?
a tenth of a gram is probably gonna make you pretty freaking high.

german laws, of course, dont account for this.

i think the brits have just raised weed with over 20% to be a medium level drug, with everything below staying a light one.
but then, british drug legislation is so much more adaptable than the german one, this may well never happen in germany.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Who is saying anyway that the demographic issue will collapse the economy? That seems like a claim which in deed is in need of thorough substantiation before believable.
What the actual issue is is a mixture of old-age poverty, fiscal debts to fight that and less tax money left for other issues. So a situation where everybody suffers, but the retired probably the most.

 

[Tahuti]

I absolutely agree it doesn't have to, but will we have the stomach to do the necessary adjustments in time?

Immigrants are a temporary fix but they may buy us time to reform the system over a longer period without having to resort to a Pinochet-like regime. So hopefully when the population finally starts to sink we'll be as rich as europeans.

That's spot on. There are basically three options available: Increase retirement age, decrease retirement benefits or radically change the way retirement benefits are funded. While the former two are probably unavoidable, the latter should be tried out first. I think old-age benefits could much more sustainable if they were to be funded using through levies on consumption as opposed to levies on income.

 

[Leoreth]

And I'll be very surprised if African population growth does not suffer the same halt as the Brazilian one did. 40 years ago the Brazilian population was growing faster than the African...

Brazil has developed considerably in these 40 years, though, and I'm sure that's the major reason for its change in demographics. Similar situations are hard to imagine for most African countries, where population often grows faster than the economy, worsening the situation of both poverty and population growth.

That's spot on. There are basically three options available: Increase retirement age, decrease retirement benefits or radically change the way retirement benefits are funded. While the former two are probably unavoidable, the latter should be tried out first. I think old-age benefits could much more sustainable if they were to be funded using through levies on consumption as opposed to levies on income.

I think the most important aspect is to achieve that each generation has to finance its own retirement costs, and not rely on the following generation.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Here's an amusing graph whose vertical axis might be called "intelligence", and horizontal, "time"

"I was wondering when you'd notice
there's lots more steps."

 

[Monsterzuma]

Quantitative easing in the UK did not lead to an increase in the supply of money

Spoiler :

Did ‘quantitative easing’ in the UK lead to an inflationary increase in the supply of money and did it, therewith, increase inflationary risk? Not in the UK. At least, not at this point in time, as households and companies are deleveraging. The graph shows ‘M-3 money’. But other definitions of money (according to data of the Bank of England) show the same pattern.

(emphasis added in anticipation of remarks along lines of "M-3 is a load of @$#%")

http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/01/1...-to-an-increase-in-the-supply-of-money-graph/

 

[Winner]

And I'll be very surprised if African population growth does not suffer the same halt as the Brazilian one did. 40 years ago the Brazilian population was growing faster than the African...

Brazil 40 years ago was still far more developed than (most of) Africa is today. Demographic transition requires a certain level of social and economic development to kick in. The problem is that overpopulation will kill Africa before it could reach it.

Once I made these graphs based on some data I found online (meaning I won't vouch for their correctness):

All these countries experience sharp rise in population since their independence, but their economic output stagnated or fell. It's better now, but nowhere near good enough to stave off their collapse.

It's especially bad since overpopulation drains the resources that could otherwise be used to improve their living standards and thus stop the population from growing so fast. Land is being overused, forests are being cut down to make space for more subsistence farmers, mineral resources are being plundered by the Chinese (and the Westerners, of course), and the governments are too weak or incompetent to do any serious long term planning.

So, compared to Africa, Brazil is a first world country with a rosy future.

I absolutely agree it doesn't have to, but will we have the stomach to do the necessary adjustments in time?

We'll have to.

Adjusting the pension system is the most thorny political subject in Brazil. Everybody knows it must be done, as the deficit - that's right, deficit is of tens of billions of dollars per years, and predicted to grow to hundreds of billions. The system has been deficitary even with a robust population growth and sharp increase in productivity. It will utterly collapse with a stagnat or decreasing population and more modest gains in productivity. As I mentioned to Sill, we have a vast contingent of our retired population with near zero net worth, entirely dependant on government pensions to survive. Reforming the system is an absolute necessity, but I don't see how it will get done on time under a democratic regime.

If you said that about Europe, you wouldn't be wrong. You still have plenty of time to prepare, unlike us.

Immigrants are a temporary fix but they may buy us time to reform the system over a longer period without having to resort to a Pinochet-like regime. So hopefully when the population finally starts to sink we'll be as rich as europeans.

That's a folly. The problem with these short-term fixes is that they usually become long-term "solution" thanks to politicians' cowardly nature that compels them to kick the can down the road instead of taking risks now.

And of course unemployed european immigrants are a huge opportunity that even the braindead Brazilian government acknowledges. There is a huge shortage of qualified workforce in Brazil and a surplus in several European countries. The government should make it extremely easy for Spaniards, Portuguese and co. with technical backgrounds to immigrate. The number of qualified immigrants is increasing fastly (over 30% in 2011 face 2010), but is still way too low.

Well, to be honest, Latin America is pretty low on the list of places I'd consider immigrating to if I had to leave Europe (and had the "right" skills in technical/engineering fields). In Europe, you have low crime levels, well-functioning public services and other things people like to have. Perhaps if you offered those, you'd get the kind of immigrants you desire.

 

[Winner]

I call this utter bollocks

A new index scores planetary bodies on their suitability for life

TWO decades ago astronomers suspected that planets might orbit other stars, but no one had ever seen one. These days hundreds are known. In a (subscription-only) paper published in the journal Astrobiology researchers, led by Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University, have come up with an index that aims to describe just how friendly to life such exoplanets might be. Tipping its hat to the possibility that aliens could have dramatically different biochemistry from earthlings, the index confines itself to measuring big-picture factors such as the presence of a solid surface, the average surface temperature, the strength of a planet's magnetosphere (which helps shield it from cosmic radiation) and the like. Unsurprisingly, Earth comes top of the list. Interestingly, though, Titan, a Saturnian moon covered in hydrocarbon lakes, takes the second spot in our solar system, ahead of Mars. There is still some doubt about whether Gliese 581g, the highest-scoring exoplanet, actually exists; but the existence of its companion world Gliese 581d, which scores nearly as highly, is uncontroversial. Sadly we won't be visiting any time soon—the Gliese-581 system is around 20 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Libra.

Updates: One reader correctly noted that we referred to the Gliese system, when we meant the Gliese-581 system. And others have queried why Earth does not get the highest possible score of 1.0. It falls short because it lacks a significant amount of "tidal flexing". By regularly deforming planets and moons, such flexing can generate friction that helps to keep them warm (as happens, for instance on Saturn's moon Enceladus). Happily for earthlings, a perfect score appears not to be necessary for life to flourish.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

If this is true, then according to the Great Filter hypothesis our failure to find extraterrestrial intelligent life has pretty terrifying implications.

The Great Filter

With no evidence of intelligent life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with "advanced explosive lasting life" must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable. Hanson's list, while incomplete, describes the following nine steps in an "evolutionary path" that results in the colonization of the observable universe:

The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
Reproductive molecules (e.g., RNA)
Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
Complex (archaeatic and eukaryotic) single-cell life
Sexual reproduction
Multi-cell life
Tool-using animals with big brains
Where we are now
Colonization explosion
According to the Great Filter hypothesis at least one of these steps - if the list were complete - must be improbable. If it's not an early step (i.e. in our past), then the implication is that the improbable step lies in our future and our prospects of reaching step 9 (interstellar colonization) are still bleak. If the past steps are likely, then many civilizations would have developed to the current level of the human race. However, none appear to have made it to step 9, or the Milky Way would be full of colonies. So perhaps step 9 is the unlikely one, and the only thing that appears likely to keep us from step 9 is some sort of catastrophe or the resource exhaustion leading to impossibility to make the step due to consumption of the available resources (like for example highly constrained energy resources). So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Money Supply Figures Suggest Italy Headed Into Depression
aka
The Euro is leaving Italy

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mish...nh5w/money-supply-figures-suggests-italy.html

 

[Mise]

It's their suitability to life, not to human life. We know there is evidence of life on Mars, so I don't see what's so outrageous about the chart. Even if the numbers on the index aren't worth looking at, the order of the bodies certainly is.

 

[Leoreth]

We don't even know if it exists, but it must be pretty suitable for life!

Seriously? Can we at least perform spectroscopy on Gliese 581g, or is that all based on a Goldilocks zone argument? Because that didn't work out well for Venus.

 

[Winner]

If this is true, then according to the Great Filter hypothesis our failure to find extraterrestrial intelligent life has pretty terrifying implications.

Ah, not this again.

The universe may be full of civilizations that have progressed far beyond where we are now. However, if they use sufficiently advanced technology (aka magic, according to Clarke's Law) we might not be able to detect them. It might also be true that multicellular life and true intelligence are evolutionary oddities that are not really that common - it took 4.5 billion years for intelligence to develop on Earth, and of it some 3 billion or so for multicellular life to arise.

In any case, it's foolish for us to expect that we will encounter civilizations that are anywhere near our level of development - we've developed our civilization in the span of just 10,000 years or so, which is nothing compared to the billions of years of evolution on this planet. It may very well be so that civilizations only do the stuff we expect from them (astro-engineering, macroscale constructs, sub-light interstellar travel, planetary colonization, etc.) for a relatively short period of time, say a few hundred thousand years, and then move towards something else, something we can't even imagine right now (some sort of non-corporeal existence like that of Clarke's aliens from 2001: Space Odyssey).

So, screw the Great Filter, it's another of those pseudo-religious concepts I resent.

It's their suitability to life, not to human life. We know there is evidence of life on Mars, so I don't see what's so outrageous about the chart. Even if the numbers on the index aren't worth looking at, the order of the bodies certainly is.

It's bollocks. Titan isn't more habitable than Mars, it's a deep frozen chemistry lab. Even if some sort of life arose there, it would have little room for expansion and further evolution. The same goes to Enceladus, which is just a small ball of ice with some geysers fuelled by tidal flexing. (I love Saturn's moons, but let's be realistic about their prospect of harbouring a flourishing biosphere).

Extrasolar planets we know very little about (we know their distance from their suns and we can guesstimate their mass) shouldn't even be on the list. And the gas giants, really?

It's exactly graphs like these which confuse the general public and contribute to stupid headlines in press.

 

[Mise]

As I said, nobody's talking about flourishing biospheres. They're merely talking about life, which has a broad definition even using life on Earth as a template. Indeed, the scientists who put the index together define life even more broadly than that, as the paragraph states.

I don't really care whether the public or the press is confused. I'm clear on what the index is supposed to measure.

 

[Winner]

As I said, nobody's talking about flourishing biospheres. They're merely talking about life, which has a broad definition even using life on Earth as a template. Indeed, the scientists who put the index together define life even more broadly than that, as the paragraph states.

Which makes it totally useless and stupid. It's about as scientific as if I made a set of arbitrary criteria and made my own chart.

I don't really care whether the public or the press is confused. I'm clear on what the index is supposed to measure.

You should care, because next there will be thousands of idiots thinking they could settle Titan because it has the second highest "habitability" index.

 

[Mise]

How does that make it useless or stupid? It's perfectly useful and entirely valid if you're interested in planets that can sustain life. You, however, seem only interested in planets that can sustain a "flourishing biosphere" -- which is even more stupid and useless. There are clearly no planets or bodies in the solar system that are capable of sustaining a flourishing biosphere. That is demonstrably true - just look at the other planets. And finding evidence that a planet in some other solar system is capable of sustaining human life is basically impossible with current technology. A body that's capable of sustaining single-cell life, however, is well within the realms of possibility. And finding evidence to suggest that a planet is capable of sustaining this broader form of life is much, much easier. You might not find single-cell life particularly interesting, and you might only find studies useful or interesting if they find evidence for the existence of capable of sustaining human-like alien life, but science doesn't exist to satisfy your narrow interests.