End of growth.

I was thinking about life, like you do and this generation is about the best, still got the chance to expand and make money and live and oil is still cheap, god knows what a future the next generation will have and the generation after that, immigration is a massive problem for the uk because you have all these idiots coming from backwards countries and treat this country like a cash machine, you have to give something, keep things moving, building things, infrastructure, when their kids have kids we are left with a lot of problems.

Dont even mention the EU and the freedom to work in any country.
 
Naff8000 said:
haha what a load of rubbish. What is he basing this so called end of growth idea on? references? where is the mention of this in other crisis journals?
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No the fact that for decades, and really the last couple of centuries, Englands growth was based on industry, manufacturing, not office jobs, paper pushing.

LIkewise, the percentage of those employed in the public sector, IE, non growth generating jobs, is MASSIVELY increasing. These things all counter growth.

Then you've got the basics, the old example. Car plant turn of the 20th century, 100 guys build 1 car and it takes 2 weeks. Now it takes 10 guys to build 100 cars a day, using robots. Production has increased dramatically, but manpower, jobs, wages earnt has gone down massively, not since 1901 levels, but from the 1960-1970's vs the robotic construction lines, jobs are being lost by the day in this country, and we're replacing them with office jobs.

The few things in the world that still require lots of people, like making lots of Nike shoes, or crappy toys, all the production has or is being shifted to the far east.

Growth in these industries, new chip fabrication plants, they are opening in taiwan, Singapore, America, Dubai, Israel, India, China, etc, etc. How many are opening in the UK? Yup, none. Companies go around and countries/states "sell themselves" to companies, come here and we'll give you X% tax breaks, provide 20k jobs, 40k construction jobs for 4 years, we'll pay for some roads and stuff locally and everyones happy.

Thats what AMD did, why they built a HUGE fab in New York state, circa $8billion plant, thousands of construction jobs, thousands of long term jobs, several billion in revenue now flowing through New York state, huge tax sums being paid, huge tax from all the new jobs. New houses required for the local workers, new restaurants for those new people to eat in, new cinema's, and clubs, and bowling alleys, and newsagents, and supermarkets for all those people to go to.

The problem is, even with the USA getting one HUGE fab, 90% of all these new industries are building and growing almost exclusively in the far east.
 
drunkenmaster said:
No the fact that for decades, and really the last couple of centuries, Englands growth was based on industry, manufacturing, not office jobs, paper pushing.

LIkewise, the percentage of those employed in the public sector, IE, non growth generating jobs, is MASSIVELY increasing. These things all counter growth.

Then you've got the basics, the old example. Car plant turn of the 20th century, 100 guys build 1 car and it takes 2 weeks. Now it takes 10 guys to build 100 cars a day, using robots. Production has increased dramatically, but manpower, jobs, wages earnt has gone down massively, not since 1901 levels, but from the 1960-1970's vs the robotic construction lines, jobs are being lost by the day in this country, and we're replacing them with office jobs.

The few things in the world that still require lots of people, like making lots of Nike shoes, or crappy toys, all the production has or is being shifted to the far east.

Growth in these industries, new chip fabrication plants, they are opening in taiwan, Singapore, America, Dubai, Israel, India, China, etc, etc. How many are opening in the UK? Yup, none. Companies go around and countries/states "sell themselves" to companies, come here and we'll give you X% tax breaks, provide 20k jobs, 40k construction jobs for 4 years, we'll pay for some roads and stuff locally and everyones happy.

Thats what AMD did, why they built a HUGE fab in New York state, circa $8billion plant, thousands of construction jobs, thousands of long term jobs, several billion in revenue now flowing through New York state, huge tax sums being paid, huge tax from all the new jobs. New houses required for the local workers, new restaurants for those new people to eat in, new cinema's, and clubs, and bowling alleys, and newsagents, and supermarkets for all those people to go to.

The problem is, even with the USA getting one HUGE fab, 90% of all these new industries are building and growing almost exclusively in the far east.
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But new industries are being created all the time- how many people were employed in IT in the 1960's in Britain? Today it is one of the largest sectors. You didn't have Java and C++ programmers then, did you?

Future growth will come from sectors such as genetics, biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, renewable energy and IT will continue to take up a larger and larger proportion of the economy, with areas such as Artificial Intelligence occupying an ever-growing slice of the software pie.

I agree with the often-cited point that we don't manufacture on a massive, labour intensive scale like we used to, but the same can be said for the US, even Germany and other economically advanced nations. We're a post industrial economy where services make up 73% of GDP. I would say that we are probably still too reliant on financial services and that more of a focus should be made on R&D in sciences, technology and engineering, developing new products and industries.
 
It depends how they define growth. If you look at it on an individual level, is growth taking a loan out from the bank and spending it on a business that will create jobs for 6 months ?

On a macro level, I do not think government spending money is growth. Growth to me is manufacturing and an increase in savings and advancements in technology. Advancements in tech could be considered progress, (not the progressive non sense labour always goes on about) but real progress. Say at one point we were producing 1000 socks a day and someone invents a machine in the uk that produces 10000 a day at the same rate. That is progress. Whether that can be considered growth is debatable.

GDP is a terrible indicator for growth and imo for any thing realy.
 
The Financial Component of Economic Contraction

If limits on resources and environmental sinks were closing the spigots on growth, the palpable pain that ordinary citizens were directly experiencing seemed to be coming mostly from another direction entirely: loss of jobs and collapsing real estate prices.

As we will see in Chapters 1 and 2, expectations of continuing growth had in the previous decades been translated into enormous amounts of consumer and government debt. Americans were no longer getting rich by inventing new technologies and making consumer goods, but merely by buying and selling houses, or by moving money around from one investment to another, or by charging transaction fees as others did so.

As a new century dawned, the world economy lurched from one bubble to the next: the emerging-Asian-economies bubble, the dot-com bubble, the real estate bubble. Everyone knew that these would eventually burst, as bubbles always do, but “smart” investors aimed to get in early and get out quickly enough to profit big and avoid the ensuing mayhem.

In the manic days of 2002 to 2006, millions of Americans came to rely on soaring real estate values as a source of income, turning their houses into ATMs (to use once more the phrase heard so often then). As long as prices kept going up, homeowners felt justified in borrowing to remodel a kitchen or bathroom, and banks felt fine making new loans. Meanwhile, the wizards of Wall Street were finding ways of slicing and dicing sub-prime mortgages into tasty collateralized debt obligations that could be sold at a premium to investors—with little or no risk! After all, real estate values were destined to just keep going up. God’s not making any more land, went the truism.

Credit and debt expanded in the euphoria of easy money. All this giddy optimism led to a growth of jobs in construction and real estate, masking the underlying ongoing job losses in manufacturing.

A few dour financial pundits used terms like “house of cards,” “tinderbox,” and “stick of dynamite” to describe the situation. All that was needed was a metaphoric breeze or rogue spark to produce a catastrophic outcome. Arguably, the oil price spike of mid-2008 was more than enough to do the trick.

But the housing bubble was itself merely a larger fuse: in reality, the entire economic system had foolishly come to depend on impossible-to-realize expectations of perpetual growth and was set to detonate. Money was tied to credit, and credit was tied to assumptions about growth. Once growth went sour in 2008, the chain reaction of defaults and bankruptcy began; we were in a slow-motion explosion.

The effort of governments since then has been directed toward getting growth started again. But, to very limited degree that this effort temporarily succeeded in late 2009 and early 2010, it merely masked the underlying contradiction at the heart of our entire economic system—the assumption that we can have unending growth in a finite world.
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Growth in the post war period is down to cheap energy mostly in the form of oil, as the cheaply extractable oil goes and we start drilling in more expensive deep sea fields oil no longer be such a cheap source of energy and growth will suffer.

Coal is extracted much more cheaply than in the past, but it's hard to move, who knows what advances there will be in energy. Before the end of the century we could have almost limitless almost free energy and be living the dream.
 
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