Status Updates From The Age of Turbulence

For Americans, opening our borders to the world’s skilled workforce and education reform must be high on the policy agenda.

A major aspect of human nature — the level of human intelligence — has a great deal to do with how successful we are in gaining the sustenance needed for survival. As I point out at the end of this book , in economies with cutting edge technologies , people , on average , seem unable to increase their output per hour at better than 3 percent a year over a protracted period.

It is why annual inflation rates almost everywhere ( Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Iran being notable exceptions) are currently in single digits — one of the few times, perhaps the only time, this has happened since the abandonment of the gold standard and the embrace of fiat, or paper , currencies in the 1930s.

The shift of shares of world GDP since 2001 from low-saving developed countries to higher-saving developing countries has increased world saving so much that the aggregate growth of savings worldwide has greatly exceeded planned investments.

Developing countries typically have much higher savings rates than do industrialized — in part because developing nations’ social safety nets are weaker, so households naturally set aside more money for times of need and retirement. ( Other factors also play a part. In the absence of well-established consumer cultures, for example , households have less inclination to spend)