(En 2014)

Ah ça c'est marrant.
Sur la démographie américaine: l'age du premier enfant recul en moyenne, mais en fait il y a un gros clivage en fonction de l'orientation politique: ça ne bouge pas chez les républicains, et ça vieillit vachement chez les démocrates.

Après, la causalité n'est pas forcément celle-ci hein, il peut aussi y avoir un déplacement électoral: avec la bourgeoisie (qui a des enfants plus tard) qui se met à voter démocrate tandis que les classes populaires deviennent d'avantage républicain.

Mais c'est tout de même intéressant.

Fait remarquable : il a lui-même travaillé dans la mine avant de la diriger, et donc il a pris les mêmes risques que les autres (d'où les conséquences). Mais ça n'arrive presque jamais

Le niveau de la politique US, par échange de punchlines par tweets interposés, c'est affligeant.

Au moins, ça peut permettre de faire évoluer les mentalités vis à vis du tirage au sort : si les hommes politiques professionnels se comportent comme des collégiens à quoi bon avoir des politiciens professionnels …

The actual problem is twofold. Roughly forty years ago, we stopped seeing the relationship between democracy and private economic power domestically, which enabled the roll-up of power into domestic monopolies. And then in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, we stopped seeing the relationship between security and economic power globally. All of this goes under the philosophy of neoliberalism, and it manifested itself through trade, antitrust, and regulatory policy.

In 1998, Bill Clinton allowed Exxon to buy Mobil, helping to recreate a good chunk of the Standard Oil empire. In 2006, someone asked Exxon Lee Raymond why he wouldn’t build more refining plants in the U.S. for security purposes. He said, “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”

In other words, today we have an open and largely ungoverned American political economy dominated by financiers and monopolists with no loyalty to United States interests. And now we are encountering aggressive authoritarian state capitalists who will not hesitate in exploiting our own corporate giants. Disney, for instance, not only makes most of our billion-dollar movies but does so according to the whims of Chinese censors.

Let’s start with domestic concentration. Over the last two decades, 75% of U.S. industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels. You can see it in everything from syringes to cheerleading to missiles and munitions. Such concentration results in a host of problems, like low productivity growth, less firm formation, and regional inequality. Hidden risk is a classic feature of monopoly, because a monopoly means putting all your eggs in one basket.

The increase in concentration is obvious if you pay any attention to business, but there is a sort of ‘believe me not your lying eyes’ quality to the debate. There are an endless army of economists who explain how concentration doesn’t exist or isn’t a problem, but these arguments are often parlor tricks of only measuring the benefits of scale.

For instance, in Rob’s book Big is Beautiful, one of the key examples of the importance of scale is Boeing. Boeing is a roll-up of aerospace companies, and it first crossed $100 billion in revenue in 2018 as America’s leading exporter, as Rob was writing his book. Like large banks on Wall Street, Boeing’s size and market power, which mistook for innovation and health, was masking an underlying deterioration of the corporation’s ability to make airplanes. Much of the strength of monopoly is often a mirage, based on refusing to look at hidden risk.

Hidden risk is now everywhere. According to the Pentagon, we now have sole sources of domestic supply for large numbers of military inputs, from flares to high voltage cable, fittings for ships, valves, key inputs for satellites and missiles, and even material for tents. Drug shortages tripled between 2005 and 2010 and continue to grow. More than 100 drugs were in shortage as of January 2020.

And this hidden risk has enabled China to acquire power. Now all the CCP has to do is gain control over a sole source producer. China makes a host of key inputs for DoD missiles, satellites, and other defense manufacturing programs. Our ability to fight a war with China in some ways hinges on whether Chinese companies are willing to keep selling us ammunition. The same is true in medicine. Our hospitals are critically under-sourced for things like respirators and masks, as well as chemical inputs for drugs, most of which are made in China.

We have also learned helplessness among our policymaking elite.

Here’s Assistant Air Force Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Will Roper’s plan for dealing with the F-35 disaster, and a lack of competition in military aerospace. “I don’t think we’ll have a new prime come in, but maybe a company that’s founded by a bored billionaire that wants to build cool airplanes just because.”

In other words, not only do our top military officials have no control over what China does, but they have little ability to source domestically. I can assure you, that is not how we won World War Two.