About 10 years before I retired I heard a speaker say, at that time, that this was the worst parented children in the history of the Republic. Now there's a sweeping generalization.

Controlling population is not easy to say the least. In a democracy - or republic the citizenry has to be brought along.

As to Athens, I thought it was overreaching in its conquests - a ruinous war with Syracus, and its final defeat at the hands of the Spartans.

 

I'm not disagreeing that democracy is not an ideal way to run a civilization always long-term, but it has been very beneficial for our citizens over the past 100 years (prior to WWI the US wasn't a superpower and wasn't an easier place to live vs. other areas, in fact was much harder place to live the first 40 years or so of our great nation). The issue is the common person does not discount the future enough. With the right form of republic this could be reduced, but it is always within the natural tendency of people, inherited via mother nature, to think in terms of their immediate future and perhaps their immediate offspring.

A republic could be good but it is a very vague term, there are lots of poorly organized ones. However the countries that have had the most success implementing theirs generally have a long history of a stable, homogeneous people who are complicit with semi-authoritarian regimes (Iran, China). I think the west's paradigm of the individual will be the end of it if things aren't changed, however. In Asian cultures its not about separating individual stars and laggards but rather about the group and harmony within it. Its not communism in the sense that economic outputs are not evenly distributed, but rather applied in social contexts vs. economic. Its not a "I win, you lose" paradigm and generally its worked well for them longer-term. Part of the reason I see Toyota and Honda far ahead of Detroit when it comes to these technologies--their senior management doesn't have to worry about nor answer to irate shareholder's worried about quarterly EPS but rather are freer to take long term risks. Here in the west the bean counters would never have allowed the projected negative ROI Prius to be developed, so Detroit waited a few more years.

On peak oil it looks like it came earlier this decade. There was just an article in the WSJ on 1/31 about how most members of big oil are no longer at reserve replenishment rates. In 2000 they were at a 200% replenishment rate, in 2006 they were around 60%. When Exxon was questioned why they aren't spending drastically more on exploration and infrastructure given recent oil prices and instead plowing their earnings into share buybacks and dividends they said their projects must make economic sense/clear ROI hurdles. In other words the cheap oil is gone. The remaining oil is either geopolitically risky or faces technological hurdles to its extraction to make it economically unfeasible. Plug in vehicles couldn't get here soon enough.

 

Don't Japanese companies have stock market investors that they need to answer to?

Aren't some Japanese car companies going down the toilet? (I heard Nissan but have not verified that.)

 

Yes, Japanese companies have stockholders, but they also have a totally different cultural mindset. The Japanese (all of them, employees, stockholders, company execs.) all want their companies to be paternal, stable, and with a long term view into the future. They are very willing to sacrifice short term gains for long term stability.

Japanese companies can go down the toilet, but more frequently all the stops will be pulled out to prevent this; again, that stability thing they care so much about.

 

There's good and bad to everything, Japan also had a decade long recession partly because "they pulled out all the stops" keeping some banks/businesses afloat that they should have allowed to go under early on.

They're big on stability because being on an island with hardly any resources means the negative effects of war really gets magnified. I've been told that's why the have so many rules of politeness in their culture, is to prevent flareups. But too much stability breeds complacency and they got a huge shock when the West showed up with a navy that was at least 2x technical superiority.

All that being said, if they can manage a modern economy with a shrinking population then they are ahead because peak oil will make the rest of us deal with what Japan is already dealing with. I think Europe is another example but they're bigger and their population will shrink later.

 

The Japanese have foolishly started paying women to have more babies.

Talk about short-term (and wrong) thinking. Having more people just drains resources, and will make it more difficult to survive the coming oil starvation. Japan should allow the population to decline. Whereas Americans focus on "getting rich quick" instead of earning money slowly over time.

Whereas Americans use a Darwin approach: The company either survives in the market, or it dies. And the companies that survive are stronger & more efficient.

Frankly there are a lot of companies I'd like to see die,
rather than follow the Japanese approach of saving them.
Many companies deserve to disappear forever.

 

As I recall, our ruinous war was not exactly a national vote. It was accomplished by virture of our republican government.

Something else which wasn't envisioned by the FF: Political Parties. And yet, here they are.

Senators were appointed by governors, and slaves were not quite human for voting purposes. My point is no governing document is perfect. Somewhere politics, i.e. compromise enter into the mechanics of its production.

As the saying goes, s*** happens. Lots of unintended consequences from then to now.

 

While I agree with the concept of creative destruction, we should look at Japan and how they managed to achieve dominance of the U.S. automotive industry over the past 40 years and ask how. Of course higher quality products people wanted, but why were these companies, based in a country with little natural resources, able to achieve this yet the American one's weren't as effectively. Higher quality products people wanted, surely had something to do with it. But I don't think theres anything physiologically different about the Japanese/other Asians that means that only they are capable of reading the market and making high quality vehicles the market wanted.

I think it has to do with the structure and short-term constraints of U.S. companies. Ford was sitting pretty in 1999 when they were selling half a million Explorers a year, just as they were selling similar sized cars in the early 70s before the oil shocks. Ford's senior management wouldn't think to develop a hybrid like the Prius or HCH via investing billions, because if it flopped they knew that due to shareholder activism their jobs might be endangered. It limited their risk-taking and hence limited their competitiveness when the environment changed.

On Japan paying for babies I agree. I don't think reality has set in for most of the world though that industrial growth is at major risk with $100 oil and no feasible substitutes available in sufficient quantity to avert hardship. Their problem, like in the US, is that they have massive government wealth redistribution programs (ie: like medicare and social security) that are based on a pay as you go system. These systems are not viable long-term and the US will face fiscal disaster as the ratio of workers to retirees drops precipitously.

 

Yes but at the TIME the US was behind the war. It was only latter that poor results and a political agenda turned more of the people against the war.

 

We were I thought kinda comparing Athenian Democracy with our Republican Form of government. Some people's think that is where we are now. A Democracy. In point of fact, the terms are used interchangeably without any thought given to the differences.

As to the above referenced war, and the means by which we got into it: The vote was by elected members of the US Congress. None of us, "unwashed masses" were asked to participate in that vote.

It was unfortunate the polls showed a desire to go to war. However, looking at how the masses want to get us out of that war now (oh how fickle we are), one can wonder where the real Democracy is as poll after poll shows the masses want to end it.

So much for Athenian Democracy.