Spengler's observations
The only way for everyone to save at the same time without crashing the economy is to export, just as China does. That works well enough on paper: but what are Americans to export? Not electric cars, it would appear. Warren Buffett isn't buying General Motors these days, but he did put down over $200 million for a tenth of BYD, China's contender in the electric-car sweepstakes. China requires nuclear power plants - it will install three a year for the next quarter-century - but America shut down its nuclear industry some time ago. There's always Caterpillar, but the field of heavy earth-moving and construction equipment now is dominated by Japanese and German engineering, as a quick tour of the diggings for New York's Second Avenue Subway make clear. America can't even provide the capital equipment for its own infrastructure projects, let alone for China's.
If BYD's electric car takes the jackpot rather than General Motor's much-heralded "Volt", Detroit may never come back, and the American automobile industry may shrink to a skeletal remnant of itself, like Britain's.
China's thrift, industry and diligence are qualities born of long experience with hard times. The terrible suffering of the 19th and 20th centuries left every Chinese parent with the conviction that the world shows no mercy to mediocrity. They have less tolerance for fantasy than their Western counterparts. Reality has intruded on their lives for generations to the point that they are ready to meet it head on. Enough of them devote their lives to making their children excel as to produce an army of hothouse wonders so large as to swamp whatever competition the West might send against them. If Westerners think the present recession is unpleasant, they cannot begin to imagine how the recovery will look, for it may occur entirely remote to them, on the other side of the world.
It is harder and harder to dismiss the awful thought that Americans, too, might require long experience with hard times to restore the sort of diligence that their Chinese counterparts learned at such a high price.
If BYD's electric car takes the jackpot rather than General Motor's much-heralded "Volt", Detroit may never come back, and the American automobile industry may shrink to a skeletal remnant of itself, like Britain's.
China's thrift, industry and diligence are qualities born of long experience with hard times. The terrible suffering of the 19th and 20th centuries left every Chinese parent with the conviction that the world shows no mercy to mediocrity. They have less tolerance for fantasy than their Western counterparts. Reality has intruded on their lives for generations to the point that they are ready to meet it head on. Enough of them devote their lives to making their children excel as to produce an army of hothouse wonders so large as to swamp whatever competition the West might send against them. If Westerners think the present recession is unpleasant, they cannot begin to imagine how the recovery will look, for it may occur entirely remote to them, on the other side of the world.
It is harder and harder to dismiss the awful thought that Americans, too, might require long experience with hard times to restore the sort of diligence that their Chinese counterparts learned at such a high price.
posted by temporal at 4/21/2009
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