Jun

13

Forgive the length, but I thought this was too good not to share:

Let's take their model, their parable, their most extreme case, and walk through it for a moment. It takes Frank Ramsey's basic model, in which savings equals investment equals capital growth, and extends it to a world in which capital can flow freely around the globe to wherever it earns the most interest.

If savings can flow across countries to wherever the interest rate is highest, and if people can borrow across countries without trouble (say, by mortgaging their home to a bank that borrows money from investors in Japan), then in the long run there's only one possible outcome: the most patient country owns everything. The most patient country owns all of the capital equipment in the world, all of the shares of stock, all of the government bonds, all of the mortgages, everything. What happens in all of the other countries? [the "Impatients"] Eventually they spend essentially all of their national income repaying debt to the most patient country. They literally mortgage their future through decades of high living, decades during which they borrow cheap money that is gladly lent by more patient countries.

…After years of enjoying a grand life of consumption, the average Impatient [country] eventually ends up spending its whole income on interest payments, forever.

Well then, who are the Patient countries? Those who lend and export. Who are the Impatient countries? Those who borrow to spend in the short term. Okay, that's definitional. But is there another way to define the Patients/Impatients? It turns out that national average IQ defines them well. And here's the shocker: The U.S. has an average IQ of 98. The U.K's. is 100. East Asia (i.e. China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore) have average IQs of 106. If we look say 25 years into the future, it's likely China's average IQ will have increased. What do you think will happen to the average IQ in America?

This is from "Hive Mind" an excellent book by economist Garett Jones of George Mason University.

anonymous writes: 

Mr. Jones ignores a few minor problems. The first is default; the second is that Ramsey's equation only works in a world where Marx and monetarists are the only people who keep the tally sticks. The patient people may think they own everything but only until they discover that their debt claims are not going to be paid, that neither principal nor interest will be forthcoming. then there is all that investment in apartment blocks and bullet trains. they certainly cost a great deal; by labor theories of value they should be an enormous accumulation of wealth, except there are no actual tenants who can afford rents for the apartments and no travelers who want tickets for the trains. the last and worst fallacy of aggregation is the ranking of average IQs. the world tuns on the machinery and thought that the very smart people produce and the grunt labor that the rest of us do. we depend on the really smart people's discoveries and enterprise and the scut work done by people who stack the grocery shelves and vacuum the think tank carpets. Whether on average people score C+ or B on what is a school exam called an IQ test makes no difference, except, of course, to the people whose livelihoods depend on the rest of us paying ever increasing tithes to the priestly class of schoolies.


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