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ben_wtoday at 2:13 PM1 replyview on HN

Sure, but until then, proportional to each of [population, education/educated workers, capital, instantaneous industrial base, energy supply].

Asia's diverse, but I'd say they seem to be doing pretty well with rapid improvements across all fronts.

In comparison, the US's weaker (not weak-weak, just weaker) areas currently seem to be educated workers, instantaneous industrial base, and energy supply (relative to rapidly growing demand from compute); while the EU's weaker areas currently seem to be capital and energy supply (from supply shock, as it doesn't have the compute). The US and EU both have coming demographic issues, but not as soon as the other stuff becomes more important. People talk about China having demographic issues too, but they're a dictatorship, they can make it shift if they care to.

(And Russia's losing a lot of people, more educated people, capital markets, industrial base, and energy supply).


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myrmidontoday at 3:31 PM

> People talk about China having demographic issues too, but they're a dictatorship, they can make it shift if they care to.

China has a significantly bigger problem with demographics than the EU does, it is just on a slightly longer fuse, compare:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?f...

The big drop in Chinese fertility is going to be very disruptive in the near future, because it is much less gradual than European trends and the retiree/workers ratio is going to spike much harder because of that.

Having full authoritarian control is not gonna change anything now because it is already much too late (action would have been required like 35 years ago).

Best they can do is get through it somewhat smoothly.

edit: This is an even better visualization (projected working age population fraction)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-young-working-...