Where are the Jobs?

Having fully immersed myself in the rigours and demands of the financial world I realise how quickly I reverted to my old habits and views.

It is not that I no longer have an interest beyond the immediate financial impact of an event. It is however true that my analysis of a situation has taken on a more mercantile bent than during the time that I was happily retired and had the time and inclination to look past the economic consequences of things.

My focus had been the geo-political impact of world events falling quickly into the power politics of the "is this good for the West" nuance of my underlying cultural and ethnic nationalism.

I say this cautiously. Fully recognising that the concept of nations and nationalism are somewhat recent and arbitrary, I still find it to be a huge leap of faith to move from being an American, or at least a member of the West and rather than joining the Global village so often heralded as the only way to salvation.

Perhaps it is my early belief in Malthus perfectly executed in the life cycle of the humble muskrat. This gregarious water rodent breeds like crazy until they overpopulate an area resulting in mass starvation. This continues until the population levels have been lowered enough to sustain the local muskrats such that they can start the cycle over again.

It is all a question of resource management. Muskrats don't have much to work with in terms of reshaping their environment and expanding the relevant yields of those resources necessary to sustain their population. Their complete reliance on the natural level of available nourishment determines the rise and fall of their "civilisations".

I have always thought that the life cycle of muskrat society was unfortunately a good example of what in the end would be the fate of our human society. Yes we could extend crop yields, expand our control of nature to farm just about everything and yet, in the end, we would find that overpopulation would be the heaviest burden a society would have to bear.

To the normal local world of rich and poor, haves and have-not's we have now added the geopolitics of nation states and are now confronted by the dual challenges of managing resources within our regional groupings as well as within the global village.

What is now being heralded as the Arab Spring, is in my opinion nothing more than the calculations of Malthus coming to the fore.

Depending on your source somewhere between 50 and 60% of the populations of the Arab world are under the age 25. Of these, according to the Financial Times some 40% are unemployed. They live in relatively infertile regions albeit in many cases in countries with valuable natural resources. The distribution of the wealth created by the exploitation of these resources is heavily weighted to a small minority of the the ruling elites leaving much of the remaining population with neither readily available food or the means to acquire it.

A few months ago I quoted Russ Limbaugh as threatening President Obama to adhere to Mr Limbaugh's view of the world or America might "go Egypt" on him.

Now Mr Limbaugh is an idiot and thankfully the USA is still in relative terms the land of plenty. But raise our total unemployment levels to those currently being realised by Afro-Americans and Hispanics (~20%)and we might not be that far from our own Arab Spring.

This fear of social unrest is one of the biggest drivers of the Chinese governments policy making doing what they consider to be right for China at the possible expense of the world at large.

And just for the record, German unemployment in 1933 peaked around 22.5%....