Economist: “In China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Asians’ supposed commitment to conservative family life is collapsing…Millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier and—in the East Asian context—less male-dominated arrangements. In a region that is home to over a fifth of humanity, the socioeconomic and demographic consequences will be vast, potentially destabilising and will shape millions of lives.” More: “While traditional families remain widespread, families across the region are becoming far more varied. As young people delay or eschew marriage and having children, nuclear families are in decline: in Japan, where this process began earliest, couples with at least one child accounted for 42% of households in 1980, when single-person households made up just 20%; by 2020, couples with children had fallen to 25% of households, and single people accounted for 38%. In East Asia today, “the diversification of household structures is the story,” says Paul Chang, a sociologist at Harvard University.”
Economist: “Emerging-market financial institutions struggle to find funds at home, since few households save and there are not many big firms. Instead, they turn to international markets. Counterintuitively, the risk premium demanded by foreign financiers tends to fall when inflation is rising, since at such times economic growth tends to be strong. This balances out the impact of central-bank rate rises. Nor are international markets the only force with which policy must contend. Poor countries are also home to big informal sectors, where firms do not borrow from banks. The un and imf reckon that over 60% of the developing world’s workforce, and more than a third of its gdp, is off the books. Although informal lenders eventually match banks’ interest rates, this takes time. And informal labour markets are flexible, meaning workers’ pay rather than employment adjusts when rates rise. According to the Bank for International Settlements, a club of central banks, this means emerging economies take longer to feel the pinch of higher rates.”
Noah Smith: “In the 2010s, everyone knew that China was “the future”. In the 2020s, it feels more like the present. China has fully arrived on the world stage. Around the world, people’s houses are full of Chinese products, they spend their time watching videos on a Chinese app, and many of them now drive Chinese cars. China makes the best drones and the best trains. The internet is full of videos of the country’s luminescent skyscrapers, cavernous train stations, and futuristic payment systems. Chinese researchers dominate the journals, and are believed to lead the world in many areas of technology. No one questions the fact that the PRC is now one of the world’s great military powers, with the U.S. as its only real rival…The key fact is that China’s meteoric rise seems like it’s drawing to a close. Already the country is not growing much faster than the G7, and as the ongoing real estate bust weighs on the economy, even that small difference may now be gone. The country’s surging auto industry is a bright spot, but won’t be big enough to rescue the economy from the evaporation of its primary growth driver.”
WSJ: “Time off boosts work performance in part because it acts as jet fuel to supercharge creative thinking. Psychologists call this downtime an “incubation” period, during which you are consciously ignoring a problem and after which your unconscious rewards you with a fresh insight or solution. They theorize that when you are occupied with nonwork matters, your brain is able to noodle ideas in the background. What’s more, as you engage in other activities, you’re vacuuming up additional information, mixing in even more potential thoughts that can coalesce into new ideas. For those who can take extended time off, the results can be transformative. Deborah S. Linnell and Tim Wolfred surveyed 61 nonprofit executives who had taken sabbaticals of several months each and found that in addition to relieving stress, the time away allowed them to “spark creativity,” develop “out-of-the-box” thinking and introduce new visions for their organizations.”
