When should you unsubscribe from my Substack?
This is not a newsletter about politics.
If you want to know who is “winning” the news cycle, which candidate you should vote for in the upcoming Republican primary, or want to know who is going to be the next Dogcatcher of Fresno, then reading this will not be the best use of your time.
This may sound strange to several of you, who no doubt think of me as part of “Political Twitter” — but I’m not really fascinated by politics itself. I’m more interested in the long-term social, economic, technological, and cultural trends that affect our society, and therefore affect our politics.
Not that politics is a waste of time. Ideally, everyone should have some faint idea of what’s going on in Washington DC. But at the same time, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture, especially in today’s low-attention span, 24hr horse race media environment. This is especially true for the past few years, when all anyone could talk about was politics, politics, politics.
It can give the false impression that everything in our world can be manipulated through the political process. But there are limits to public policy. Here is an example…
We’ve heard the stump speech from both Republicans and Democrats about how there used to be Good Jobs before they were all shipped to China. There is some truth to this, but it isn’t the whole truth. Before the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping and long before China joined the WTO, US industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit were already losing jobs to Germany and Japan. The reason why the US had such a robust and high-paying manufacturing sector in the middle of the 20th century is because, after World War II, it was the only industrialized country in the world besides Australia that wasn’t bombed to smithereens. As Germany and Japan rebuilt their industries, the extremely tight unskilled labor market of the 1950s wasn’t so tight anymore.
There are all sorts of these trends happening. The balance of power is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Internet killed the video star. People are having less sex than ever. The global population is projected to top out and start shrinking for the first time since the Bronze Age Collapse sometime this century. New technologies like AI, robotics, and remote work are poised to change our world.
I’ll do my best to analyze these trends, and give interesting thoughts on them. My hope is to isolate the signal from the noise of daily news. To work in the long-term, and not the short-term. With all that being said, you should immediately unsubscribe from me if you see any articles with titles resembling the following:
“Thoughts on Joe Biden’s speech to Congress.”
“Ron DeSantis BODY-SLAMS and CURB-STOMPS Miami Herald reporter in press conference!”
“Does the bipartisan proposal for a three-cent titanium tax from Mitt Romney and Sherrod Brown go too far, or not far enough?”
If you see anything on here remotely resembling this, then please unsubscribe and don’t look again. It will mean that I have run out of things to write that truly interest me.
(I do, however, reserve the right to write articles about the implications of major elections, but only after the votes have been counted. No horse race stuff allowed on here!)
Acknowledgements
I want to give a brief shout-out to everyone who has followed my Twitter account. I appreciate all of you very much, and hope that if you like my Twitter feed, you’ll like my Substack too.
If you’ve made it this far, then I sincerely thank you for lending me your attention, and hope you’ll enjoy some coming articles.
"The global population is projected to top out and start shrinking for the first time since the Bronze Age Collapse sometime this century."
I'm not sure the global population actually decreased during the BAC (it started rapidly increasing in Palestine about that time). It decreased at various points during the 2nd millennium AD (due to the Black Death and Spanish conquest, revolutions in China, wars in Germany, etc.). Also, I doubt the world population will actually shrink at any point during this century due to the growth of Sub-Saharan Africa and European TFR likely rising by the time Africa's population growth slows down.
"US industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit were already losing jobs to Germany and Japan."
True, and also to other places in the U.S. The monopoly rents Northern cities had during the early 20th century were bound to break down due to the spread of trucking and electricity.