Charlie, It's fine to think that way. My point was only to ponder on your previous post, and note that the the end of Empire 1.0 did not result in a fatal collapse of the British economy.

Nor did it bring an end to national responsibility. You were on the leading edge in WWI and WWII, and although you had help in both of them, you had sufficient strength to hold your own when the going got tough.

I think we'll do fine in the long run (not counting WMD incidents down the road).

Thomas is quite correct. I'm especially annoyed that the UK publishing market is in recession right now, so most of my novels are only selling in the US (and non-English markets) -- the UK is potentially a lifeboat for me (it's the second most lucrative SF market) but it's shipping water. Which means about 70% of my income is currently dependent on the US dollar ...

Randy: I maintain that the USA is an empire; it's British Empire 2.0, and the first one to operate on a planetary scale. However, for ideological and historical reasons it's deeply politically incorrect in America to talk of the USA as an imperial power (despite the precedents going back over a century -- The Phillipines, anyone?) And the persistent failure to address the systemic failings of the US hegemony in terms of its status as an imperial power is one of the main causes of the current quagmire.

(If anything we owe the PNAC neocon hawks quite a bit, simply for revealing the emperor's underwear to the world --and making it quite clear that even if the "E" word was not to be spoken in public, it was still in mind.)

Tony: if you kill me now, I'll never get to write a book and dedicate it to you :)

Well on the "If Rome is burning, bring sausages for barbecue" front I would recommend that our american participants keep their liabilities in fixed-interest dollar-denominated debt and their assets in, well, anything else. In particular I would recommend investing in eastern europe. Estonia looks good. That way if/when the dollar crashes your debts are much reduced, while the value of your assets rises. This is naturally not very helpful for Stross, as his US publishers are very unlikely to agree to pay him in euros or pounds >:-)

I've wanted to have a blog post entitled "Still ill" for ages, and now you've gone and done it.
The irony is, I am currently not well, but I would've had to post a precedent-post first, describing my not-wellness, and then a follow-up after a suitable amount of time. Which would imply actually being ill for such an amount of time, and I'm not sure it's worth it just for the sake of homage.

Charlie,

That's an interesting analogy but I don't think it's that bad. The end of the British Empire was as much an end of all empires and mercantilism as anything else. I could be wrong but I'm not aware that the price of tea had changed radically since losing India.

It looks to me like Britain does very well. You still have a great navy that might have remained the greatest if not for the fact that it sails in the shadow of an even more powerful ally.


Tony,

You may as well wish Charlie well as he has enough friends/rivals to ghost write in his stead. And perhaps the thought of mis-penned sequels will give him the will to resist.

On the more micro side of markets, do you think the value of signed copies of Charlie's stuff will go up if he dies soon? Will he be "gifted genius tragically struck down in prime" or "obscure author who sunk without trace"?

I mean, I have a Christmas to finance and I wanna know if I should wish better health to our host or not...

"they who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is a slogan that's much more interesting for people who aren't in the stewpot, let me tell you. It's fun (if, by fun, you mean horrible) watching my savings plunge in value this last year. But it will make pretty wallpaper when US$1 == ¥1

Trying for the long-term perspective ...

Back some time in 2001/2002, I was struck by the parallels between the USA's situation and that of the UK in 1901/02. Now I'm beginning to think we're seeing a replay of history -- with specific reference to the rise and fall of empires -- at some multiple of realtime, by a bored god with one finger on the fast-forward button and an urge to deliver a vicious object lesson along the lines of "they who do not study history are doomed to repeat it".

Sic transit gloria PNAC.

Ben,

I'd have just one minor quibble: Most of them bought those bonds because they thought it was a good deal at the time, irrespective of whether I was buying shirts from them.

In any case, I wasn't trying to argue that the debt wasn't a bad thing, but rather, that a U.S. downturn was not a good thing for the rest of the world.

And "rest of the world" excludes the world's politicians.

Edited by author 11-23-2004 03:18 AM
Randy,

The problem is that the US has acheived this using the following offer. Tell you what China we'll buy $10b of goods from you if you lend us $5b towards the price of them.

Thats not a deal that can last forever at some point down the line that $5b has to be paid for. As the dollar is the currency the loan is in the real question is how do you reduce the size of the loan to ensure that it remains payable. The options now are weaken the dollar to make Chinese goods more expensive and try and reintroduce inflation so that that $5bn loan starts looking like a $2bn loan.

I don't see the logic in a suffering U.S. economy being good news for anyone starving in the third world. It's not as though they were living in luxury until Nike came along and offered them jobs at sweatshops.

Likewise, China is growing. While there may be problems related to defense and competition for oil markets, I still believe it's an economically good thing for the U.S. when other people prosper.

This has been building for some time. The Japanese ceased bailing a few months back, China will hopefully do likewise soon.

The current mismatch in economic power between the First world and the developing world is non-sustainable - we're going to lose our priveliged position where we can buy DVD players for 5 hours of the minimum wage, and it'll be a good thing, because it'll mean that the rest of the world won't be starving quite so much.

Welcome to the slightly-more-evenly-distributed future.

Charlie, you're obviously sick and thus not thinking clearly. Deficits? Who cares? "Deficits don't matter" was the quote a while back from Dick Cheney as I recall. You gotta have faith in the guys running the US, they don't make mistakes in economics any more than they do in foreign policy or intelligence matters. Faith-based economics, it's the latest thing. Even better than supply-side economics, honest.

Ah, suddenly I'm feeling quite ill. I may be coming down with the flu or something...

Just reading the executive summary is just _jolly_. Time to run it past my former boss the PhD in economics.

I personally know a pioneer in this field. A guy named Paul Moe offered my band a management contract in 80's, so he began his career as a rock promoter/manager wanna be. Talk about weird personality quirks!

While trying to help a close friend who was dying of AIDS cash in his life insurance he developed a way to do these deals with big financial investors. Now he's CEO of Living Benefits Financial Services LLC in Wayzata, Minnesota. They plan to buy nearly a billion USD in life insurance policies in the next year! Blood money is big business!

Check this out, he says the toughest problem for his industry was/is not the AIDS drugs shakeout, but the the increasing competition from other companies copying their approach (people still die of many other nasty things in predictable ways). Imagine fielding offers and taking the highest bidder for your Stage III Melanoma. How long before we have online bookmaking for what's about to kill ya.

Creepy, man.

See also Terry Pratchett's version of insurance and the fire brigade.