The Future Is Definitely Not What It Used to Be:

How Distraction Becomes Destruction

By Shlomo Maital

 

Productivity Growth in the US has Been Abysmal Since 2008

   “Americans aren’t saving money the way they used to. U.S. households scaled back their pace of savings to the lowest level in nine years at the end of 2016. At the same time, wage growth slowed, according to updated government figures. The personal savings rate was 3.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016, the lowest reading since a 2.8 percent rate in the final three months of 2007, just as the U.S. was entering a recession.”

             – Bloomberg Business Week

       What a week. TrumpCare goes down to defeat. Trump’s new communications director nicknamed “Mooch” spews profanity. The White House Chief of Staff is fired.   LGBT’s are banned from the US armed forces.

         These are all distractions. None have any real relation to core issues troubling America’s society and economy.   When distractions take center stage, distraction becomes destruction.   Replace just two letters in ‘distraction’, and you get destruction!

         So what ARE the core issues?   Americans’ consumer confidence is at a 16-year high! So Americans are spending and borrowing. Saving has fallen. That leaves fewer resources for capital formation. But America needs more saving, not more spending and more personal debt.

       According to Neil Irwin, writing in the New York Times, productivity growth has fallen from a long-term average of 3% to less than 1%. (see graph). That is because wages haven’t risen, so it no longer pays to invest in labor-saving technology, which raises productivity.

       America’s infrastructure is crumbling, it has been for years, but there is no money to pay for rebuilding it. Trump’s plan is to have the private sector rebuild it. How likely is that?    

         No Administration has been this dystopic, dysfunctional, perhaps in history. And it’s a doom loop. The more dysfunctional it is, the less good capable people are willing to join it. Who wants to board a sinking ship?

         Suppose America was a company whose shares were listed on the stock exchange. Would you sell them short?   Many people would.   The major worry is not the economy. It is this — in the coming year, it is highly likely that there will be a major, unanticipated Black Swan crisis. Could be North Korea, Iran….Mideast… who knows?  

     What are the chances that the Trump Administration will handle it coolly, professionally, with good judgment and wisdom, in a way that benefits not only America but the whole world?

       Read Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly (1985). Here is the definition of folly: “Government decisions that are against its own interests”.   Can you see folly in the distractions of the Trump administration?   Can you see destruction?   And can we interpret the boom in consumer spending as a no-confidence vote in the future?