American Demographics

Implications: The referenced article begins with the now usual doomsday message which many including this writer have now exhausted ad nauseam.  Three relatively short paragraphs later, the Editor-in-Chief wraps up the forgone conclusions neatly and attempts to move on to some new meat.  You can read the rest of the article to absorb his wisdom.  This guy is a great real estate investor and journalist and I think he mostly always presents good food for thought.  I admire.

Analysis: I’d like to comment that the standards of the American middle class now include all the housing, cars, electronics and communications and entertainment equipment and services, healthcare, education, travel, recreation gear, sporting goods, insurance benefits, public health, safety and welfare services …ever enjoyed by mankind.  You can observe that the possessions of the dominant acquisitive 1% are nothing more in most cases than a larger or more refined or greater accumulation of more of the same.  Middle class suburbia doesn’t really want for at least a minimum supply of everything in most cases.  Sure, I know that every garage doesn’t include a hangar or RV storage, but if you want it you can usually possibly get it with one modicum of effort or another.  In my mind, there’s not a whole lot more going on at the top of the hill than on the flats.   And yet Americans want more hill-tops.  Even if guys like me tail off in their desires for more material, this is a young country yet and the immigrants at least until recently pour in with enthusiasm and huge want lists.  No doubt we’ll go to amnesty for at least a portion of those here without permission now and we’ll have to import much of our high and low end skills and labor, so I don’t really see the growth numbers diminishing.  Nor do I see new residents coming here to continue living in the poverty of their homeland. So we’ll have to put more savings into the capital of financial institutions and begin to more intensively develop industries which offer better returns on and of capital than housing, cars and other  consumer wants to get more to spend on consumerism.  Energy, infrastructure, agriculture, mining, electronics and communications look like the ticket if we’ll stick with the value added rather than the speculative side of such endeavors.    And, finally, we’ll have to educate, educate, educate to stay ahead of the other guys.   But we can’t just teach more of the same-old, as we need to get the curve of progressive education closer to the origins of the industry in order to get the U.S. in the game earlier and more profitably again.  Sounds like we need a venture capital kind of approach to funding education even more than exists now.