In his latest column for the Wall Street Journal William Galston muses about whether the world has already seen “peak China”:

Long-term projections suggest that China’s population, which now stands at about 1.4 billion, will drop below one billion by 2080 and 800 million by 2100. China’s working-age population, which peaked in 2011, is projected to decline nearly a quarter by 2050. Meanwhile, the number of elderly Chinese will rise from 200 million to 500 million at midcentury, and providing for their needs will be a mounting challenge for China’s workers and policy makers.

While these demographic trends will cause issues in the future, current problems are challenging the playbook that China has used to maintain growth in recent decades—infrastructure development, housing production and exports.

Burdened by rising debt, local governments are finding it difficult to sustain their current pace of infrastructure investment. Meanwhile, China’s housing sector looks desperate. Dozens of developers have defaulted on bonds and other financial obligations in the past two years. Last week, Country Garden, one of China’s largest remaining developers, missed interest payments on debt with a face value of $1 billion, sending new shock waves through the sector. The monthly value of new home sales by China’s 100 largest property developers has fallen more than 80% since late 2020. Looking forward, annual housing demand is estimated at between nine million and 10 million units, well below the peak (much of it speculative) of 14 million purchases in 2021.

Let’s visualize China’s demographic situation a little more:

With the regular caveat that we’re working in the dark, relying on China’s reported population which may or may not be correct, I think that population pyramid is revealing.

The major change occurred about 30 years ago, I would assume due to a combination of the “One Child Policy” with China’s currency revision which led to the growth spurt that seems to have come to an end. Jobs became more available and lucrative, particularly for women of child-bearing age; children became an economic liability.

That will really begin to bite in about 30 years, i.e. around 2050. China’s dependency ratio will be unworkable with little way around it unless you’re willing to kill a lot of old people, a move that may prove difficult if there’s anything left of filial piety in that China. A relatively small number of working age Chinese will be trying to support a very large number of older Chinese.

Organized retail theft, sometimes described as “flash rob”, is making quite a bit of news these days. Pamela N. Danziger reports at Forbes:

Smash-and-grab mobs descended on two luxury retailers in the Los Angeles area last week and made off with nearly a half-million dollars in merchandise. The mayhem was caught on camera for all to see, causing shoppers to think twice before setting foot in luxury stores where so much loot is so easily had.

Last Tuesday, 30 to 40 thieves descended on a Yves Saint Laurent store in the Americana at Brand lifestyle center in Glendale. They hit the store around dinnertime and stole an estimated $300,000 in merchandise, escaping in multiple get-away cars. Americana at Brand is a prime retail and dining destination operated by Caruso.

Then, around 4 p.m. on Saturday, a similar-sized mob ransacked a Nordstrom store at the Westfield Topanga Mall in Woodland Hills. This group was armed with bear spray to take out security guards. An estimated $100,000 worth of merchandise was lifted with numerous vehicles ready to speed the thieves away.

In both instances, nobody was caught, though the police reported they had “investigative leads.”

While retailers calculate the direct losses in dollars and cents, it will have a long-lasting impact on luxury shoppers already on high alert from rising crime rates.

And it’s not just happening in California, where shoplifting laws have been rolled back. Major cities nationwide are seeing a rise in organized retail crime with New York, Houston, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta and Dallas among the top ten cities most affected.

It’s estimated that organized retail theft accounts for something like $100 billion in losses for retailers per year.

What, if anything, should be done about organized retail theft? The matter has a number of different dimensions including the role of social media, not just for organizing such thefts but in fencing the loot and the role of “crime tourism”, i.e. people coming from other countries for the express purpose of theft.

It was just about 40 years ago that I stood up in a town meeting in Evanston and criticized the plan for a research park, modeled on California’s Silicon Valley or Raleigh’s Research Triangle on the grounds that

1. It would uproot an established black community that dated back before the Civil War
2. It would primarily make money for a handful of developers
3. It would never work because Evanston was too expensive to live in and lacked the transportation infrastructure to make the research park practical

The plan prevailed anyway. Guess who was completely right in his criticism? The plan went ahead and the so-called research park is practically empty.

At The Free Press Adam Popescu reports on Evanston’s reparations plan. Here’s the kernel of the story:

In November 2019, Evanston, Illinois—which is mostly white and wealthy, with a black community comprising 16 percent of its population of 75,000—passed a resolution creating the Reparations Fund and the Reparations Subcommittee.

It was not until March 2021 that the city pledged that it would set aside funds for its first round of reparations, and it was a far cry from the plan favored by many Democrats in Washington, which would allocate $800,000 to every black household in the country for a total cost of at least $10 trillion. But it was the first time any jurisdiction in the United States has attempted—in any formal, financial, or legislative sense—to look back over the long, winding course of American history and to do something about the country’s often sordid treatment of African Americans. Not just with speeches or gestures or monuments. But with money.

and

Reparations in the city have done practically nothing to lay the seedbed for the “intergenerational wealth” its supporters envisioned. That’s because the city could afford only to allocate $400,000 for its first round of recipients, meaning only a tiny fraction of Evanston’s black community has received any money: out of roughly 12,000 black residents in the city, only 674 have applied for reparations, and out of those 674, only 59—total—have received them.

The story of what happened in Evanston and the first reparations law in American history—and what might soon happen in other cities considering similar measures—is the story of what the most contentious public policy issue in the country looks like when it is actually put into practice, when ideals meet reality, when vision meets bureaucracy.

Is the lesson of Evanston that reparations can’t work? Or that the city didn’t go far enough? Or that, in trying to do something—anything—it actually made things worse?

Although slavery was never practiced in Evanston, the town has a lot to make reparations over and you don’t need to go back to slavery (see above). Racially restrictive covenants were a commonplace right into the 1960s.

I think this article by Betsy McKay in the Wall Street Journal about the new class of drugs including Wegovy and Mounjaro is confused. Here’s the meat of it:

The success of the powerful new class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs shows how important chemistry is to determining a person’s weight. The brain is the body’s chief chemist, regulating appetite and making it difficult for many people to shed pounds and keep them off. The brain determines how much fat it wants people to carry, according to years of research bolstered by the new drugs.

The amount is like a setting on a dial, or what many researchers call a “set point” or “defended fat mass.” The brain maintains the dial setting or set point by regulating how much a person eats. Ozempic, its sister drug Wegovy and another, Mounjaro, lower the dial setting, or set point, in effect by acting on the brain to reduce hunger and make a person feel full sooner, some obesity researchers say.

The new set point lasts as long as a patient is on the drug, they say. Patients who ate a lot before they started taking one of the drugs feel less hungry and fill up more quickly—sometimes after one slice of pizza when they once ate the whole pie.

“This is not about willpower or personal choice,” said Dr. Florencia Halperin, an endocrinologist and chief medical officer of Form, a virtual medical weight-loss clinic. “This is about your brain driving behaviors.”

to which I respond so what? It’s easier for you to maintain a healthy weight than it is for me because your brain doesn’t send your body the wrong signals. That does not render it healthier for me to be overweight. It just means that it’s harder for me than it is for you. Life isn’t fair.

Furthermore, these drugs have all sorts of side effects possibly including pancreatitis, allergic reactions, kidney, stomach, and gallbladder problems, even some forms of cancer.

And there’s a distinction between serious obesity and losing five or ten pounds every so often. We have no idea what on again off again usage of these drugs will do on a longitudinal basis.

Taking drugs so you can avoid self-restraint is the very definition of gluttony. Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins for a reason. That reason is that it reflects a relationship with material things that is disregulated, out of control.

Virtue is a habit. You cultivate the virtue of self-restraint by practicing it. If you don’t practice it, you won’t magically restrain yourself.

The reason I don’t post about Trump is simple. I don’t intend to vote for him. I’m content to let the cases work their way through the courts. I don’t want him to “live rent-free in my head”, to quote an advice columnist.

Well, here’s a title I never expected to see in The New Republic: “15 Reasons Why Trump Should Be Favored Against Biden in 2024”. That’s the title of a piece by Brynn Tannehill there.

That’s a bit misleading. Here are his first several bullet points:

1. Americans perceive the economy as bad.
2. Trump probably won’t be in prison at the time of the election because these trials take so long, and he faces the possibility of being out on appeal even if he does go to trial.
3. Nothing says you cannot run for president from prison.

Those don’t illustrate why Donald Trump should be favored over Biden so much as that it’s not impossible for him to win.

Unlike progressives I think I understand why Donald Trump has such a following. It’s not fascism, racism, or any other -ism other than, possibly, elitism on the part of the progressives. He’s tapped into a broad discontent with the imperious and condescending air being assumed by the denizens of Washington, DC. Call it the “Deep State” or whatever else you care to but it’s real and it’s dangerous.

The problem I see is that Trump will not or cannot deliver on dismantling it. As evidence I would submit the four years of his presidency.

My problem is that I don’t want either Trump or Biden to be elected president. I think they’re both low characters and corrupt. You can’t get blood from a stone. Or as the New Testament puts it a bad tree can’t bear good fruit.

I’ve been seeing quite a few articles lately whinging about remote work. I have news for the writers: those office buildings will remain empty. Some claim lower productivity which is disputed. I would be more impressed with the articles if I were sure that the authors weren’t sitting at home writing them. One that I read recently described how much more efficient people moving boxes were when they came back to the office. People moving boxes aren’t working from home. I found the simile puzzling.

To understand why people won’t be returning to their offices any time soon, this article at Forbes by Morgan Smith makes a pretty good primer:

Remote jobs aren’t disappearing — they’re just moving out of expensive coastal metros like New York and San Francisco.

Faced with labor shortages and rising wages, companies are hiring for more remote jobs overseas and in smaller U.S. cities.

During the pandemic, thanks to jobs that were no longer tied to offices, millions of Americans flocked to cities like Phoenix, Asheville and Boise, seeking greener pastures and more affordable housing.

But remote work has opened up new opportunities for employers, too. Companies quickly discovered that their employees could still be productive from afar, often for a third of the cost, if they stretched their location requirements.

Some of the claims by people writing in praise of officework are, shall we say, exaggerated:

Currently, 12.7% of full-time employees work from home, illustrating the rapid normalization of remote work environments. Simultaneously, a significant 28.2% of employees have adapted to a hybrid work model. This model combines both home and in-office working, offering flexibility and maintaining a level of physical presence at the workplace.

An eighth of full-time employees is not an enormous number and IMO is unlikely to fill those empty offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. For one thing a lot of those employees are really remote. On a daily basis I have meetings with workers in India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Serbia, and Mexico. I doubt they’ll be coming into the office soon.

My heart goes out to the people of Lahaina who’ve lost their homes, all of their possessions, and, in many cases, family members to the fires that have swept through their town. We won’t know for a while how great the fatalities were. It will turn out to be something between 1% and 10% of the town’s population. Claire Rush, Beatrice Dupuy and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher report at the Associated Press:

LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town climbed to 93, authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. The blaze is already the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said Saturday.

“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles, and it is full of our loved ones,” he said, noting that the number of dead is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.”

The scale of the destruction and damage is substantial:

At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, nearly all of them residential. Across the island, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion.

To give you some idea the total permanent population of Lahaina is something around 12,000 people, nearly all of them employed in the hospitality sector: groundskeepers and cleaning workers, cooks, waiters and waitresses, etc. Not exactly high-income people.

The article goes on to strike a parallel between the Lahaina fire and the Paradise fire in northern California a couple of years ago. I think the parallel is too many people living in a environment that can’t really support such a population, low housing construction standards and weak regulations, and emergency infrastructure inadequate to the task.

At this point none of our friends or acquaintances who have cadaver dogs have been called into service although I wouldn’t be surprised if some were.

Clearly, such a poor population cannot be expected to bear the costs of this tragedy but I don’t think having the costs fall on poor people on the mainland is just, either. That’s what happens when the federal government spends more than it receives in revenue and borrows the rest. The burden of that falls mainly on the poor.

This disaster was no surprise. They have been warned of it for more than a decade, as reported by Dan Frosch and Jim Carlton at the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly a decade before a wildfire destroyed the coastal Maui town of Lahaina this week, killing at least 89 people, a report by Hawaiian fire researchers warned that the area was at extremely high risk of burning.

Another report, in 2020, tied fires to winds from a passing hurricane—similar to the ones that fanned the Lahaina blaze.

And the state’s electric utility had for years worried about wildfire risk in the area. It even flew drones to monitor conditions.

Yet local authorities said in the aftermath of this week’s devastation that though they knew wildfires were becoming more frequent in Hawaii, they weren’t prepared for one to roar through Lahaina.

IMO it’s pretty clear that the tourism and hospitality sectors need to bear more of the risk of such catastrophes. There are 378 hotels in Lahaina. Poor mainlanders shouldn’t be subsidizing them.

I think the award for Rant of the Day should go to Jacob Howland at UnHerd:

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

That’s just a snippet. It goes on in a similar vein at some length. If anything I’d say he’s understating the problems.

I for one do not believe that we get the government we deserve. I think we get the government inflicted on us by people trying to gain wealth and power.