🇹🇭🇰🇭 - The situation in the Poi Pet direction, western Cambodia:

Four Thai military incursions have been noted - three of which were launched using Cambodian military installations captured earlier this year, in July.

🇨🇩🇷🇼🇧🇮⚡- Burundi has closed the border with Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

🇧🇯🇹🇬⚡- Pascal Tigri, who led the failed coup attempt, has reportedly fled to Togo.

🇨🇩🇷🇼🇧🇮⚡- BREAKING: Uvira falls to the M23, eastern DR Congo.

🇨🇩🇷🇼🇧🇮 - M23 are now less than 9km from Bujumbura, Burundi's economic capital, largest city, and former political capital.

🇺🇸 🇸🇪 🇳🇴 Trump said he wants to bring in immigrants from countries like Sweden, Norway, and 🇩🇰 Denmark, instead of “shithole countries” like Somalia.

🇸🇴 Trump said Somalia is “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.”

📎 AF Post

Wealth and Power in an Aging Society (I)

🔷 Again using theoretical mathematical modelling of populations and demography, a simple age-dependent wealth distribution that assumes 60 year olds are on average 3 times as wealthy as 30 year olds (with a slow increase from 1 to 3 between those two ages, all younger than 30 are worth 1 and all older than 60 remain being worth 3) can show that an ahistoric concentration of wealth (and, if the axiom is granted that money is power) and power in the baby boom generation as it hits it's numerical-wealth maximum before the natural decline from death.

🔷 It cannot be overstated how important this observation is: over the course of the 150 year window modelled here, such a concentration of wealth is only seen once and is a remarkable outlier. The yellow spot marking peak concentration is up to 43% higher in value than the regular greenish-turquoise band that occupies an age range about 10 years wide beginning from age 50, where power and wealth naturally accumulates due to age of the individuals. When the boom generation dies, this concentration of wealth dissipates and is never seen again; instead only the consequences of longer natural lifespans remain in the shape of a longer tail now extending past 75 and above the age of 80 for meaningful wealth concentrations.

🔷 If I had used a more realistic tabulation of average wealth by age, this graph would appear even more absurd than it already does. Indeed, one must take note of the "shadow" to the southeast of the yellow dot: those born about 40 years after the boom will be uniquely underrepresented (as measured by wealth alone) for a time, and are also an ahistoric exception to the steady state of this model: observe that these "trailers" (analogs to today's Gen Z) are represented by the second lowest color level (dark blue), despite the typical 30-somethings being represented by the lowest, while their parents occupy the highest color level (yellow) simultaneously!

🔶 What we can take from this is the following; if wealth is concentrated by age and a society goes through a boom and subsequent reduction in births which then remains constant, then there will be an ahistoric concentration of wealth in the boom generation together with an ahistoric lack of wealth among their children. All it takes is to factor in a single mechanism like stock markets divesting into real estate (i.e. housing) to "protect assets" for there to be a very real competition between parent and child of the type not possible or seen elsewhere in history due to the totally novel disparity in wealth between the generations. Now money is serving the interests of money at the costs of those with unusually little money to begin with.

🔶 The boomers are often derided for having "eaten their children", but it appears simple arithmetic forces them to behave in this way in such a system that permits housing to be traded as a commodity for money (one must remember that housing used to be tied to families and could not legally be sold), contains an unregulated stock market ridden with speculation and other dangerous financial practices, and where foreign predatory interests may attack both the housing and financial markets for short term gains, simultaneously imperiling the "parked wealth" (boomer stock market assets) and the non-participating young through the consequences of financial meddling: record inflation, trade tariffs on common household products such as coffee, intolerable energy prices, and ultimately being locked out of the housing market altogether.

🔶 The solution is simple: should such a dramatic disparity in wealth concentration appear due to demographic factors, as they have done, then the "free flow of money" must be stopped and made subject to ethical policing that stabilize the wealth of the old while creating opportunities to inherit/access wealth for the young. All foreign interference must be ruthlessly stopped and countered

Wealth and Power in an Aging Society (II)

📉 Represented another way, and the system's steady state is visible in the years 90-130, as well as just before the end by year 240 (where a new equilibrium is reached as people now live longer), there is a massive disruption of who holds how much of the society's total wealth. Well planned economic systems could ignore changes within the 0-10% range and would require some course correcting to accommodate 11-30% changes. No economic system can survive a disruption by a factor of 2 without active intervention. The pre-quake of the boom is visible when the boom itself was young: by sheer volume they command a lot of mass, even if it isn't a substantial sum on a per-person basis. The accumulation phase (practically perfectly in tune with the boom of the 80s, money being "free", the computer age on the stock market, etc) is swift and probably impresses any naive observer who does not respect demographic factors (many people can do lots of work simultaneously, thus a "miraculous economic growth" is misappropriated where there is actually just a legion of workers). But the future is an arithmetic certainty: after this massive accumulation of wealth comes more or less immediate redistribution due to the natural fact of death.

📈 Accumulation must feel nice when it is happening for apparently no reason from the perspective of the boomers and economists, particularly when it simultaneously defeats an inoperable and infeasible competitor system like communism. But it happened for a reason, and what comes after must happen too. Redistribution is painful: who has to give up what and how much? Boomers and other mass asset hoarders shudder at the thought; but it is a biological necessity to reorganize a society's wealth if the young (those tasked with forming today and tomorrow's families) cannot start having children. Redistribution requires careful tending and mutual trust, it cannot be allowed to "happen by itself", as that would be unadulterated chaos.

👮 About half of the redistribution will come naturally by inheritance. The other half of the wealth however might become trapped in unmaneuverable institutions: consider that as the boomers retire, the most experienced and well networked employees of a mass asset holder, such as a bank, disappear within a few short years. Can an institution sustain losing its managerial elite? Can the remainder continue managing the assets, or do they fall out of focus with no one really taking responsibility? Does a lot of wealth become "lost" to society because a retirement wave shocks the asset manager class into dysfunction? What can the state do to intervene and prevent this from happening? Consider a BlackRock, already having completed a full frontal offensive against the detached single home housing market, now standing before mass retirement of its managers. Will the rest of society continue to tolerate a dead institution owning perfectly serviceable but empty homes because it is unwilling to nationalize and disassemble such a company?

👶 Children require room and resources. These must be made available to them in an organized and rapid fashion through an orderly transfer of wealth from the old to the young natives of Western nations. There should be ethical policing of last wills to prevent old people sending resources abroad, as with donations to the church or various dubious charities who primarily work in the third world. A redistribution will come because aging is unavoidable, the question is what shape this redistribution will take and who will be its master; and what purpose it will serve. It is my humble suggestion that it serve native birthrates primarily and so far as possible, exclusively. If a stable population can only be engineered by the abolition of the stock market, controlled investment schemes, limits on personal autonomy in financial matters, a maximum legal age of majority or forced nationalizations of private companies; then so be it.

Full relevant model data for the above calculations

The four scenarios differ only in life expectancy and birth cohort size. 1 through 3 are each scenario in isolate, where it is notable that the third (shrinking cohorts) has a much longer term effect than either an increase in lifespan or baby boom on their own, with 4 combining all. The extension of lifespan and the babyboom are both fixed to the year 120 to help ease comparison (and essentially apply to modern western nations).

The third scenario is notable for concentrating wealth in a single age band over time, whereas the baby boom does this for a single generation only. Combining this with longer life expectancy is equivalent to constructing an economic timebomb once Western style social security systems are factored in. More to follow!

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