Chinese timebombs:
Highly interesting thread in Randy McDonald’s LJ about the ticking timebombs of Chinese demographics and environmental pollution.
In the former, you sit hard on increasing the population by limiting new births, which means that you end up with an oversupply of dateless young men and a large retirement-age population they have to help support. Happy happy joy joy.
In the latter, you put the economy on overdrive to improve the lot of the country and its citizens, and you don’t ask (or allow to be asked) silly questions like what the long term effects of this are going to be. As long as people have new jobs and better stuff, they’ll shut up and let you run things. But eventually, the levels of pollution and arable land destruction catch up, along with the levels of corruption and abuse (people stop working for bad bosses and demand more wages, people stop allowing the crooked local governments and their pals from looting the neighborhood). And when the economic engine stops its ascent, the whole thing is primed to crash, and crash monumentally.