Beetle:

Thanks for the great post, which has obviously inspired much discussion and debate.

I guess I am getting too old when, after reviewing many of these articles and ideas, I am taken back to the De-Industrialization issues of the mid-1990s, wherein we referenced backward to Drucker, etc... and the Marshall Plans, and the older industrial systems and structures. Not much new in the macro-world except re-arrangements of assets, and re-assessments of what makes which assets important at the moment.

Rare Earth? Re-opening the Inland Silk Road? Russia having resources on which Europe is critically dependent? Oil empires fighting for nuclear technology so that they can free up export capacity by generating domestic power from something other than oil?

Manufacturing chopsticks in Georgia (USA) for the chinese market due to availability of wood, minimal mechanization, cheap labor and cheap transport (empty reverse haul containers). Go figure?

Comparative advantage is in real-time flux, and the dynamic and interactive market complexities remain beyond the limits of command planning at the macro level.

The downfall of all this stuff is not the failures of complex market systems to track, control and project past activity into the future, but their inability to grasp what the actual future will be defined by.

Thanks for making me rethink about this stuff.