Books: Exploring the World Of Japanese Craft Sake

  

(Drivebycuriosity) - Do you like Sushi & Sashimi, the freshness, taste & texture of uncooked fish? Then you might also enjoy sake. I was wondering how a relatively plain grain like rice can be turned into such a delicious wine. The book "Exploring the World Of Japanese Craft Sake" by Nancy Matsumoto gives an introduction (amazon ). 

The authors went to sake bars and visited a lot sake brewers and rice farmers and interviewed them. Especially the female co-author focused on the family histories of the sake makers, too much for an introduction book.

But there are also some small informative parts about the different kinds of rice used for brewing, the types of water (minerals) and the regional differences. There is one very short chapter about the alchemy of sake making and explains the chemistry of transforming the starch of the grain into final product and I learned a lot about the use of mold - a special kind of mold - during the transformation process. 

Unfortunately the book is not formatted as an e-book and it looks like a PDF -  very hard to read. I will try to find a better book. 

Books: A Case Of Two Cities - The Curse Of Series

(Drivebycuriosity) - Everyone has to be efficient and productive these days - even writers. It seems that when an author has an idea for a good novel he stretches it out and turns it into a series. Unfortunately the following volumes are seldom good.

This is also true for Qiu Xiaolong`s "Inspector Chen Cao" series. I enjoyed volume 1"Death of a Red Heroine" about a detective in Shanghai in the 1990s (my review ). I liked also Vol 2 & 3, but I gave up reading vol 4 "A Case of Two Cities" after about 50% ( amazon).

This book focuses in corruption in China in the 1990. The subject is not new and the author really inflates it. So it becomes tedious to read again and again about the bad behavior of so many politicians and bureaucrats. There is a lot about Chinese poetry which I found interesting in the first 2 vol. but also got tiresome and slowed the already tardy plot. 

So reading Vol 1 - and maybe Vol 2 & 3 - is worth the time and the money, but not Vol. 4. 

Economics: Why A Shrinking Population Is A Boon

  (Drivebycuriosity) - There is a lot ado about the shrinking populations everywhere. Are we really doomed? I doubt it.

We could learn from history. The Middle Ages already experienced drastic shrinking populations, caused by the plague. In the year 1348 the bubonic plague (Black Death) reduced populations in England and other European countries by more than 30%. As a result the living standard of the survivors rose. 

Food prices fell because fewer people purchased food. The falling demand for food forced the producers to cut their prices. Wages rose because there were fewer farmhands and other workers and the employers had to pay higher salaries.

Today a shrinking population would support the living standard of low income groups. There would be less demand for housing which would reduce rentals and food prices would be constrained. 

A shrinking population is also a big win for the environment and could be the answer to global warming, another favorite subject of the doomsayers. 

Fewer people burn less energy - and they emit fewer greenhouse gases. Fewer people also eat less; therefore the incentive to destroy forests, to gain more land for farming, becomes weaker and the problem of over-fishing disappears.

 

                  More Green & Clean 

A shrinking population also slows down the trend of turning forests & meadows into the sprawl. There is no need for constructing more and more one-family houses, streets, strip malls, store houses & parking places. A shrinking population makes the world more green & clean!

A smaller population is also the answer to another doomster alert: "The robots are coming" And: "Automation will destroy our jobs!"  (" thehill). Both trends are mostly compensating each other: A falling demand for workers, thanks to automation, compensates a declining supply by shrinking populations.

 

                      Industrial Revolution 

Machines have been replacing labor for many centuries. In the middle ages wind & water mills already substituted human & animal labor. In the 18th century followed steam power, starting the industrial revolution. In the recent centuries the ongoing automation process has been raising productivity of labor considerably - and the progress has been accelerating. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is raising the productivity of labor even even further, reducing the demand for human workers even more. 

And there is more: science is making exponential advancements in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence and will support the economy and the labor markets in the coming decades. 

               Less Work, More Income

Today even farmers are using robots, for instance for harvesting strawberries or milking cows (wikipedia). Drones are being used in warehouses and yards for inventory management. Robots also help restaurants to deal with the scarcity of labor.  

"Domino’s Pizza Inc. is putting in place equipment and technology that reduce the amount of labor that is required to produce our dough balls", reports time.com. 3D-printers are also replacing workers, even in construction. "A 3D printer can build the walls of a house in as little as two days versus weeks or months with traditional construction materials" notices today.com.  

 A study by economists John G. Fernald and Charles I. Jones from Stanford & the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco claims that "it becomes possible to replace more and more of the labor tasks with capital" (robinhanson ). Fernald & Jones define capital as physical capital (machines including robots & computers), plus human capital (knowledge & skills) plus discovery of new ideas (inventions like computer, internet etc.). According to them "artificial intelligence and machine learning could allow computers and robots to increasingly replace labor in the production function for goods", meaning that the society can produce more things without increasing hours worked or even with a shrinking labor force. As a result the growth rate of income per person and the long-run growth rate (now around 2%) will rise as well: "The possibility that artificial intelligence will allow machines to replace workers to some extent could lead to higher growth in the future.

 

                 Universal Basic Income

Naive observers claim that a shrinking population reduces the demand for goods & services and will destroy many markets and businesses (noahpinion). These pessimists ignore that demand is the number of potential buyers multiplied with the purchasing power per capita. Thanks to the accelerating technological progress the purchasing power per capita is rising and will overcompensate the shrinking number of consumers.

I reckon that technological progress leads to:

    - rising salaries (for those still working), 

    - climbing dividend incomes and stock market gains 

which will raise the purchasing power of most people - enough to compensate the shrinking number of buyers. Even those who don`t invest in the stock market may participate via pension funds and insurance investments. 

The productivity gains will finally translate into higher tax revenues for the governments (by taxing company profits, dividends & stock market gains). Some day a much greater part of goods & services will be produced by robots and other machines. Then fewer people may work than today and many things will cost less. Then the time could come for an universal basic income, paid to everybody, and financed by productivity gains delivered with automation (driveby ).