The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.
Billionaires are poor.
Having more money doesn't make you wealthier or more powerful.
Apparently in America the purpose of having billions of dollars is to have job security for being a full-time podcaster or online commentator about the woke left, which, it turns out, has gone bananas.
Billions of dollars to pursue my lifelong dream of being an inflooencer.
My advice to billionaires:
Use your money to generously and widely fund crazy people with unconventional ideas. Not just their startup ideas to get A RETURN. Fund them without strings attached. Write a serious book.
Do not start a podcast. Do not tweet. Do not smile in photos.
If you only fund business ideas, you are only ever going to get more useless money. This is a terminal dead end.
If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to lose money. The more you lose, the better.
The modern billionaire will inevitably be expropriated by his hated enemies and lawyers. It doesn't take a genius of political economy to see this coming.
The only solution is to pre-emptively self-expropriate by giving away your money to people you actually like and support.
More tens of billions of dollars expropriated just through *marriage or divorce* have been used to fund intellectual and cultural movement than perhaps all of the intentional funding of all other tech billionaires combined in history.
MacKenzie Bezos and Laurene Powell-Jobs.
The reason civilization is declining and we aren't getting Martian Technocracy is that you won't pay for your preferred ideological vision of the future, but environmentalist degrowth billionaires etc. *will* pay for theirs.
It would cost no more than a few billion dollars at the absolute max, from start to finish, to reform modern society into an expanding spacefaring civilization. Cheap!
Actually, if I remember correctly, Japan easily succeeded—Mitsubishi builds half the Boeing planes already—they just failed to build it to the arbitrary specifications that U.S. airlines, regulators, unions, etc. demanded, so their airplane couldn't find enough buyers.
They built eight planes and they flew. But commercial aircraft manufacturing is not exactly a free market where the best man wins.
To be honest I basically think the decisions on who gets to make the parts, who gets to take credit for the final product, and who gets to finally profit off the whole industrial manufacturing chain, are all just made arbitrarily in Washington, D.C.
By nominal GDP per capita, Japan has stagnated since the 1990s, South Korea has grown 19x over since 1980, and China has grown 65x over since 1980 (while also being thirty times the population).
While I understand the point OP is trying to make, I'm not sure what else you would call this except "the biggest growth success story worldwide of the last forty years." The growth is big. The resulting economy is big. It's a success. It happened in the last forty years.
The existence of supply chains implies the existence of demand chains. Just as interlocking series of organizations work together to produce final products at scale, series of marketing and advertising organizations can work together to produce the desire to purchase a product.
I don't mean only the marketing and advertising arms of businesses. Many if not most nonprofit and governmental organizations are also in the profession of marketing and advertising.
I should correct my original statement: not just the desire, but the capability to purchase a product at scale. Demand is often financed, of course, and financing is as discretely and institutionally analyze-able as supply.
There is no indication that birth rates are going to stabilize, let alone recover, anywhere. Only Israel and Georgia (?) look like even half-way exceptions.
Unless they drastically and rapidly change, the 21st century will be the century of unbelievable aging and depopulation.
Based on these latest fertility numbers, we can expect the drop in new people in 100 years to be the following: USA (-47%), France (-46%), Russia (-65%), Germany (-68%), Italy (-78%), Japan (-81%), China (-88%), Thailand (-89%).
Europe's problem is that the whole continent is stuck in dead-end jobs. East Asia's problem is that everyone is an overstressed workaholic. The Middle East's problem is being an unemployed region.
America is doing OK because it's the world's underworked product manager.
Latin America's problem is that it's part-time employed. Africa and India don't have a problem. They are hustling and freelancing.
Australia and Canada are spiritually part of Europe.
There are live players and functional institutions in all of these regions, some more and much more than others, but the political economy of each region is clearly selecting for one kind of relationship to employment over another.
The same principle applies when a Middle Eastern state shows off its new nuclear plant, or when America shows off its space programs.
We're used to countries showing off their nuclear and aerospace programs and the implications thereof, but showing off your 10,000-strong coordinated quadcopter dance is certainly something very, very new.