The predicament that the so-called "advanced" economies now find themselves in — i.e., terminal debt strangulation — can be easily understood by two considerations.
The first is generally referred to as "Parkinson's Second Law": expenditure rises to meet income.
The second comes from asking, what happens if part of that consumption is financed by debt? Say our income doubles one year because we get a new job, and each subsequent year we finance a little extra consumption by taking out loans, rather than by simply spending the cash on goods.
Initially, this seems to work quite well, we can afford a lot more goods each year, much more than if we simply paid extra cash for them. But over time the debt rises, and it rises until we can just afford to pay the interest on it, in addition to our other involuntary expenses. At that point, further non-obligatory consumption stops.
Now let's suppose, the applicable interest rate declines by one percent. Suddenly we have a little more money available at the end of the year. Plugging that into our earlier loop, we buy some more goods using more debt finance, until we again can only just pay the interest.
This is exactly what happened in the last few years, as interest rates declined over a couple of decades right across the world, and governments responded by taking out fresh debt. I don't know how many times, in this period, that I read articles in the financial press talking about the national debt and concluding that it wasn't the absolute size of the debt that mattered, but the size of the interest payments, and making the observation that as interest rates seemed to be continuously declining, things looked OK, at least for a while
The problem is, if each new interest rate decline encourages you to take out even more debt, what happens when interest rates finally start to creep up again, as they inevitably must? In my lifetime, the UK bank rate has varied from 2% up to 17%, and is now back down at 0.5%. With interest rates so low, even a tiny increase will double or triple your payments. And if you've already allowed your repayments to rise until you can only just afford them, then you are bankrupted by the first rise.
That's where Europe is now, with rates being artificially held down by a quantitative easing that is temporarily sterilised by the deflationary environment. It won't last.
Wednesday 15 August 2012
Thursday 9 August 2012
Ged's guide to ... human cloning
I've never understood the general antipathy to human cloning. Your clone is just your twin, albeit one whose birth is separated from yours by an unusually long time. I guess there's an air of sci-fi about it, redolent with the promise of monsters and mutants, or maybe people are reacting to an unspoken feeling that the clone may be used as an organ supply for the original, that his or her person-hood may not be respected.
However that may be, I've finally worked out how we can do human cloning easily and cheaply, if not altogether ethically. Perhaps I might go a little further on that last point: the process involves ... steps ... that might be acceptable to the Chinese gerontocracy, or possibly if one were the dictator of North Korea, or one of the late, unlamented dictators in the Middle East, but are unlikely to go down well in even moderately democratic societies. Still, it's the idea that counts, and I'm fairly bursting with how clever this one is.
Note that this is not a technical how-to on getting a clone going. It still requires you to be able to produce a single human clone. What it does do is sidestep the problems currently resulting from that.
The current problem with cloning is that it is likely to produce clones with developmental abnormalities, as with the example of Dolly the sheep. However, if you can tolerate that then my method requires only two more things. First, that the abnormalities are limited to developmental ones, i.e. that they don't affect the germ line. Second, that the individual can at least reach the age of sexual maturity. [With those clues, you may now wish to guess for yourself how it works.]
Step 1. From a human male, acquire a cell suitable for whatever method of cloning you select. Remove that cell's Y chromosome.
Step 2. From the same male, acquire another such cell. Remove that cell's X chromosome and put it in the first cell.
Step 3. You now have a female version of the original male cell. [Well done! People will make very bad monster movies about you. Incidentally, now would be a good time to start choosing an island where you will spend the rest of your unnaturally long life hiding from the law.] Grow your first clone from this cell.
Step 4. Having raised your female clone to sexual maturity, breed her with the original donor. [Note, better start the whole process before the male is too old.]
Step 5. Profit! Time to buy that island and start raising a clone army / organ reservoir.
The elegance of this approach is that no matter what genetic recombination takes place as a result of sexual reproduction, the offspring will still be clones of the original, since both male and female sourced chromosomes have the same gene variants in the same places! Also, since all reproduction from now on is completely normal, developmental anomalies arising purely from the use of cloning technology should not occur. The only thing you have to worry about now is genetic drift arising from copy errors, and I would guess you have tens of generations before that becomes important.
Update
Tsk, not as clever as I thought. Because human gametes only contain one set of chromosomes, and because each chromosome is randomly selected from the maternal and paternal versions, it's not possible to guarantee that the offspring get the full complement of chromosomes from the original donor — for any given chromosome, an individual offspring might get two copies of the donor's paternal version for example, or two copies of the maternal version... The usual inbreeding rules will still apply, darnit!
However that may be, I've finally worked out how we can do human cloning easily and cheaply, if not altogether ethically. Perhaps I might go a little further on that last point: the process involves ... steps ... that might be acceptable to the Chinese gerontocracy, or possibly if one were the dictator of North Korea, or one of the late, unlamented dictators in the Middle East, but are unlikely to go down well in even moderately democratic societies. Still, it's the idea that counts, and I'm fairly bursting with how clever this one is.
Note that this is not a technical how-to on getting a clone going. It still requires you to be able to produce a single human clone. What it does do is sidestep the problems currently resulting from that.
The current problem with cloning is that it is likely to produce clones with developmental abnormalities, as with the example of Dolly the sheep. However, if you can tolerate that then my method requires only two more things. First, that the abnormalities are limited to developmental ones, i.e. that they don't affect the germ line. Second, that the individual can at least reach the age of sexual maturity. [With those clues, you may now wish to guess for yourself how it works.]
Step 1. From a human male, acquire a cell suitable for whatever method of cloning you select. Remove that cell's Y chromosome.
Step 2. From the same male, acquire another such cell. Remove that cell's X chromosome and put it in the first cell.
Step 3. You now have a female version of the original male cell. [Well done! People will make very bad monster movies about you. Incidentally, now would be a good time to start choosing an island where you will spend the rest of your unnaturally long life hiding from the law.] Grow your first clone from this cell.
Step 4. Having raised your female clone to sexual maturity, breed her with the original donor. [Note, better start the whole process before the male is too old.]
Step 5. Profit! Time to buy that island and start raising a clone army / organ reservoir.
The elegance of this approach is that no matter what genetic recombination takes place as a result of sexual reproduction, the offspring will still be clones of the original, since both male and female sourced chromosomes have the same gene variants in the same places! Also, since all reproduction from now on is completely normal, developmental anomalies arising purely from the use of cloning technology should not occur. The only thing you have to worry about now is genetic drift arising from copy errors, and I would guess you have tens of generations before that becomes important.
Update
Tsk, not as clever as I thought. Because human gametes only contain one set of chromosomes, and because each chromosome is randomly selected from the maternal and paternal versions, it's not possible to guarantee that the offspring get the full complement of chromosomes from the original donor — for any given chromosome, an individual offspring might get two copies of the donor's paternal version for example, or two copies of the maternal version... The usual inbreeding rules will still apply, darnit!
Saturday 4 August 2012
Best sentence read today
Moreover, we know of examples where natural selection has caused drastic decreases in organismal complexity – for example, canine venereal sarcoma, which today is an infectious cancer, but was once a dog.Gregory Cochran letting loose at West Hunter. One could quibble, but it's such an amusing sentence that I'm content not to.
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