Asia

Taro Moberly and the Moral Geography of Seeing

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:51:46 -0500

Kyoto is one of the most photographed cities in the world, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood. Most images of it feel decorative; tourist postcards masquerading as art, emptied of the quiet pulse that makes the city human. Taro Moberly’s Kyoto Dreaming breaks from that tradition. His work restores to the city its weight, its patience, its moral texture. His camera listens. Each frame insists that to see a place well is not an act of aesthetic consumption but of citizenship: an effort to attend, to notice, to dwell.

Moberly introduces his book not with self-assertion but with gratitude. Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, he grew up in California with Kyoto present in memory and story but distant in experience. He writes of visiting as a child - the grandeur and vastness of Kyoto Station, the floorboards of Nijo Castle, the toy-train shop on the top floor of Daimaru. In 2015 he moved there, returning to the place his mother was raised and his grandparents had called home. The move was not simply geographic; it was formative. “I discovered so much about the unique and fascinating culture of my adopted homeland,” he writes. “Kyoto has changed how I see the world and helped me become the person I am today.” When he returned to California in 2023, he carried the city inside him. “Within myself,” he concludes, “I still see Kyoto as a major part of my identity.” The book is less a record of that period than a testament to what the city taught him: that meaning and belonging are earned through attention.

The opening photographs tell the story. Two figures sit on the steps of a temple, dwarfed by the roof’s massive eaves. They are enveloped in silence. The composition honors scale without losing intimacy; we are made to feel the proportion between person and place. Moberly’s power lies in this restraint. His images are not declarations but invitations; to linger, to feel the density of the ordinary. In a time when nearly every image demands to be consumed instantly, his work asks us to slow down. His palette is subdued, his tones favoring twilight and rain. The light is not dramatic but devotional. Kyoto, in his hands, becomes less an object than a conversation: between architecture and weather, between time and memory, between the photographer and the city that made him.

To walk through the book is to sense the rhythm of a life lived attentively. We move from courtyards and alleys to the quiet ritual of commuting; umbrellas passing under red lights, taxis idling on wet streets, a parent guiding a child along a stone path lined with cherry blossoms. The repetition of these scenes accumulates into a moral vision. Moberly does not aestheticize civility; he observes it. His Kyoto is not the idealized city of postcards but the functioning city of mutual awareness, where strangers share space without spectacle. In this sense, his art offers something civic. The sociologist Richard Sennett described cities in his The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities essentially as theaters of encounter, sustained by the way strangers learn to look at one another. Moberly’s photographs record that encounter in real time. Every image reveals the choreography of coexistence: the small courtesies that hold urban life together. Pedestrians pause, cars yield, umbrellas tilt just enough to avoid collision. It is a social order built on perception.

The book’s stillness is deliberate. In an age of acceleration, stillness itself becomes a statement. Moberly resists the compulsion to dramatize. His camera does not chase decisive moments; it waits for coherence to reveal itself. This patience is a moral stance. It rebukes the attention economy that governs both photography and public life. Where the digital image thrives on speed and self-display, Moberly’s work restores scale and humility. The figures he captures are not subjects to be possessed but neighbors to be regarded. The act of seeing becomes relational, not extractive. The city, through his lens, is an organism of shared restraint.

Light is his great ally. In Moberly’s Kyoto, illumination functions like character: by turns tender, elusive, and instructive. Dawn glows faintly on tiled roofs; dusk turns wet streets into mirrors; neon reflections shimmer across taxi windows. He refuses the oversaturated brightness of commercial travel photography. His colors breathe within limits, his blues deepening toward memory rather than spectacle. In that restraint lies reverence. He allows light to emerge as revelation; to arrive, as grace does, without force. The viewer can feel the hours spent waiting for the right balance between luminosity and shadow, as if patience itself were a kind of prayer.

The formal discipline of the images echoes the discipline of the city. Kyoto’s architecture has long embodied order without rigidity - geometry in the service of grace - and Moberly composes with the same ethos. Lines of roofs and alleyways guide the eye gently; depth is earned through perspective, not manipulation. One image of wooden facades glistening after rain captures the principle perfectly: symmetry balanced by warmth, precision softened by use. He understands that restraint is not absence but articulation, that beauty often arises when ambition gives way to attention. In his visual grammar, order is not a constraint but a form of respect.

What makes Kyoto Dreaming resonate, though, is its humanity. The photographs breathe with companionship: a couple in conversation, a worker in the rain, a child discovering spring. The scenes are neither anonymous nor sentimental. They affirm continuity in an age obsessed with rupture. The red jacket of a child beneath pale blossoms becomes a symbol of renewal, the small assertion of color in a world rendered gray by haste. Moberly’s empathy is architectural, he gives his subjects room to exist within the frame. The result is intimacy without intrusion. He treats each life as belonging to the larger composition of the city, an act of recognition that carries its own civic weight.

As the book unfolds, its emotional key deepens from observation to gratitude. The late-night cityscapes - headlights diffused in rain, reflections stretching across wet crosswalks - feel like meditations on endurance. Kyoto, far from a timeless relic, appears here as a living organism: mortal, changing, resilient. Moberly captures that fragility with affection rather than melancholy. His attention dignifies transience. He shows how the fleeting can still feel eternal when looked at with care. That sensibility, inherited from the city’s own traditions, becomes the moral spine of the book: to see clearly is to care; to care is to remain human.

Moberly’s return to California closes the narrative but not the connection. “The city, the culture, and the people of Kyoto have left a profound impact,” he writes. “I will be forever grateful for the lessons and character taught to me by what now feels like my second home.” Gratitude is a rare word in contemporary art, but it fits him. He has made gratitude into a method, an aesthetic and a moral discipline. His photographs do not demand recognition; they offer it. In a culture addicted to novelty, this is a radical act. He reminds us that reverence is not nostalgia. It is attention sustained across time.

What emerges from Kyoto Dreaming is a philosophy of looking that transcends place. Moberly demonstrates that belonging begins with perception - that the ethics of seeing and the ethics of citizenship are inseparable. Cities depend on this kind of vision: on people who notice, who yield, who understand that public life survives through small acts of regard. His photographs are, in that sense, civic instruction. They teach us how to inhabit our own streets: how to look again at the surfaces we hurry past, how to find coherence in the weather of daily life.

The book could easily have been another exercise in aestheticized travel, but Moberly refuses that path. His work carries no slogans, no filters of irony or self-display. It asks us instead to practice the ancient discipline of looking until we actually see. In doing so, he joins a lineage that stretches from Saul Leiter’s New York to Masahisa Fukase’s Japan: photographers who understood that light, patience, and moral attention are ways of honoring the world.

In the end, Kyoto Dreaming is less a photobook than a form of civic meditation. It restores the bond between perception and gratitude. It reminds us that beauty is not found in the exceptional but in the continuous; in streets walked daily, rituals repeated, faces glimpsed in passing. The health of any culture depends on its ability to see in this way. When we lose that capacity, we lose not only art but sympathy, not only beauty but belonging.

Taro Moberly’s achievement is to make seeing itself feel like an act of care. Through his lens, Kyoto becomes more than a city; it becomes a teacher. It reveals how civilization survives: not through grand gestures or perfect design, but through the quiet labor of attention - one person, one street, one beam of light at a time.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Kyoto Dreaming book cover, via Taro Moberly's Instagram.

China's Scramble for Africa

Joel Kotkin and Bheki Mahlobo — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The West is about to get its comeuppance – if it does not wake up. The balance of the world economy is shifting decisively to what was once seen as the Third World, a shift led by China and, to a lesser extent, India. It is a dynamic that China hopes to exploit in order to replace America as the new global rule-maker. One region in particular is at the centre of China’s economic and geopolitical plans: Africa.

The rise of Africa, which now has 11 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing economies, is only just beginning. And China’s strategy is clearly focussed on harvesting Africa’s growing wealth, while sidelining the US and the diminished former European powers. In 2023, the EU’s then foreign-affairs and security-policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned that, ‘Little by little, we are losing Africa’.

Africa’s importance begins with its unparalleled resource endowments, particularly in critical minerals. These are used to power everything from fighter jets to smartphones. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone controls over 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt reserves – a critical mineral used in electric-vehicle batteries and jet engines. South Africa boasts over 80 per cent of global platinum and 70 per cent of the world’s chromium, minerals without which we couldn’t make jewellery, car exhausts or most industrial applications.

These strategic materials provide the foundation for modern technological civilisation, and China has systematically secured preferential access through long-term partnerships that exclude American and other Western competitors. Beyond critical minerals, the continent also has substantial deposits of oil, natural gas, diamonds and gold. Nigeria and Angola are among the top 20 oil-producing nations, while Mozambique’s liquefied-natural-gas reserves promise to reshape global energy markets. China has invested heavily in all three countries. In recent years, it has also upped its investment in oil-rich Libya, a major producer once aligned with Europe.

African agriculture is also strategically important. With 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, Africa represents the world’s last major frontier for agricultural expansion. Perennially facing ‘food-security concerns’, China has recognised this potential, and is investing heavily in African agricultural infrastructure and securing long-term food-supply agreements. This will reduce China’s dependence on American agricultural exports while positioning itself as Africa’s primary food-security partner.

Most importantly, Africa is producing the one critical asset that the world economy needs most: people. While China’s population is projected to decline, falling to 1940s levels by 2100, Africa’s population is heading in the opposite direction. It is projected to double to 2.5 billion by 2050, with the median age remaining below 25 throughout this period. Critically, Africa is predicted to be home to 25 per cent of all working-age adults by 2050.

Given Africa’s vast resources, agricultural potential and population growth, one would think Western capitalists and their governments might be seeking to invest in Africa. But instead, the African economy has acquired a distinctly Chinese cast, with little competition from the West. Beijing’s approach to Africa represents the most comprehensive foreign-engagement strategy on the continent since European colonialism.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Bheki Mahlobo is an economist at Cronje Private Clients. He specialises in economic and financial markets research as well as political trend analysis.

Photo: President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Xi Jinping Co-Chair the China - Africa Leaders Round Table; GovernmentZA, via Flickr, CC 4.0 License.

Global Tally Of Alt-Energy Rejections Passes 1,000

Robert Bryce — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The rejections keep coming. Since the beginning of May, a provincial government in Queensland has rejected an enormous wind project, a county board in Illinois spiked a solar project, and a district council in East Devon vetoed a battery project.

Let’s take those in order.

Last week, a $1 billion wind project in central Queensland was rejected by provincial authorities. The 450-megawatt project, which included battery storage, faced fierce opposition from local residents. According to one news report, 142 residents responded to the government’s request for comments, and 88% opposed the project.

One of the project opponents was a grazier (the Aussie’s word for rancher) named John Ellrott. He told a reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that “the Moonlight Range has got some very significant flora and fauna on it that needs conserving and doesn't need to be flattened...We don't need all our ranges covered in wind towers.” The rejection of the wind project adds more friction to the Australian government’s barmy plan to achieve net zero by 2050. (More on that below.)

Solar projects continue to see fierce opposition. In mid-May, county officials in Will County, Illinois, voted 16-5 to reject plans for a solar facility in New Lenox Township that was opposed by the township and nearby homeowners. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, “More than 80 residents of the nearby Fieldstone Subdivision signed a petition stating the commercial solar energy facility would negatively impact their property values.”

Battery projects are also being rejected. In mid-May, the BBC reported that planners with the East Devon District Council rejected a lithium-ion battery storage project “after a three-and-a-half hour debate which saw residents raise concerns about fire risks and pollution. Despite the developer stating its equipment was 100% safe, examples of BESS [battery energy storage system] fires around the country were highlighted as evidence about why the scheme should be refused.”

As I have explained many times, these rejections don’t fit the narrative that’s relentlessly promoted by climate activists and their myriad allies in the legacy media about “green” energy. But the numbers are real, the numbers are growing, and they provide irrefutable evidence that land-use conflicts are the binding constraint on the growth of alt-energy. In all, when combining the 814 rejections of wind and solar projects in the US that I have documented in the Renewable Rejection Database with the global rejections of solar, wind, and batteries, the total number of alt-energy rejections or restrictions now exceeds 1,000 — it’s 1,011 to be exact.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: Queensland cattle rancher John Ellrott has refused to lease his property to Big Wind. Credit: ABC News & Ellie Willcox.

India Is Asia's Leading Deep Tech Nation

Nima Sanandaji — Sun, 18 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Currently India features in the news due to conflict with neighboring Pakistan. In a time when international trade is shifting, with new trade and tariff deals, India is also a key trading partner for North America as well as Europe. One reason is that while China is the leading manufacturing hub of Asia, India is the main deep tech nation.

The Deep Tech Index, conducted annually by the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR) with the support of Nordic Capital, maps and evaluates the global deep tech landscape.

The USA has a very significant, and slowly reducing, deep tech lead. There are also three additional nations which hold a significant share of global deep tech, namely the UK, Canada and India.

Strikingly, all four countries which each hold a significant share of global deep tech companies have an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, as the four are made up of the UK and its major colonies.

A number of other nations in the world also host world-leading deep tech companies. Examples are Germany, Switzerland, China, and Sweden. However, these nations individually have just one or a couple of percent of the world´s 500 leading deep tech companies.

China very likely will rise in the deep tech competition, but while some of the most advanced manufacturing in the world is carried out cost effectively in the country, deep tech progress is still something that China is behind India.

There are five urban regions in India with multiple world-leading deep tech companies. New Delhi and Mumbai are alongside Singapore the leading deep tech centers of all Asia. Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad are other important centers for world leading deep tech development.

Artificial intelligence development is focused to New Delhi and Mumbai. World leading clean energy companies exist in New Delhi, Bengaluru as well as Mumbai. Clean tech, such as recycling, is another important technology area, of which Hyderabad and Jaipur are important global centers. New Delhi also hosts deep tech development of biotechnology.

Photonic and electronic is another strength of India, with Bengaluru, New Delhi and Mumbai all being important global centers in this area. Bengaluru as well as New Delhi excel in robotic & communication deep tech. Pharmaceutical deep tech is centered at Mumbai, while fintech is focused to Chennai. New Delhi, Mumbai as well as Ahmedabad host world leading companies in space & advanced materials. India has a cost-effective space industry.

Currently India hosts 5 percent of the world´s leading 500 deep tech companies. The country is also home to 5 of the world´s top 100 universities in engineering & technology, according to the QS World University Ranking. All five of the top Indian schools in technology are Indian Institute of Technology centers, namely in Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur and Kanpur.

India's real strength is that essentially all the world´s leading technology institutes – be it in Stockholm, Santa Barbara, Cambridge or Sydney – are full of students and researchers from India. Similarly, Europe as well as the USA have many Indian talents in technology areas. European decision makers are eager to sharpen their competitive edge compared to the USA, when it comes to attracting top talents from India.

In a way, talents are India's most important export. The universities and tech companies in Europe and North America are full of talented individuals from India. India itself has long had trade relations with the West, with some Indian companies over time becoming global technology leaders. This country with growing population does need numerous policy reforms, such as strengthening private property rights and raising education levels to compete with places such as China, Singapore and South Korea which excel in the PISA school tests.

During coming years India can, if the nation avoids war and conflict, improve these policies and perhaps also open up for more trade with Europe. India's already impressive deep tech strengths are likely to continue growing over time.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: Tech workers in Delhi, by ILO Asia-Pacific, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Demographia International Housing Affordability – 2025 Edition Released

Wendell Cox — Tue, 13 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This annual report assesses housing affordability in 95 major markets across eight nations (Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom and the, United States). The 2025 edition covers the third quarter of 2024.

Key Points

Ratings: The report uses a median price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) to determine affordability.

Affordability Categories: Housing markets are rated from “affordable” to “impossibly unaffordable” based on their median multiple (Table ES-1).

Geography: Housing markets are labor markets (which are also metropolitan areas or functional urban areas), largely defined by the “commuting shed.” Housing affordability comparisons can be made, (1) between housing markets (such as a comparison between Adelaide and Melbourne) or (2) over time within the same housing market (such as between years in Adelaide).

Variations within Nations: The report emphasizes that affordability often varies significantly between markets within the same country. National averages aren’t always representative.

Housing affordability in 2024 is summarized by nation in Table ES-2.

Details on housing affordability for all 95 markets, displayed by median multiple, are provided in Table 3 and by geography in Table 4 of the full report.

For the fifth year in a row, Pittsburgh (PA), in the United States, was the most affordable market in Demographia International Housing Affordability. This year the Pittsburgh median multiple was 3.2, which is moderately unaffordable.

The least affordable market in Demographia International Housing Affordability in 2024 was Hong Kong, with a median multiple of 14.4, followed by Sydney at 13.8, San Jose, at 12.1, Vancouver at 11.8, Los Angeles at 11.2, Adelaide at 10.9, Honolulu at 10.8, San Francisco at 10.0, Melbourne at 9.7, San Diego and 9.5, Brisbane at 9.3 and Greater London at 9.1. All of these markets are rated impossibly unaffordable.

Existential Threat to Middle-Income Households

Among high-income nations, middle-income homeownership was once widespread, with house prices aligned with incomes. Since the 1990s, however, prices have surged —especially in
markets governed by urban containment strategies early (e.g., San Francisco, Sydney, London)— with homes now costing 9–15 times household income.

This shift is linked to the international planning orthodoxy, which restricts urban expansion through greenbelts, urban growth boundaries (UGBs), rural zoning, and compact city policies. While intended to increase density and sustainability, these policies have severely limited land supply, raising land and housing costs and making housing unaffordable for the middle class.

Nearly all severely unaffordable housing markets follow the urban containment model. The resulting land scarcity inflates prices, particularly near UGBs. This pattern, rooted in the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, has spread virtually around the world.

Purpose of Urban Planning: Urban planning is meant to improve lives. As Jane Jacobs said: “If planning helps people, they ought to be better off as a result, not worse off.” Yet urban containment has made many people worse off, by virtue of its association with substantially worsened housing affordability.

Current planning approaches emphasize multifamily housing and other densification while restricting new detached homes at the fringe—strategies that helped create today’s crisis.

Counterurbanization: Middle-income households are increasingly leaving expensive markets for more affordable places—a trend especially visible in Canada and the U.S. These moves reflect long-term structural problems. People are “voting with their feet,” to obtain the housing denied them in markets with deteriorated housing affordability. Without major reform, this migration seems likely to continue.

Elaboration and sources are in the full report. Click here to read and download the full report.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Image and charts are from the report. Charts by the author; cover image for the report from the GPA Archive, Carol M. Highsmith collection and used under CC 2.0 License.

Will We See the End of Children?

Aaron M. Renn — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 20:28:38 -0400

What I’ve been reading: Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work by Andrew Lynn.

For those of you in the Indianapolis area, I want to highlight a great upcoming event. Farah Stockman, author of the great book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, will be in town speaking about her book on March 19th at 6pm at the Carmel Clay Public Library. (Registration required).

Stockman’s book is about the lives of workers in a bearing plant in Indianapolis that closed and moved to Mexico. I hosted her for a discussion about it on my podcast last year.

The New Yorker has a long and fantastic piece on falling fertility rates in its new issue. There’s a particular focus on South Korea.

Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon. Albania, El Salvador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, are now below replacement levels. Iran’s fertility rate is half of what it was thirty years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s demographic winter” are commonplace. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has said that her country is “destined to disappear.” One Japanese economist runs a conceptual clock that counts down to his country’s final child: the current readout is January 5, 2720....

It will take a few years before we can be sure, but it’s possible that 2023 saw the world as a whole slump beneath the replacement threshold for the first time. There are a couple of places where fertility remains higher—Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—but even there the rates are generally diminishing. Paranoia has ensued....

Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature.”...

South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren….Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary….Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn....

The after-school program was about to start. It featured two options: 3-D printing and something Lee called “a new sport.” She could give me no details on the new sport, which was played on Tuesdays. In the past, they had offered volleyball, badminton, and soccer, but such extravagances required a critical mass. She let me wander the school, which felt like a museum of childhood artifacts: an unlit but well-stocked gymnasium, a darkened cafeteria outfitted with a little proscenium stage, enormous forsaken playgrounds, ballfields gone wild. The only apparent concession to the demographic reality was a robotic apparatus for playing Ping-Pong by yourself....

Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, “They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.” The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ”…The reporter said, “When I write about this, I think, Well, what would change my mind? The answer is nothing. It’s the norm not to want kids.” Like many Koreans, she dotes on her dog. Finding gifts in Seoul for my two little soccer fanatics at home required deliberate planning—I schlepped all over town looking for national-team jerseys in child’s sizes and had to settle for black-market knockoffs—but there is a pet depot on practically every block. Last year, strollers for dogs outsold those for babies. She said, “I’m not saying people value dogs more than they value children.” She paused to gesture to the other patrons: “But all you have to do is look around.”...

Koreans cite the pressures and costs of excessive education as a large part of their reluctance to have children. (American parents in liberal enclaves might share a version of these misgivings.) An auspicious Korean childhood culminates in acceptance to one of Seoul’s three most prestigious universities. Admission is primarily based on a student’s performance on the national collegiate entrance exam, or Suneung, which is administered every year on a Thursday in November. The opening of the stock market is delayed that day, and many construction sites are closed. Bus and metro services are increased to ease traffic congestion. Students running late may avail themselves of a police-motorcycle escort. During the English-comprehension section, which requires absolute silence, air-traffic control suspends all takeoffs and landings.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Picryl, in Public Domain.

China Runs the Table

Robert Bryce — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 19:28:38 -0500

On Monday, the Biden administration issued new restrictions on the export of key semiconductor equipment and software to China. On Tuesday, China retaliated by banning the export to the US of three strategic elements — antimony, gallium, and germanium — that have multiple military and civilian uses. It is also restricted the export of graphite to the US.

The two countries are now locked in a trade war over key technologies and the strategic commodities used to fabricate everything from batteries to missile guidance systems. As two analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Security put it, “critical mineral security is now intrinsically linked to the escalating trade war.” The latest salvo in the trade war provides yet another reminder that the US has, for too long, ignored its strategic vulnerability to Chinese supply chains. If China is willing to cut off the flows of antimony, gallium, germanium, and graphite to the US, it could also ban, or reduce, the exports of other strategic metals, minerals, and magnets, and, in doing so, inflict significant damage to American industry and US security.

Three decades ago, the Chinese ruler Deng Xiaoping said, “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths. We must take full advantage of this resource.” Today, China has an effective monopoly on all of the rare earth elements and in particular, two heavy rare earths: dysprosium and terbium. It has also taken a mercantilist approach to a slew of strategic elements in the Periodic Table, including nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, and tellurium. In addition, it has a near-monopoly on the production of neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which are used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and numerous consumer and military applications.

If you skipped chemistry class in high school, antimony (Sb) is one of many strategic elements in the Periodic Table, and China produces more of it than any other country. Antimony is used in lead-acid batteries to improve the strength and castability of the battery’s grids. Antimony is also critical in multiple military applications, including bullets, missiles, nuclear weapons, and night-vision goggles. On Friday, I talked to an executive at a major US manufacturer of automotive and industrial lead-acid batteries. (He asked me not to use his or his company’s name.) He said his company had secured supplies of antimony through mid-2025, but after that, “we don’t know.” He said Trump’s threat of tariffs on all Chinese goods and the looming shortage of antimony are giving him “a lot of sleepless nights.”

The executive said that prices for antimony have more than tripled over the past few weeks to $17 per pound. He said the US has taken antimony — which is considered a critical mineral by the Interior Department, along with rare earths, cobalt, and uranium — for granted for too long. The last major antimony mine in the US, the Stibnite Gold Mine in Idaho, was closed in the 1990s. Today, the US imports 100% of the antimony it needs from overseas suppliers, and China accounts for about half of that supply. Now that it has control over antimony and other key elements, the executive told me, China is “putting the screws to us.”

Can the US get unscrewed from China’s stranglehold on strategic metals and magnets? Let’s take a look.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: China has dominant positions in the global markets for numerous strategic elements, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, gallium, germanium, tellurium, antimony, and the rare earth elements.

Our Incredible Shrinking Planet

Nicholas Eberstadt — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 19:28:38 -0500

If the 20th century was an era obsessed with the fear of a global population explosion – a time when governments, experts, and journalists fretted that population growth powered by high birth rates would soon outstrip the planet’s finite resources – the 21st century promises to be the opposite, a time when fears focus on the world’s population growing older and smaller.

As experts begin studying the coming implosion, the tendency thus far has been to emphasize the negative. We read about falling government tax revenues, less productivity and innovation, strained finances, depopulated militaries, and small families struggling to care for more numerous and longer-living older relatives. But that is only one part of the possible future. As we start preparing for the coming changes – and prepare we must – some humility is in order, for two reasons. First, many of the demographic prognoses that dominated headlines in the last century proved wrong. And second, if there is one constant running through all of history, it is that humans are remarkably ingenious and adaptable. There are thus good reasons to believe that we will avoid disaster this time too – that a shrinking world may prove just as manageable as a growing one did.

Older and fewer

Low birth rates are the sole reason we are heading toward global depopulation. Humanity’s life expectancy at birth has never been higher; in 2023, according to the U.N. Population Division (UNPD), the average lifespan worldwide was 73 years.

The UNPD also estimates that more than 70% of humanity now lives in countries with below-replacement fertility rates – that is, childbearing patterns insufficient to assure long-term population stability in the absence of compensatory migration. On every continent but Africa, fertility levels have fallen below the replacement level, generally benchmarked at 2.1 births per woman during her lifetime. And birth rates are continuing to decline almost everywhere.

The UNPD anticipates that the global population will peak in the year 2084 – at least, that is its current “medium variant” projection. Under this scenario, close to 40% of the people currently alive – a little over 3 billion people – will live to see that momentous demographic turning point. By the UNPD’s “low variant” projection, on the other hand, human numbers will top out in the year 2053 – roughly a generation from now. If that version of the future comes to pass, more than 6 billion people alive today, or almost three-quarters of our current population, will still be around when the planet begins its depopulation.

But the world’s population could start shrinking even sooner than that. Childbearing rates are currently plunging to levels that demographers would not have deemed possible just a few years ago. In the Indian city of Kolkata, for example, the fertility rate has reportedly fallen to one birth per woman – less than half the replacement rate. Bogota, Colombia, is now down to 0.9 births per woman. Last year, South Korea hit a fertility rate of just 0.72 births per woman – barely a third of the level necessary to maintain its population. We don’t know how far such extremely low birth rates will spread, or how low fertility can go. But since recent developments have already taken us into a demographic reality almost no one would have imagined even a decade ago, it would seem incautious to assert that no further surprises lie ahead.

Read the rest of this piece at The Bush Center.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he researches and writes extensively on demographics and economic development generally, and more specifically on international security in the Korean peninsula and Asia. Domestically, he focuses on poverty and social well-being. Dr. Eberstadt is also a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR).

Photo: Riba, a medical robot that is intended to assist nurses with patient care. Ars Electronica via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Middling Kingdom

Wang Feng — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 20:28:08 -0400

In July, on the 35th anniversary of World Population Day, the United Nations released a new report that reduced the world’s peak population prediction by 100 million – from 10.4 billion to 10.3 billion – and predicted that the Earth will reach that peak in 2084, two years earlier than previously thought. This is not the first time the U.N. has adjusted its forecast downward. In 2019, the organization projected a peak world population close to 11 billion, with growth extending into the 2100s.

A significant reason for the downsizing is China, which was not long ago the world’s most populous country. Two years ago, when China first reported that its population was beginning to decline, the U.N. projected that the country’s population could shrink by 45% by the year 2100, from today’s 1.4 billion to 771 million. Now the U.N. has cut its prediction for 2100 to 633 million. That difference of 138 million people is almost the size of Russia’s current population (144 million) and is larger than the current population of Japan (125 million).

The reduction can be attributed to the U.N.’s assumptions about the rate at which women in China are having children. For more than three decades now, China’s fertility rate has been below the replacement level of about two children per woman. When Beijing lifted its one-child policy in 2016, in place since 1980, the government hoped that fertility levels would rebound; instead, they have continued to decline. The government’s new pronatalist policy, which includes calling for couples to have three children, has had no discernable effect on birth rates. Instead, the fertility level has dipped to an ultralow rate of barely one child per woman. As a consequence, China now faces the daunting challenges that come with rapid population aging, such as a smaller young labor force and a growing elderly population. At the moment, about 15% of the Chinese population is 65 and older. That’s three times the size it was in 1990. In the next 25 years, this share is expected to double to 30%.

Hard choices

A smaller and older population will weigh on Chinese leaders as the challenges associated with such demographic shifts become increasingly pressing. How Beijing addresses these challenges will have far-reaching global geopolitical implications.

As Chinese health care and pension expenses rise alongside a rapidly swelling elderly population, the country’s leaders will have to make hard decisions – decisions they have mostly talked about in the past but avoided implementing. One example is China’s long delay in raising its official retirement ages (currently 60 for men and 55 for women), which were set half a century ago. As its population continues to age, the Chinese government will have no choice but to resort to raising taxes, curtailing benefits, or both. Leaders will also have to choose between funding pensions and medical expenses or increasing military and security spending. Over the past decade, spending on the former has increased faster.

These are hard constraints and hard choices. Failing to address them will threaten social stability and the government’s political legitimacy. When the government enforced a one-child policy, it implicitly promised to help with elderly support when the time came. That time has now arrived.

Read the rest of this piece at The Bush Center.

A Guggenheim Fellow 2024, Wang Feng is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert on global demographic change. He is also the author of China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath.

Photo: Yichang via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Climatism or Energy Humanism?

Robert Bryce — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 16:00:45 -0400

On Saturday, I gave a 10-minute TED-style talk on energy humanism to about 300 high school students. The talk was part of an all-day event at the John Cooper School in The Woodlands called the Summit for Emerging American Leaders. The event was arranged by US Rep. Dan Crenshaw, the Republican and former Navy SEAL who represents Texas House District 2. The caption for my talk is the same as the headline above. In April, I gave a similar presentation to about 50 students at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

In both lectures, I explained that today’s students are inundated with messaging about catastrophic climate change and claims that we have to quit using hydrocarbons. My aim in the presentations was simple: to remind them that regardless of what they think about climate change, energy poverty is rampant and that the real challenge we face isn’t to use less energy. Instead, it’s to make energy more affordable and more abundant so that we can continue adapting to the weather (whatever it is) and help ensure that more people all over the world — particularly women and girls — can enjoy higher living standards.

I began with the photo above. As I explained in my latest book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, Rehena is a resident of Majlishpukur, a tiny agricultural settlement located southeast of Kolkata. When I met her, she was 44 years old. A soft-spoken, elegant woman, she had her first child, a girl, when she was 16. Two other children, a boy and a girl, came shortly afterward. My friend, Joyashree Roy, a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, explained in Bengali that we wanted to discuss electricity. Rehena replied that her modest home had been connected to the electric grid 14 years earlier. In A Question of Power, I wrote:

She immediately began talking about the difference that electricity had made to her children and their schoolwork. Thanks to electricity, her children were able to read books, practice their writing, and manage their school work at night. That had had a clear and positive result: one of her daughters was attending college in Kolkata, a fact of which Rehena was clearly proud. After we’d talked for a while longer, I asked Rehena: “If you had lived in a house that had electricity when you were growing up, would you have gone to university, too?” A brief smile flashed across her face and without a nanosecond of hesitation, she nodded her head to the right, in the way typical of many residents of West Bengal, and said, “Yes. I would have.” There was no remorse. No bragging. No what-could-have-beens in her reply. Only a direct, matter-of-fact response that was almost as if I’d asked her if the sun was going to come up in the east the next morning.

In the book, I continued:

That 15-minute conversation that I had with Rehena and Joyashree made me see the light: Darkness kills human potential. Electricity nourishes it. It is particularly nourishing for women and girls.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: by author.