EconAir

  INTRODUCTION   Japan gets special consideration because it is further along the demographics declining population curve than any other large country. Unless there are major changes in healthcare technology, immigration, public policy, and birth rates, all other industrialized countries will follow Japan down the path of declining and aging populations, and smaller labor forces.    PROJECTIONS   Japan’s current (2024) population is around 122 million people. This is the 15 th  year of population decline, down from a high of 128 million. The yearly decreases so far have been small, both in numbers and as a percent of the total. This is expected to continue until 2030. Then population decreases are expected to accelerate to a population of 104 million in 2050 and 87 million in 2070. At the end of the century, Japan’s population is projected to be 60-65 million people, about half its current size.   The high dependency ratio (the number of elderly divide...

Adam Smith - Our Founding Father ADAM SMITH VISITS A PIN FACTORY   Adam Smith’s description of a pin factory is on the first page of  The Wealth of Nations .  (Chapter 1 – “Of the Division of Labour”)  Drawings of pin factories of this period show workers using hand tools. Smith says the process can be broken down into 18 distinct steps, including packaging the pins. Smith mentions that pin factory workers were poorly paid, despite their high productivity.    Adam Smith says he visited a pin factory employing 10 men who produced 48,000 pins per day.  If each of the ten workers had done all the steps themselves, Smith says each worker could produce only 10 or 20 pins per day.  So the pin factory replaces 2,400 to 4,800 pin makers. The increase in labor productivity (output per person per day) is as high as 50 times that of individual pin makers.     This reduction in unit cost or average cost (AC) and the huge i...

Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Andrea investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course on "New Jersey's Explosives History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick in the fall, 2024. For details, see the fall catalog at  olliru.rutgers.edu . The course is described on page 31.   1914:  World War I Breaks Out   Russia started to modernize its army in 1913, with substantial French financial and weapons support. The beginning of a five-year plan, one of the main goals was to expand artillery to catch up with Germany. But war broke out.    After the first four months of the war, all combatants realized they were in for a long war with deadly modern weapons. Every country’s strategy of a quick victory through offensive warfare failed. Germany did not defeat France and England in the west, and the Russian offensive against Germany in the east ended in disaster. The result was four years of tre...

Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Andrea investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course on "New Jersey's Explosive History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick. For details, see the fall catalog at olliru.rutgers.edu . The course is described on page 31.   Hiram Maxim and his machine gun Hiram and Hudson Maxim:  Inventors of the Machine Gun and Developers of Smokeless Powder   New Jersey's eccentrically brilliant brothers, Hudson Maxim (1853-1927) and his cantankerous, womanizing older brother Hiram Stevens Maxim (1840-1916)  were both born into a poor, rural Maine family. Hudson claimed receiving his first shoes when he was sixteen. He rarely attended school and was self-taught. Astonishingly, Hudson Maxim's earliest claim to fame was as the author of a popular "teach yourself" book on penmanship. He also possessed a breathtakingly large ego, once bragging that he could write an ar...