China’s big cities don’t have a great reputation these days: housing prices are
soaring, traffic is choking, pollution is worsening. Small cities are certainly
quieter, but this has worked against them, with fewer job opportunities to
attract new migrants. The result, as Rosealea explains in this piece, is that
China’s excess housing supply is mostly concentrated in smaller cities—a problem
that could worsen, as the future dynamics of urbanization will favor big cities
over small ones.
From GaveKal, Rosealea Yao
No surprise here, with Globalization the big companies are killing the small ones. When a prospect goes into a shop and don't know what to buy sometimes they ask, who is the leader! Low risk decision.
The costs of regulation are so high that the small businesses are being killed by bureaucracy/Goverment.
To live in a big city everything is cheap comparing to la small city or countryside. You can eat 24 hours a day, you get a plumber in a Sunday, the economies of scale are huge.You vcan go out and see smart people almost every night.
Bigger get bigger is the trend with Globalization.
What to do?
1.Live in a big lively city
2.Buy your competitor
3.Get bigger is worth more than to get better
What the BLS data tells us is that even in a rapidly automating world, we can't
automate empathy.
Last week, when the BLS reported that the U.S. economy
added 175,000 jobs in May, analysts noted that one of the
labor market's bright spots involved restaurants and bars. Waiters, cooks and
bartenders accounted for a full 16% of the month's job growth. As the Washington
Post's Neil Irwin put it, "A robot may be able to assemble a car, but a cook
still grills burgers."
I agree fully with this nice article. Automation is destroying a lot of jobs everywhere. But there is hope, all manual things will still be needed and jobs where there are human empathy are more & more on demand. Low paying jobs but they are jobs.
This wonderful graph from Gave kal says it all
Since
WWII we have been used to some growth in the world. Now things are stalling a
bit, in the Developed world first and now even some Emerging Markets are not so
hot anymore. We see riots in Turkey,
Egypt and strikes in Europe. I don’t see growth coming back soon for the
simple reason that there is excess supply in almost every business. If
factories are working at 50% of capacity why building a new factory? On top of
this every day machines are replacing some workers and doing much better what
humans do, not in every task but enough to have an impact. There are of course
some areas where there is some pricing power, today in FT as a result of demand
from Asia the prices of Fresh sea fish are skyrocketing.
What
to do in this envoirment ?
1.Find
something to do that can not be replaced by a machine (arts, manual labour,
all non repeatable tasks, the guy who programs the machines.)
2.Invest
in areas with pricing power (Brands, some commodities that are rare and you can’t
increase production, monopolies)
3.Get
away from businesses that are essentially a commodity and don’t add nothing and
have no intellectual property (easy to copy)
This is the world we are living now. Supply is bigger than demand & workers are being replaced by machines everywhere.
