Maturity and other such restrictions

Demitrius took a break from his thoughts on haggis to give an excellent little tutorial in on the state of the UK economy as soupçon.   His thoughts reflected the folks over at the Automatic Earth and I think add some nice thoughts on a rather frightening article.

We here in the US have been passing into a mature economy for quite some time.  The mature of an economy is somewhat akin to the maturity of a person:  they both stem from the inexorable narrowing of options and the attendant learning to live within those limitations.

Here in the US, the narrowing of options came in the guise of globalization,  where the industries that rebuilt the world post WWII moved away from us, closer to the consumers (we are after all only five percent of the worlds population) and away from our outsized expectations of rewards.  Oh granted, having drilled and pumped our oil reserves to sell to the world might have had something to do with it, but it is a nasty little family secret that no one appears to wish bandied about in polite company.

Where the US took off into its maturity in the 1980's in much the same way that a forty-something approaches it, as a decline from a peak, the UK kind of took a different route.  The Empire was well in the past, living on as a polite little commonwealth with the unspoken truth being that it really didn't mean that much.  When the US started to spin thing overseas and playing with fire in the form of financial chicanery, London was like an old geezer who had just been told about Viagra.  The folks in The City took no time at all in converting the meager savings and dignity of a senior to the financial equivalent of a toupee and a red corvette.

I think that both countries were more than a little tasteless in how they handled their newfound limitations.  However, I think that Britain will probably have a much harder time of it that us Yanks.

They have my sympathy.