First I want every one to know that I am not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just trying to figure out how to make realistic projections about what the next 20 + years are going to bring from a financial and living standard stand point.
I just got through re-reading "Culture Matters". The nut shell message in the book is that economic out come is for all practical matters predicated by culture. If you have a culture of thrift, self sufficiency, honesty, hard work, reciprocity, trust, etc. The out come will be positive with general high quality out comes and incomes. ( Western Europe, North America,Australia.)
The converse is true if those things are lacking then no matter how many natural resources or other geographically positive attributes are available the out come will always be a very small minority of politically powerful people controlling almost all of the wealth and the average person living very poorly and in fear of their government. ( Most of Asia, Africa, South and Central America.)
We have been amazingly successful in the US over the last 40 years or so in implementing multiculturalism so that our culture is now much closer to a mixture of 1/4 African,1/4 Asian 1/4 South and Central American and 1/4 What I will call old American culture. I'm not making judgment, right/wrong/ good/ bad, I'm just observing and trying to fit the data to reality.
Now the 64 thousand dollar question is.. Is there any way to integrate the data from other parts of the world with firecalc. For instance is it some how possible to go back 30-40 years and figure the outcome if you had 1/4 of you money in Mexico, 1/4 in Mozambique, 1/4 in the China and 1/4th in the US. My theory is that would give much more realistic out comes than data based on a cultural base that does not exist.
I just got through re-reading "Culture Matters". The nut shell message in the book is that economic out come is for all practical matters predicated by culture. If you have a culture of thrift, self sufficiency, honesty, hard work, reciprocity, trust, etc. The out come will be positive with general high quality out comes and incomes. ( Western Europe, North America,Australia.)
The converse is true if those things are lacking then no matter how many natural resources or other geographically positive attributes are available the out come will always be a very small minority of politically powerful people controlling almost all of the wealth and the average person living very poorly and in fear of their government. ( Most of Asia, Africa, South and Central America.)
We have been amazingly successful in the US over the last 40 years or so in implementing multiculturalism so that our culture is now much closer to a mixture of 1/4 African,1/4 Asian 1/4 South and Central American and 1/4 What I will call old American culture. I'm not making judgment, right/wrong/ good/ bad, I'm just observing and trying to fit the data to reality.
Now the 64 thousand dollar question is.. Is there any way to integrate the data from other parts of the world with firecalc. For instance is it some how possible to go back 30-40 years and figure the outcome if you had 1/4 of you money in Mexico, 1/4 in Mozambique, 1/4 in the China and 1/4th in the US. My theory is that would give much more realistic out comes than data based on a cultural base that does not exist.