Oh no, you said his name, and like clockwork my precious upvotes have started to turn to downvotes :-)

We agree, though. Capitalism is really, really good at growth and really, really bad at steady-state. We've never really come up with a good alternative for steady-state. I think Marx got the diagnosis right and the treatment wrong, which seems like a pretty modest hypothesis given the relative difficulty of the two. Regardless, we had better figure this out or things will get messy. Very messy.

TBH I have higher hopes for a couple more industrial revolutions to push the meltdown out beyond my lifetime. Bio and space, maybe? :/

> Economics and politics haven't caught up with this yet.

That seems unlikely. Political and economic leadership throughout the "White West" has been subsidizing and expanding the non-productive underclass for decades.

And most of that happened after the US ditched the gold standard in 1971, and part of the reason for that was a budget deficit. And the other countries often had FX reserves, only fueling the overcapacity and reducing bond yields.

Japan was already a powerful manufacturing nation well before the second half of the 20th century. Dont you know the defeated Russia at the end of the 18th ?

Japan defeated Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

They definitely weren't a major manufacturing economy in the 18th century.

This was also not a prolonged war (lasted about a year and a half). Japan had to commit all its forces to the (successful) campaign. Russia was forced to surrender due to internal conflict and a stagnant economy, but had much more manpower it could have sent to turn the tides.