Energy and polity

Following up comments kindly added to my piece, The Dolorous Stroke, I have aired the following and wonder if it has any merit:

I have a half-formed theory that coalitions/unifications have a destabilising effect. If, as with Germany and its customs unions in the 19th C, the result is greater efficiency, energy is released and the system attempts to expand, with the results we saw in the 20th C; if, instead, the system becomes less efficient, as with some giant commercial company mergers, the result is decay and contraction as inefficiencies fail to be addressed in a timely manner. I think the EU is / will be an example of the latter.

Massive inequality

I've said more than once that the housing market is segmented geographically and by price bracket, so discussion of house price movements in aggregate is not very helpful.

The same can be said of the savings rate, and here Andrew Kaplan plays with figures to show that US income is so unequally distributed that the top 1% could theoretically account for all the savings in the US. It is getting dangerous, I feel - I sense (I hear) among many ordinary people an inchoate rage against the financial elite, as well as against the remote political class that services them.

This concentration of wealth and power is exactly what sparked the American revolt of the 1770s. But a colonial secessionary war is quite different from a civil war; making peace after the latter is much harder. "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne."