News of the Future

In case you missed it, Samsung just followed Apple in declaring a big and unexpected revenue shortfall. And the cause seems to be the same: Chinese consumers have stopped buying smartphones. They have apparently also stopped buying cars.

It might be just that the market has reached saturation point. But that seems an unlikely explanation, for a drop so sudden and so big. Put this together with the swift and severe crackdown on dissent reported by YouTube vloggers, and China’s current sabre rattling abroad, and I conclude that China is facing serious trouble economically. I suspect that, lacking transparency, there is a lot of smoke and many mirrors in China’s economy. And things could collapse quickly.

In other news, several respectable forecasters have reported recently that 25% of colleges and universities in the US will be gone within the next ten years. Some say 50%. Moody’s says 25% of private colleges are now running in the red. Traditional tertiary education is about to go the same way as the press. First, there are now better and cheaper alternatives online. Second, they have lost their comprehension of their original mission, and have become self-perpetuating parasitical cliques.

You’d think that, faced with tightening budgets, the colleges would do the obvious, and start cutting out administrative jobs, which do not relate to their core mission or the quality of what they are doing. But this is the reverse of what they have been doing: in recent years, more and more of their budgets have been going on administration, and where they have cut is on actual teaching, by using more adjuncts and hiring fewer permanent faculty.