Quite interesting. Gladwell interprets the woes of the American manufacturing economy and the Irish boom in terms of dependency ratios--the number of dependents taking from a system in the form of lost work hours, welfare-state benefits, etc. (and for sure, for sure, I recognize the absurdity of saying that people raising kids are "taking" from a system or that health care shouldn't count as value-for-money. Our economic measures are all wrong [and efforts to do something that actually measures improvements in people's lives, like David Cameron's gross national happiness or whatever the hell they're calling it, are so airy and quixotic as to birth tiny conspiracy theorettes in my mind about setting up straw men and pulling the discourse back into some David Ricardo hellscape. This should all be apparent; I just mean to summarize the article). Simple math, really--not enough people paying in vs. taking out means fallapart. Too many people coming in vs. moving out means big growth followed by big indigestion as outlined in the previous sentence. Strong economic growth happens in a sweet spot where everybody's working and their kids and olds aren't dragging 'em down--but the future depends on kidz and being able to look ourselves in the eye depends on taking care of the elderly. What it means for companies like GM is they suffer not for doing things wrong but right--staying in business long enough to pay retirement benefits to workers from the '50s; developing more advanced processes requiring fewer workers (and that question of structural employment and what people could be doing instead of failing to get a job at GM and going to Walmart, and how much art and fun we could have if we split jobs and did with less, and all, are again things Gladwell doesn't even give a shout out to. He's some kind of neoliberal, is he? I guess I should read his book at some point so I know what the deal is)--are the things that force them to pay many healths with few $$$--and so companies fold. On an international level, there are questions of immigration (Ireland is the test case here because of ways in which the recent growth is purported to depend on the end of oldtimey Catholic family nonplanning; one wonders if the even-more-recent crisis can be related to the dependency argument in productive ways)--apparently if you just slap Africa up on Europe, ignoring all feasibility and cultural problems, the demographic difficulties of both continents vanish--and as Gladwell notes, the dependency argument is a good balance to the shit that gets shopped around about differences in African and Asian growth rates over the last 50 years being down to Confucianism, or whatever. New Yorker. ( )