And even if they do invest and innovate, the capacity to scale up production fast is hit because there are ever fewer consumers with rising real wages to buy the new products.
More difficult, because there are ever fewer places left in this globalised world where you can go and feel utterly foreign when you get there.It has long been true in America that nobody can be foreign because everybody is foreign.
Desalination is booming worldwide, both because there are ever more people who need ever more scarce, fresh water and because desalination has been getting cheaper.
Perhaps the reason this atmosphere felt so special is because there are ever fewer spaces where different demographics are actively encouraged to co-exist.
Last night I met a successful businesswoman (my wife) who had been moved to hopeless tears of frustration by the barbaric tussle of driving a mere three miles in central London: a grim cast of purple-faced and cruelly determined black-cab drivers, psychotic rubble-trucks, crawling buses, lost souls and no respite from the Inferno because there is never, ever, anywhere to park.
A BBC cameraman who had filmed on the Dunkirk beaches told me that nothing he had shot there was ever used because it showed an army in defeat.
"They could have done a cost analysis of at least what Saddam was selling to Syria," said Hans von Sponeck, a longtime United Nations diplomat who resigned as relief aid coordinator for Iraq in 1999, "and then ask Iraq for a credit to the oil-for-food program because there was never ever money enough for the minimal needs of the people".
Along with the idea that nothing ever changes — because there's always going to be another drink — there's an underlying idea of 'let it all come down.' That the destructiveness is something that they, on a very deep level, invite in … A drinker can't change, because they they'd have to stop drinking.
I don't think it will ever stop, because there's always the next stupid pop song to make fun of".
Because if there was ever destruction in the world it was the destruction of Rwanda — where the country was empty, the banks were emptied, the Army had fled, the people had fled, all the infrastructure gone.
