What Happens After The Low-Hanging Fruit Has Been Picked?

Right now China is at the top of the S-Curve, and the problems of stagnation are still ahead.

What happens after all the low-hanging fruit has been picked? We can phrase the same question using a different analogy: what happens when all the oxygen in a room has been consumed?

One way to understand why the global financial meltdown occurred in 2008 and not in 2012 is all the oxygen in the room had been consumed. In the U.S. housing market, there was nobody left to buy an overpriced house with a no-document liar loan because everyone who was qualified to buy a McMansion in the middle of nowhere had already bought three and everyone who wasn’t qualified had purchased a McMansion to flip with a liar loan.
Once the pool of credulous buyers evaporated, the dominoes fell, eventually circling the globe.
What happens after the low-hanging fruit has been picked? Here’s an analogy: erect an enormous 13-story building on a thin slab foundation that is barely adequate for a 2-story house, and tie that flimsy foundation to the earth with fragile hollow pilings. What happens? Collapse.

Analysis of the Collapse Of 13-Story Building in China

Shanghai building collapse (Telegraph, UK)

Anyone tracking the global economy has an eye on China, for obvious reasons.China has led the world’s growth for the better part of two decades, and now the growth story has entered a new phase. China is weakening its currency (renminbi/yuan), and trying to throttle its vast credit/shadow banking expansion even as Chinese officials claim China’s economy is still expanding at a phenomenal clip (7+% annually).

I think we can shed some insightful analytic light by saying that the low-hanging fruit in China has all been plucked, and this creates an entirely new set of problems and challenges.

The first thing to note about nations experiencing rapid growth is the mathematical impossibility of continued break-neck growth: when China’s economy (in purchasing power parity (PPP) or nominal dollars) GDP was $500 billion, an expansion of $50 billion equated to 10% a year.

Now that China’s PPP gross domestic product is around $13 trillion, a 10% growth rate would require an expansion of $1.3 trillion–roughly the entire GDP of Spain or Canada.

Obviously, fast growth is easy when the low-hanging fruit are abundant, and it becomes progressively more difficult to maintain as the economy expands.
This pattern of rapid growth, maturity and stagnation can be seen in the S-Curve, a pattern that natural and human-made systems alike track.