How much Tyler Cowen have you read? He has an ideology, but maybe not quite the one you think.
If wages do not increase, and demographics remain the same, social security does become a big problem. But that doesn't make him an alarmist that wants to gut social security. His typical writings prefer to avoid the problem the other ways: By either finding ways to increase wages, or through immigration.
He has also written book on the problem of how, while the last decade was great for world growth, it was very bad for the US and Europe: He calls is the great stagnation. So he is aware that more of the same could be coming. He just thinks most NYT readers do not really expect this to happen, as they think it'd be unprecedented.
The entire point of the article is not that 19th century India's problems were all that similar to the great depression, but that the US' current problems are a lot like India's, in the sense that we are facing a major supply shock as some major competitors industrialize and get better, while the country in question does not. In India, it was a country with major manpower advantage getting hit by new technology it couldn't adopt quickly. In the US' case, it's about a lot of countries that were competing mainly on cheap labor, and that now are catching up on technology, making the US' advantages disappear.
If wages do not increase, and demographics remain the same, social security does become a big problem. But that doesn't make him an alarmist that wants to gut social security. His typical writings prefer to avoid the problem the other ways: By either finding ways to increase wages, or through immigration.
He has also written book on the problem of how, while the last decade was great for world growth, it was very bad for the US and Europe: He calls is the great stagnation. So he is aware that more of the same could be coming. He just thinks most NYT readers do not really expect this to happen, as they think it'd be unprecedented.
The entire point of the article is not that 19th century India's problems were all that similar to the great depression, but that the US' current problems are a lot like India's, in the sense that we are facing a major supply shock as some major competitors industrialize and get better, while the country in question does not. In India, it was a country with major manpower advantage getting hit by new technology it couldn't adopt quickly. In the US' case, it's about a lot of countries that were competing mainly on cheap labor, and that now are catching up on technology, making the US' advantages disappear.