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The global population pyramid

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Re: The global population pyramid

#171
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is our culture so blind as to see no distinction between moral value and economic value? This doesn't make sense on an intuitive human level, which is why people will often help out their fellow man without being motivated by profit. Similarly, a stay-at-home parent is (most often) working for the good of their children at the expense of creating economic value, and we as a society need to recognize the moral value o…

Try to pay your mortgage with moral value. Or, as my grandfather was known to say: wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first. No, the virulent strain of capitalism that has gripped the western world over the last century does not value anything but currency. Full stop.

Some of these comments from today might help brighten your worldview. Human beings do feel love and and act on it, regardless of how virulent your perception of capitalism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19727156

Re: The global population pyramid

#172
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being raised almost exclusively by one parent, and having the other confine themselves to cutting checks. If that's how you see the environment that a stay-at-home parent produces, with a full-time employed parent functioning only as a vending machine, then how could two working parents be an improvement?

Two part time working parents, BOTH engaged with domestic tasks.

That would be a good alternative if an unlikely series of conditions were met, e.g. availability of sufficiently-paying part-time jobs, sufficient wage similarity to not make the lower-earning partner's work a relative waste, affordability of insurance, etc.

Re: The global population pyramid

#173

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction…

Immigration is the obvious solution to this problem. (not claiming its the best, mind you)

If the fertility rate is around 1.7, then the country should accept around 20% of their population in immigration over a generation to achieve a stable number. Assuming a generation is ~30 years, that's around 60 million new immigrants in the US.

Assuming the immigrants are from underdeveloped nations, it will lead to changes to entire demographics of nations over 2 generations or so.

Re: The global population pyramid

#174
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone living in a city that has over the last 20 years had a massive increase in population I believe the previous poster is referencing less competition for limited resources. In day to day life this could be less traffic jams or less competition to use shared resources such as parks or even just lower property prices.

Understood but lower population could also mean less people trading and that would impact quality of life quite badly. Steve Jobs living in a world of 10,000 would have been living in abject poverty no matter how good his entrepreneurial skills. A larger population can do more things, and with trading increase quality of life in important ways (medicine, technology, arts) that may be better off than ghost towns with…

I think it depends a on where you live. If you are living in a smaller city/town then you can benefit from the advantages that you mention without the externalities that I talk about.

Re: The global population pyramid

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home".…

If it comes to it, we will have no problem adopting a Brave New World style procreation strategy. Creating humans out of other human's blood/cells/dna/etc is either already here or imminent. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/babies-from-bone-marrow

Creating babies is the least of our problems. It is what happens to them between baby-adult is the part that keeps them from being produced at the desirable rate.

Re: The global population pyramid

#176

It seems to me that the segment of the population that is most affected by societal/political policies are the young to middle age adults who are raising kids, establishing their careers, building wealth, etc. My understanding is that in the past, due to shorter life expectancies, this was also the generation that was generally in the majority; so each generation got a fair shot at making sure society served their ne…

People seem to like asking for and getting things but slamming the door behind them. Can't have it both ways, although which default is better is an open question.
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