451–460 of 881 posts
My wife’s theory is that there will be a lot of babies born in about 6 months (9 months after the quarantine started), but only for first time parents. Being quarantined with a child is the absolute best birth control.
For this a childless couple has to live together. Not separately in one person household, not with parents, not sharing the place with flatmates.
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In a society that wishes to support people who are not producing value, the people who are producing value will need to overproduce. Whether you measure the overage in units of lifetime granaries, or running annual surpluses, is primarily an accounting choice. As a practical matter, it's impossible for one farmer to save up enough food to span their entire retirement. Storage is an expense, and food goes bad eventual…
Yeah but we have money that can be stored and anyone that is old and have reserves of money will be treated and get food etc. Society doesn’t reward you based on the value you produce but based on how much fictional currency you have. This could be entirely granted to you for example in a a lottery and you never produced anything of value.
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Isn't Atlanta a major metropolitan city? I would assume that many of the same opportunities present in LA or NY wold be available there. I live in Portland, OR and there are tons of 20 year olds here and we are a very very tiny city.
Portland is very very tiny? It has 600k people. That's larger than Atlanta.
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Isn't Atlanta a major metropolitan city? I would assume that many of the same opportunities present in LA or NY wold be available there. I live in Portland, OR and there are tons of 20 year olds here and we are a very very tiny city.
Portland is very very tiny? It has 600k people. That's larger than Atlanta.
It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times as many people as we do now if we all just sacrifice Y. When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity…
The problem with the economic line of thinking is: Why do peasants in Africa have more children than Lawyers in New York? Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco? Poor people in general have more kids than rich people. It doesn't fit the data.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/about-bill-gates/a-conversation-w...
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Why does it seem like a win?
The planet is of finite size, so unlimited growth was clearly never an option. The question is, what is the best population size, and how do we get to that level?
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I'm not sure having children so you won't be lonely in old age is a good thing.
It also assumes a good relationship with your children which may not always be the case. Or that your children live (relatively) close to you.
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A big part of that problem is that most nations have a pension system where the active work force pays for the pension of the elder instead of each person paying their own pension by saving/investing troughout their lives.
But then our lifespans are getting longer and longer so we might be able/doomed to work forever and not need that pension.
It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times as many people as we do now if we all just sacrifice Y. When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity…
This is the point I was about to make, but you've put it better than me. As the traditional factory job disappears more and more, the aging population will provide a huge source of new caring/support jobs. We'll have to find a way to pay them a living wage, but then we had that problem with factory jobs in the early industrial revolution too.
The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once.
A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors.
But those productive sectors need to exist! In a world where many people are doing such low-productivity jobs, everyone will be much poorer.
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Isn't Atlanta a major metropolitan city? I would assume that many of the same opportunities present in LA or NY wold be available there. I live in Portland, OR and there are tons of 20 year olds here and we are a very very tiny city.
Portland is very very tiny? It has 600k people. That's larger than Atlanta.