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Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

economist.com

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Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#201

Post by ugh »

protagonist_h wrote: post #198
prodigal_erik wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Humanity grows exponentially, food production grows linearly" has not been debunked. People have starved in the last few decades, and we barely managed to avoid a widespread catastrophe through a big one-time upgrade to the best farming techniques known. How many other improvements are left before we reach biology's productivity limits? How long until we run low on natural gas to make fertilizer, having long since m…

Almost every case famine during last few decades had to do with some kind of local conflict (e.g. local gangs interfering with delivery of food aid) as opposed to resource shortage. Developed countries produce much more food than they need and then consume it in a very inefficient way. Growing grain and using it to feed livestock as opposed to consuming grain directly is one such example. Earth could comfortably supp…

But what if we actually want to eat meat? What if we want a TV? A refrigerator? A dishwasher? A mobile phone? A car?

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#202

Post by bzbarsky »

emanuer wrote: post #127
nhaehnle wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you might be aware Japan had a “lost decade” during the 90s. It experienced almost no growth of the GDP. There are many theories as to why, but the most convincing one is: The Japanese “Baby Boomers” retired during this decade. Richard Koo has a different view on this, one that should also inform the thinking in the US and rest of the Western world these days. According to him, the Japanese "lost decade" was cause…

Yes I am aware of this point of view. I think, the trigger for the lost decade can be attributed to the housing bubble. Yet, the almost complete stop in the GDP's growth and the complete immunity to monetary stimuli (~0% interest rate for 20 years) are impossible to explain by the bubble collapse.

~0% interest rate doesn't imply monetary stimulus. At least not when the rate gets hiked as soon as inflation goes over 0% or so, which is what the Bank of Japan has been doing.

In other words, BoJ has _explicitly_ targeted stable to falling prices in its monetary policy. That's not monetary stimulus; that's just contractionary policy. What interest rate target they use to implement that policy isn't really relevant.

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#203

Post by neutronicus »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #114
bobo888 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, considering that humans are on top of the food chain, maybe what you describe is a good thing (and we have it in our genes): Population can not grow forever on a planet with a limited amount of resorces. So people either stop having children, or begin killing each other.

malthusian arguments have been debunked. humans are wealth producing, not destroying.

> humans are wealth producing, not destroying.

Why should this statement be independent of the number of humans in the world?

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#204

Post by burgerbrain »

mortenjorck wrote: post #191
burgerbrain wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can "handle things as a team" without bringing into bring into the equation the full force of a modern judiciary system and a stone-age property rights system.

Would you co-found a company without the full force of a modern judiciary system?

I wouldn't co-found a company with someone I had an emotional attachment to.

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#205

Post by sovande »

cageface wrote: post #55
lionhearted wrote: post #44

I have a theory that I haven't found expounded before. It came from a combination of travel through 60+ countries, living and working and interacting with local people on a pretty intimate level sometimes, and study of lots of history. It's going to be controversial and maybe even shocking, so brace yourself for a moment before reacting please. I think peaceful societies self-destruct. With a few notable exceptions t…

Oswald Spengler made a similar argument in 1918: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West

> Oswald Spengler made a similar argument in 1918

Not really, his main argument was that the western society has lost control of its technology. We (the west) are like a horse carriage where the driver has been thrown of and the horses (technology) are driving the carriage (us) in a wild ride towards the cliff. [An updated version of this philosophical thinking is Bill Joy's Grey Goo article "Why the future doesn't need us." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html]

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#206

Post by jessedhillon »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #165
lionhearted wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a appealing theory, marred only by the fact that it is appears to be gibberish. Man, it's very possible to be skeptical without the asshole tone. It's a common theme in your comments, but it's really unnecessary. Anyways. It's a good point, regardless of tone. Where'd my analysis come from? I've noted that: -You see baby booms frequently after the conclusion of war, increasing fertility. -As nations age and…

I'm going to leave the ad homs to one side, though I suspect a review of your comment history would reveal a parade of unwarrantedly self-assured geek autodidacticism... hey, it's milder than 'asshole'. Here's a deal; I'll be less snarky if people like you can be less pretentious. I'm still baffled as to your evidence; apparently the Mongolians are hard bastards and like fucking, or something. What's asinine is that…

"...unwarrantedly self-assured geek autodidacticism..."

+1, this really nailed it. Not just this thread either, but the all-too-common, arrogantly presented naive analyses that we see from time-to-time on the HN comment threads.

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#207

Post by gbog »

neutronicus wrote: post #160
gbog wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your theory fit with the enormous counter example you have under the eyes? i mean, China has been peaceful for centuries, underarmed, and did not collapse, or did we learn a different history?

China fought a war with Japan from 1930-1944, concurrent with and followed by its own civil war. Not to mention its involvement in Korea and Vietnam. Not exactly centuries.

History, especially in the case of China, did not start in 1900. During Han, Tang and Ming dynasties at least, the country was not in a military struggle for survival, and while dynasties die eventually, the country survived all them (until now).

Note aside, it is funny to see that when doing some quick blind generalizations on mankind, like "countries at peace die eventually", one can almost always use China as a coutner example. I can trow a fairly lenghty list of them.

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#208

Post by felipemnoa »

lionhearted wrote: post #44

I have a theory that I haven't found expounded before. It came from a combination of travel through 60+ countries, living and working and interacting with local people on a pretty intimate level sometimes, and study of lots of history. It's going to be controversial and maybe even shocking, so brace yourself for a moment before reacting please. I think peaceful societies self-destruct. With a few notable exceptions t…

The problem is, we've reached the unique point in our history where one major war can be the end of all wars. With so many nuclear armed countries it is a really bad idea of thinking about another major war. One major war could start a chain reaction that could easily send us back to the stone age, if we even make it. So much for progress.

The thing is that all countries eventually collapse just like all things eventually collapse. Remember, stars die too. I could easily make the claim that a lot of countries destroy themselves in a time of war. The loser of a war doesn't always rises from the ashes.

A nation probably has a timespan that it can be alive. Eventually it will just die and a new one will be formed.

Finally, correlation is not causation. Just because the two seem to show up together doesn't mean that one causes the other. It is an interesting idea though.

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#209

Post by varjag »

lionhearted wrote: post #44

I have a theory that I haven't found expounded before. It came from a combination of travel through 60+ countries, living and working and interacting with local people on a pretty intimate level sometimes, and study of lots of history. It's going to be controversial and maybe even shocking, so brace yourself for a moment before reacting please. I think peaceful societies self-destruct. With a few notable exceptions t…

> I have a theory that I haven't found expounded before.

Nietzsche represented this point of view better in his 'Will to Power' back in the 19th century. In the decades since, a lot of paper was devoted to criticism of his work.

Also, one nation that actually tried to live by his principles failed spectacularly.

Re: Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

#210

Post by thomaslangston »

dctoedt wrote: post #181
bokonist wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read "The Fates of Nations" by Paul Colinvaux? It's a fascinating - and disturbing - book, covering the exact topic you are talking about. But where Colinvaux and myself would disagree with you, is the direction of the cause and effect. My interpretation is that a society starts off warlike. At some point it either conquers, or is conquered by its neighbors. Once the empire is at its natural borders, war no…

According to Robert Wright in his book Non-Zero , future generations of both the conquering bordering tribe and the conquered old civilization (at least, those who survive) will derive benefits from the resulting cross-fertilization of cultures. That, he says, drives the combined civilization further up evolution's escalator. An example that comes to mind is England after the Norman Conquest.

I would dare to hypothesize that America history of immigration and cultural cross pollination could be a framework for a somewhat peaceful means of reaching the same ends.
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