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The Fertility Implosion

nytimes.com

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Re: The Fertility Implosion

#41

Post by jarek »

ebiester wrote: post #39
jarek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already see the reaction to acqui-hires. The sick should love having their services sunsetted.

Ah, but direct to consumer isn't necessarily the right play in this market. HIPPA is still a major pain, and the sick (and families of the sick) tend to have less cash. (Though, they have a lot of points where their lives could be made better by software. The low hanging fruit has been done in the app store, of course.) Further, if you go B2B, the aqui-hire might be more interesting if you have multiple hospital grou…

Or you may be acquired by a bigco and your product killed to eliminate nascent competition. Frankly, I'm not convinced the usual VC-funded startup ecosystem is a great match for healthcare. If you think consumers might be afraid of companies going out of business, you should see how some of a) large businesses that make all decisions for five years at a time or b) small practices that still use Access and macros from 2001 because they work feel about the situation.

Re: The Fertility Implosion

#42

Post by chii »

kiba wrote: post #3
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #2

I've always believed in "Quality of Life", over "Quantity of Life". And reading stories like these gives me hope for the planet. I'm not sure we can handle 10 billion people living off of it simultaneously. Just look at all the problems we've got with only 7 billion and the upcoming food and resource shortages. Smaller populations living great full lives is so much better than massive populations living terribly. Eco…

10 billion human beings is nothing, especially when you consider that we absorb more energy from the sun in one hour than do humanity use in one year. Resource isn't much of a problem either if you consider nuclear energy and asteroid mining. Currently we either don't exploit it due to the political environment, or can't exploit it due to technological limits. I would argue that the food storage and resource storage…

The day we obsorb all incoming energy from the sun for solely our own use, is the day we destroy all other life on earth...

Re: The Fertility Implosion

#43

Post by ekianjo »

DanBC wrote: post #16
ekianjo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the beginning of the century (20th, that is), people were already afraid of a world with 2 or 3 billion people. They predicted mass resource shortage, wars and so on. But overall we could cope, and population has been increasing steadily ever since, and we have never had so few cases of starvation as in modern times. Most people on Earth live now better than their ancestors. There is a huge amount of progress in q…

> and we have never had so few cases of starvation as in modern times. Hunger kills more people than Malaria, HIV / AIDS and tuberculosis combined. About 925 million people are hungry (that's very roughly 1 in 7 people). Undernutrition kills 5 million children under the age of 5 each year. ( http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats )

Yeah, while we should check the numbers, I am pretty sure there were far more poor and starving people 100 years ago, not in total number of course, but in proportion of the actual world population. When is the last time you heard about starvation in China, for example ?

Re: The Fertility Implosion

#44

Post by chii »

majmun wrote: post #17

This is non issue, if needed, nation state can produce arbitrary number of children.

a nation state that can coerce its populace into having an arbitrary number of children is not one where those children would like to grow up in...

Re: The Fertility Implosion

#45

Post by majmun »

chii wrote: post #44
majmun wrote: post #17

This is non issue, if needed, nation state can produce arbitrary number of children.

a nation state that can coerce its populace into having an arbitrary number of children is not one where those children would like to grow up in...

...and nation state with 90% old people is? BTW im just claiming this is not issue. if need arises for fixing this there are known solutions (it is very easy to reproduce). I dont understand this hype and urgency about aging of europe. Every once and then this headlines appears for some reason.

Re: The Fertility Implosion

#46

Post by simplefish »

chii wrote: post #40
simplefish wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't think we are conquering global inequality. I think it's getting worse." I'm sure you think that, but the numbers are clear, and not really under any dispute. Global inequality has been falling steadily and rapidly since 1980; it's the biggest reduction in absolute poverty the world has ever seen. You can interpret those numbers however you like, but those are the numbers. "And the environment might not recov…

Some believe that equality means that the gap between the rich and poor is lessened, and if that was your frame of mind, then it does seem like global inequality has risen. However, absolute poverty is decreasing just as you said, and i think that ought to be the real measure. Who cares if the richest of the rich is 100million times better off than the poorest, if the poorest is better off already?

This stuff is actually not as hard as you seem to be making it. We don't need all these "some believe" or "seem like" qualifirs.

First, what do we mean by "global inequality"? Well, let's break that down. We're talking about a metric measuring income dispersion, which is, yes, a measure of the gap between rich and poor. A common metric is the Gini Coefficient[1]. And instead of looking at the coefficient of a single country, if we look at the entire population, we get a metric of global inequality. Not hard, right?

Second, what have metrics of global inequality been doing since 1980? Why, they've been falling[2]!

So, yes, the "gap between the rich and poor [has] lessened". I have no idea why you or anyone else might think that it seems otherwise. Find an op-ed or column about the global economy from anytime in the past decade, and you've got a good chance of it either talking about how real incomes in the West (ie, the global 1%) are stagnating, or how real wages in China (ie, the global 99%) are booming. There's really no way this could happen and not result in a significant reduction in the gap between the rich and poor. And indeed, that's exactly what's resulted. (And to tie it back to a perennial HN favourite, the mechanism by which this has happened - an unprecedented reduction in global inequality and a massive reduction in absolute poverty - is exemplified by Apple and Foxconn.)

(You're also right that we could have a reduction in absolute poverty even as global inequality increased. But that's now what is happening.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

[2]: I'm resisting supplying citations because a quick Google search will turn up, literally, pages of results. Still, if you want one image, this one[3] isn't bad.

[3]: http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/cf_images/200...

Re: The Fertility Implosion

#47

Post by specialist »

derleth wrote: post #20
specialist wrote: post #8

Please prefix the pundit neocon's name to these types of submissions. Linking to David "Bobos" Brooks is the political equivalent of linking to goatse. Not to pass judgement, but if Brooks ever manages to tap out anything less than utterly wrong and contemptible, I'm quite certain someone else said it first, only better.

I don't know about the rest of the people here, but I'd be interested in hearing why you think Brooks is so contemptible.

Unrepentant war monger.

If you really want to get worked up, watch one of his tete a tetes with Mark Shields on PBS (if they're still doing that). I'm surprised Brooks has the brain power to breathe.

Anyway. Is it really too much to ask submitters to prefix their links with the celebrity neocons name?

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