Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

sas.upenn.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 409 posts

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#161

Post by WalterBright »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #155
WalterBright wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves. Historically that's never been a requirement for people to make children. Poor people have tended to be pretty prolific. > hoarding more and more of the wealth In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".

> In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated". The free market hasn't figured out how to create more land. Especially arable land.

It has figured out how to make better use of the land.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#162

Post by worik »

lurk2 wrote: post #21
Arainach wrote: post #7

The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.

> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves. National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.

> the average number of years a woman spends being educated;

Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#163

Post by WalterBright »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #152
WalterBright wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fact, not a theory. The wealth in the economy did not exist 100 years ago. Therefore it must have been created. And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?

Come on. Sometimes wealth gets created. Sometimes wealth just gets moved around. That is a fact. Musk's wealth is mostly notional. Most of it is based on people's guesses about the future of electric cars and so forth. It's not clear yet whether that is creation or transfer or what.

Musk's wealth was transferred from nobody. It was created.

When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments.

That's why I prefaced it with "free market".

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#164

Post by WalterBright »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #153
WalterBright wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fact, not a theory. The wealth in the economy did not exist 100 years ago. Therefore it must have been created. And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?

Some wealth is created. People build new things and sell them. Video Games or Programming Languages for example. Some wealth is just transferred, like rent or interest. It would be nice if everybody had somewhere to live for free, unfortunately, most people have to pay rent or interest on a mortgage to those that came before them.

> Some wealth is just transferred, like rent or interest.

Both of those are an exchange, not a transfer. Taxation is a transfer.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#165

Post by WalterBright »

cowpig wrote: post #158
WalterBright wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves. Historically that's never been a requirement for people to make children. Poor people have tended to be pretty prolific. > hoarding more and more of the wealth In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".

How do you define "free market"?

Transactions based on free negotiations, not force or fraud.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#166

Post by worik »

WalterBright wrote: post #129
Arainach wrote: post #7

The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.

> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves. Historically that's never been a requirement for people to make children. Poor people have tended to be pretty prolific. > hoarding more and more of the wealth In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".

> In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated"

That is incorrect

In a free market wealth has a definite tendency to clump together, to concentrate.

A moment's thought will make clear why.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#167

Post by oh_my_goodness »

WalterBright wrote: post #163
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. Sometimes wealth gets created. Sometimes wealth just gets moved around. That is a fact. Musk's wealth is mostly notional. Most of it is based on people's guesses about the future of electric cars and so forth. It's not clear yet whether that is creation or transfer or what.

Musk's wealth was transferred from nobody. It was created. When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments. That's why I prefaced it with "free market".

Maybe a startup can have a high valuation for a while and ultimately be worth nothing. Maybe that has happened.

Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke.

Maybe both.

Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its legal owner as having created it. Maybe they created it. Maybe they stole it. Maybe we all wigged out and handed it to them voluntarily. It's case by case.

We all read Ayn Rand back in the day. And I can groove with that at a certain dosage, but you're taking way too much.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#168

Post by agalunar »

stego-tech wrote: post #86

Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de... Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers an…

I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.

This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.

So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#169

Post by WalterBright »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #156
WalterBright wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fact, not a theory. The wealth in the economy did not exist 100 years ago. Therefore it must have been created. And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?

If I cut down trees to build a house, then I may have created "wealth" but I've also destroyed trees. Now the net affect may be that wealth has increased, but it may also have an effect which actually destroys wealth like for instance if those trees existed on a hill, and the roots were holding the soil in place, the act of cutting down "Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value. It only cares…

> "Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value.

Oh, but it does. It turns out that people who own land take care of it, so that it keeps producing. People who own timber land tend to manage it so it continues to be productive.

Destruction happens with government owned land.

For a related example, why are we not running out of cattle, hogs, and chickens, despite slaughtering them on an epic scale? And why are we running out of fish?

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#170

Post by worik »

WalterBright wrote: post #147
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".' That's a theory from economists. Economists have a lot of theories.

It's a fact, not a theory. The wealth in the economy did not exist 100 years ago. Therefore it must have been created. And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?

> And where did Musk's money come from?

No body (?) is contending that in a free market wealth is not created.

The contention is that when wealth is created it tends to head to other wealth.

When a bank lends capital and has a choice of lending to, say, Elon Musk or me, I think the bank will make that rational choice and lend to Elon. Thus once you have some wealth attracting more wealth is less difficult than from before you had wealth

This pattern is repeated over a d over.

See Captain Grimes' boot theory of economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Post reply on HN