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

251–260 of 409 posts

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

#251

Post by bombcar »

chrisco255 wrote: post #124
jmclnx wrote: post #15

This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact. Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping. The much larger worry should be Climate Change , a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run…

The history of the world and economics is far more nuanced than rich people hoarding wealth. Wealth is the economy, it's created from systems. The feudal system in the medieval age was relatively poor at generating wealth. A series of technological and intellectual developments began to rapidly increase in the 1400s that culminated in the modern era, including especially the printing press. But in the 1300s serfdom w…

Financialization can also make it appear wealth has increased when really nothing has happened.

If all property is “owned” by the crown and people only have various “rights” to it that can be inherited but never encumbered or sold, then there’s really no point in “valuing” the land beyond simple comparisons.

Once land can be bought and sold value appears to track it; but the land was always there.

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

#252

Post by bombcar »

nradov wrote: post #250
bombcar wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often meditate on this - can even the concept of index fund retirement survive an actual depopulation scenario? Of course, older forms of retirement can still work (have ten kids each of who have ten kids and you command an army in retirement; perhaps they’ll even call you King) - but aside from that where does the growth come from when not from population or immigration?

Index funds will survive anything short of a complete collapse of the financial system. Even if returns are low, they only have to be better than the alternatives (on a risk adjusted basis).

Sure - but being better than the stock-alternatives in a fifty year bear market is cold comfort; and many retirement plans are built on assumed real returns that may never be seen again.

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

#253

Post by cindyllm »

anonym29 wrote: post #248
pfannkuchen wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. I do have similar impedance mismatches with the social consensus in a lot of areas. In everyday life I basically do what you are suggesting, but internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close. I do sometimes wonder whether mass education and extensive media exposure from childhood have essentially brainwashed all bu…

No offense, but I'm not particularly interested in helping wargame propaganda strategies for either side of culture war debates. I'm not particularly interested in seeing culture zealots succeed at dehumanizing people, regardless of alignment. Edit: I understand you see the topic of discussion as an abstract strategic question. I don't, and I'm not particularly interested in embracing that framing. We seem to have di…

[dead]

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

#254

Post by bombcar »

anonym29 wrote: post #231
bombcar wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it matters in how you define quality of life, for one. Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two. I think space and other pressures may have their place as causes, but are mostly downstream from whatever the root issues are.

>Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two. Do you have anecdata on this? I grew up with a single sibling, and we had to share a room as young children due to economic circumstances, but we were both very excited to get our own rooms when our parents bought a larger house. I have no kids of my own and don't plan on having any, but I'm fascin…

My experiences is that below the age of six, they ALL want to cluster together. Above six it starts to sex-segregate naturally, and around teen years the desire for their own space soars.

But even then they often want congregation, but the ability to retreat. I sometimes think the perfect “large family” house would be tons of tiny bedrooms but lots of common areas. Almost college dorm-like.

Another anectdata - I’ve never met a family with same-sex twins where the twins did NOT live in the same room, even when there was ample space to not do so. I presume the triplet case is even stronger.

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

#255

Post by cosmic_cheese »

cyberax wrote: post #214
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transportation can be a challenge, but I don’t agree that a car is a requirement. When I’m in Japan it’s common to see parents carting around a kid or two on an appropriately kitted out bike for example. That wouldn’t be as practical in a sprawling suburb, but it can work in denser cities. > Suburbs are really nice for kids, basically zero car traffic, you can play in the street, easily go to parks. And when the pare…

> When I’m in Japan it’s common to see parents carting around a kid or two on an appropriately kitted out bike for example. Yes, and now look at their fertility rates.

I’m not saying that Japan has it all figured out, just that cities can be built to allow many families to thrive without a car. Japan has their own set of issues w.r.t birthrate, but it’s partially a different set than those seen in the US.

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

#256

Post by Animats »

rangestransform wrote: post #101
robots0only wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B). Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (…

IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics

They did? Amazon has recently been showing their Vulkan picking robot, and Aaron Parness still seems to be at Amazon.

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

#257

Post by WalterBright »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #225
WalterBright wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who owns it bought it from person who created it. The person who bought it then manages it, maintains it, organizes it, advertises it, pays taxes on it, etc. And there's nothing wrong with that. If rentable places were not allowed to be sold, very very few would exist. This is because people specialize - some build rentals, some manage them. Both are productive enterprises. You can become a landlord if you…

>The person who owns it bought it from person who created it. The land was not created, it existed long before humans. It was taken by force and the strong began extracting rent from the weak.

I'll check out of diverting this into a 10,000 year old grievance.

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

#258

Post by pfannkuchen »

anonym29 wrote: post #248
pfannkuchen wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. I do have similar impedance mismatches with the social consensus in a lot of areas. In everyday life I basically do what you are suggesting, but internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close. I do sometimes wonder whether mass education and extensive media exposure from childhood have essentially brainwashed all bu…

No offense, but I'm not particularly interested in helping wargame propaganda strategies for either side of culture war debates. I'm not particularly interested in seeing culture zealots succeed at dehumanizing people, regardless of alignment. Edit: I understand you see the topic of discussion as an abstract strategic question. I don't, and I'm not particularly interested in embracing that framing. We seem to have di…

Well I don’t think any influential people from any political jostling group are reading all comments on hacker news, so I doubt we are helping to war game anything.

Your second paragraph seems like ad hominem? Or are you suggesting that homosexuality emerges from lived experience, and therefore I should relate? I am confused.

I don’t really have a dog in the gay fight. The longstanding cultural view in the west going back a very long time was that it is a choice. Some political people today retain that view. The modern view is that it isn’t a choice. Some political people today hold that view. I just look at the sides in a detached game theoretic way and it just seems like the red team has a move they haven’t played.

Is that bad? I do understand not wanting to go there mentally, since it is definitely hard to hold views apart from most of society, even if the view is “things are less clear than what everyone thinks they are”. I think humans generally seem to have some preprocessing that drops view candidates that would put them in that position.

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

#259

Post by WalterBright »

thisisthenewme wrote: post #238
WalterBright wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth? No > Is it infinite? Yes > Are there any limits to its creation? Government trying to crush it. > Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"? The only value it has is what someone else is freely willing to pay for it. There is no such thing as "inherent" value.

I find the belief that government is the only limit to wealth creation very intriguing. I also find it interesting that the talking points usually contrast "free markets", which I assume represents the best case, with just "government". Markets can be limited or impacted by forces outside of government (price fixing, monopolies, manipulation). Is there an equivalent best-case scenario for "governments" that we can us…

Nobody has discovered any limit to wealth creation, but governments have been very successful with putting a stop to it.

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

#260

Post by idiotsecant »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #151
stego-tech wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a…

Disclaimer: my thought process tends to be somewhat autistic, I don’t mean any offense. As a non gay man I am just curious to hear your perspective. From a strictly biological perspective, I think it could be argued that gay “sex” isn’t actually sex. Like, what makes it sex? Is it sex for pleasure? Or is it something adjacent to sex? That has some commonalities with sex, but isn’t actually sex. Like there is a part o…

I assure you, your thoughts on this are not unique or something hardly anyone thinks about, they're just not well reasoned. People have sex for a lot of reasons, and having children is, proportionally, almost never the primary driver. Sex is not the act of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm. If it was, we would call IVR 'sex', which obviously nobody does.
Post reply on HN