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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What overpopulation crisis? Current UN projections have population peaking not to much higher than now. China's population is expected to peak in 2026 then start shrinking. Most of Europe is facing a depopulation crisis.
How is depopulation a crisis?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What overpopulation crisis? Current UN projections have population peaking not to much higher than now. China's population is expected to peak in 2026 then start shrinking. Most of Europe is facing a depopulation crisis.
How is depopulation a crisis?
Most of our social institutions rely on having an increasing or at least stable population. We need young people to support retirees, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What overpopulation crisis? Current UN projections have population peaking not to much higher than now. China's population is expected to peak in 2026 then start shrinking. Most of Europe is facing a depopulation crisis.
How is depopulation a crisis?
The broader answer is that it upends economic expectations. Say I'm thinking of building an office tower. If I know there will be fewer workers in 10 years, instead of more, I'm less likely to build it. If I'm pricing stock in a company, and I know there will be fewer customers in 10 years, instead of more, then I'm going to value that stock lower. What happens to the value of Facebook stock if we realize that there will be fewer and fewer teenagers as time goes on? The economy of the present is hugely dependent on expectations about the future.
Finally, though I don't think any European country is in danger of facing this yet, you need a certain critical mass of people to build a truly world-class city with world class arts, culture, etc. Cities smaller than about a million people don't have the consumer base or the tax base to really offer world class amenities. Now, this is admittedly a matter of aesthetics, but if you look at a place like Detroit, which went from 1.8 million to less than half that, you can see that the city is not just a smaller version of itself, but something lesser entirely.
And it's not just because of Detroit's poverty. Nobody wants to invest in a city that's shrinking. Contrast Detroit to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is one of the poorest major cities in the country, but it's population very slowly inched up during the 2000's. And while it's not the site of a high-end construction boom like say Toronto, it's a flourishing city. People are opening up new restaurants, new shops, etc, and reshaping downtown to be a much more livable place than it was just ten years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What overpopulation crisis? Current UN projections have population peaking not to much higher than now. China's population is expected to peak in 2026 then start shrinking. Most of Europe is facing a depopulation crisis.
How is depopulation a crisis?
* the % of people capable of highly intellectual work is quite low * as time goes on, more fields of activity require those people * you need a growing population to provide that supply
They cited Russia as an example (population has been declining since the collapse of the USSR) - basically, to have e.g. a competitive aerospace industry in the 21st century, Russian population would have to increase by about 25%.
This is just one example.
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> Drifting into a state of perpetual war? Isn't the current period the most peaceful in known history? Let's look at the evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_military_confli... The only reason we aren't aware of the number of military conflicts taking place is because they aren't on the evening news. And yes, by any objective measure, this is a more warlike time than any in prior history, simply bec…
That's not actually evidence related to the assertion at hand. For that, you'd need a historical comparison, which that list does not provide. You may be right about absolute numbers, but absolute numbers are pointless here. From what I've seen before, in terms of the relative number of people killed in war compared to the overall population, this is the most peaceful time known. If 2x as many people get killed in wa…
Male energy is in crisis. In the modern world boys aren't allowed to be boys to make sure they will become men grown tame. Boys are grown by women—and these days also men who have adopted the women's way of growing kids. We think that male energy is aggressive and offensive, and it must be suppressed and tainted, while simultaneously we have lost our icons of what real manhood entails. We don't have rites of manhood…
Male energy is in crisis. In the modern world boys aren't allowed to be boys to make sure they will become men grown tame. Boys are grown by women—and these days also men who have adopted the women's way of growing kids. We think that male energy is aggressive and offensive, and it must be suppressed and tainted, while simultaneously we have lost our icons of what real manhood entails. We don't have rites of manhood…
This reasoning seems a bit specious.