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Studying the demise of historic civilisations

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Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#151
post #63
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Make each generation start from scratch And how do you prevent people from giving gifts? Parents giving their children a gift of money? And trusts are a thing, so gift tax would not help as much as you would think.

I'd find it much more acceptable if you gave your children your wealth during your lifetime. At least you have to actually give up something rather than passing on all your economic power after you no longer have use for it

Then people transfer their wealth just before they die?

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#152
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be anti your family while being pro 10, 100, or even 10,000 other families, depending on the wealth amassed. That sounds incredibly pro-civilization and pro-society.

Forbidding people from passing on wealth (or anything else) to their children seems inhumane - and wealthy people are still people with emotions and feelings. Personally, I would sooner accept 90% tax to the rich&living, than 100% tax upon death. Both are theoretical of course - there is no way to enforce them really without hurting overall society. There is also no need I think. A better solution is to make sure tha…

I could even see a tax system where you get the choice: pipe your money through the income tax function or leave it in the "tax free now, taxed to oblivion upon death" account, your choice. The "tax free now" account can be used for expenses that would otherwise be deductible, paperwork avoided.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#153
post #64
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar. For…

The comparison of the Roman Empire and the Chinese civilization is very flawed. First of all, Rome did not unite neighboring groups in Italy as a culture, never mind Europe. The lands and tribes they conquered simply used Latin for trade and as a lingua franca. It never became the mother tongue for any of those people. In China, for thousands of years, you have people from every province celebrating many of the same…

> The lands and tribes they conquered simply used Latin for trade and as a lingua franca. It never became the mother tongue for any of those people.

And yet, there are 800 million native speakers of Romance languages ("the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries") in the world [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages. Throughout history poor people were happy because they believed they were born to that life so they didn't have the stress or jealousy of believing life was unfair to them. If you read any old philosophy book it's all lessons…

>Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness. Such a speculative statement. You cannot predict the behavior of a group of people anymore than you can predict a stock. I would say a more realistic statement to your topic is: People can be happy with what they have and be unhappy with what they have and throughout…

It is not a new phenomenon.

When I said "relatively new" I meant "in the past 300 years or so". When I said "any old philosophy book" I meant "one written 1500 years ago". I didn't make my frame of reference clear; that was obviously a mistake on my part. Saying things like "new" on a tech forum has a very different meaning compared to "new" in terms of history and philosophy. 300 years ago people were born in to a strata of society and couldn't work their way out even if they wanted to. Social mobility in the middle ages didn't exist (with a few notable exceptions like demonstrating valour in warfare.)

More recently (in the past 50 years) there have been some quite extensive studies of happiness, and envy is almost always found to be a confounding factor. Why that is seems to be the case is an interesting evolutionary question - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0161...

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#155
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that the bulk of the worlds population doesn't live in the Anglosphere, or Europe. E.g. if you're from the Middle East, or Africa then you might know a thing or two about revolution, if not war itself. Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan an…

Thats the thing though, generations didn't serve in Afghanistan or Iraq. Even if you counted the some ~3 million service members engaged in those wars over their duration of the ~70 million Americans between 25 and 45 as all being in that age group thats 4% of those generations participating in the wars.

[deleted]

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#156
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd find it much more acceptable if you gave your children your wealth during your lifetime. At least you have to actually give up something rather than passing on all your economic power after you no longer have use for it

Then people transfer their wealth just before they die?

While there are ways to make sure that the wealth transfer happens "just before they die" (rather than them living on after giving it away), the law tends to frown upon them.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#157
post #64
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar. For…

The comparison of the Roman Empire and the Chinese civilization is very flawed. First of all, Rome did not unite neighboring groups in Italy as a culture, never mind Europe. The lands and tribes they conquered simply used Latin for trade and as a lingua franca. It never became the mother tongue for any of those people. In China, for thousands of years, you have people from every province celebrating many of the same…

> First of all, Rome did not unite neighboring groups in Italy as a culture

It very much did.

> never mind Europe.

It did that, too, though less tightly.

> The lands and tribes they conquered simply used Latin for trade and as a lingua franca. It never became the mother tongue for any of those people.

And where exactly did the Romance languages that are the mother tongues of much of the area that Rome used to rule come from, then?

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#158
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get rid of multi generational transfers of wealth. Make each generation start from scratch. I know it's easier said than done as not all assets are fungible or distributable (social networks, geography etc) but it would make a difference. I read recently that the same families that controlled most the wealth in Florence in the 1600 still control most the wealth now, that's probably not good for scrappy innovation.

What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life if I can’t leave anything to my children?

1. There's something fundamentally strange about this question. Suppose the answer is "there is none"; is that meant to be some sort of absurdity? Perhaps we should spend less effort "accumulating wealth". It might be healthier for us and/or for society.[1]

2. I suspect that no one in this discussion (even those whose words suggest otherwise) want it to be so that you literally can't leave anything to your children. So there's some point in accumulating whatever amount you can leave to them.

3. By and large, I think people accumulate wealth mostly in order to have it. I'd rather have $3M in the bank and know that barring really major upheavals I never have to worry about being poor, than have $0 in the bank and live precariously from one payday to the next. This would be true even if I had no children and no prospect of ever having any. It would be true even with a decent "safety net" ensuring that even if I completely ran out of my own money I'd never be, e.g., at risk of starvation or homelessness.

[EDITED to add:] Wait, there's more.

4. You might accumulate wealth in order to use it for some expensive enterprise. Consider e.g. Elon Musk, who (at least the way he tells it) got rich in order to save the environment and give us the ability to escape to Mars if we need to. I don't know what Warren Buffett's original motivation for getting rich was, but his present alleged intention is to give away almost everything he has for charitable purposes, and he explicitly says he doesn't want to give his children too much. (Though it may well be that "too much" in his sense is much more than 99% of parents could possibly give their children.) The advantage of this sort of use of wealth is that it doesn't suffer from diminishing returns as much as spending the money on yourself does. There's not much I could do with $2B that I couldn't do with $1B, but $2B will save approximately twice the number of lives that $1B will.

5. You might want to turn your wealth into power. Lots of lobbying. Carefully targetted political donations. Make yourself a household name and run for president of the US. Give funds to academics and other potential public intellectuals who happen to have views you want to be more widely heard. With a couple of billion used carefully you can have a big impact on your country, or even on the world as a whole.

[1] Or, of course, it might not; it could be, for instance, that the smooth running of a modern economy depends on a level of acquisitiveness that could never exist if people were getting money only for their own use and not their children's. (As it happens, I think that's unlikely.)

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#159

You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the…

People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages. According to all observations the most likely end to modern civilization is over exploitation and over usage of natural resources. The amount of resources available and the amount we use point to a trend that has one conclusio…

> People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.

I have better medicine, better comfort (bed, electricity, running water ..), &c. than the richest emperor of 2000 years ago. Does it invalidate any critics I can make ?

As far as I can tell capitalism didn't sell mere survival as a goal, yet we're telling an ever growing part of the population that they'll have to deal with it.

"The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically."

"The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive."

- Raoul Vaneigem

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#160
post #32

Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totall…

"Western civilization" is not a useful concept so is falling out of use
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