magnax1
1yr ago
This assumes there is no such thing as a free market. Sure, a single company can suicide by keeping a significant dead weight in its workforce, but they'll just be outcompeted by companies who don't, or maybe even countries who don't. Markets are just entropy, and entropy always wins out.
By European standards no growth since 06 is excellent. That's second best record, basically tied with France and behind Germany (And Russia, but their economy is trash anyways) Most of Southern Europe hasn't grown since ~1990.
Edit: I'm only referring to the major economies here. There's still limited growth in the nordics and small eastern euro countries.
magnax1
1yr ago
Yes, the anti-individualist argument would be against allowing them to take hormones, dress up, etc. I'm not aware of any significant cohort who wants to do that in North America.
magnax1
1yr ago
I'm not sure if I wasn't clear, but that 1% (which definitely extends far beyond just forcing the use of pronouns and includes conforming to all sorts of norma) is basically the whole political disagreement. As I said,
I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children)
magnax1
1yr ago
Forcing individuals to accept outside group cultural norms out of some moral imperative seems very communal, not individualistic. We should note that almost all of the debate about trans issues are their ideological normalization in society. If this were an individualist issue, you would expect one side to be against their very existence. I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children) Almost all the debate is over forcing people to take part in their image of themselves.
magnax1
1yr ago
Basically all industrialized countries went through the modernization that led to declining birth rates post WW2, but France definitely lagged behind Germany and the UK economically before the 2nd world war.
magnax1
1yr ago
Earth is nowhere near its carrying capacity, and the human population is more realistically limited by the resources of the solar system on any time scale where the Earth's carrying capacity is an issue. If Human population was about to trend to 40 billion, then Malthusian carrying capacity might become an issue. 9 billion? Not even close.
The biggest issue right now is that modern welfare systems are basically ponzi schemes. The eventual solution will be obvious--drastically cut spending, but that's difficult to achieve in democracies where the people paying are outnumbered by the people being paid.
Russia and France modernized post WW2. Qatar is currently modernizing and therefore is only just now dropping below replacement. It's where France was in the 50+ years ago in the cycle. Obviously modernization is the main trend here that dominates all other, but Qatar doesn't seem to be an outlier at all. UAE is already sub 1.5. Saudi Arabia seems to be behind on the curve, but its still quickly trending below 2.1. It may be the case that in 20 years Qatar's TFR will still be 1.80, but it doesn't seem that way.
magnax1
1yr ago
Definitely not true, because I'm a YIMBY and am totally opposed to dense urbanification. You could call most of the republican party functionally YIMBY (anti construction regulation) but anti urbanification, they just don't use those terms. There's a pretty clear connection between how red an area is and its lack of housing regulation.
magnax1
1yr ago
If we accept that NIMBY policies lead to lower density, then sure. I don't think that's the case. Very few places have an incentive to build up and not out, but regulations increases costs for both.
magnax1
1yr ago
Religiosity doesn't seem to have much correlation in general. There are exceptions (mormons, like you said, but even they are trending down fast) and the most religious countries in the world, the Arab peninsula states, have low birth rates that are trending down fast.
magnax1
1yr ago
I cannot express just how confident I am that the price of a square foot of housing in the United States is not an important driver of low fertility rates
You are absolutely wrong. Population density and it's associated costs are maybe the biggest difference in variation between tfr of developed countries.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693032/
This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
You can easily see this within the US as well. Places like NYC have abnormally low birth rates, especially among native populations.
magnax1
1yr ago
It seems to me that people associate and conflate nimbyism with multiple different issues. It's understandable, maybe even beneficial, that people might oppose things like housing projects in areas with lots of families. One could argue those things need to go somewhere, but I think ultimately housing projects in modern urban america have been failures. Its time to try something else.
Then there's the more common somewhat related problem of regulatory burden, where people oppose construction of basic housing, apartments, businesses, or infrastructure, through arcane laws that basically upend the function of property rights (I can do with my property as I will). This seems less defensable and ultimately is one of the main cruxes of the housing crisis in high cost west coast cities.
Then there's this recent left leaning obsession with dense urban living that gets thrown in (without any logical connection IMO). The claim is that it's more environmentally friendly, would lead to more equitable or equal outcomes, and also just seems to be an aesthetic choice. The method to achieve this seems to be scrapping suburban infrastructure, regulating away cars, and generally centralizing government authority so people cannot resist. There are a lot of obvious reasons not to do this (dense urban areas have poorer outcomes than suburbs in income inequality, mental health, self reported happiness, crime and basically every metric you can think of outside of average income, which may or may not still exist when adjusted for cost of living) If it isn't obvious I think the value of this argument approaches nill, and is just signal boosted by the location and recruiting pool of media conglomerates. If anything, as the internet makes your location more and more economically irrelevant, it seems that dense urban living makes less sense than ever.
magnax1
1yr ago
I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think.
I don't think they're separate. Like I said-
the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden
But civil rights suits and so on are not the biggest burden. It's one of many burdens, and the burdens become bigger and more arbitrary the bigger the company.
magnax1
1yr ago
I think you're misreading companies' regulatory burden for fear of wokism. Google et al are holding back for the former, which is much more central to its daily life. In fact, the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden via law suits supported by old civil rights law.
Google saw that openAI got away with releasing tech without the feds slamming down arbitrary regulation (so far) and were like "okay, maybe it's safe." This is all at best tangentially related to wokism. Never forget that the federal government's regulatory apparatus is the #1 concern of any large corporation.
magnax1
1yr ago
No, I'm just saying some of what chatgpt puts out is pretty much garbalygook. "What's the joke?' is a question without an answer.
Yes. The deep south cash crop states were not the only slave states. You pointed out border states yourself, many of which are quite temperate in climate. There was no reason for them to be so undeveloped compared to new england, and even some of the relatively underpopulated great lakes states. Virginia is actually an ideal place for industrialization--lots of cheap coal, lots of riverways that can transport coal and then power industry in cities, and lots of amazing places for huge ports. Yet, Virginia never really industrialized.
Studies have actually been done, although the veracity will always be fuzzy with 150+ year old data, they never suggest the effects are "not very" large.
A lot of borders are arbitrary, but the outcomes are not. The policy of a state and culture of a region are maybe the most important single factor for economic development. Slave states vs non slave are maybe the best example outside of east and west germany.
magnax1
1yr ago
There is no good economic argument that slavery was an integral part of the north's development, or the south's in terms of opportunity cost. You can clearly see the impact of slavery as an institution was highly negative just by comparing outcomes across borders of states with and without slavery. Slavery's incentives were totally counterproductive to long term economic growth. It shouldn't take a genius to see why--it's not worth it to build up skilled labor, either slave or non slave, with slavery dominating the labor market. It's not too dissimilar to the resource curse where you're incentivized to dig money out of the ground instead of build up long term economic prospects like education and infrastructure. It might be worse because even on an individual level people have little reason to better themselves whereas resource curses mostly suck up expensive corporate and state level capital.
magnax1
1yr ago
I'm not surprised race obsessed americans draw spurious connections on racial grounds, but like I said, it says more about them than Rowling.
It reminds me of this recent incident-
https://nypost.com/2022/11/25/lamar-odom-thinks-phoenix-suns-having-a-gorilla-mascot-is-racist/
Most people don't see a gorilla mascot and immediately leap to "That's a racist caricature!" Because that's just not normal. Likewise for banker goblins and jews.
magnax1
1yr ago
I think that some people saw greedy bankers im a fantasy world and immediately went "Wow! Those are jews! How dare she!" Says more about them than anything else. There is just so little connection that it doesn't deserve a counterargument.
magnax1
1yr ago
You may be right that rational is not the right word (I actually kind of hate that word, I just wasn't being precise enough I guess) but projection and the general meaning of the statement as a whole should be pretty obvious--they are projecting their worldview and values onto other countries, that America and co have the same zero sum authoritarian worldview and that will lead them to conflict with russia, when it's obvious by their different actions (How NATO plays out vs historic Russian alliances) that this isn't the case. They then use this claimed worldview to justify things they were going to do anyways (invade a third party). I think it's totally fair to call this irrational, in that it's just not an argument that stands up to any scrutiny, but it is also has a clear purpose and the term rational is too wishy washy relativistic to be meaningful.
magnax1
1yr ago
Fantasy and reality often have a sheer chasm between them. There definitely is some truth to the fact that some girls enjoy some level of non-consensual encounters, but there is also a wide range from "I said no, but if he ignores that it gives me cover to not feel bad about cheating" to "Some random stranger held a gun to my head and forced me to blow him."
I don't think many, even those who have non-consensual fantasies, would enjoy the latter.
magnax1
1yr ago
IIRC work is now the most common place to meet a spouse, and if not, its ones of the most likely. Of course workplace romances can end poorly, because most romances do. I don't think that's a good argument against them. I have had some regrettable workplace romances. One was so nasty that I was credibly threatened by the woman, among other things. On the other hand, I don't think there are many other good places left in the modern world to find a spouse that are widely accessible.
As for the business, it probably isn't worth it in an abstract sense, but what people forget is that companies are just groups of people, and people want to get laid. HR can't really fight human nature and they're never going to fire top people over getting laid. If you suck at your job? Yeah, they might use it as an excuse.
Neoliberal is definitely not woke. Neoliberal is Reagan and Thatcher and maybe Tony Blair if you're stretching it. Only in fringe online circle (like the reddit neoliberal sub) does neoliberal have anything to do with woke. When the average person uses neoliberal, usually in a pejorative sense, they mean "Those bad people who supported free market reforms at the expense of unions or the coal miners (or whatever)"
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