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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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the health of broader society

The textbook example of such societies are the Malthusian in nature. If having kids is the only way to ensure you survive in old age, then it is in everyone's interests to breed like rats. The outcome is an exponential grows which periodically gets mowed down by the horsemen Pestilence, War and Starvation.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

The main problem with the pension system is that the working generation is paying the pensions for the previous generation, which works when the population is growing or stable. What we should do instead is make each generation pay into a fund which will eventually pay for their pensions. So even if the size of generations changes, the per capita funds will be stable.

Previous generations if nationalists worried a lot about having enough manpower to throw into the meat grinder of war. In the nuclear age, this is not much of a concern among superpowers any more.

Personally, I would predict a rebound of the TFR at some point, once space in the metropolitan areas becomes more affordable due to the shrinking population, people are likely to have more kids. But even if I am wrong, I would much rather that some robot nurse cared for me in old age than living in a society which puts undue pressure on people to have kids.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

But they are societies. Ceteris paribus, they'll survive forever. With our 'continuously declining sub-replacement fertility' model it's either replacement or extinction.