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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26628 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people.

Do you have evidence you can point to for this?

Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.

I don't know that I'm convinced of this. The earth is not currently running up against Malthusian limits, so having the increased labor force allows for more work, more innovation (and so more technological progress), more division of labor, and so on. Of course, some parts of that depend on having decent institutions.

Anyway, average (arithmetic mean, I assume?) quality of life is not my sole concern, but I get that it's yours, so I'll assume it for the sake of the argument.

The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement.

Yes, and the current fertility rates are dysgenic with respect to IQ, at least in the US, though I don't remember to what extent. We need a smart enough populace for upkeep, at the very least.

Roughly the same can be said of the remainder of your paragraph.

Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare.

But this doesn't depend on public spending. With fewer people, and an inverted population pyramid, more of the total wealth will be devoted to supporting retirees.

80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.

Fair enough.

No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.

But demographic trends are currently removing the most productive people from the group, or at least moving in that direction.

I think decline in population also can lead to insufficiently maintained infrastructure and buildings.

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