= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (343)
It's an argument based on false premises. Limitations on resources have, in past, proven to be fairly meaningless, and there's no particular reason to believe this will change going forward. Every time we think we've hit a wall(running out of wood in the 18th century, whales in the 19th century, food in the 20th century, or oil in the 21st century), we've come up with new technologies to keep going without much trouble(coal, oil, GMOs/agricultural chemistry, and tar sands/fracking respectively). Limitations on space are even less relevant.
Conversely, we've built first-world societies on a governmental safety net that only actually works with an increasing population. If we don't grow, then pension plans will start detonating like someone's carpet-bombing the economy. (Yes, worse than they are already). I think the people who created those pyramid schemes should be taken out behind the woodshed for a posthumous beatdown, but it's a bit late to fix it now.
If you want to know what a negative population growth rate looks like, look at what will happen to China over the next couple decades. It's the biggest demographic time bomb in human history.
Also, if you're bringing sustainability into this, IMO the only truly sustainable option is to advance technology so fast that we can defeat the Second Law somehow. Anything else just delays the inevitable.
Or you can look at Japan right now. Their total workforce has been contracting for the last few years and the only way to go is down. And their amount of government debt is not a coincidence.
Yup, them too. Both were held up as countries that were going to overwhelm the US through their superior economic performance, both are going to suffer long and agonizing collapses as their demography ruins them. I went with the more topical example, but Japan is probably the better one, because they're so much further along.
A "long collapse" is a bit of an oxymoron -- presumably you mean they will collapse and stay collapsed.
But that raises an interesting question -- can a society/country downscale without a collapse? Theoretically, it's perfectly doable -- you population decreases, so does your GDP but not GDP per capita. You just have more space for less people.
In practice, of course, there are issues.
I don't regard "collapse" as referring to something instantaneous. The fall of Rome, for example, could be referred to as a multi-century collapse.
And in principle, yes, it could happen. But in practice, before people die, they get old. And old people suck, economically speaking.
Taking away the pensions of people who've paid a tax that's supposed to fund pensions all their lives would be political suicide.
It depends on what the alternative is.
If you have nothing to pay pensions with, you have nothing to pay pensions with. See Detroit.
For sovereigns who can print fiat money the situation is a bit more complicated but the same in medium term. The amount of money doesn't matter, what matters is the amount of value that the country produces and which it then redistributes among people. If there is not enough value, printing money will just lead you into an inflationary spiral.