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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In the most general approach, negentropy. In the context of human societies, it's population, talent, economic production, power. Things a society needs to survive, grow, and flourish.
A lot of that doesn't look like the kind of thing societies consume, more like the substrate they run on. At least aside from a few crazy outliers like the Khmer Rouge.
I'm having a hard time thinking of policy regimes that require governments to trade off future talent, for example, for continued existence. Maybe throwing a third of your male population into a major war would qualify, but wars that major are quite rare.
Tentatively-- keeping the society poor and boring. Anyone who can leave, especially the smarter people, does leave. This is called a brain drain.
Literally borrowing ever increasing amounts of money against future generations' productivity.
Having social policies that lead to high IQ people reproducing less.
They are now, anyway.
The Ottoman Empire lost 13-15% of its total population in WWI but had by far the worst proportional losses of that war, particularly from disease and starvation.
In WWII, Poland lost 16%, the Soviet Union lost 13%, and Germany 8-10%..
In the U.S. Civil War, the U.S. as a whole lost 3% of its population, including 6% of white Northern males and 18% of white Southern males..
Rare, not nonexistent. The World Wars are the main recent exception I was gesturing towards, although more extreme examples exist on a smaller scale: the Napoleonic Wars killed somewhere on the order of a third of French men eligible for recruitment, for example. And they were rarer before modern mass conscription, although exceptions did exist.