I find it mystifying whenever I read a futurist economist simultaneously celebrating technological advance and lamenting the lowering rate of human reproduction and the impacts of impending "depopulation."* Those advances include automation, robotics, and AI utility, no? More production, fewer people: the threshold of saturation affluence, which I'd argue we've reached already in some material goods production. Only a bad idea for the Ideology of CapitalISM, which demands both scarcity and perpetual growth in order to sustain the power and fortunes of the wealthy. That's why so much newly made stuff breaks so easily nowadays, yes? As a great supporter of independent enterprise, personal initiative, ingenuity, and the virtue of Value Addition, I'd like to see markets addressed in more imaginative ways than the default that's generally assumed as axiomatic truism--deference to the Inertial Momentum of Whoever Has The Most Money, as of the most recent Quarter.
I also can't help but find a subtext in some of these discussions: a concern that AI will replace "middle-class jobs"--like economic forecasting--and replace much of the labor demand with the requirement of a larger number of young people to "care for an aging population" (at least until depopulation gets over the hump and ZPG balance is restored.) Oh no, the grandchildren of Millennials will have to go into caregiver occupations, en masse. How declasse!**
It's terribly difficult to know all of the generational, 20-year ramifications of declines in national populations--or an overall decline in global population. And I'm baffled by the insistence that our problems require a 21st century baby boom in order to solve them. It's strange for me to read acknowledgement by economists of the transformations being wrought on civilization by robotics and automation--and productive longevity--existing in the same realm as deference to the same old set of assumptions about productive human lifespan, human labor requirements, and human buyer consumption patterns.
Almost all Traditional economists--whether Capitalist or Marxist--are terribly uneasy with incorporating the factor of voluntary restraint of consumption into their calculations. It's untidy. Worse, it implies the role of restraint due to considerations other than lack of purchasing power or availability; responsibility requires acknowledging other constraints, self-restraint, limitation. The question of Responsibility also has political implications. It's worth noting that while the Radical Green approach championed by people like Derrick Jensen is doomed by its unrealism (and for that reason, a marginal school of thought that even many Greens reject), the Trump administration is currently using its political Power to attempt to abolish the physical reality of global climate change, by no longer funding the research that charts the data. That's a far more pernicious policy than Jensen's romantic ecopessimism. Thank heavens the Chinese appear to be acting like the adults in the game. I wish that the US was leading the way, but the Democrats lacked both a forthrightly ambitious platform and the executive will power to carry one out. Now the US is in the hands of wealthy ignoramuses, bent on Moving and Shaking--and putting all of their governmental power to underwriting the fossil fuels industry.** No vision, and entirely too much reliance on predation and swindling. Not an augury of success.
Speaking of auguries of success, the ideal source of global energy appears to me to be Deep Geothermal Power. I'd venture that we might be well on our way to implementing it by now, if the Bush administration hadn't squandered $3 trillion on the geopolitics of Petroleum. Squandering continues to be an underrated problem in the realm of human economic activities.
(*A Longtermist Utilitarian would of course opt for some means to dispense--or anyway reduce--the population of the superannuated. Based on objective measurements of their diminished productivity versus their resource-depleting, labor-intensive requirements.)
[**Elder care isn't the worst; it's what I'm doing right now, for a 98-year old family member. While knowing I'm fortunate that our household can afford it. So far. ]
[***I would have preferred US energy policy to commit to a program of safely sited small modular nuclear reactors and grid interconnection, back around the year 2000. They'd already be up and running, now. But it's a very different world nowadays. And the 20 year lead time argues against a nuclear power program that ambitious. ]
I find it mystifying whenever I read a futurist economist simultaneously celebrating technological advance and lamenting the lowering rate of human reproduction and the impacts of impending "depopulation."* Those advances include automation, robotics, and AI utility, no? More production, fewer people: the threshold of saturation affluence, which I'd argue we've reached already in some material goods production. Only a bad idea for the Ideology of CapitalISM, which demands both scarcity and perpetual growth in order to sustain the power and fortunes of the wealthy. That's why so much newly made stuff breaks so easily nowadays, yes? As a great supporter of independent enterprise, personal initiative, ingenuity, and the virtue of Value Addition, I'd like to see markets addressed in more imaginative ways than the default that's generally assumed as axiomatic truism--deference to the Inertial Momentum of Whoever Has The Most Money, as of the most recent Quarter.
I also can't help but find a subtext in some of these discussions: a concern that AI will replace "middle-class jobs"--like economic forecasting--and replace much of the labor demand with the requirement of a larger number of young people to "care for an aging population" (at least until depopulation gets over the hump and ZPG balance is restored.) Oh no, the grandchildren of Millennials will have to go into caregiver occupations, en masse. How declasse!**
It's terribly difficult to know all of the generational, 20-year ramifications of declines in national populations--or an overall decline in global population. And I'm baffled by the insistence that our problems require a 21st century baby boom in order to solve them. It's strange for me to read acknowledgement by economists of the transformations being wrought on civilization by robotics and automation--and productive longevity--existing in the same realm as deference to the same old set of assumptions about productive human lifespan, human labor requirements, and human buyer consumption patterns.
Almost all Traditional economists--whether Capitalist or Marxist--are terribly uneasy with incorporating the factor of voluntary restraint of consumption into their calculations. It's untidy. Worse, it implies the role of restraint due to considerations other than lack of purchasing power or availability; responsibility requires acknowledging other constraints, self-restraint, limitation. The question of Responsibility also has political implications. It's worth noting that while the Radical Green approach championed by people like Derrick Jensen is doomed by its unrealism (and for that reason, a marginal school of thought that even many Greens reject), the Trump administration is currently using its political Power to attempt to abolish the physical reality of global climate change, by no longer funding the research that charts the data. That's a far more pernicious policy than Jensen's romantic ecopessimism. Thank heavens the Chinese appear to be acting like the adults in the game. I wish that the US was leading the way, but the Democrats lacked both a forthrightly ambitious platform and the executive will power to carry one out. Now the US is in the hands of wealthy ignoramuses, bent on Moving and Shaking--and putting all of their governmental power to underwriting the fossil fuels industry.** No vision, and entirely too much reliance on predation and swindling. Not an augury of success.
Speaking of auguries of success, the ideal source of global energy appears to me to be Deep Geothermal Power. I'd venture that we might be well on our way to implementing it by now, if the Bush administration hadn't squandered $3 trillion on the geopolitics of Petroleum. Squandering continues to be an underrated problem in the realm of human economic activities.
(*A Longtermist Utilitarian would of course opt for some means to dispense--or anyway reduce--the population of the superannuated. Based on objective measurements of their diminished productivity versus their resource-depleting, labor-intensive requirements.)
[**Elder care isn't the worst; it's what I'm doing right now, for a 98-year old family member. While knowing I'm fortunate that our household can afford it. So far. ]
[***I would have preferred US energy policy to commit to a program of safely sited small modular nuclear reactors and grid interconnection, back around the year 2000. They'd already be up and running, now. But it's a very different world nowadays. And the 20 year lead time argues against a nuclear power program that ambitious. ]