As alluded to, the population increase wss less about women having more babies, and more about people living longer.
In the 1970s, people were in a panic over the 'population bomb' that would result in more people than the earth could sustain. We are all supposed to have starved to death by the year 2000. So, I'm reluctant to make predictions on how it will be fifty years from now. But it would seem that if we were able to get by with 4 billion people in 1970, we could do it again in 2075.
1. It might be WWIII but it won't be called that unless it starts to resemble WWI and WWII. The real first world war, called The French and Indian War in the US and the Seven Years War in Europe and other things elsewhere, is the model and thus expect this to have a similar name like "The Fifteen Year's Wars" (my educated guess on length).
2. On the importation you also risk importing a population that can't cover the work and can be educated too fast enough. It seems lots of Europe has that problem. I'm still out on if the US does.
3. How dare you claim Trump is anything other than a 23-D Chess Grandmaster or Idiot Savant Fascist leader :)
4. Didn't know you watched Triggernometry, but I'm glad you highlighted that very disturbing episode.
5. I know plenty of people who can (and have) read through and understood old COBOL and Assembly (but since I'm one of them and have done it for money no surprise I know several). To be fair, of all the older languages I'd like to have to get new people up to speed on COBOL is probably one of the better ones and of Assembly 360 again isn't bad...it's assembly for humans, not assembly for compilers.
A partial solution is to declare a year in which all debts no matter how small or large are forgiven. We apply the old Biblical concept of the Year of Jubilee on a global scale.
Jubilee as a tradition would definitely have prevented--or at least severely curtailed--the financiailized end of this whole mess.
As a potential solution I find it very appealing, but for two problems:
1) There being no tradition of jubilee in the current system, declaring one would destroy the trust that makes the system work. If done it would have to be introduced as a regularized, dependable thing.
2) There is no global authority that could impose such worldwide--and, since the worst of these debts are those held between nations, attempting to enact one would cause wars (no nation will voluntarily give up the leverage that other nations' debts gives them).
Other obstacles (like the financial industry) are relatively easy to overcome compared to the knock on effects of these two problems. But I would love to be proved wrong.
There is also the issue that willy-nilly debt forgiveness could bankrupt most financial institutions whose business model is lending at interest. In Israelite society, people knew when the debt forgiveness was pending, and could account for it. Many loans near the end of cycle would be short term for that reason. Can you imagine looking to take out a 30-year mortgage close to the jubilee, only to discover that nobody was going to make such a loan, since it would be immediately forgiven?
To make them longer term, the Sanhedrin, about two thousand years ago, instituted the prozbul, which assigned certain debts to the courts, exempting them for forgiveness, allowing for longer term loans.
Loan forgiveness, if not built into the system, destroys trust and borrowing.
The trust the current system runs on is rapidly collapsing anyway. In banking and finance in particular it has since 2008 and with another 2008 looming a jubilee probably won't do any additional damage.
In fact, a 2008 repeat would probably create a demand for a jubilee. There already is one for student loans that is getting support from surprising places.
«A partial solution is to declare a year in which all debts no matter how small or large are forgiven.»
That is not quite what happened in the past (and I think this idea is due to Michael Hudson who knows better): jubilees were about forgiveness by kings of *tax* arrears (that usually had already been sold to foreign merchants, so in practice it was a form of state default, greek/argentinian/... style).
There is already a common institution for the forgiveness of debts which is of recent development and it is *bankruptcy* and can happen at any time.
Arguments about jubilees (which are unlikely to go anywhere) seem to me to have the (perhaps deliberate) effect of distracting from the important issue of bankruptcy reform, as bankruptcy in most countries is too hard on the debtors.
That would be fantastic--would make it a very simple case.
Alas, there's a complicating factor at work:
While the Gov't is the guarantor of such loans, it isn't the holder. It basically sells the loans to 3rd parties, and the notes become a traded asset on the debt market, to most student loan is, in fact, held by retirement funds, investment groups, and collection agencies, rather than by the Fed itself.
Nonetheless, unlike many of my buddies, I think student loans are illegitimate to start with, both because of their non-dischargability and because of the near-compulsory nature of them. It's rather like obligating someone to sell themselves into indenture, and then denying any claims they have about the terms of the indenture. Plenty of precedent in common law for abrogating those debts and clawing at least a % of the lost capital back from the schools.
Trouble is, literally nobody in the equation has the balls to jubilee the whole system--all proposals so far are simply giveaways either to young voters or to universities, or both, which is basically how we got into this mess in the first place.
My understanding is at this point DoEd holds large amounts directly but I could be mistaken.
And I don't think it's "rather like obligating someone to sell themselves into indenture". I think it is. The making of the BA/BS an effective union card for white and not so white collar professions then propagandizing about the necessity while making them a legal bypass for employer barred from other forms of ability proof is horrific.
It is bad enough in my youth people were encouraged to pay for college with a more formal voluntary servitude, military service. At least in theory getting youth to serve in the military serves a national purpose. Loans don't even do that.
Oh, and on the last point, I suspect I'll live to see a de facto jubilee via either inflation and general collapse of enforcement mechanisms.
It seems some kind of negotiated debt reduction/cancellation (perhaps only up to a fixed amount with some subsidy for those with less debt) would be less disruptive and make the odds for general collapse of enforcement mechanisms lower.
«student loan forgiveness qualify as a jubilee given»
There is a case for that. Jubilees are essentially a generalized “pardon” of penalties and crimes (failure to pay tax debts was considered a crime), for example jubilees were declared to celebrate when a new king took power, or the wedding day of a king’s child, and involved not just cancellation of tax debts but also cancellation or shortening of prison terms. Then some became periodic because you can’t always wait for a new king or a royal wedding celebration.
But there are important differences: student loans are not taxes imposed from above, but voluntary borrowing, and usually student loan portfolios are not sold to foreign bankers, which would make it politically easier to cancel them.
«2. Such loans are specifically exempt from bankruptcy.»
The reason is obvious: otherwise every student who graduated would immediately declare bankruptcy as upon graduation they would be penniless, and in a few years bankrupt status would go away. Suppose someone had no intention to get a degree: they would borrow to enroll, spend a few years partying on campus and then declare bankruptcy. But student loans should be subject to bankruptcy after say 20-30 years, or should be repaid with a surtax as in England (where anyhow they get canceled after 25-30 years).
Perhaps the risks you describe in #2, which are legitimate, are proof that such loans are a bad idea. Certainly that are not one the government should encourage.
The need for government guarantees certainly makes their value in the world questionable. Like government back mortgages they seem less designed to meet a market failure and more to justify inflated costs above the market clearing price for some good.
#2 is not true. The law was changed in the mid-2000s (term 2 of Bush 2). For 20yrs previously bankruptcy was oegal, and it wasn't used as an easy get-out.
«#2 is not true. The law was changed in the mid-2000s (term 2 of Bush 2). For 20yrs previously bankruptcy was oegal, and it wasn't used as an easy get-out.»
Up to twenty years ago university fees and costs were much lower especially at state universities and since bankruptcy has some downsides even for the penniless it was easier to repay the loans.
Also when I wrote "every student who graduated would immediately declare bankruptcy" I was clearly exaggerating: in a loan scheme it often takes under 5-10% of borrowers to default to turn it into a loss-making business.
>You could use a naked scam—such as, for example, the AI industry
I do not think it's a scam, at least not more than similar technological leaps in the past. There are a lot of hype and scams around it, and on the financial side of it is certainly a bubble, and quite possibly the energy side of it may also prove to be bunk. But the LLMs are legit and will prove to be a very useful tool increasing productivity and allowing people (and governments) do novel things. Whether it's a good thing or not is a separate question.
In a related development, I used to dismiss fears about the dangers of LLMs. Having worked with AI agents for the last few months I am not that sanguine anymore.
That said, there is probably much more to the Stargate project that they are openly admitting to.
> so they can finally reach for the stars
I guess even atheists are not immune to millenarian ideas
Not millenarian at all. Millenarianism looks forward to an end to history. Our species does best when we have a frontier--and our evolution styips when we're all in the same petri dish.
Interesting stuff, but I'm not sure we'll collapse as you suggest. One thing you can count on elites to do is to do whatever it takes for them to remain the elites. If it looks like their cush gig is about to end due to old farts, then it will be time for the Night of the Pillow. Look up all the un-American stuff our government did during the Great Depression, and realize that is just for starters.
They don't even have to directly steal boomer retirements, just inflate the shit out of the economy while freezing benefits. This is already being done to both the elderly and the poor, from even before Covid. But they will steal retirements directly if needed, as nations have already done in the past couple of decades. Deposit "haircuts", capital controls, tax on saved money. Some Euro countries and Japan have already implemented negative interest rates for banks when needed. CBDCs will massively increase a nations' ability to do such things, which I'm sure is part of the increasing urgency to get that implemented by the Europoors.
Indeed. I mentioned both of those main scenarios in the article.
But historically speaking, the triangulation problem is a big deal in politics, as is the bubble problem, especially in late-cycle circumstances. I wouldn't count on the ruling class to be able to get good enough information to actually save their own necks in most places, though they surely will try.
«Poor people have lots of children, because poor people need them: Children provide stability and labor in family businesses, they provide care in old age»
It is not "poor people", but *women without pensions* (usually poor women). Most women for a long time had sons as pension assets ("care in old age" indeed).
«Pretty much anywhere that television or the Internet shows up, birth rates drop, though it is unclear if the relationship is causal (due, for example, to aspirationalism or propaganda) or coincidental (i.e. if the arrival of access to TV and the Internet and fertility drop are both due to another causal factor or basket of factors).»
A classic fact of statistics is that density of television antennas on roofs and cancer rates were highly correlated! It was not causal, and "coincidental" is not quite the right word for “both due to another causal factor” (a "concause"): the common underlying cause is that rising incomes in those those areas enabled people to buy both more television sets and more packets of cigarettes.
The fall in natality rates is due to the availability of alternatives to sons as pensions assets, that is financial asset pensions (state pension payments or private pension funds invested in bonds or stockmarkets). Indeed pensions were invented by Bismarck to allow the state to introduce mass military conscription with less opposition by mothers who had invested so much risk and effort into raising sons for their old age. The availability of financial asset pensions is one of the effects, together with television or internet, female education, etc. of a rising incomes in a financialized economy.
There is something else you may be overlooking. A consequence of Europe being religious is confidence in certain values such as the imperative to help others, even when you don't gain from it. Many of our secular elites virtue-signal about helping others: what matters is how it looks to their peers, rather than whether it actually helps. Add, too, the impact on our society of Muslims, whose values are very different. I don't think the cases are really comparable.
Just started reading this, but wait, what? "Since the first world war, wars have been fought by professional soldiers." *First* world war?? Is that a typo? WW2 was a mass mobilization war, if there ever was one. Red Army, anyone?
Both to a degree and WW1 especially, except for the UK and the US, were initially fought by mobilized reservist previously trained and drilled.
While not the highly competent professional army of the UK in 1914 the armies of August 1914 and 1939-1940 were the best trained and most professional armies in Europe since Napoleon, possibly Frederick, and maybe even since Rome. You can even argue that degree of professionalism was part of the problem.
Your observation about the Red Army as a contrast does stand, however.
All true. Nonetheless it was World War One (and especially the problems of WW1) that created the professional soldiery. WW2 was mass mobilization and immensely destructive, but as a one-and-done event it was not as demographically significant as the wars that plagued Europe from the 16th-19th centuries (and the sudden end of the war created the Baby Boom). Wars since then have been very thin on conscripts indeed, especially in the Anglosphere.
As alluded to, the population increase wss less about women having more babies, and more about people living longer.
In the 1970s, people were in a panic over the 'population bomb' that would result in more people than the earth could sustain. We are all supposed to have starved to death by the year 2000. So, I'm reluctant to make predictions on how it will be fifty years from now. But it would seem that if we were able to get by with 4 billion people in 1970, we could do it again in 2075.
Agreed. The trick is figuring out how to get from here to there without succumbing to the various spirals that beset our path.
Random thoughts (again):
1. It might be WWIII but it won't be called that unless it starts to resemble WWI and WWII. The real first world war, called The French and Indian War in the US and the Seven Years War in Europe and other things elsewhere, is the model and thus expect this to have a similar name like "The Fifteen Year's Wars" (my educated guess on length).
2. On the importation you also risk importing a population that can't cover the work and can be educated too fast enough. It seems lots of Europe has that problem. I'm still out on if the US does.
3. How dare you claim Trump is anything other than a 23-D Chess Grandmaster or Idiot Savant Fascist leader :)
4. Didn't know you watched Triggernometry, but I'm glad you highlighted that very disturbing episode.
5. I know plenty of people who can (and have) read through and understood old COBOL and Assembly (but since I'm one of them and have done it for money no surprise I know several). To be fair, of all the older languages I'd like to have to get new people up to speed on COBOL is probably one of the better ones and of Assembly 360 again isn't bad...it's assembly for humans, not assembly for compilers.
A partial solution is to declare a year in which all debts no matter how small or large are forgiven. We apply the old Biblical concept of the Year of Jubilee on a global scale.
Ah, they're dancing in the street it's jubilee
We sold ourselves for love but now we're free
I'm so sorry for that ghost I made you be
Only one of us was real and that was me
Treaty, Leonard Cohen
Jubilee as a tradition would definitely have prevented--or at least severely curtailed--the financiailized end of this whole mess.
As a potential solution I find it very appealing, but for two problems:
1) There being no tradition of jubilee in the current system, declaring one would destroy the trust that makes the system work. If done it would have to be introduced as a regularized, dependable thing.
2) There is no global authority that could impose such worldwide--and, since the worst of these debts are those held between nations, attempting to enact one would cause wars (no nation will voluntarily give up the leverage that other nations' debts gives them).
Other obstacles (like the financial industry) are relatively easy to overcome compared to the knock on effects of these two problems. But I would love to be proved wrong.
There is also the issue that willy-nilly debt forgiveness could bankrupt most financial institutions whose business model is lending at interest. In Israelite society, people knew when the debt forgiveness was pending, and could account for it. Many loans near the end of cycle would be short term for that reason. Can you imagine looking to take out a 30-year mortgage close to the jubilee, only to discover that nobody was going to make such a loan, since it would be immediately forgiven?
To make them longer term, the Sanhedrin, about two thousand years ago, instituted the prozbul, which assigned certain debts to the courts, exempting them for forgiveness, allowing for longer term loans.
Loan forgiveness, if not built into the system, destroys trust and borrowing.
Yup
The trust the current system runs on is rapidly collapsing anyway. In banking and finance in particular it has since 2008 and with another 2008 looming a jubilee probably won't do any additional damage.
In fact, a 2008 repeat would probably create a demand for a jubilee. There already is one for student loans that is getting support from surprising places.
It's an interesting point that I had not considered.
«A partial solution is to declare a year in which all debts no matter how small or large are forgiven.»
That is not quite what happened in the past (and I think this idea is due to Michael Hudson who knows better): jubilees were about forgiveness by kings of *tax* arrears (that usually had already been sold to foreign merchants, so in practice it was a form of state default, greek/argentinian/... style).
There is already a common institution for the forgiveness of debts which is of recent development and it is *bankruptcy* and can happen at any time.
Arguments about jubilees (which are unlikely to go anywhere) seem to me to have the (perhaps deliberate) effect of distracting from the important issue of bankruptcy reform, as bankruptcy in most countries is too hard on the debtors.
So, would student loan forgiveness qualify as a jubilee given:
1. The government is pretty much the holder of all such loans.
2. Such loans are specifically exempt from bankruptcy.
That would be fantastic--would make it a very simple case.
Alas, there's a complicating factor at work:
While the Gov't is the guarantor of such loans, it isn't the holder. It basically sells the loans to 3rd parties, and the notes become a traded asset on the debt market, to most student loan is, in fact, held by retirement funds, investment groups, and collection agencies, rather than by the Fed itself.
Nonetheless, unlike many of my buddies, I think student loans are illegitimate to start with, both because of their non-dischargability and because of the near-compulsory nature of them. It's rather like obligating someone to sell themselves into indenture, and then denying any claims they have about the terms of the indenture. Plenty of precedent in common law for abrogating those debts and clawing at least a % of the lost capital back from the schools.
Trouble is, literally nobody in the equation has the balls to jubilee the whole system--all proposals so far are simply giveaways either to young voters or to universities, or both, which is basically how we got into this mess in the first place.
My understanding is at this point DoEd holds large amounts directly but I could be mistaken.
And I don't think it's "rather like obligating someone to sell themselves into indenture". I think it is. The making of the BA/BS an effective union card for white and not so white collar professions then propagandizing about the necessity while making them a legal bypass for employer barred from other forms of ability proof is horrific.
It is bad enough in my youth people were encouraged to pay for college with a more formal voluntary servitude, military service. At least in theory getting youth to serve in the military serves a national purpose. Loans don't even do that.
Oh, and on the last point, I suspect I'll live to see a de facto jubilee via either inflation and general collapse of enforcement mechanisms.
It seems some kind of negotiated debt reduction/cancellation (perhaps only up to a fixed amount with some subsidy for those with less debt) would be less disruptive and make the odds for general collapse of enforcement mechanisms lower.
«student loan forgiveness qualify as a jubilee given»
There is a case for that. Jubilees are essentially a generalized “pardon” of penalties and crimes (failure to pay tax debts was considered a crime), for example jubilees were declared to celebrate when a new king took power, or the wedding day of a king’s child, and involved not just cancellation of tax debts but also cancellation or shortening of prison terms. Then some became periodic because you can’t always wait for a new king or a royal wedding celebration.
But there are important differences: student loans are not taxes imposed from above, but voluntary borrowing, and usually student loan portfolios are not sold to foreign bankers, which would make it politically easier to cancel them.
«2. Such loans are specifically exempt from bankruptcy.»
The reason is obvious: otherwise every student who graduated would immediately declare bankruptcy as upon graduation they would be penniless, and in a few years bankrupt status would go away. Suppose someone had no intention to get a degree: they would borrow to enroll, spend a few years partying on campus and then declare bankruptcy. But student loans should be subject to bankruptcy after say 20-30 years, or should be repaid with a surtax as in England (where anyhow they get canceled after 25-30 years).
Perhaps the risks you describe in #2, which are legitimate, are proof that such loans are a bad idea. Certainly that are not one the government should encourage.
The need for government guarantees certainly makes their value in the world questionable. Like government back mortgages they seem less designed to meet a market failure and more to justify inflated costs above the market clearing price for some good.
#2 is not true. The law was changed in the mid-2000s (term 2 of Bush 2). For 20yrs previously bankruptcy was oegal, and it wasn't used as an easy get-out.
«#2 is not true. The law was changed in the mid-2000s (term 2 of Bush 2). For 20yrs previously bankruptcy was oegal, and it wasn't used as an easy get-out.»
Up to twenty years ago university fees and costs were much lower especially at state universities and since bankruptcy has some downsides even for the penniless it was easier to repay the loans.
Also when I wrote "every student who graduated would immediately declare bankruptcy" I was clearly exaggerating: in a loan scheme it often takes under 5-10% of borrowers to default to turn it into a loss-making business.
Whoa. Mind...blown 🤯
This is all completely overblown. The collapse won't be in twenty years, it will be in thirty.
>You could use a naked scam—such as, for example, the AI industry
I do not think it's a scam, at least not more than similar technological leaps in the past. There are a lot of hype and scams around it, and on the financial side of it is certainly a bubble, and quite possibly the energy side of it may also prove to be bunk. But the LLMs are legit and will prove to be a very useful tool increasing productivity and allowing people (and governments) do novel things. Whether it's a good thing or not is a separate question.
In a related development, I used to dismiss fears about the dangers of LLMs. Having worked with AI agents for the last few months I am not that sanguine anymore.
That said, there is probably much more to the Stargate project that they are openly admitting to.
> so they can finally reach for the stars
I guess even atheists are not immune to millenarian ideas
Not millenarian at all. Millenarianism looks forward to an end to history. Our species does best when we have a frontier--and our evolution styips when we're all in the same petri dish.
Interesting stuff, but I'm not sure we'll collapse as you suggest. One thing you can count on elites to do is to do whatever it takes for them to remain the elites. If it looks like their cush gig is about to end due to old farts, then it will be time for the Night of the Pillow. Look up all the un-American stuff our government did during the Great Depression, and realize that is just for starters.
They don't even have to directly steal boomer retirements, just inflate the shit out of the economy while freezing benefits. This is already being done to both the elderly and the poor, from even before Covid. But they will steal retirements directly if needed, as nations have already done in the past couple of decades. Deposit "haircuts", capital controls, tax on saved money. Some Euro countries and Japan have already implemented negative interest rates for banks when needed. CBDCs will massively increase a nations' ability to do such things, which I'm sure is part of the increasing urgency to get that implemented by the Europoors.
Indeed. I mentioned both of those main scenarios in the article.
But historically speaking, the triangulation problem is a big deal in politics, as is the bubble problem, especially in late-cycle circumstances. I wouldn't count on the ruling class to be able to get good enough information to actually save their own necks in most places, though they surely will try.
«Poor people have lots of children, because poor people need them: Children provide stability and labor in family businesses, they provide care in old age»
It is not "poor people", but *women without pensions* (usually poor women). Most women for a long time had sons as pension assets ("care in old age" indeed).
«Pretty much anywhere that television or the Internet shows up, birth rates drop, though it is unclear if the relationship is causal (due, for example, to aspirationalism or propaganda) or coincidental (i.e. if the arrival of access to TV and the Internet and fertility drop are both due to another causal factor or basket of factors).»
A classic fact of statistics is that density of television antennas on roofs and cancer rates were highly correlated! It was not causal, and "coincidental" is not quite the right word for “both due to another causal factor” (a "concause"): the common underlying cause is that rising incomes in those those areas enabled people to buy both more television sets and more packets of cigarettes.
The fall in natality rates is due to the availability of alternatives to sons as pensions assets, that is financial asset pensions (state pension payments or private pension funds invested in bonds or stockmarkets). Indeed pensions were invented by Bismarck to allow the state to introduce mass military conscription with less opposition by mothers who had invested so much risk and effort into raising sons for their old age. The availability of financial asset pensions is one of the effects, together with television or internet, female education, etc. of a rising incomes in a financialized economy.
There is something else you may be overlooking. A consequence of Europe being religious is confidence in certain values such as the imperative to help others, even when you don't gain from it. Many of our secular elites virtue-signal about helping others: what matters is how it looks to their peers, rather than whether it actually helps. Add, too, the impact on our society of Muslims, whose values are very different. I don't think the cases are really comparable.
Just started reading this, but wait, what? "Since the first world war, wars have been fought by professional soldiers." *First* world war?? Is that a typo? WW2 was a mass mobilization war, if there ever was one. Red Army, anyone?
Both to a degree and WW1 especially, except for the UK and the US, were initially fought by mobilized reservist previously trained and drilled.
While not the highly competent professional army of the UK in 1914 the armies of August 1914 and 1939-1940 were the best trained and most professional armies in Europe since Napoleon, possibly Frederick, and maybe even since Rome. You can even argue that degree of professionalism was part of the problem.
Your observation about the Red Army as a contrast does stand, however.
All true. Nonetheless it was World War One (and especially the problems of WW1) that created the professional soldiery. WW2 was mass mobilization and immensely destructive, but as a one-and-done event it was not as demographically significant as the wars that plagued Europe from the 16th-19th centuries (and the sudden end of the war created the Baby Boom). Wars since then have been very thin on conscripts indeed, especially in the Anglosphere.