Europe submits voluntarily

[LordKiran]

If it's natural for fashions to change then why the big hubbub about changing fashion trends in Europe being informed by foreign cultures?

Hubbub ? There's no hubbub

Well alright!

 

[angelo]

As were a vast majority of Catholic countries 100 or 150 years ago. It didn't lead to America becoming such because of Catholic immigration!
Actual historical experience shows us that "a regression toward what US was like 150 years ago, and very probably far beyond that point" is an unlikely consequence of migration. And yet you prefer to ignore the evidence and keep going on about how this obviously has to be so because it seemed logical in your head.

Also they didn't just become shitholes because "Teh Izlam!" These things happened for a reason for which The US and GB are ultimately complicit and now we get to live with the consequences as do many people who actually live there.

Really if you need someone to blame, I would just as soon blame Eisenhower for setting the ball rolling post-WW2, and then after that comes the people who proceeded him, and then the people who proceeded them, onward unto the modern day. But then I guess that doesn't fit into a nifty hashtag so who cares?!

Er. no.. all these countries became shitholes when Islam spreaded out from Saudi Arabia long before the US existed!

 

[Jokodo]

As were a vast majority of Catholic countries 100 or 150 years ago. It didn't lead to America becoming such because of Catholic immigration!
Actual historical experience shows us that "a regression toward what US was like 150 years ago, and very probably far beyond that point" is an unlikely consequence of migration. And yet you prefer to ignore the evidence and keep going on about how this obviously has to be so because it seemed logical in your head.

Also they didn't just become shitholes because "Teh Izlam!" These things happened for a reason for which The US and GB are ultimately complicit and now we get to live with the consequences as do many people who actually live there.

Really if you need someone to blame, I would just as soon blame Eisenhower for setting the ball rolling post-WW2, and then after that comes the people who proceeded him, and then the people who proceeded them, onward unto the modern day. But then I guess that doesn't fit into a nifty hashtag so who cares?!

Er. no.. all these countries became shitholes when Islam spreaded out from Saudi Arabia long before the US existed!

Your grasp of history tenuous.

 

[Vork]

You appear to be mistaking your cultural idiosyncrasies for universal and fundamental truths.

Female breasts are seen in a different way in the dominant monotheistic traditions. But that's no more a reason to cover them than Islam is a reason to cover women's hair.

Tell that to the New Guineans or Pacific Islanders who think that covering their breasts is disrespectful (and who don't find the sight of bare breasts particularly sexually arousing).

And as it happens, women can already walk around, or swim, in very little clothing. So it's not much of a real inconvenience to them. If anyone objects, it's more of an in principle, "men can go around without a top on so why can't women?", rather than it actually being a genuine burden on women that they wear a bikini rather than go topless.

No, it's just what you are used to, so you think it's normal to the point of being a universal truth.

Just as you might feel about the burka if you were an Arab peasant.

Modern western men are aroused by exposed breasts because they are kept hidden and taboo. Just as exposed ankles were in the 19th Century.

How you could get that out of my post, I have no idea. I didn't say it was a "fundamental" truth at all. I said precisely that such a thing could be questioned.

But that there is a cultural element to it, I don't think it automatically follows that the cultural rule is bad and oppressive. Yes breasts could be seen in a different way, but they don't happen to be at this time. Female breasts are more sexualized than the male chest, regardless of whether it's just purely cultural, or there is some biological basis to it being more sexualized. It's a fact about our culture that we take into account. Hypothetically we could try to remove the "taboo", but that may be more difficult and troublesome than some might think.

And given that it's a relatively small detail anyway, and not a serious real-world oppression that utterly changes your life, it's nothing like the burka as far as I can see.

Female bodies are more sexualized. That gives women both advantages and disadvantages; but really having to slightly cover the breasts barely even falls into the "disadvantage" category.

 

[Vork]

BTW, you know one group of people that really refuses to integrate into a secularised society?

That would be the Slovaks

They've shared a country with the Czechs, possibly the most secular nation on the planet, for 70 years. In Czechia, the traditionally dominant Catholic Church today claims a membership of about 10% of the population, though this maybe an exaggeration even. Minority religions included, no more than 10-15% of the population are associated with any kind of organised religion. When asked whether they believe in God, two thirds will say no.

And the Slovaks, did they adapt and integrate? No, after three generations as a minority in Czechoslovakia, over 80% are still members of a recognised religious group (mostly Roman Catholics, but with sizable Greek Catholic and Protestant minorities). That's one of the highest numbers in Central Europe, along with Poland, Croatia, and Italy, and well ahead not only of Czechia but also of Germany, Austria, or Hungary.

I dare you to find one example of a Muslim minority or immigrant group with a similarly large gap in religiosity compared to the local majority population, after a similar amount of time!

(No, I'm not proposing Slovak bans or any such thing. It's called a reductio ad absurdum.)

Imo, that would indeed justify a ban on anymore Slovak immigration *if* the nature of Slovak religion were sufficiently troublesome.

The issue is not just "Immigrant group X is holding onto their culture over multiple generations", it's, "What is their subculture like?", "Does it cause us problems?".

It may be that the Slovak subculture is harmless. But it could also hypothetically be very damaging. That seems like the more important issue over the exact percentages that hold to it.

But anyway, I think you have given a good example that Muslims aren't necessarily going to integrate over the longer term. (Even if they do a better job of it than the Slovak population in terms of percentage difference being religious.)

 

[bilby]

You appear to be mistaking your cultural idiosyncrasies for universal and fundamental truths.

Female breasts are seen in a different way in the dominant monotheistic traditions. But that's no more a reason to cover them than Islam is a reason to cover women's hair.

Tell that to the New Guineans or Pacific Islanders who think that covering their breasts is disrespectful (and who don't find the sight of bare breasts particularly sexually arousing).

And as it happens, women can already walk around, or swim, in very little clothing. So it's not much of a real inconvenience to them. If anyone objects, it's more of an in principle, "men can go around without a top on so why can't women?", rather than it actually being a genuine burden on women that they wear a bikini rather than go topless.

No, it's just what you are used to, so you think it's normal to the point of being a universal truth.

Just as you might feel about the burka if you were an Arab peasant.

Modern western men are aroused by exposed breasts because they are kept hidden and taboo. Just as exposed ankles were in the 19th Century.

How you could get that out of my post, I have no idea. I didn't say it was a "fundamental" truth at all. I said precisely that such a thing could be questioned.

But that there is a cultural element to it, I don't think it automatically follows that the cultural rule is bad and oppressive. Yes breasts could be seen in a different way, but they don't happen to be at this time. Female breasts are more sexualized than the male chest, regardless of whether it's just purely cultural, or there is some biological basis to it being more sexualized. It's a fact about our culture that we take into account. Hypothetically we could try to remove the "taboo", but that may be more difficult and troublesome than some might think.

And given that it's a relatively small detail anyway, and not a serious real-world oppression that utterly changes your life, it's nothing like the burka as far as I can see.

Female bodies are more sexualized. That gives women both advantages and disadvantages; but really having to slightly cover the breasts barely even falls into the "disadvantage" category.

You really struggle to consider other perspectives than you own, don't you?

What's all this 'our culture' bullshit? Why do you assume that you and I share a culture?

And even if we did, why would you assume that it was somehow more 'correct' than other cultures?

Female breasts are not sexualised because of any extra-cultural reality; whether or not they are considered sexual characteristics at all is entirely a result of the culture in which we are raised.

"At this time" should, at the very least, read "at this time in my location".

But then you need to consider and address why anyone should care about your time and location.

I am not suggesting that it is bad or oppressive. Just that it is pathetically parochial.

 

[Vork]

bilby, you completely misrepresented my earlier post, and gave a fantasy reply pretending I had said nearly the exact opposite of what I actually said!

I'm talking about Western culture. My point didn't depend on you being from the West and sharing that culture. It also didn't depend on its view of female breasts being "more correct" than a different cultural view. You can say that X is a fact about our own culture, and that we therefore take it into account, even recognising that we could think differently in a different culture and without worrying who "has it correct" or whatever.

As for "'at this time' should at the very least read 'at this time in my location'", I considered that obvious from the context of what I was saying, and I didn't think I needed to spell it out.

Why should anyone care about my time and location?-- those making the rules in my time and location, should care about the culture in my time and location. I didn't say anyone living in a different place, thousands of years in the future, should worry about our view of breasts! But it's reasonable that our own rule makers take it into account.

 

[angelo]

Er. no.. all these countries became shitholes when Islam spreaded out from Saudi Arabia long before the US existed!

Your grasp of history tenuous.

Why would you think that most shithole countries with Muslim majorities exist because of perceived American policies?

 

[Jokodo]

Er. no.. all these countries became shitholes when Islam spreaded out from Saudi Arabia long before the US existed!

Your grasp of history tenuous.

Why would you think that most shithole countries with Muslim majorities exist because of perceived American policies?

I didn't say that.

Why would you think though, that they "became shitholes when Islam spreaded (sic!) out"?

You do realise that in the 7th/8th century, by todays standards, every single country was a shithole by todays standards, Muslim or not; that in the 13th century still, every single country was a shithole by todays standards, Muslim or not, though many of the least shithole-ly shitholes were Muslim countries. That pretty much well into the 19th century, every single country in the world was a shithole by todays standards.

So it's logically impossible that they "became shitholes" through to Islam when being a shithole was the default at the time.

 

[angelo]

Why would you think that most shithole countries with Muslim majorities exist because of perceived American policies?

I didn't say that.

Why would you think though, that they "became shitholes when Islam spreaded (sic!) out"?

You do realise that in the 7th/8th century, by todays standards, every single country was a shithole by todays standards, Muslim or not; that in the 13th century still, every single country was a shithole by todays standards, Muslim or not, though many of the least shithole-ly shitholes were Muslim countries. That pretty much well into the 19th century, every single country in the world was a shithole by todays standards.

So it's logically impossible that they "became shitholes" through to Islam when being a shithole was the default at the time.

Ah so, and exactly how many muzzle majority countries today are rated as first world? Don't mention Turkey because that's heading at a rate of knots towards shitholes because of Erdogan..

 

[ruby sparks]

Ah so, and exactly how many muzzle majority countries today are rated as first world? Don't mention Turkey because that's heading at a rate of knots towards shitholes because of Erdogan..

Being '1st World' is a wonderful privilege. In the case of many European countries, it's arguably a lot to do with having plundered half the world to get rich and meddling in the politics, economies and national boundaries of countries now considered not 1st world. In the case of many colonial countries it came about partly as a result of wiping out the existing natives. In the case of most western countries it's a case of ongoing exploitative capitalism and/or exporting war.

Just sayin'.

Imo, your views are extremely bigoted. That doesn't mean I don't partly agree with you on the general point about it arguably being reasonable to restrict immigration, perhaps especially from certain cultures, including muslim ones.

 

[LordKiran]

How you could get that out of my post, I have no idea. I didn't say it was a "fundamental" truth at all. I said precisely that such a thing could be questioned.

But that there is a cultural element to it, I don't think it automatically follows that the cultural rule is bad and oppressive. Yes breasts could be seen in a different way, but they don't happen to be at this time. Female breasts are more sexualized than the male chest, regardless of whether it's just purely cultural, or there is some biological basis to it being more sexualized. It's a fact about our culture that we take into account. Hypothetically we could try to remove the "taboo", but that may be more difficult and troublesome than some might think.

And given that it's a relatively small detail anyway, and not a serious real-world oppression that utterly changes your life, it's nothing like the burka as far as I can see.

Female bodies are more sexualized. That gives women both advantages and disadvantages; but really having to slightly cover the breasts barely even falls into the "disadvantage" category.

You really struggle to consider other perspectives than you own, don't you?

What's all this 'our culture' bullshit? Why do you assume that you and I share a culture?

And even if we did, why would you assume that it was somehow more 'correct' than other cultures?

Female breasts are not sexualised because of any extra-cultural reality; whether or not they are considered sexual characteristics at all is entirely a result of the culture in which we are raised.

"At this time" should, at the very least, read "at this time in my location".

But then you need to consider and address why anyone should care about your time and location.

I am not suggesting that it is bad or oppressive. Just that it is pathetically parochial.

You know Jordan Peterson's statements on identity politics seem pretty apt right now. Why assume two americans share a culture, nevermind two people from different countries? JP states that the individual is the ultimate minority since there's only ever one you. Well what happens if I don't just consider myself an American? What if I consider myself a Texan or Californian? What if I consider myself a San Franciscan? Or what if my culture is limited to just the people on my block that I interact with on a daily basis? How can we reasonably say that I share the same culture as someone who lives a thousand miles away just because we live in the same national polity?

 

[Hermit]

Had someone worn a bikini at a public bath or the beach in the 1870, they would not have been arrested? Dream on..

Not possible. As I pointed out earlier, the bikini had not been invented. Fashions change. Now we have the thing bikini swimwear.

Of course it's not possible, but had someone worn a bikini at a public bath or the beach in the 1870, they would certainly have been arrested.

One day someone will enlighten you about conditional sentences.

Anyway, after the bikini was invented women were arrested for wearing them and charged with indecency. This happened to Yvonne Freedman and Jean Parker in 1951 at Bondi Beach, for example.

 

[TSwizzle]

Of course it's not possible, but had someone worn a bikini at a public bath or the beach in the 1870, they would certainly have been arrested.

Oh FFS, and if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

 

[Bomb#20]

Sorry for the delay -- I've been away from my computer for weeks.

I spent a lot of time on this response. ...

The discussion is about your claim "Germany needs immigration to avoid the fate of Japan". The notion that overcrowding is not relevant to the discussion is insane. Too much immigration will give Germany the fate of Japan.

I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you are a Malthusian. That you believe that the population is increasing exponentially and that the production of food can only increase linearly.

My first reaction was to stop reading right there. There is little point in trying to reason with you, because although you spent a lot of time on your response, you didn't spend that time doing anything intelligent. You spent it making up a fantasy opponent, because you'd evidently rather argue against your own ideology's self-congratulatory cartoon of the opposition than against a real person. You should go start a thread of your own, where you can write your two-week screeds without interference from pesky other people's thoughts. Oh well, one last try...

Which is to say, no, I am not a Malthusian. And you didn't have a reason to think I was. You just like making up garbage about your opponents. You've done it to many people before; you've done it to me many times before; and you'll inevitably do it to me many times again before you find something better to do with your life. Stop acting like a jerk.

Malthus was wrong. He was wrong because he didn't anticipate the invention of the birth control pill. The population is increasing exponentially, but that's temporary. Food is also increasing exponentially. That too is temporary. Whether the exponential growth will end with more or less food per person than today is something we don't know yet.

Your statement above seems to indicate that you believe that the problem is one of over crowding. That you believe we should take this opportunity to let the population decrease.

"the problem"?!? There are many problems. Some countries have overcrowding problems and some do not. I have just returned from my first trip to Japan. I have now personally experienced a subway so crowded that the riders who couldn't score overhead handles were kept on their feet only by the pressure from the bodies of those of us lucky enough to reach one. Japan has an overcrowding problem. Countries wishing to avoid the fate of Japan need to stop relying on the Ponzi scheme of maintaining their social welfare systems by adding ever more workers sooner in demographic terms than Japan did. Since Japan's fertility is now below replacement, Japan should take this opportunity to let the population decrease. Japan, not "we"! Whether other countries should do likewise depends on local conditions. When you wrote "Germany needs immigration to avoid the fate of Japan" you were wrong. Germany needs immigration limits to avoid the fate of Japan. Ounce of prevention/pound of cure.

Once again, the problem of a fertility rate below replacement is the opposite of over crowding.

Which is to say, a low derivative of a function is the opposite of a high value of that function. For the love of god learn some bloody calculus.

It is a problem of too few people, not too many. Without immigration both the US and Germany are facing a slowly declining population. The same problem, as I said, that Japan is has struggled with for two decades because they allow little immigration.

You have not provided a reason to regard a slowly declining population as a problem. All you've done is repeat a bunch of pseudomath that Jokodo has already ably refuted, so there's no need for me to say any more on that topic.

If this is not the argument that you are trying to make you must tell us why we shouldn't just increase our immigration to maintain a constant population.

Um, because our population is rising, duh! We're adding a million people a year! Increasing immigration will not maintain a constant population! Never mind calculus, learn some bloody arithmetic!

Your Malthusian obsession with over population and your xenophobia seem to be combining to prevent you from seeing that my argument is about simple math.

I'm neither Malthusian nor xenophobic. I personally worked on the immigration cases of several third-worlders. Stop making up garbage about your opponents. People are not required to be the storybook villains from the narrative of your personal hero's quest in order to notice and point it out when you make stupid arguments.

Once again, here it is. Tell me which one of these statements in the logic train below that you don't understand or you believe is wrong. Hopefully you will agree with these and we can move on.

1. Without immigration a birth rate below the replacement rate means that the ratio of retirees to workers will increase over time.
2. When the ratio of retirees to workers increases it is harder for the fewer number of workers to support the retirees.
3. The further the birth rate goes below the replacement rate, the faster the ratio of retirees to workers will increase.
4. Increasing the number of working age immigrants we let into the country will reduce the retiree to worker ratio.

The second one is obviously wrong. It goes against the entirety of first-world experience. You are reasoning as though we were medieval peasants who could look forward to nothing but the same dreary lives as our parents and their parents. As more and more of the work is done by machines, it gets easier and easier for people to do just about everything except lose weight. Duh!

If you have any more questions along those lines, ask Jokodo. He's more patient with idiocy than I am.

The fertility rate in Israel is the highest in the developed world at 3.1, compared to an average of 1.7 in the OECD countries. And it is due entirely to the birth rate of the haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews. ... This means that the haredim will double their current population in about seven years. As the haredim increase the 3.1 birth rate of Israel will increase.

But there isn't anything to this that is not told to us by the birth rate overall and its growth. It doesn't matter if the growth of the birth rate is in a subculture or evenly distributed across the population.

That's more pseudomath. You don't have a reason to believe what you just wrote is true.

I don't understand what point you are trying to make with this diversion into this discussion of subcultures.

Then ask Jokodo to explain it to you. He seems to have more success than me at getting mathematical points through your skull.

I especially am on pins and needles to hear your ideas on lowering the mortality age. Assisted suicide coupled with a ban on anti-depression meds for seniors?

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I did not advocate lowering the mortality age and you don't have a reason to think I did.

I don't think that you can affect any of the three, especially when you explain that the reason to do it is to soothe your xenophobia.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I'm not a xenophobe and you don't have a reason to think I am.

You seem to rely on the hope that things will get better and that the US wouldn't follow every other developed country into a lower than replacement fertility rate.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I'm not relying on that and you don't have a reason to think I am.

... then genes for wanting babies whether you're being pressured or not will just become more prevalent.

This approaches babbling. I need some more explanation before I can accept the "Theory of Yearning Genes."

That's a counterargument on a level with what comes out of creationists' mouths. Learn some biology. "Genes for wanting babies" is no more a theory of yearning genes than "Genes for being tall" is a theory of tall DNA molecules. A "gene for X" simply means a DNA variant at a particular location that by some (usually very indirect) mechanism causes the organism to be more likely to have feature X. Practically any difference of any organism from the average can have been made more or less likely by some genetic difference?

Okay, I was being more than a little flippant, but this is a pretty serious stretch of an argument that you are making. Women definitely are programmed to have a baby but it is ridiculous to say that enough of them will come to their senses at some future date and have the three or more babies required to raise the country's overall birth rate.

I didn't say a word about "come to their senses". There's nothing unsensible about not wanting three babies. Human interests simply don't align with gene fitness. That doesn't change the fact that in the end either the species goes extinct or the genes win.

The birth rate is what it is right now because the vast majority of women satisfy their maternal instinct by having one or two children. What you are saying is that you hope that this changes at some time in the future but you seem to have no idea how that would happen, at least that you are willing to share.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I didn't say a word about what I hoped for and you don't have a reason to think I did. As for how it would happen, that's painfully obvious. It's called "natural selection". Look it up.

That's the case only as long as people don't use sex-ratio-influencing technologies. For instance, in China it would take more than 2.1 babies per woman to prevent future population decreases, due to all the preferential aborting of female fetuses there.

You are quite right, any sexual preference technology could make the problem worse requiring even more immigration to maintain the population constant.

China does not require more immigration. China requires a readjustment of its anti-women culture.

The only question remaining is why you think that this fact helps your argument.

It helps my argument because if women are in fact happiest having 1.5 children each, and if that preference in fact stays constant in the long term, then sex selection to birth half a boy per girl is the optimum sustainable ratio for a population. Preserving a one-to-one ratio and making up the difference by having countries where women have more babies than they're happy having is blatantly suboptimal.

That is required to determine how much immigration is needed, not what we are talking about here, whether immigration is a valid measure to correct for a declining fertility rate. You are arguing that it isn't, I am arguing that it is.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I didn't say a word about what measures are valid and you don't have a reason to think I did. What I said was invalid was your argument. If a declining fertility rate is somehow incorrect then of course immigration is a valid measure to "correct" for it. But that doesn't imply it's the best measure to "correct" for it; and you haven't shown declining fertility is in need of being "corrected" for.

A declining population is a problem as I repeatedly said because it reduces growth in the economy and leaves fewer workers to pay the taxes to support the retirees. Your repeated efforts to propose alternatives to immigration suggests that you understand that it is a problem. If you don't think that declining or negative economic growth and a declining tax base to support Social Security aren't problems then (1) why bother to offer alternatives to immigration and (2) why don't you just explain why these aren't problems.

I and the Christian Democrats in Germany are saying that these are serious problems. You seem to be trying to have it both ways.

Good grief, are you somehow under the impression that when you make an argument that contains two errors, anyone who spots them is required to decide which error he prefers to point out, and then politely go along with the fiction that the rest of your argument is perfectly valid? You made an argument that was wrong for two different reasons, so I told you about both of them. Deal with it.

You are saying that you won't accept immigration in any event.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I said nothing of the sort and you don't have a reason to think I did. I'm pro-immigration.

It is a standard mantra of open-borders ideology that their opponents are anti-immigration, but that's just a libel designed to make believers feel pleasantly superior. You are believing your own side's self-congratulatory propaganda. Anti-open-borders is not anti-immigration. Anti-illegal-immigration is not anti-immigration. Immigration affects both the would-be migrant and the people of the receiving country. When it's a mutually voluntary deal it can be expected to be a mutually beneficial deal. But if it's not mutually voluntary then there's nothing keeping it mutually beneficial. You might as well accuse me of being anti-immigration because I'm against kidnapping foreign women and bringing them here to put out in American brothels.

The analogy to ordinary trade is pretty accurate. You are doing the equivalent of claiming that since I'm against letting the Coca Cola Corporation sell soda pop to people who refuse to buy it, that means I won't accept capitalism.

This is xenophobia, the irrational fear of foreigners. This is incongruent in the US where the vast majority of the people in the country got here through immigration through the generations.

"The vast majority"?!? Newsflash: 100% of the people. American Indians are the descendants of immigrants every bit as much as the rest of us.

The number of retirees will always be greater than the number of workers and will be getting worse because the number of retirees is dependent on the life expectancy of adults, which should be increasing. However, if you get your way and people are forced to work well into their their seventies and eventually into their eighties the life expectancy of adults would start to drop.

That's yet more pseudomath. There is no reason to think continuous increases in retirement age will cause reduced life expectancy.

Please, what I said was that if the retirement age stays the same, the problem will get worse. You recommended that we keep advancing the retirement age to avoid having to increase immigration. Those of us who don't have an irrational fear of foreigners, i.e. who aren't xenophobes, believe that this is ridiculous.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I recommended it to avoid having to add people, without distinction between immigration and birthrate increases. It didn't have anything to do with xenophobia and you don't have a reason to think it did.

There's no reason the retirement age should stay the same. There's nothing magic about 65. It was only picked because in the 1930s it made actuarial sense for SS. Life expectancy is increasing because we're getting better at keeping old people healthy. There's no reason to assume that many of the same scientific advances that keep people alive longer won't simultaneously keep people healthy enough to work longer.

Why would you imagine that a birth rate of 2.05 instead of 2.1 wouldn't be compensated for by some specific retirement age higher than 66, say, 67? And an even lower birth rate, say, 1.9, wouldn't be compensated for by some even higher specific retirement age, say, 70? Where are you getting the notion that if it's 2.09 then we'll have to continuously crank the retirement age higher and higher until nobody gets to retire?

Not too surprisingly this isn't what I said.

Oh please. That is exactly what you said. Post #6541.

"Yes, working past retirement is a solution for a lower birth rate but it only is a stop gap, measure, as long as the birth rate stays below the replacement rate the problem will keep getting worse, requiring people to work even longer past a common retirement age. Finally it will be work until you die, and even then it will continue to get worse."
​

Your words.

Of course, you can compensate for a lower fertility rate by increasing the retirement age. You could also do it by increasing the work week beyond 40 hours or doing away with holidays and vacations or by reintroducing child labor or slavery. But these are ridiculous things to do because you are afraid of foreigners. Irrationally afraid of foreigners. Except from Norway, I assume.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. Everything I said applies equally to all the tedious proposals to artificially encourage women to have more babies. It didn't have anything to do with xenophobia and you don't have a reason to think it did. If you want to accuse me of irrational fear of Ponzi schemes, feel free to show that they're rational.

There's nothing ridiculous about people working to a higher age when they're going to live to a higher age. It's just common sense. In 1935, US life expectancy was 61. If 1935 life expectancy had been 78 there is no way we would have enacted retirement at 65. The proposal would have been laughed to scorn.

If the fertility rate keeps dropping and you are compensating for it by forcing people to work longer there comes a point when you have a retirement age that exceeds the morbidity age.

That goes beyond pseudomath. Now you're saying stuff that's not even wrong. "Morbidity age" is a nonsense phrase.

If what you meant was "life expectancy", there's nothing unreasonable about a retirement age that exceeds life expectancy. Not only does it not mean "work until you die", it is exactly how Social Security was designed to operate in the first place!

Once again, do you want to be forced to work until you die?

If the birth rate reaches zero, somebody will have to work until he dies. Shy of that, it won't be necessary; and if you still don't see why not, get Jokodo to explain it to you.

Will your great grandchildren?

If I were going to have any, I would certainly hope they'd be able to work until I die. 90-year retirements don't hold much appeal to me. YMMV.

You are the one who said that I needed a neoliberal economist from the University of Chicago to convince you that adding people to a population increases the number of people in the population. Why you need this is a question best left up to you. I don't see it.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I said nothing of the sort and you don't have a reason to think I did. What I invited you to have a neoliberal economist convince me of was your contention that Germany needs immigrants because gains from automation go to profits.

This from a person who claims that adding people won't increase a population.
...
Once again, I was reacting to your suggestion that I need a neoliberal economist to convince you of the simple fact above.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I said nothing of the sort and you don't have a reason to think I did.

I don't have a great deal of respect for neoliberals and I wouldn't change my opinion even if they backed me by saying that indeed, adding people to any population increases the number of people in that population.

I gave an example of a incompetent policy that they support, that really defines them, supply side economics, that the way to make everybody better off is to give all of the growth from the economy to the rich. They have been saying this for fifty years

If that's true then you should have no difficulty producing a quotation from them saying this. Failing that, stop making up garbage about your opponents. I do not believe they said anything of the sort and I do not believe you have a reason to think they did. Feel free to score a major rhetorical point by proving me wrong, by quoting them.

You read this and instead of arguing that the neoliberals are right and giving evidence to support it, you argued that I had to be wrong because I am incompetent.

Why would it be my job to argue that the neoliberals are right? Where the heck did I say the neoliberals are right? Whether they're right is beside the point.

The point is, I have no reason to believe you when you attribute positions to them. The fact is, you are incompetent. The fact is, you misrepresent opponents' words and positions, constantly. It's what you do. It's who you are. Look how many times you did it to me in just one post! You are an unreliable witness. For you to dispute this, or even to doubt it in your own mind, would be laughable. The evidence against you is overwhelming and it's on full public display right here in this thread.

I gave you an example of their theory, and instead of pointing out how I messed up their theory you ducked specifics and made a leap to the generalization that I am incompetent on the whole subject of economics.

Why on earth would I point out how you messed up their theory with specifics? I don't know their theory. I don't understand economics well enough to evaluate their theory. So what? The problem isn't that I'm familiar with their theory and noticed a discrepancy between it and what you said. The problem is that what you said their theory was didn't ring true. What you said they said just aren't the sorts of things people normally say. They're the sorts of things people normally claim their enemies say.

Do you know what a "tin ear" is? The problem is that you quite obviously have a tin ear for other people's ideas. I do not have a tin ear. I can generally tell when an attributed statement is plausible and when it isn't.

I suggest that you look up the term "ad hominem attack" and commit it to memory. It doesn't bother me in the least, because it is the last refuge of many who are losing an argument. But many people consider it to be impolite.

I suggest you look it up. What you wrote about me -- "I also know that you show no interest in understanding economics any better than you already do." -- is an ad hominem attack. Inviting my opponent to quote a reputable economist to back up his contentions does not qualify as an ad hominem attack.

You accused me in that thread of building a strawman to tear down.

Quote me.

I didn't accuse you of building a strawman to tear down, because I didn't see you build a strawmen to tear down. A strawman is a deliberate misrepresentation of an opponent's position or argument. It's the sort of thing Underseer does. You don't appear to misrepresent opponents deliberately. You appear to do it stupidly, or carelessly, or both. For an example, see above, when you just accused me of claiming that adding people won't increase a population. It never happened. You made it up. But I have no reason to doubt that you really believed it was true when you said it. It didn't instantly strike you as implausible, because you have that stupid tin ear. And you didn't go look for where you thought you remembered me saying it before you posted the accusation, because you are careless. Literally careless: you just don't care. You're willing to spend 15 days writing an essay expounding on your own positions, but you aren't willing to spend 15 minutes fact-checking your claims about your opponents' positions. Finding out you made up garbage about your opponents apparently doesn't make you feel ashamed of yourself. It ought to.

You have accused me of being too incompetent in economics to discuss it. You have the perfect opportunity to go back to this thread and to expose my incompetence for all to see. It is here, titled "Where I expose my ignorance of elemental economics.

I pointed out errors in your presentation of neoclassical economics. My posts in that thread can stand on their own; I don't feel a need to revisit the topic; and anyone who cares can go read them. If you disagree with what I wrote there and wish to challenge any of it, feel free to necromance the thread.

The founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, had a theory about wishing. He said that the economy could be changed by wishing, that all we have to do is to treat the economy as if it was the way that we wished it to be, and that it will behave for us as if it is the way that we wish it to be.

I don't believe you. Based on your track record, the fact that you say Friedman said those words does not give me any grounds to elevate my estimate of the probability that he said them. Feel free to provide a link, backing up your claim that he said that. But failing that, I'll take the fact that you put such implausible words in your opponent's mouth as telling me a great deal about the worth of your words, and nothing at all about the worth of Friedman's.

A Friedman fan boy, yes?

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. A Friedman fan boy, no, and you have no reason to think I am one. I know little about Friedman, but I know quite a bit about you. You have a tin ear.

I doubt that you would accept any source that I gave you considering your low opinion of my knowledge, so I will let you pick out a reference that you trust.

Oh for the love of god. Who do you think you are to assign me to do your homework for you? Post for us a link to the Friedman paper you have in mind, pointing out where he says what you claim he said, or don't. No skin off my nose either way. But don't kid yourself that it's my job to hunt down evidence for your extraordinary claims.

He also proposed the even more ridiculous idea that the more assumptions that had to be made about a proposed idea in economics, the closer the idea is to being a fundamental law of economics.

Also feel free to post for us a link to a Friedman paper where he says that, or don't, tin-ear-man.

In any event, if your point is to denounce neoliberalism, there are better threads for it than this. So let us presume for the sake of argument that Chicago School economics is completely wrong. How does this help show immigration is needed? How does the hypothetical failure of the neoclassical synthesis help show that eight workers and five hundred machines had an easier time supporting a retiree than two workers and five thousand machines will have?

Automation again. The replacement of workers by machines can't do anything but to make the problem worse.

Workers directly pay one half of the payroll tax and the number of workers and how much they earn determines how much the employer pays in the other half of the payroll tax. If you decrease the number of workers you decrease the amount of payroll taxes paid. There is no tax on the machines, no tax on the profits generated by the machines that replace the workers that supports Social Security and Medicare.

You say that as though it's a law of nature. If at some point the payroll tax stops being a financially viable way to pay for Social Security and Medicare, then Congress will finance them by income tax or some other tax long before Congress ever lets them go broke. Duh!

Once again you are the one who asked me to provide you with a University of Chicago economist who would support my wild theory that if you add people to a population, that the population gets larger. I didn't believe that I had to for such a simple concept, but you are you and there is where we sit, disagreeing about simple math.

Once again, stop making up garbage about your opponents. You should be ashamed of yourself, for having the personal character flaw of being willing to spend more time repeating your own libels than you're willing to spend fact-checking them.

Most, including the object of your affection Milton Friedman, are proposing to change the economy by removing the government control over it, that an organic free market will spring forth then, a free market that self-regulates.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. He is not the object of my affection and you have no reason to think he is.

Bomb#20 is not right that the only input that puts value into a product or a commodity is labor, which is what most people think of when they champion the labor theory of value.

Stop making up garbage about your opponents. I have never championed the labor theory of value in any form, and I have never claimed or implied that labor is what puts value into a product or commodity, and you don't have a reason to think I did. The labor theory of value is dead wrong, and I have said so many times.

Moreover, your own false accusations aren't even mutually consistent. On what planet would Milton Friedman be the object of affection of an LTV supporter? Do you even read your own posts?

 

[angelo]

Ah so, and exactly how many muzzle majority countries today are rated as first world? Don't mention Turkey because that's heading at a rate of knots towards shitholes because of Erdogan..

Being '1st World' is a wonderful privilege. In the case of many European countries, it's arguably a lot to do with having plundered half the world to get rich and meddling in the politics, economies and national boundaries of countries now considered not 1st world. In the case of many colonial countries it came about partly as a result of wiping out the existing natives. In the case of most western countries it's a case of ongoing exploitative capitalism and/or exporting war.

Just sayin'.

Imo, your views are extremely bigoted. That doesn't mean I don't partly agree with you on the general point about it arguably being reasonable to restrict immigration, perhaps especially from certain cultures, including muslim ones.

Bullshit. The West if anything has brought civilisation and Western values and modernity to backward civilisations that would most probably still be living as head hunters and liv9ng in caves. Capitalism may not be perfect, but beats the alternative hands down.
May I present just one example- Zimbabwe. The bread basket of Africa at one time to basket case today. South Africa is heading down the same road.
Getting back to the subject of this thread though, the present and past instability in muzzle dominant countries is the inherent instability of Islam, especially when it comes to Shi-it's and Sunni factions. This has nothing at all to do with capitalism or Western democracies in the least. Letting these warring factions into Western Europe, or any Western nation is committing suicide by a thousand cuts.

 

[Hermit]

Of course it's not possible, but had someone worn a bikini at a public bath or the beach in the 1870, they would certainly have been arrested.

Oh FFS, and if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

Undoubtedly. And if there were bikinis around in the 1870s, their wearers would have been arrested. No doubt about it.

 

[Jokodo]

Then ask Jokodo to explain it to you. He seems to have more success than me at getting mathematical points through your skull.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but he hasn't reacted to my last post in this subdiscussion either.
At any rate, if this is so, it may be because I'm worse at math than you are, so I don't scare him with calculus but rather derive the same result with explicitly iterative calculations - because that's easier for myself too.

 

[Jokodo]

Um, because our population is rising, duh! We're adding a million people a year! Increasing immigration will not maintain a constant population! Never mind calculus, learn some bloody arithmetic!

Last time I checked, the US had a population growth of 0.7%. According to my version of arithmetic, that means it's adding over 2 million people a year

On a more serious note: I'm going to try to sketch the argument in abstract terms.

Societal prosperity (or more specifically amount of commodities* available per capita) depends on two things, and two things only*: productive capacity and its proportion to the consumer base, and the priorities of those in control of production.

A textbook example for low prosperity almost entirely owed to the first factor would be neolithic farmers, who hardly spent any of their time producing things beyond the goods for their immediate consumption and yet didn't live in luxury by any stretch.

A textbook example for low prosperity almost entirely owed to the last factor is the war economy during WWII in Britain, Germany, or most of all the Soviet Union: As much as was reasonably possible of society's productive capacity was diverted away from the production of consumer goods (direct or indirect) and directed towards the arms race. A peace-time economy in which a large and growing fraction of each company's revenues goes towards financing legal battles and ad wars with their competitors, and on a societal level to re-inventing things that have already been invented but are copyrighted, could also qualify for the second type. Thus one where a large fraction of the productive capacity is spent on metaphorical arms races between private entities rather than in primary production. I prefer to remain agnostic, at this point, as to whether and to what extent we live in such a society.

There's thus in principle three strategies to increase prosperity, though I'll henceforth only talk about (1) and (3):
1) Increase productive capacity
2) Decrease the consumer base
3) Shift the priorities of those in control of production

Within each strategy, there's some substrategies:
1a) Increase productivity through the level of automation
1b) Increase the number of workers through encouraging higher birth rates
1c) Increase the number of workers through encouraging female workforce integration
1d) Increase the number of workers through encouraging immigration of young able-bodied people
1e) Increase productivity through better education
1f) Make sure people stay able-bodied longer

2a) Kill surplus people
2b) Convince people that they don't need as much stuff

3a) Create appropriate incentives
3b) Take public control of the means of production

SimpleDon initially simplified by replacing "productive capacity" with "workforce". When pressed, he indirectly admits that the two are not the same thing but insists that increasing productive capacity by any means other than increasing the workforce will not have the desired effect due to the way the livelihood of those consumers no longer receiving a wage or salary is currently organised, which he thereby implicitly paints as god-given.

When pressed further, he'll say that the real problem isn't actually too small a productive capacity but the priorities that are all wrong because of neoliberalism. Despite this, his proposed fix doesn't touch the priorities at all, it's a fix targeting the first factor alone (that is, increasing productive capacity), and one of the most obsolete ones within that category. Fireplace, meet open window.

It's also a fix with a best before date in the very near future: To the extent that low fertility rates qualify as a problem, they're a "problem" not of Japan, Germany, the US, and a handful of other developed countries alone. They are increasingly a global phenomenon. Already today, a (slight) majority of the world's population live in countries with below-replacement fertility, many of them so-called "third-world countries". Current trends persisting, this majority will be overwhelming in just a few more decades.

If the first world, as per SimpleDon's proposed fix, needs constant immigration of young able-bodied people from the third world, we're going to have to take active measures to artificially keep the fertility rate in the third world high in the very near future.

(Bomb#20 also made the following point in slightly different words.)

So I guess the question to SimpleDon would be: Assuming for the sake of the argument, as you appear to do, that the only handle we have on productive capacities is indeed through the sheer size of the workforce and that we don't have any handle on the priorities: Do you really believe that forcing third world countries to end all programs encouraging female education (at this point, probably the only thing that can revert a globally declining TFR), by bombing them into submission if necessary, is morally preferable to letting healthy adults in Western countries work into their early to mid seventies?



---

* I'm not ignoring gifts of nature, I'm treating them as a constant. To the extent that they're not constant, their availability can be subsumed under productivity though: A planet on which one in three pebblestones in any riverbed is a gold nugget will have a more productive gold mining industry than a planet where it takes expensive equipment and many hours of labour to extract gold from ores with low concentrations. On this planet of ours, running out of easily exploitable deposits of, say, copper translates to a drop in productivity for copper mining and industry that depends on it.

One frequent mistake critics of the Labor Theory of Value make, at least the way I understand it, and I'm neither a Marxian nor any other kind of economist, is to overlook that the LTV presumes a distinctions between goods and commodities (a subset of goods) and between use values (which all goods can have) and exchange values, a property of commodities only. I remain agnostic as to whether you have fallen into that trap. The LTV applies to exchange values, and claims that the average labor input required to produce a good sets the lower limit for a good's exchange value when it becomes a commodity, while its use value sets the higher limit. A good or service that requires labor input in excess of its use value will fail on the market. It can pop up as a short term phenomenon when a company misjudges the market, but it doesn't establish itself as a commodity. Think of the service of painting every individual hair on one's head with black and red longitudinal stripes. Since the effect of this, except under a microscope, is indistinguishable from having your hair submerged in a dark red dye, and since people are known to go to the hairdresser ordering exactly that, the use value is obviously non-zero, and yet there is no market for it.

On the other hand, a good that requires no labor input will also not become a commodity (absent monopolies). Think about oxygen: We'd die within minutes without it, orders of magnitude faster than without food, housing, and in most climates clothing, and yet few of us are willing to pay for oxygen what we pay for those things and the market for it is correspondingly small. Absent monopolies and intellectual property rights (themselves a form of monopolies), the price of commodities, it is claimed, converges towards the lower limit, thus the amount of labor it typically takes to produce a good (or service) including the labor to produce the machinery used in production and to extract the resources to produce the good itself and that machinery, etc.

tl;dr: not every good is a commodity. Your wild banana picked for one's own consumption doesn't fully work as an argument against LTV because LTV only applies to commodities, that is goods with a stable presence in the market.

 

[4321lynx]

Given all the above, do you consider 'labour' as a good or service or commodity? Or are they human beings trying to do their honest or dishonest (sometimes murderous), individual or collective, private or national, even racist, "best" as they see it. And many now realise that the whole economic system is a Ponzi scheme with the devil take the hindmost as the underlying "principle."