Capitalism: the cause of and solution to all life's problems

[Moose-tache]

I'll admit I'm guilty of plenty of wishful thinking regarding economic alternatives to Capitalism. You've probably seen my Pinko Utopian Bloviating in this and other threads. But even I roll my eyes at the notion that returning to subsistence farming is a good idea.

First of all, there is the obvious problem that material wealth will decrease for nearly all levels of society. New clothes, out-of-season vegetables, travel, and book collections would go back to being luxuries. Without economies of scale, tight-knit urban markets, and global trade, you would have a lot less specialization and more expensive goods and services. This also weakens the argument that it would be much more comfortable than medieval subsistence agriculture because we would still have modern technology. A lot of technology relies on modern economics. For example, the existence of antibiotics won't do much good if there is a chronic shortage of trained doctors and well-equiped laboratories, to say nothing of how expensive antibiotics would be in a world where a new shirt costs a day's wages. Similarly dreadful economics would apply to the internet and news media, mechanized farm tools, and government services. I imagine that even with all this, there are people who will see this as a sort of utopian vision. The sort of person who just wants to grow radishes by Walden Pond in peace isn't going to be discouraged by the fact that they can't afford newspapers or tennis shoes. But this is, in my opinion, more dystopian than utopian. I prefer zero-growth models that do not involve dismantling cities and global institutions.

[Nachtswalbe]

The problem with Degrowth is that it’s implementation is vague and can go from simply cutting down on heavy industry and advertisements to the sort of thing Pentti Linkola prefers

Reminds me of this post complaining the British left is “not English” enough, referencing a 50-year old film about a couple LARPing as subsistence farmers: https://mobile.twitter.com/JSMilbank/st ... 3127027712

[MacAnDàil]

Well, sure but support for economic growth, which I would see as its opposite, includes just as general a span of ideas.

[Travis B.]

To me the best approach would be to focus not on degrowth but rather on more intensive urbanization, (re)industrialization (in a more local fashion), and agriculture (also in a more local fashion) to use less land more efficiently and to concentrate production locally, as opposed to the current suburbanization (which is very wasteful of land, and requires heavy use of personal transportation in practice), exporting industry (which results in goods having to be transported long distances in practice), and growing crops far away (which results in food having to be transported long distances to market). Cities are better for the environment than sprawl or rural development, whatever land is used for growing food is land not available to the natural environment (and if it is used less efficiently more of it will necessarily be used), and transporting goods wastes energy and contributes to their carbon footprint.

[Moose-tache]

Unfotrunately, using land more efficiently and concentrating production locally are opposites. If you want to grow rice in France instead of shipping it in from Thailand, you have to use more resources, not less. And industry that repeats itself across the landscape will never compete with industry that concentrates in one area while letting the others decay.

[Nortaneous]

To me the best approach would be to focus not on degrowth but rather on more intensive urbanization

Fertility rates within developed countries are inversely correlated with population density and every developed country reproduces at below replacement rates. More intensive urbanization is the last thing anyone needs. If anything, suburbs are too dense.

[Travis B.]

Unfotrunately, using land more efficiently and concentrating production locally are opposites. If you want to grow rice in France instead of shipping it in from Thailand, you have to use more resources, not less. And industry that repeats itself across the landscape will never compete with industry that concentrates in one area while letting the others decay.

In some cases you don't have a choice, but when you do, it makes sense to bring production as close to its market as possible.

[zompist]

Fertility rates within developed countries are inversely correlated with population density and every developed country reproduces at below replacement rates. More intensive urbanization is the last thing anyone needs. If anything, suburbs are too dense.

There's a lot of post hoc propter hoc going on there.

Fertility rates in the developed world are all over the place, from 1.26 in Spain to 3.04 in Israel. All of those developed countries have cities.

Urbanization doesn't seem to be a strong correlation. France has 1.88 fertility and 81% urbanization; Germany has 1.57 fertility and 78% urbanization. Israel, the high outlier on fertility, has 93% urbanization; the low outlier, Spain, has 80%.

Industrialization and birth control certainly have an effect— when women can control births, they do. So commonly when a country gets more prosperous, births go down.

If a country's been industrialized for a long time, though, other factors are more important... though what they are isn't so obvious. From that table, Australia and the Netherlands have maintained about the same fertility rate for 40 years.

Also, the decade-to-decade comparisons are pretty crazy. E.g. Germany went from 1.39 to 1.57 in the last decade, but that's almost the same as its rate in 1980.

[Nortaneous]

Fertility rates within developed countries are inversely correlated with population density and every developed country reproduces at below replacement rates. More intensive urbanization is the last thing anyone needs. If anything, suburbs are too dense.

There's a lot of post hoc propter hoc going on there.

Fertility rates in the developed world are all over the place, from 1.26 in Spain to 3.04 in Israel. All of those developed countries have cities.

Urbanization doesn't seem to be a strong correlation. France has 1.88 fertility and 81% urbanization; Germany has 1.57 fertility and 78% urbanization. Israel, the high outlier on fertility, has 93% urbanization; the low outlier, Spain, has 80%.

Industrialization and birth control certainly have an effect— when women can control births, they do. So commonly when a country gets more prosperous, births go down.

If a country's been industrialized for a long time, though, other factors are more important... though what they are isn't so obvious. From that table, Australia and the Netherlands have maintained about the same fertility rate for 40 years.

Also, the decade-to-decade comparisons are pretty crazy. E.g. Germany went from 1.39 to 1.57 in the last decade, but that's almost the same as its rate in 1980.

It's possible that the well-accepted negative correlation* is caused by coincidentally correlated factors, and almost certain that whatever causal factors there are can't be captured by a single "urbanization" bit. What does it mean for a place to "have 93% urbanization"? Cross-country comparison also seems inappropriate due to country-specific factors - AFAIK, Israel doesn't have Spain's crippling economic difficulties and Spain doesn't have Israel's large Haredi population. Within-country comparisons show this correlation at least in the US.

(One obvious candidate for a coincidentally correlated factor is delayed progression through life stages. Couple A met at 32 after being in school til 30; couple B got married straight out of high school. Which couple has more kids at 50? But there are plausible causal factors as well - if you live in a one-bedroom sardine can, how many kids do you have room for?)

* See here, from some think tank: "Urbanization – the process through which an increasing proportion of the total population resides in towns and cities – has long been touted by analysts as a main factor in fertility decline."

OTOH, from the conclusion: "More inclusive urban policies, whether or not they actually increase the rate of urbanization, are likely to encourage the sort of urbanization that reduces fertility. Exclusive urban policies (i.e. policies that try to exclude certain groups, particularly low-income migrants, from coming or integrating themselves into the city fabric) are quite likely to contribute to the maintenance of high fertility levels in a country, whether or not they are effective in preventing people from settling in cities." So maybe urbanization isn't objectionable on fertility grounds as long as it's sufficiently exclusive. Or maybe this is think-tankese for "whatever we wanted anyway is good for whatever metric you want to optimize".

[Ares Land]

Who cares if developed countries are below replacement rates? It's not like we have a shortage of human beings these days, is it?

Not that I'm really in favor or against urbanization. The problem is with certain forms of sprawl.
If people want to go live on a mountain or something, excellent. Problem arises when they start tearing apart their surrounding for a strip mall, or when they have to drive two hours a day to get to work.

[Nachtswalbe]

Who cares if developed countries are below replacement rates? It's not like we have a shortage of human beings these days, is it?

Not that I'm really in favor or against urbanization. The problem is with certain forms of sprawl.
If people want to go live on a mountain or something, excellent. Problem arises when they start tearing apart their surrounding for a strip mall, or when they have to drive two hours a day to get to work.

One argument for encouraging people to have kids is that eventually every country will be below replacement rate, and then you won't be able to rely on immigration to make up for increasing ratio of retirees:taxpayers

[Ares Land]

True enough. But it's a long way off: it'll take several generations and I'd say that right now the problem of low birth rates isn't a very pressing one.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I've encountered some idea that it might be owing to environmental contaminants causing sperm count to drop, but I'm not sure if the science is in on that one yet or not. I wouldn't find it particularly surprising if this were the case, however — plastics and teflon seem like very chemically nasty things.

[Ares Land]

Yes, that's true. Sperm counts are indeed lower than they used to be and I think people have more trouble conceiving than they used to.

I think the biggest factor by far is that people are choosing to have fewer children though.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I wouldn't dispute that. I think it isn't impossible the United States could act out something parallel to Japan's "Lost Decade", and socioeconomic anxiety there seems to have triggered all manner of extreme psychological conditions.

[hwhatting]

One argument for encouraging people to have kids is that eventually every country will be below replacement rate, and then you won't be able to rely on immigration to make up for increasing ratio of retirees:taxpayers

As Ares said, low fertility rates worldwide is not an immediate problem. Long term that can be solved by increasing retirement ages and shifting taxation from work income to land, wealth, and capital income.
Decreasing populations will help with the problem of allowing a bigger share of people high material living standards without killing our planetary ecosystem.

[Linguoboy]

As Ares said, low fertility rates worldwide is not an immediate problem. Long term that can be solved by increasing retirement ages and shifting taxation from work income to land, wealth, and capital income. Decreasing populations will help with the problem of allowing a bigger share of people high material living standards without killing our planetary ecosystem.

It's funny how in my lifetime we've gone from panicking about the "population bomb" of exploding birthrates in the developing world to panicking about a shortage of little people in rich countries.

We have an economic model which is predicated on limitless expansion. This made more sense when the world as a whole was sparsely populated and there was a very high ratio of natural resources to consumers. But that ratio is tilting quickly and we really should be looking at models that are more sustainable in the longer term. If the short-term problem is a localised lack of productive bodies, well, that's exactly the kind of problem less-restrictive immigration policies can fix. The medium-term solution is increased productivity through automation and AI, but a true long-term solution has to find a model which allows population growth to plateau or even decline steadily.

[Ares Land]

I wouldn't dispute that. I think it isn't impossible the United States could act out something parallel to Japan's "Lost Decade", and socioeconomic anxiety there seems to have triggered all manner of extreme psychological conditions.

The US birthrate is about on par with other rich countries. That said, there certainly are parallel to be made with the Lost Decade (and in Europe as well.)

It's funny how in my lifetime we've gone from panicking about the "population bomb" of exploding birthrates in the developing world to panicking about a shortage of little people in rich countries.

In this it seems we revert to a very tribal pattern of thought. In addition to that the conservative Christian point of view that there's something morally very wrong about not having children has filtered to the mainstream.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I wouldn't dispute that. I think it isn't impossible the United States could act out something parallel to Japan's "Lost Decade", and socioeconomic anxiety there seems to have triggered all manner of extreme psychological conditions.

The US birthrate is about on par with other rich countries. That said, there certainly are parallel to be made with the Lost Decade (and in Europe as well.)

I also don't think we're quite there yet, but we're alarmingly close, I think.

[MacAnDàil]

Unfotrunately, using land more efficiently and concentrating production locally are opposites. If you want to grow rice in France instead of shipping it in from Thailand, you have to use more resources, not less. And industry that repeats itself across the landscape will never compete with industry that concentrates in one area while letting the others decay.

Or just eat more barley in France and more rice in Thailand etc?