Overpopulation is the Devil's work

Discussion in 'Free Thoughts' started by game-junkie, Aug 20, 2012.

  1. game-junkie Registered Senior Member

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    57
    You will have to explain to me why a shrinking population will be our problem? Will we have less people working in factories threading together trainers? Americans haven't won any rights. You haven't won equality in wealth yet. Which is the most important thing for your country. Yes, lets have the africans die in droves because america cannot provide enough help for these people. The U.N have also predicted there will be 95 million cases of infection in africa by 2025. This is an argument which has gone on for years. I can safely say overpopulation is the problem. It's why we have wars.

    Americans still accept inequality in wealth. I think Obama wanted to adopt modern socialism for america, but he probably woke up and realized it's a pipe dream. Organizations can be disposed of fairly comfortably, that isn't a problem. After all, the american government is the world's leader. The country has all the power. You have only won the rights on your country. You haven't really done much to help most countries. You think you have. Which is quite arrogant of the US government.


    If anything, we would operate much faster if the population decreases. Which is the opposite in how it should be. The most important things in this world is equality of wealth and resources. The simple things people need to live. America will not help the countries who truly need it the most. It wouldn't be difficult for them to do so either. What with the trillions they have. Ask yourself why your country holds onto so much wealth?
     
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  3. game-junkie Registered Senior Member

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    You're just stating the obvious, Gregg. We all know many wars have been loosely based, or based on lies to start a war. The Global Elite have made money through modern day slavery.

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    James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.

    He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, "protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy". According to Henry's research, the top 10 private banks, which include UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, managed more than £4tn in 2010, a sharp rise from £1.5tn five years earlier.

    he detailed analysis in the report, compiled using data from a range of sources, including the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, suggests that for many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world.

    Oil-rich states with an internationally mobile elite have been especially prone to watching their wealth disappear into offshore bank accounts instead of being invested at home, the research suggests. Once the returns on investing the hidden assets is included, almost £500bn has left Russia since the early 1990s when its economy was opened up. Saudi Arabia has seen £197bn flood out since the mid-1970s, and Nigeria £196bn.

    "The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says.

    This is no conspiracy.
     
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  5. Gregg Schaffter Registered Member

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    I can't argue against non-sense really, so I will just ignore this debate. This is all based on opinion and no actual fact has been presented. Though if you do present actual facts instead of circumstantial evidence I might reconsider.
     
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  7. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah...good idea Gregg. To me this just sounds like the post-bong philosophy of a clueless teenager.
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    I see you slept though Econ 101A. Increased demand results in more people bidding for a given supply of a product or service. The people who want it or need it more are willing to pay more for it. But the supplier could still afford to sell it at the original price, so he creates more of it. If it's a service, it means putting more people to work. Even if it's a product it still means using more labor, more equipment, more supplies, perhaps a larger building, etc. This is the engine of prosperity in a free-market economy. You keep hiring new workers to provide goods and services (and the supporting processes) for new consumers. Because of the time lag from conception to market, demand is always a little bit out in front of supply, which results in a slight, healthy inflation rate that keeps the process moving.

    Just the opposite happens with a shrinking population. The goods that have already been produced, or the services that are ready to be utilized, are not all sold because there are fewer consumers than there were a while ago. So the producer is left with an inventory, resulting in a reduction in production. People who were producing goods or providing services are laid off ("made redundant" in the Queen's English). They suddenly have no income (or some but not much, in a social democracy) so they drastically reduce consumption. The time lag works against us this time. This leads to a multiplier effect as demand decreases even faster than population, inventories pile up, and production is reduced even further. Prices decline, leading to deflation, which is the death knell of any industrial economy.
    I'm not sure what a "trainer" is, but as production continues to be automated we'll have fewer people doing manual labor of any kind. They will continue to migrate into so-called knowledge work, which was originally scribes and scholars but is now an army of computer jockies. People still do manual labor in China, Malaysia, El Salvador and Pakistan (I'm just reading the labels on my clothes

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    ), but as the per-capita GDP increases and their standard of living follows, their wages will rise and nobody will be able to afford to pay them to push the button on a machine anymore. They too will become knowledge workers.

    The Information Age is still in its infancy--if you don't believe it, try measuring the reliability of the dozens of software products you use every day. There is still an unpredictable amount of software, databases, network protocols, and other information technology that we haven't dreamed of yet, to be built, and moreover to be built better. Once they're built, the applications that use them will also be designed. This will (if all goes well and people do a better job of pointing their children in the right direction than they're doing right now, with "political science" still being a popular major in college) hopefully provide jobs for the people who no longer have buttons to push.

    Presumably the work week will undergo another quantum decrease. The transition from a population of farmers to one of industrial workers reduced it from 120 hours to 40, so the transition to information workers will probably drop it to 10-15. Every technology shift leverages the productivity of human labor and results in a quantum improvement in wages (just compare the wealth of the lowliest peasant in a farming village--a house, furniture, dishes, cooking utensils, a larder full of surplus food, several jugs of wine, a shed full of farming tools, etc.--to that of a nomadic hunter-gatherer) so they will be better off than we are.

    But this will happen only if the traditional cycle of population growth/increased demand/rising prices/increased production/more jobs continues. Without it, what will happen? I don't pretend to know, if only because the last time population decreased was in the Paleolithic Era and that doesn't provide any good clues.

    In a world comprised of individual countries jockeying for political influence and various religions threatening to annihilate each other, overlaid with a Paradigm Shift from industrialization to information work, facing a sudden reversal of a population trend that's been going on for tens of thousands of years, I would say that the worst thing we could possibly do is nothing, i.e., leave the economy to find its own way on autopilot.
    I beg your pardon, but you're unconsciously applying your European value system to another people. Your people value economic fairness above all else, even if it reduces the scope of individual choice. Americans value individual freedom above all else, even if it allows for vast discrepancies in wealth. That's a colossal difference. Not understanding that leads you to say nonsensical things like:
    No actually, it's not. You don't understand America and Americans, so your analysis is simply wrong from the start.
    As I noted earlier, we have been shipping tons of food to the Third World since the end of WWII. It is hijacked by their despotic rulers and sold on the black market. They use the money to buy champagne, HumVees, Swiss villas, hookers, and lots and lots of weapons to make war on the despot in the country next door. We can't solve that problem without invading their countries, murdering their despots, and rebuilding them in our image. That worked out so well in Iraq and Afghanistan that you can bet we will never try it again.
    Overpopulation is not the cause of these infections. Just as we have a gigantic surplus of food in America, we also have a gigantic surplus of antibiotics. We ship them over and the same thing happens to them: The despotic dictator (as if there were any other kind) sells them on the black market and uses the money to bolster his power. The population density of the country does not matter.

    Hong Kong, Malta and Singapore have population densities that make Manhattan look like a country club. Yet there is no infection crisis and no food shortage there.
    You say that like it's a bad thing. We don't agree with you. It's as simple as that. We think your overbearing governments that control every move you make are stifling, but you just regard them as kind nannies taking care of little children who are too stupid to take care of themselves.
    You don't get to make that decision for seven billion people. We don't all agree with you, so please stop putting words in our mouth. There's a reason our ancestors left Europe. They didn't like it there then, and we don't like it there now!
    You obviously don't read much. Americans are incredibly generous people. As I said, we ship boatloads of food, medicine, machinery and other supplies to people in poor countries every day. Some of it is official government largesse, but quite a bit is our private charities like World Vision International and the Red Cross. As I noted, once it is on the dock in the other country, we lose all control over it, and some dictator confiscates it for his own use.
    Because we've learned that giving it away only enriches despots. Next question?

    Fortunately despotism is on the wane. The technology revolution is helping. Cellphones and the internet put people in touch with each other so they can organize. Once they're organized it's not so easy for the despot to have his way with them. Every decade sees a smaller and smaller number of people living under un-democratic regimes.

    Ironically, once they free themselves from despotism their economies make a quantum improvement. They need some foreign aid for a few years to get things going, but then they can take care of themselves. Look at Estonia, under the thumb of selfish, uncaring communist bureaucrats for decades. One generation after Perestroika it's a high-tech powerhouse. My friend's son and his wife emigrated there to start a software firm. They invested their life savings in the country's economy. Nobody had to give the Estonians free food and medicine.
     

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