[HN Gopher] Why the wheels of human history seemed to turn faste...
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Why the wheels of human history seemed to turn faster for some
Author : pepys
Score : 20 points
Date : 2022-05-05 00:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| > Technological innovation caused increases in food production,
| which caused higher population growth -- until the additional
| mouths to feed canceled out the productivity gains, bringing
| living standards back to subsistence levels.
|
| Is this accurate? My understanding was that the cap on human
| population levels had more to do with survival rate of childhood
| for which nutrition is only one of many factors. Didn't we see a
| larger increase in population due to advances in medicine
| eliminating many childhood diseases? I'd say that this reasoning
| is rather tenuous, if food production were the only limit on
| population growth then we should have seen booms in population
| level with each agricultural advance rather than the slow, linear
| increase up until the industrial revolution.
|
| > the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose
| to have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing
|
| This also seems to run counter to evidence from currently
| industrializing societies where reduction in infant mortality and
| increases in education are the big drivers of dropping fertility
| rates. It isn't that they see more value in their children, it's
| that they aren't dropping like flies so you don't need to have 8
| kids just to make sure 2 make it to adulthood and can help
| support you as you get older.
|
| > Because a subset of a group is likely to be less diverse than
| the whole group, populations became more homogeneous the farther
| they traveled
|
| This is just lack of genetic diversity and I don't see what it
| has to do with the following sentence
|
| > diversity can inhibit economic growth by decreasing social
| cohesion, but it can also increase growth by promoting
| specialization and innovation
|
| because that kind of diversity has more to do with appearance,
| language, culture, religion, etc. than it does with genetics,
| physical appearance being the only one of that mix that is
| determined by genetics.
|
| > In Galor's account, Europe escaped the poverty trap in the 19th
| century because of increased investment in education and the
| decline of the gender wage gap.
|
| This is the first I've heard of it.
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| yeah, the article is full of de rigueur dogma & talking points,
| so much so that it verges on word salad
| malfist wrote:
| I stopped reading about three quarters of the way through, it
| seemed to be so much drivel. It seemed to be dangerously
| verging on "14 words" nonsense. Hyper concerned as it was
| about women earning a paycheck instead of making babies and
| declining birth rates in genetically homogeneous regions.
| twofornone wrote:
| >it seemed to be so much drivel. It seemed to be
| dangerously verging on "14 words"
|
| Blithely dismissing cultural practices which may lead to
| successful and flourishing societies merely because some of
| them also happen to be espoused by white supremacists is
| more dangerous.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the value
| of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have
| fewer children and invest more in their upbringing. Longer life
| spans made human capital even more important. As women's wages
| began to approach those earned by men, it became more costly for
| them to leave the workforce to have children, further reducing
| birthrates. This demographic transition allowed technological
| progress to vastly outstrip population growth, producing our
| present world of material plenty.
|
| I wonder if some of this is the demographic equivalent of having
| a fantastic time feasting on your seed corn. IIRC, pretty much
| all these populations are at sub-replacement level, and some by
| quite a significant amount.
| qiskit wrote:
| > "With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the
| value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to
| have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing."
|
| Parents didn't "choose" to have fewer kids. The leaders of
| industrialized/industrializing nations
| encouraged/demanded/brainwashed people into having less
| children - both foreign and domestic. I guess being forced or
| brainwashed into having fewer kids is the saming thing as
| "choosing".
|
| It isn't that parents chose to have fewer kids and invest more
| in their upbringing. It's that the elites wanted fewer children
| so that parents could spend more time at work making more money
| for them. It's about extracting the most value from a
| population.
|
| Of course the flip side is eugenics. Where we
| encourage/fund/order the third world countries to have less
| children. The first major experiment was in hong kong where the
| british founded the eugenics league in the 1930s and encouraged
| a 2 child policy on the chinese people there.
| notch656a wrote:
| It's also worth noting that the incentives and economics for
| having kids have changed in other ways.
|
| Having kids is a privatized loss with socialized gains. The
| parent is responsible for the costs. Even if one walks away,
| they are on the hook for 20% of their gross to pay for the
| upbringing.
|
| Socialized gains: everyone benefits from the tax the child
| pays after the parents finish raising the child. Many elderly
| and disabled benefit from the social security the tax the
| child will pay after they're raised. These recipients of
| social welfare benefit whether they had children themselves
| or not.
|
| It's a massive personal investment, and then once the child
| is an adult society taps the child as their tax piggy bank,
| with only the smallest tax offsets to the parent for raising
| the child. Counter this with the ways of old, where the
| child's contribution to the elderly was generally done
| through the family structure rather than through compelled
| taxes to general public elderly via social security, even
| those who didn't raise children.
|
| This incentive structure means the childless
| disproportionately benefit from the socialized gains and
| those with many children, assuming they raised them without
| welfare, almost assuredly disproportionately do not recoup
| the socialized gains after subtracting the personal losses.
|
| The stakes have gone up as well. CPS, child welfare laws,
| nosy neighbors, and all manner of other much stricter
| enforcement have emerged in the past 50 years. Before you
| could let your child play out on the street alone if they
| were ready at age, say 7. Now if you do that in the wrong
| place, many people will call CPS, at no risk to themselves
| and in fact in an extreme act of unconstitutional perversion
| you are not allowed to face your accuser who are protected as
| 'anonymous'. Many people are looking to crucify the parent
| they see making any perceived error, and the state apparatus
| has been vastly expanded to rush down and 'save the children'
| and destroy you in the process. This enforced coddling of
| children from every perceived outdoor 'danger' destroys the
| development of the child and improperly robs the parent of
| the ability to focus on other tasks, further yet destroying
| the will of the parent to make the mistake of raising another
| child.
|
| Note: there are some caveats to this: obviously the childless
| pay higher taxes and also K-12 is partially publicly funded,
| but these only damper the effects.
| danuker wrote:
| > feasting on your seed corn
|
| Assuming the ratio of the average salary to the average pension
| in my country stays the same, and that I will work for 40 years
| and retire for 10 (which is the expected case in Romania, but I
| expect I'll live longer), the return of the national pension
| fund is -78.6% of what I contribute.
|
| There's no way I will get a meaningful pension, especially
| given the fact that the country is undergoing depopulation. I
| have to manage my own wealth.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I don't think there is anything particularly new in that. For
| most of human history, cities relied on migration to maintain
| population levels. Both because cities were so unhealthy places
| to live in and because people had better things to do.
| twofornone wrote:
| >According to Galor, diversity can inhibit economic growth by
| decreasing social cohesion
|
| Surprised to see this acknowledged on Washington Post.
|
| >migration distance, geography, disease, culture and political
| institutions.
|
| It's a shame that modern anthropology is dead set on downplaying
| the influence of culture and politics on national success. I
| think part of the push back against the horrors of WWII has
| manifested as an overly anti-nationalistic slant among our
| institutions, at the cost of objectivity in social sciences,
| among other casualties.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I assume that diversity here means when you have rival cultures
| in proximity to each other you are actually at war all the
| time, and your people are fighting and dying instead of growing
| in peace and property.
|
| You have to spend time making armies instead of houses.
|
| Having played a lot of Civ, I can only assume that's what he
| means.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >playing Civ instead of Europa Universalis and thinking you
| understand geopolitics
| Agamus wrote:
| >>According to Galor, diversity can inhibit economic growth by
| decreasing social cohesion
|
| >Surprised to see this acknowledged on Washington Post.
|
| Agreed, but it is argued as an aspect of an average: "According
| to Galor, diversity can inhibit economic growth by decreasing
| social cohesion, but it can also increase growth by promoting
| specialization and innovation; therefore, regions with an
| intermediate level of diversity had the highest levels of
| economic development."
| dc-programmer wrote:
| Don't political scientists study those questions? Social
| capital and trust, rule of law, comparative analysis of
| institutions are some things I know social scientists study.
|
| Anthropologists probably avoid analyzing the causality between
| culture and national success for the same reasons historians
| de-emphasize it. It's an impossible dimension to tease out.
| Countries don't exist in cultural silos untethered from
| history, geography, and foreign relations.
|
| If anything the first is the flawed approach. The models that
| come out of it frequently fail to capture the complexity of
| reality. And that's why so many data informed policy
| interventions fail.
|
| And on the topic of applied social science. I don't think
| attributing success to culture would even be useful because a
| culture in one place (or time) can be successful, but would be
| disastrous in other contexts.
|
| On a personal level I would be distrustful of any attempts of
| the government to optimize culture. Culture is not the domain
| of Caesar.
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| yeah, it could be said that much of science has been tainted
| and even crippled by mandatory adherence to certain
| dogma/narrative talking points
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