I don’t like disagreeing with you, H. While there certainly is lots of blame to go round in that segment of the economy, the Heart of Darkness is the Political Class, those eminently buyable self-servers who impose the arcane rules within which the game is played.
Insurance companies basically collect money from Peter and give it to Paul – minus Paul’s lawyers 30-50% share. And we Peters just have to keep on paying more & more.
When I am King for a Day, I will write a different rule – the only penalty for medical malpractice will be that the medical professional who made the mistake is struck off. No payouts for the patient or her lawyers – because the patient has to accept the reality that things can go wrong if she wants that medical treatment. Consequently, the insurance industry will be substantially simplified and the lawyers will go away.
The costs of medical treatment will drop substantially, and the burden of defensive bureaucratic record keeping will decline precipitously. Job satisfaction among medical professionals will grow in leaps & bounds as they can focus on using their good judgment to aid their patients instead of ticking the boxes on a protocol. The world will be a better place!
At the end of that happy day, I will gleefully surrender the crown and go back to my plough.
Nope! Won’t work, Gavin. You forget THE essential ingredient - government. MOST of our woes are government imposed. Look at “privacy”. We physicians ALL knew what patient confidentiality was and how to go about it. But the government stepped in to cure an unknown ill, and in the process created a whole industry of “patient confidentiality” types. Forms, protocols, reviews, directives, limitations - name it, it’s in there. ?How do you get rid of that kind of quagmire. It’s like getting rid of Civil Service, the source of the bureaucracy that runs the nation.
You allow the Political Class to think they can regulate productive activities out of existence and spend money they don’t have. Eventually, the government & bureaucracy collapse when foreigners lose interest in trading essential real goods & services for dubious IOUs. After a long period of chaos and destruction, the whole cycle starts over again, probably somewhere else. See history.
Problem is, I’m no longer satisfied with “slow but certain”. I don’t have enough time left on earth to see this. change, and I would like to know it’s done for my grandkids (who will be, after all, paying for all this). That may be impatient but I was never known for my sterling patience.
So there must be another way - short of tossing out the whole bunch, which. is a bit like throwing out the baby with the bath water. You guys are bright - think of another way. besides open combat.
Almost everything important has happened before – often many times. When we look at the historical record, there don’t seem to be any examples of a better way. Collapse is the historical standard.
As a mental exercise, let’s give ourselves a clean sheet. That means people on Social Security drop into poverty, Medicare and welfare go away, millions of government-supported jobs disappear … women & minorities most affected. Then we start the slow process of digging new mines, building new steel works, opening refineries, etc. The yardstick there is the progress of Germany & Japan after WWII and China after Mao – two generations of hard work to claw back out of the hole.
Our great-grandchildren may again have a good life – if they are lucky.
It’s not going to be so easy the next time around. All the easy-to-mine natural resources have already been exploited. Sophisticated methods and equipment, manufactured and operated by smart people, are required to continue to extract and use these resources. Once civilization drops below a certain level, this is may no longer be possible.
Some have made the case that there’s no coming back from a deep collapse. Germany and Japan relied upon outside help (e.g., Marshall Plan). More important, the now well-documented secular decline in IQ (negative Flynn Effect) means that human resources of the future will also be inferior. And if you’re thinking AGI will save us, I’m skeptical given that so far it’s mostly been parlor tricks. The hype has greatly exceeded the reality.
It may not play out like this but either way, it’ll be one heck of a ride.
Not to put too fine a point on it but species do decline and become extinct. The collapse of human fertility worldwide is not a hopeful sign, especially since the reasons are not altogether clear. Humans are relative newcomers with a short track record. Humans are not, as Taleb would say, Lindy. And not all extinctions are caused by catastrophes like a meteor impact.
The expectation of steady improvement, albeit with brief reversals, comes to us from progressive ideology. A long view of history does not support this bit of wishful thinking.
If we look at Rome as a classic example, it seems that is an eminently supportable position. No-one takes the Italians seriously these days, but nevertheless they seem quite happy.
On the other hand, look at China’s ruling class decision in the 1400s to try to freeze their technological status. That led to a decline rather than a collapse – but it took about 500 years and a huge amount of pain for China to get its mojo back. 20 generations!
Any way we look at it, the good times are going to come to an end. We are not going to vote our way out of the problems of unpayable debt, unsustainable trade deficits, a failed educational system, and a de-industrialized hollowed-out economy. It is not the end of the world, but it does mean that it will take 2 or more generations to resolve those problems. And of course, this vital issue is not even a subject of serious consideration by our Political Class.
In his thought-provoking book Rulers, Religion & Riches Jared Rubin argues that the Gutenberg press was pivotal to an early economic divergence within western Eurasia, between those areas where commercial elites began to seize more power (think England and the Dutch Republic), and those where religious elites maintained control (not just the Ottoman Empire, but the Spanish one too). The spread of printing, he argues, gave the Reformation a chance to succeed; and wherever it succeeded, commercial elites had a vacuum to step into. The Spanish Empire, then, was an example of where the printing press was fully adopted but where the Reformation failed, while the Ottoman Empire is interesting because the printing press seemingly didn’t take root.
But why not? The Ottoman Empire was no distant, closed-off land, but a place with long common borders and extensive trade links to many of the countries that adopted the printing press early on. Indeed, the block-printing of books seems to have been done throughout the Islamic world in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, if not earlier. And there actually were some moveable type printing presses in Istanbul from as early as 1493, set up by Jewish refugees from Spain. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, various other minorities set up printing presses too. But the one thing they all had in common was that they did not print Arabic characters — used, at the time, for writing both Arabic and Turkish.
It was only in the early eighteenth century that Arabic-character printing began in the region, initially by Christians in Aleppo from 1706, and culminating in 1727 with the establishment of an official, state-run Ottoman printing press. Even then, the official press didn’t print at anything like the scale of the European presses, and with interruptions too. So it wasn’t really until the nineteenth century that anything like an Ottoman print culture began to emerge.
Illiteracy correlated with Ottoman rule still way into the second half of the 20th century:
Your last graphic I would questian since Yugoslavia was primarily Serbs and Croats. Their alphabet was stupid simple to learn, to the point you could “read and write” without any knowledge of what was said. Just write down the sounds. We aren’t talking “scholars” -we’re talking able to read and write.
Yes, but while there were a lot of muslims in the Balkans, they were of the Serbian tribe, crossed over mostly for either economic or political reasons (or both). So the spoken language was Serbian. Croatian is a dialect of Serbian, as are Dalmatian, Macedonian, Bosanski. It is akin to English as spoken by New Englanders vs Alabamans vs western US, vs England vs Australian, and so forth. Each dialect will have some small segment of local phrases and accents, but it’s the same language.
Not a considerable minority in the former Yugoslavia, it’s more a Romanian & Spanish minority - although I’ve seen the traditional Roma use of children for panhandling in NYC:
Welfare policies are leading to a much higher birth rate among Roma (as well as among Muslims), however - and ordinary people are beginning to mind the discrepancy.
The overall tendency for high birth rate societies seems to track education. The higher educated, the lower the birth rate. Not sure why = could be women are more preoccupied with a career than raising families, could be that educated families are delirious of better educated kids, and that’s expensive, could be simple selfishness (DINKS may just want to continue the kind of lifestyle a two-income family can enjoy), could be that more education leads to more pessimism about the future (having children usually is a sign of confidence, nay even hope, for the future). Pick something. Some of these issues are touched upon in How Civilizations Die by David Goldman. He contends islam is also dying (from his lips to God’s head!).
That all said, Romas will more likely be nomadic in nature, so less educated and larger family structure. They will also more closely approximate a subsistence culture, with the attendant rigid hierarchy of authority. Islam approximates that, too, despite all the civilizing influences one would expect it to have accumulated.
OR East German poor women feel despair and a lack of hope for the future. Especially when they compare themsleves against the more “successful” women around them. Envy is a potent sensation.
Your graph is interesting. I was surprised to see Finnland and Estonia so high, and surprised at how low the Italians and Portuguese are.
This was not always so; it is particular to modern Western culture. In the past, wealth was positively correlated with fertility, as it was with education. The correlation switched sign at some point, probably mid-20th century. Countries made the switch at different times; some probably haven’t yet. Trying to find universal underlying causes is a fool’s errand since the correlation is not stable. This is why it’s an error to mix up countries at various stages of development and demography. For instance, East Germany wasn’t part of the West until relatively recently.
The collapse of fertility globally probably has nothing to do with any of these factors. It will be more fruitful to look for answers elsewhere given the variety of cultures currently experiencing the phenomenon. Interesting candidates are
