On Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 9:30 AM James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jan 10, 2025 at 8:12 AM James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Percent of GDP is the wrong metric. The right metric is Total Fertility >> Rate. TFR is driven more by median income per household. But even thenFor >> example, the counties around Washington DC and even then the calculation of >> median income per household is ... >> > > I had started into a palaver about the proper proxy measures for well > being based on TFR and would have linked to this lecture by Elizabeth > Warren from a time before she entered into the counties around > Washintgton DC and had her mind parasitically castrated by That Unspeakable > Thing In DC: > > https://youtu.be/akVL7QY0S8A?list=PLA5C53A28CC3AE2F2 > In the 1 hour video, Warren compared US family income and expenses in the 1970s to the early 2000s. Income per person is flat (inflation adjusted) but household income is up because the mother is working. Food and manufactured items are cheaper, but housing and services like health care, education, and child care are up. Transportation costs more because couples need 2 cars now, although cars are cheaper because they last 2 years longer and require fewer repairs. Median savings rate dropped from 11% to 0% of income, and debt and bankruptcies are up. It is safe to say that all of these trends continued for the next 20 years and will likely continue. The disappearing middle class is a symptom of economic growth and inequality: the poor get richer but the rich get richer faster because it takes money to make money. Wealth has a power law distribution, the exponential of a Normal (bell shaped) distribution by the central limit theorem because it is the product (sum of logs) of many small random variables. AI will widen the distribution because when most work is automated, your main source of income will be selling your personal information, which only has value in proportion to your wealth. There wasn't any political discussions of how to "fix" this. Taxing the rich and giving to the poor would raise collective utility because happiness increases with the log of income. But this would also slow economic growth by weakening incentives to produce. If UBI allowed everyone to live comfortably then nobody would work. Some centuries long trends not mentioned in the video: Life expectancy is up worldwide. Hunger is down. Crime is down. Prisons are more humane. Technology is better. World governments are shifting from dictatorships to democracies. There are fewer wars. Travel and trade are easier. English is becoming the world language. Working conditions are improving. Slavery was abolished. You have more income and more career choices. The world is safer. Child mortality and infectious diseases are down. Knowledge is growing and more accessible. The social safety net is wider. (100 years ago there was no social security or free public schools). All of these trends are at odds with fertility rate. Women are allowed to choose careers other than motherhood. Child marriage was banned. There is no longer a social stigma or legal or religious prohibitions against sex outside of marriage or for purposes other than reproduction. Birth control and abortions are more reliable and more available. (US abortions are up 20% since Roe v Wade was overturned). AI will lead to social isolation and a further drop in fertility. This can't be fixed just with more economic incentives to have children, like many developed countries are now doing, at least not at a level that we are willing to pay. The purpose of all living things is to reproduce and die. Humans are competing with other species that put all of their effort and resources toward this top level goal. We already had this figured out before we were smart enough to work around our evolved programming. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tff34429f975bba30-M0abc6329d1028fbfa2fb83cd Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
