Links to Consider, 12/8
Steven Pinker on irrational beliefs; Tove K on the population crisis; Russ Roberts and Tyler Cowen on econGoat; Friedman vs. Friedman; Rebecca Burgess, Michael Lucchesi, and me (video)
To be sure, people are always vulnerable to paranormal woo-woo, conspiracy theories, and other popular delusions, though not to fill a gap left by religion—it’s often the religious who are most credulous about other nonverifiable beliefs. A vulnerability to weird beliefs is not the same as a need for them. Religious belief does not seem to be a homeostatic drive, like food or air or sex, where if people don’t have enough, they’ll start to crave more. A lot of people in secular Western European and Commonwealth democracies seem to do just fine without any form of religion or substitute raptures.
This quote seems to ignore the idea of social epistemology. He needs to be reminded that what we believe depends on what others who matter to us believe. And others may believe something as a way of firming up a tribal bond. Beliefs do not have to be rational in order to provide a basis for tribal bonds. In fact, irrational beliefs may work better, as they provide a sort of loyalty test.
Yes, a sustained birth rate below 2 will make the human race smaller and smaller until it goes extinct. But only if the human race is not divided into groups where some groups have a higher birth rate. Then some groups of humans will decrease exponentially and other groups will increase exponentially. The human race will not disappear. Its composition will just be altered in favor of those who know how to make children.
If it turns out that the groups that know how to make children are currently small, there might be a blip where the human population of planet Earth actually does decrease for a time. But the exponential nature of population increase will make sure that such a decrease becomes just a blip. The human race has rebounded from many crises before. It will rebound from the population crisis too.
,,,The current low fertility levels in the developed world is not likely to lead to a much smaller global population. Instead, it will lead to:
More religion
More Africans
Less technology
I agree that it is wrong to look at overall reproduction rates. Instead, consider who is reproducing.
Here in the United States, I have been to weddings where the young couple seems delightfully normal. I root for them to have children. On the other hand, there seems to be a segment within the younger generation that holds idiotic viewpoints and does not wish to reproduce. I say fine. The gene pool could use an adult swim.
Russ Roberts and Tyler Cowen discuss the latter’s EconGOAT project. They discuss Keynes’ anti-semitism and connect it with Keynes’ dislike of the norm of accumulating savings.
I came away from Skidelsky’s three-volume biography of Keynes with a different explanation for his hatred of “hoarding.” Keynes’ friends were the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group, including his gay lover Lytton Strachey. They shared a desire to overthrow Victorian morality. You could say that this was their project. Strachey’s iconic book, Eminent Victorians, was an ironically titled scathing attack. Reading Skidelsky, I connected Keynes’ abhorrence of the saving mindset to the overall anti-Victorian project of the crowd that he hung out with.
The simplest explanation for someone buying both insurance and lottery tickets is that he has a utility function for which marginal utility first decreases and then, above some level, increases.1 That is logically possible but if you are free to make any assumption about utility functions you like in order to explain observed behavior economics becomes a theory that predicts nothing, since any behavior can be explained by suitable assumptions.
The footnote points out that this was the Friedman-Savage utility function, which might be considered Milton Friedman’s first major academic contribution. After deriding his famous late father’s explanation, David goes on to offer alternatives.
I talked with Rebecca Burgess and Michael Lucchese about Emanuel Todd’s book on feminism. Where are our social norms headed?
substacks referenced above:
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"A lot of people in secular Western European and Commonwealth democracies seem to do just fine without any form of religion or substitute raptures."
Right Uncle*. Oh, well, unless you count their crazy political worldview and messianic, utopian project as religion-substitute, which is exactly what every anti-religious leftist thinker used to honestly and explicitly say they were hoping to accomplish for centuries until fairly recently. A worldview based not just in 'nonverifiable' beliefs about the supernatural or hidden conspiracies, but either ones about nature which are easily observable and just as easily empirically falsified, or when they reluctantly concede one of those facts, nonverifiable and unfalsifiable meta-explanations impervious to logic and evidence. It's impossible to better characterize Kendi and D'Angelo as anything else but religious figures: preachers and prophets, their events as anything other than enthusiastic camp tent revivals.
*Sadly, he's not actually my uncle. But me, Pinker, and Napoleon all share a male ancestor -and- a female ancestor. Hail Natufians! eupedia.com/genetics/famous_y-dna_by_haplogroup.shtml#E-M34
"I say fine. The gene pool could use an adult swim."
I get that this is kind of a joke. But to the extent it's not, it's pretty cavalier, and there are several big problems.
First, sure, it's a mathematical truism that if even a barely higher propensity to breed is even slightly genetically heritable then eventually - maybe in thousands of years - you end up with a population where the frequency of genes leading to maximum expression of this trait go to fixation for the whole population. However, you have to wonder, why didn't this already happen in mostly-Malthusian evolutionary history, and why despite the enormous amount of genotypic and phenotypic diversity in the human population we see for every other trait, is is apparently so easy to turn practically the entire population into below-replacers? It's not 'modernity' because, again, this happened throughout history and as far back as antiquity. The obvious answer is that the heritable genetic factors are too weak to matter, and that, even if could theoretically fix things in the long run, we don't have that kind of time.
What *is* strongly heritable is talent, and that talent pool is collapsing in all the IQ-shredder Big Winner Cities, almost everywhere on the planet. We are eating the seed corn with more famine on the way.
Second, population numbers and age distributions have enormous impact on societal features and capacity for progress. It's not just Ponzi-scheme welfare state fiscal doom, though that's not nothing!
Gerontocracy in general is bad enough already, and it's going to get incredibly worse. The domination of the elderly and the favoring of their interests and preferences as they start to vastly outnumber the young is a recipe for stagnation and decline and socially pathological "shrinking pie slice" fighting.
As TFR-worriers have been saying for a while - and finally, recently succeeded in convincing Robin Hanson to believe and thus become a TFR-doomer too - there is a strong argument that innovation depends on economic incentives that in turn depend on population growth, which because there are not infinite reserves of importable fungible humans out there, inevitably depends on natural population growth, i.e., people - especially innovators - having above-replacement numbers of babies again.
Here is the dark implication. Eventually an inverted pyramid for population structure becomes untenable with all the political power at the big top but all the production needed to pay for it all needing to happen at the shrinking slices in the "prime years". Something is going to give. There are lots of possibilities for what that thing might be. All of them are ugly, some really, really ugly.
It is not going to matter much what we said or did or supported in life if by when we get really old the justifiably very angry youngsters decide to push us all out on the ice floes rather than try to shoulder the impossible burden placed upon them to which they never consented. And if those youngsters perceive themselves as somehow demographically or culturally distinct from all those old people -which, duh, they will - then the ice floes are going to seem like paradise in comparison.
Finally, while this is currently a global problem, not every country on the globe has the same, ahem, "state capacity" to take it seriously and deal with it effectively. In the nature of things, order than is not reestablished within will be imposed from without. Those states with capacity - and the dividend of a baby boom swelling their military ranks - will just take over from those that don't. Whatever you might like about some X in the developed world that is not likely to be enjoyed by subjects of the kind of states who have that kind of capacity, "Make the World Safe for X" means either fighting for X by matching that capacity, or giving up on X, accepting one's fate, and trying one's best to die with dignity.