Sure, though I hope you don’t mind me giving the cliff note version.
Demographic dividend is spent. (The rate of dependency falls after the introduction of modernity (together with legalised contraception) because of lower birth rates. It later rises again as the population ages a few decades after the drop in birthrates)
Related, precisely because the society on average is old and seems incapable of embracing any kind of new ideas or a change in what its stated ideals and values are. Not only are young people few but they extremely conformist outside of a few designated symbolic kinds of “rebelling” compared to young people in other parts of the world. Oversocialized indeed.
Free higher education and healthcare produced a sort of “social uplift dividend”, suddenly the cycle of poverty was broken for a whole bunch of people who where capable of doing all kinds of work, but simply didn’t have the opportunity to get the necessary education to do so. After two generations of great results not only has this obviously hit diminishing returns, there are also some indications that we are actually getting less bang for buck on the policies as time continues. Though its hard to say since European society has also shifted away from meritocracy.
Massive destruction of infrastructure and means of production that enabled high demand for rebuilding much of the infrastructure (left half of the bell curve had more stuff to do than otherwise, since the price of the kinds of labour they are capable of was high).
The burden of technological unemployment was not as great as it is today (gwern’s arguments regarding its existence where part of what changed my opinion away from the default view most economists seem to take. After some additional independent research I found myself not only considering it very likley but looking at 20th century history from an entirely fresh perspective ).
Event though there are some indications youth in several European countries is more trusting, the general trend seem to still be a strong move away from high trust societies.
I put significantly lower confidence in these predictions than those of the previous post.
Generally speaking I expect comfortable, well maintained social democracies to first become uncomfortable, run down social democracies. Stagnation and sclerosis. Lower trust will mean lower investment which together with the rigidity and unadaptability will strengthen the oligarchic aspect of the central European technocratic way of doing things. Nepotism will become more prevalent in such an environment.
Overall violent crime will still drop, because of better surveillance and other crime fighting technology, but surprising outbursts of semi organized coordinated violence will be seen for a decade or two more (think London). These may become targeted at prosperous urban minorities. Perhaps some politically motivated terrorist attacks, which however won’t spiral out into civil wars, but will produce very damaging backlash (don’t just think radical Islam here, think Red Army fraction spiced with a nationalist group or two).
Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I’m very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation’s youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it’s irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that’s wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the way to rethink the problems of this age from scratch is a worthy goal for the rationalist project, especially in a “hold off on proposing solutions”, analyze-the-full-problem-and-introduce-it-from-a-novel-angle sense. Publications such as, say, Le Monde Diplomatique, are pretty good at presenting well-researched, competently presented alternative opinions, but they still suffer a lot from “political leanings”.
I know we avoid talking politics here because of precisely its mind-killing properties, able to turn the most thoughtful of agents into a stubborn blind fool, but I think it’s also a good way of putting our skills to the test, and refine them.
Sure, though I hope you don’t mind me giving the cliff note version.
Demographic dividend is spent. (The rate of dependency falls after the introduction of modernity (together with legalised contraception) because of lower birth rates. It later rises again as the population ages a few decades after the drop in birthrates)
Related, precisely because the society on average is old and seems incapable of embracing any kind of new ideas or a change in what its stated ideals and values are. Not only are young people few but they extremely conformist outside of a few designated symbolic kinds of “rebelling” compared to young people in other parts of the world. Oversocialized indeed.
Free higher education and healthcare produced a sort of “social uplift dividend”, suddenly the cycle of poverty was broken for a whole bunch of people who where capable of doing all kinds of work, but simply didn’t have the opportunity to get the necessary education to do so. After two generations of great results not only has this obviously hit diminishing returns, there are also some indications that we are actually getting less bang for buck on the policies as time continues. Though its hard to say since European society has also shifted away from meritocracy.
Massive destruction of infrastructure and means of production that enabled high demand for rebuilding much of the infrastructure (left half of the bell curve had more stuff to do than otherwise, since the price of the kinds of labour they are capable of was high).
The burden of technological unemployment was not as great as it is today (gwern’s arguments regarding its existence where part of what changed my opinion away from the default view most economists seem to take. After some additional independent research I found myself not only considering it very likley but looking at 20th century history from an entirely fresh perspective ).
Event though there are some indications youth in several European countries is more trusting, the general trend seem to still be a strong move away from high trust societies.
Thank you. Cliff notes is fine. What do you expect social democracies to turn into?
I put significantly lower confidence in these predictions than those of the previous post.
Generally speaking I expect comfortable, well maintained social democracies to first become uncomfortable, run down social democracies. Stagnation and sclerosis. Lower trust will mean lower investment which together with the rigidity and unadaptability will strengthen the oligarchic aspect of the central European technocratic way of doing things. Nepotism will become more prevalent in such an environment.
Overall violent crime will still drop, because of better surveillance and other crime fighting technology, but surprising outbursts of semi organized coordinated violence will be seen for a decade or two more (think London). These may become targeted at prosperous urban minorities. Perhaps some politically motivated terrorist attacks, which however won’t spiral out into civil wars, but will produce very damaging backlash (don’t just think radical Islam here, think Red Army fraction spiced with a nationalist group or two).
What, you mean like in Gangs of New York?
Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I’m very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation’s youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it’s irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that’s wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the way to rethink the problems of this age from scratch is a worthy goal for the rationalist project, especially in a “hold off on proposing solutions”, analyze-the-full-problem-and-introduce-it-from-a-novel-angle sense. Publications such as, say, Le Monde Diplomatique, are pretty good at presenting well-researched, competently presented alternative opinions, but they still suffer a lot from “political leanings”.
I know we avoid talking politics here because of precisely its mind-killing properties, able to turn the most thoughtful of agents into a stubborn blind fool, but I think it’s also a good way of putting our skills to the test, and refine them.