What's going on with fertility?
My comments on a Marginal Revolution post that linked to this Der Spiegel article about the ROI of different forms of fertility subsidies. (As of 2010, German fertility rates were 1.39 despite sizeable subsidies for family formation.)
Reshuffled my comments to make for easier contiguous reading:
...What I take away from the German article is that people REALLY don’t want to get married – or rather, [people really don't want to] avoid single parenthood. Thus bribing them to have two-parent households is really expensive. If you want to increase your birthrate, the argument goes, subsidizing single motherhood + work instead has a better ROI because that’s what people want to do anyway.
Let that sink in for a moment. Somehow, in the last few generations, the traditional family model that people have been eagerly perpetuating for centuries has suddenly become incredibly unappealing. People don’t want to get get married, and women in an incredibly wealthy country would rather add a little additional income rather than spend time raising their children. (Whatever happened to diminishing marginal utility of money?)
There’s good evidence that kids were never a
This seems like an odd position for someone who spends a relatively larger fraction of his LW time on politics.
Edit: Didn't mean to make it personal. Was just interested in the rationale.
I see no particular reason why someone can't believe that healthcare consequentially saves lives and that drone warfare also consequentially saves lives.
What evidence is there for the assertion (by e.g. Moldbug) that democracy and liberalism has made the world a worse place: by the usual measures of peace and prosperity? Even if I buy the cynical story regarding the nature and origins of the current world order why shouldn't my conclusion be that they're doing a pretty good job?
A quick talking point is that colonial Rhodesia used to be practically a first-world country. (Is now zimbabwe). Same story for most of the third world, AFAIK.
The fact that only rich imperialist powers happen to be progressive democracies isn't much evidence; if democracy fails in 9 cases out of 10, and fails in a way that degenerates to third-world barbarism, you will see a few successful progressive democracies, and a lot of third-world hellholes. Mind you, this is not an argument for tearing down democracy, merely that it could be the case that setting up a new democracy is a bad idea (see afganistan, iraq, etc).
Further, if you accept the cynical take, realizing that you live in a brainwashing theocracy ought to affect your intuitions about what looks like "doing a pretty good job". Have you taken this into account?
These are not my opinions. Being neither a historian, political philosopher, or government employee, I am not qualified to have opinions on this subject.
A quick talking point is that colonial Rhodesia used to be practically a first-world country. (Is now zimbabwe). Same story for most of the third world, AFAIK.
The problem with that talking point is that Zimbabwe isn't a liberal democracy, and neither are most third world countries. If you want an example of a third world country that is plausibly a liberal democracy, India comes to mind. And in this case at least, the country's economy has performed much better post-independence than it did under colonial occupation. It's true that India's growth in the first three decades after independence (the 50s through the 70s) wasn't particularly impressive, but it was still significantly better than its pre-independence record, which was positively dismal.
As Amartya Sen has pointed out, India hasn't experienced a famine resulting in massive loss of life since its transition to liberal democracy. Under British rule, famines occured at regular intervals, with the last major one in 1943 involving 1.5 million starvation deaths. In contrast, the closest India has come to famine conditions since independence was in 1966, and the death toll was only about 2500. According to Sen, the institution...
Gerry Mackie's book Democracy Defended is probably the best scholarly counter-argument to Moldbug. It goes through all the usual arguments against democracy, and offers counter-counter arguments.
You would probably want to read Stephen Holmes' The Anatomy of Antiliberalism and Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction (Amazon link) as well to put Moldbug's claims in historical and rhetorical context. Holmes' book is on the history of reactionary thought, while Hirschman's is on the rhetoric that reactionaries have used through history.
Not that I think all of Moldbug's claims are bad. The idea that there is a definite connection between American Protestants and democracy is a very strong one, I think (see this paper that was linked on Moldbug's comments section that is a much better scholarly take on Protestants and democracy).
I don't actually agree with the assertion, but I can see at least one coherent way to argue it. The thinking would be:
The world is currently very prosperous due to advances in technology that are themselves a result of the interplay between Enlightenment ideals and the particular cultures of Western Europe and America in the 1600-1950 era. Democracy is essentially irrelevant to this process - the same thing would have happened under any moderately sane government, and indeed most of the West was neither democratic nor liberal (in the modern sense) during most of this time period.
The recent outbreak of peace, meanwhile, is due to two factors. Major powers rarely fight because they have nuclear weapons, which makes war insanely risky even for ruling elites. Meanwhile America has become a world-dominating superpower with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, so many small regional conflicts are suppressed by the threat of American intervention.
That gets us to "democracy/liberalism" doesn't get credit for making things better. To go from there to "democracy / liberalism makes things worse" you just have to believe that modern liberal societies are oppress...
I'm not sure we can call Ethiopia a democracy but we certainly can't call it a liberal one. The Democracy Index labels them an "authoritarian regime".
That a bad liberal democracy doesn't exist shouldn't surprise us, since, if it was bad, we wouldn't consider it liberal.
I have more of a request for an elaboration of the position of others.
In very broad terms, what do you support the government doing? I'm not looking for a list as much as a rule governing your approval.
For example, I'm basically a small government geolibertarian. I'd have the government primarily protect your negative rights, set up laws and courts to resolve disputes as an alternative to the private resort to violence, and as major part of those laws enforce private property as the rules governing enjoying the fruits of your labor, or exchanging those fru...
I support the government acting as a solver of coordination and lack-of-information problems.
To reuse an example I brought up in another discussion, suppose that a company is using a chemical in some manufacturing process which is highly toxic, and that toxic chemical is making its way into the population in harmful quantities. 0.2% of the population knows about this and understands the danger, and of these, all who do not work for the company oppose the practice. The remaining 99.8% of the population has no opinion.
In such a situation, a boycott is highly unlikely to be useful (getting a boycott to work even under favorable conditions is a formidable coordination problem, and it's much worse in a situation where most of the population is unaware of the relevant information, since any attempt to raise awareness has to compete with every other source of information jockeying for the target audience's attention.) However, if the concerned parties can go to the government and say "this is the evidence that this manufacturing process is harmful, we all agree that it's too dangerous to allow," then the government can review the information and decide whether the process should...
I reject the idea that it is my duty to have political opinions. Conscription into the de-facto government is barbaric. Further, I don't have the power to tell them what to do anyways, so the question is low-value. Therefor I have no official opinion on what the GoC ought to be doing.
However, for the purposes of our entertainment in this thread, if I had a magic button that could make one small change to the government, I would require all MPs to read Yvain's consequentialism FAQ, and possibly something to kick some statistical sense into them.
The Conservative Party is already pretty good at talking the consequentialist talk, it would just be nice if they believed it too. On the other hand, they occasionally make stupid comments like "we don't make decisions based on numbers" (their excuse for scrapping the mandatory long bonus census). I'm also not sure they've got their values straight, or if they're pursuing lost purposes (they do an awful lot of selling "pieces of Canada's future" to China), and delusion (Christianity).
I reject the idea that it is my duty to have political opinions. Conscription into the de-facto government is barbaric. Further, I don't have the power to tell them what to do anyways, so the question is low-value. Therefor I have no official opinion on what the GoC ought to be doing.
I like this a lot. As a personal example, I was recently reading about the debate over allowing women to be in combat jobs in the US military, and trying to decide where I stood. Egalitarianism is good, definitely, and they've proved themselves capable as de facto combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But can they meet the physical standards? What about unit cohesion? Ahhh!
And then I shook myself, and realized that I am hugely unqualified to make that decision, not being in the military or a position of power in the government, or an expert in this field or any related field at all. And luckily, no one is seeking out my opinion! I do not have to know the answer or even care. It's okay. This will not be on the test. It was tremendously liberating.
government authoritarian communist socialist libertarian republican democratic masculinism feminism political discussion thread politics
No reactionary tag :(
About a quarter of the threads that end up being in such threads are about Reactionary stuff.
As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.