Finland is a good place to move to fix most of these, if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs.
And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that.
And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that.
There is nothing new under the sun.
[1]: <https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-lite...>
Imagine sitting down for 9 hours typing, then going home and scrolling through porn and getting high and thinking that's much more interesting than conquering a village, sailing the coast of a new continent, having sex with a beautiful virgin, and teaching your sons to reach even further into greatness.
Or on the other hand, the hard reality redpill that your life in the past would be manual labor on a farm as a peasant, making a lord rich.
I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present.
Maybe it's anomie, people don't have children when they don't believe in their civilization
If you made it as far as wife and kids, you were a winner.
If wife made it as far as the third kid without dying of sepsis, she was an ultra winner.
eg: https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-...
and that's Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess and founder of two monasteries handing out the Ye Olde abortion pills.
It's explained in the article that you linked. Some women did take the medicine to induce an abortion, but they did not do that with Hildegard's aid or assent.
There is a helpful discussion around this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/q88veb/is_this...
You mean raising lord’s kid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur
> I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present.
Why are so focused on porn? Modern life is amazingly diverse with activities: jumping with parachute, sports, dancing, games, science clubs, I could go in forever. Maybe instead of lamenting try to actually do something except for jerking off and writing ansible for 9 hours?
From the link to wikipedia you sourced:
> A majority of historians[citation needed] have concluded that the idea is a myth and that all references to it are from later periods.
Also from the wikipedia link you sourced:
> Scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries gave the historical basis of the "right of first night" a good deal of attention.[clarification needed][37] Historians David M. Walker and Hector McKechnie wrote that the right might have existed in medieval Europe,[7][53] but other historians[who?] have concluded that it is a myth, and that all references to it are from later periods.[54][8] Over time, the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Larousse encyclopedias dramatically changed their opinion on the topic, moving from acceptance to rejection of the historical veracity of the idea.[55] French writer Louis Veuillot wrote a book in 1854 disputing its existence.[56] After an exhaustive historical study, German jurist Karl Schmidt concluded in 1881 that it was a scholarly misconception.[37] After Schmidt, many of those who believed in the existence of the custom based their opinions on anthropological studies of tribal societies, though according to W. D. Howarth, this was a misguided argument because of the disparity between the tribal societies and medieval European society.[57]
What do I have? What do I want? How can I beat use the former, to achieve the latter? Those are the questions of practical importance.
If you want to be able to go to a pub, you have to allow for one to be built within walking distance. The absolute worst thing about American suburbs is that they have decided to enforce puritanical idiocy by not interspersing pubs with houses, which mean the DUI rates are ridiculous. And the places in the US where this is not the case are the most expensive, in a turn that surprises no-one.
As for Ansible, I think I'd rather do the farm labour, to be frank.
The future belongs to Mormons and Muslims.
Poor people in Asia and Africa still have large families.
I think you hit the nail on its head so to speak. Here in Poland the parenting/childcare situation is probably worse than Finland from what I hear, but much better than it used to be. The change in benefits for example eliminated child poverty, but had zero effect on population growth(which was one of its selling points).
I think unless we manage to invent "artificial womb" in long term (as humanity) we are going to have huge problems. Not because there will be less of us. No, but because the huge majority will be very old. This will blow up our heathcare, economy etc. Who will care for all these old people? Robots?
This is a very serious problem that will hit us in next ~30 years. Imagine if a single person at work supports 5 pensioners? Someone can say, what do you mean, these pensioners are living off investment income on the decades of their contributions. But this is not exactly right. For them to consume someone has to produce. If there is shortage of workforce there will be shortage of goods, the prices will skyrocket, the workers wages will adjust, but pensioners will be left with nothing or will be helped by the state. Also imagine what impact on national security this will have? Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies.
I propose in medium term this is a far bigger problem than climate change.
What is the solution then? Immigration. (the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration. For this we absolutely have to give up the insanity of "cultural relativism". No, cultures that cherish freedom of the individual and ones that treat women as property are not equivalent. Without the strong backbone of acceptance our culture is superior and certain things are non-negotiable (like individual liberties, freedom of religion, expression, identity) this will not work. But if we can manage to implement this without sliding into extremes people from other places will want to come, live here, work and raise their children. This will solve our (the West) population growth problem in the short to medium term. In the long term? Only robots and artifical wombs.
I can understand holding either of those views, but not both at the same time. Why do you expect immigrants from a culture that produces a surplus of people (and pressure to immigrate) to have a lesser/better effect on your culture than the offspring of native religious "sects"?
>(the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration.
Immigration is not a single problem to be for or against. It's a complex problem that can help us resolve our population growth problems or it can destroy our societies(there are examples of both).
The key differences between the "good" immigration and the "bad" immigration are: the good is usually, but not always legal and the bad is usually but not always illegal.
Other things that matter a lot are the purpose why people immigrate(escaping an actual war going to closest safe place, trying to better one's economic situation by gaining a skill that allows one to work in a more developed economy or going with an intent of gaming the benefit system and living off that), the desire to integrate once the immigrants gets there and the actions the host state does to encourage that (example of bad: put immigrants all in social housing together creating no incentive to learn the host country's language etc, example of good: distribute migrants evenly across the entire country requesting each local gov to provide few units of social housing that are not right next to each other),and finally one of the major ones :the ease of gaming the benefit system. I personally have met people that had their children registered for benefits in 3 countries and the entire family living off that (Germany, Denmark and Netherlands I believe.). I heard in Germany an unemployed immigrant gets more in benefits that he (because it is a he 99% of time) could hope to earn in any unskilled job. This doesn't promote integration and asimilation. It promotes people who go to work being called suckers by their peers.
So yes, there is good immigration (all the people that immigrate legally, or are fleeing a genuine war next door) and there is the bad (all the desperate people that were sold a dream of a life without having to work by living off benefits, then they pay people's smugglers and if they manage to survive the trip they realise this life is not going to be as good as they thought).
So yes, I propose we increase legal, skill based immigration, we encourage integration and assimilation a lot more, and we have expulsion as a penalty for crime. Furthermore, we actually protect our borders, and we enforce the border enforcement by the countries on route, so the illegal immigration goes down to a manageable level. And where people in source countries are really suffering we help these countries over there.
I only glanced over the problem. The ne would have to write a book on the subject to properly cover it. However, seeing first hand examples of good and bad immigration in many countries such as the UK, Germany, France and Poland I believe calling all immigration bad is equally silly as calling it all good.
I propose instead: deporting citizens who were sold a dream of a life without having to work by living off benefits?
In this awful world you want to live in, why should people born in one place get to screw me over while people born in other don't? There's nothing special about Greg from down the street, let's throw him down a well to drown if he's not benefiting me
I'm not quite sure why you equate deporting someone who crossed the border illegally, because he thought he can live there without having to work, with "throwing Greg from down the street into a well"? We already have systems in place where people can demonstrate that if they are indeed in danger of loosing their life they will be granted asylum.
You're confusing people that are genuinely in danger (escaping war or persecution) with people that just want to better their economic situation illegally.
Are we sure about this because a shortage of workforce leading to a shortage of services makes sense but the same doesn’t hold for goods I don’t think?
E.g. I don’t really see myself going to a robot physiotherapist for example. I can’t see how productivity improvements (capital investment in automation for example) can universally improve service production - there are some cases for sure but plenty of gaps.
On the goods side, i don’t care if my TV was made by a robot rather than a craftsperson. As i understand it, the energy and labour required to produce comparable goods today is less than yesterday.
As i understand it, services have gotten relatively more expensive over time as goods have done the opposite. These costs I’m led to believe can be seen as a proxy for labour costs since labour is often the most expensive part and as production volume increases the cost to produce a good tends towards the cost of its material inputs.
Yes, supply is an issue in all these places (due to mass internal migration to the biggest metros). But also a decade of low interest rates combined with inflationary guarantees/bonuses for first time home owners (esp. in Finland) also has a lot to do with it.
When you make it so everybody can get a loan and cap the interest rate artificially low for them, all you’ve done is inefficiently create inflation.
The developed world elite all attend the same conferences, so we all make the same stupid policy mistakes together.
I don't disagree with your claim that last generation's housing policies have caused serious problems, but the scale of what I've seen so far in Finland is nothing like what it is in the United States.
The fact that when you inherit property from a deceased relative, you're also hit with a 15% inheritance tax that year, to be paid in cash, helps. Suddenly holding onto that $700,000 Helsinki condo for the kiddos starts to look like it might do more harm than good.
https://www.suomi.fi/guides/death-of-a-close-family-member/p...
Ultimately I hold out hope that Finland will continue down its path of very common remote work, allowing even mid-career professionals to live wherever they want in this beautiful country. We're all in this together.
This is because US housing was already insanely cheap by comparison globally. Just as you say housing is cheap outside Helsinki...outside NYC/SF/LA, housing in the United States is even cheaper.
Even today, the average US house is 40% cheaper than the average Finnish house. [1] And US incomes are on average 25% higher. AND taxes are 15% lower on average in the US.
Meaning the price-to-net income ratio is almost 2X for Finnish real estate vs. US real estate.
[1] As of 2023, average price per sq meter in Finland is 2800 USD. Average price per sq meter in the US is 1800 USD.
My memory tells me that's not what it felt like when I lived in the US. by your stats I'd have expected my US rent to have eaten closer to 15% than 30% of my take home pay, like it does here, at least if the rents were a competitive enough market to track closely with mortgages. But that's not what I remember ever happening, nor did I spend most of my life in major metros -- my adult working life was almost entirely in Madison, WI, which is about the size of my current Tampere. Rent ate up about 30% of my take home in both places. The apartment I currently rent is bigger than the apartment I rented back there as well, although it is a little older.
I'd expect to have felt the pinch of such a vast price to net income ratio difference in my rent, at least a little bit. So... why haven't I? I have about as apples-to-apples a comparison as it is reasonable to make, right down to them both being heavy student towns.