Bad Words

64. Personality in the Post Nuclear Family — Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-07-28T10:03:00.007-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #64, released on 28 July 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (40 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com. See bottom for notes on this transcript and how it was generated.

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

In this episode, I'm going to talk about personality—the personality of individuals—and how this relates to the post-nuclear family. The post-nuclear family, of course, is my hypothetical system for raising a bunch of kids by a bunch of adults. Instead of two adults raising two or three kids, I would have at least eight adults raising between 9 and 18 kids. So how does personality relate to this? Well, personality turns out to be the most vital issue for success or failure of this project, most importantly who you choose to be your parents. We have these eight people who somehow must cooperate in the long term on raising children, and it's all keyed on their individual personalities and whether their individual personalities are compatible with this system.

Although this this podcast is about demography and large numbers of people, I'm very cautious not to promote the post-nuclear family as a solution to any country's demographic problems. The reason is because the vast majority of adults in any society are simply not suited to this system. You can't take eight adults off the street, throw them together and expect them to cooperate on parenting. On the long term, it's just not going to work, and that's simply because there are so many defective adults out there. There are so many mental illnesses, so many self-destructive personalities out there, that you just can't pick people randomly. You have to be very selective. The whole success and failure of this operation depends on somebody making wise decisions about which personalities should be allowed to join this club.

There are also other aspects of personality. Personality is going to emerge in the children you raise. If they come from diverse genetic backgrounds, you're going to have a lot of diverse personalities—people who are capable of a lot of different things. Within your group of children, there could be toxic personalities. It’s entirely possible that one of your children, despite all your good efforts, turns out to be a bad egg in one way or another.

We've also got to teach our children about personality, because if you come grow up in a very warm and functional family, and you go out into the real world, you're going to find there's a lot of dysfunctional people out there. In raising our children, we've got to prepare our them for the dysfunction and the downright evil that exists out there.

But we're going to start with a question of “What is personality?” A personality is a person's habitual way of interacting with the world. If you take a person and plop them down in some social situation, they're going to mold that social situation according to their personality. They're going to respond to that situation according to their personality.

For example, someone who is prone to addiction is going to find something to be addicted to, even if you take away one drug or another. If you take away their heroin, then they'll turn to alcohol. That is a factor of their personality, their style of operating, that they're susceptible to addiction, whereas [some] other personalities would have no interest in any kind of addictive substance.

So that's one simple example, but personality runs through everything a person does. Basically, it is assumed that once someone reaches adulthood—let's say their mid-20s—personality is pretty much fixed. It can evolve slowly over time, but you, from the outside, can't change someone's personality after they reach their 20s.

Personality is a product of both Nature and Nurture. There is experimental evidence showing that genes play a significant role in someone's long-term style, and this can be tested in identical twins. If you have identical twins raised apart, even though they have different life experiences, there are certain factors in their personality that are likely to be repeated. That's pretty clear evidence of a genetic component in personality.

Yet of course early life experiences are also vital. The post-nuclear family has a lot of control over those early life experiences. the whole design of the family, the design of the child rearing unit, is intended to promote good personality styles—cooperative people, people who can follow rules.

When the fertility of the original founding parents runs out and you have to go looking in the world for egg and sperm, it would be irresponsible not to take into account the personalities of the people who produced those egg and sperm. If you've got one psychopath and they marry another psychopath, there's a good chance their children are going to have many of those same defects. If we can clearly identify personality traits, that would be a factor in deciding which sperm unites with which egg.

It's not so much that you're trying to build a master race or you're trying to promote genius. You're just trying to eliminate certain genetic factors that might contribute to a defective personality. Schizophrenia, for example, has a strong genetic component, and if both the mother and the father of an [embryo] have schizophrenia, there's a good chance the children are going to have schizophrenia, so that's something that we have to eliminate from our gene pool when deciding to have children.

So how would we do this? How do we select for personalities? Well it turns out to be a lot easier than it seems. You've no doubt had toxic romantic relationships. You found yourself working for a toxic boss, and it kind of struck you out of the blue because you weren't prepared for it. Maybe you grew up in a rational environment without these toxic influences, and you just weren't prepared for them, so you might have ended up marrying a toxic personality—as I did some 20 years ago—and you have to learn the hard way how personalities work, how mental illness works.

But that doesn't have to be. There's a lot of scientific and reproducible information on personalities and on mental illnesses, and if you pay attention to it, you can detect difficult personalities at a very early stage. If you're trying to form one of the first post-nuclear families, you're trying to pull together eight people, you can hire a clinical psychologist to review your candidates. This is just like reviewing candidates for an astronaut core or a Biospherian core. Remember my podcast about the Biospherians [Episode 58] who locked themselves in a greenhouse for two years. There can be a process by which you can detect personalities that are not going to work in the long run.

There's all sorts of systems for this. Probably the most popular personality evaluating system is called the MBTI. I think it's called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It's popular at parties. It's popular to take the test and see what kind of personality you are and talk about how this personality interacts with the world and interacts with others. It is not very scientifically reliable. Most [scientists] in the personality field kind of dismiss it.

I kind of dismiss it, except for one thing—in that I’ve taken the test, and I’ve come up with a type. There are 16 types under this system and my type is called INTJ (I-N-T-J) and I'm supposedly a very rare personality type who's known by the shorthand as "The Architect". He's the mastermind. He's likes to work on abstract projects and isn't too influenced by social pressures. The more I read about this personality type, the more I realize it matches me to a “T”. Although I'm ready to dismiss the whole MBTI system—Boy!—they got me nailed as to what kind of personality I am.

I'm the sort of personality who would work on a project for years without any social reinforcement—which is exactly what I’ve been doing in this Demographic Doom project. In my post-nuclear family, I'm working on it in total isolation. I don't give a damn whether anybody likes my system or praises me for it. It’s an abstract thing, and I'm looking at how to do it right, and that's characteristic of The Architect, the INTJ.

So I embrace that, but I reject pretty much everything else about the MBTI system, because I just don't understand it. For example, what is the difference between Intuitive and Sensory? I just don't get most of those criteria. I don't understand how this thing is arrived at—but it's actually a pretty good starting point, in that it takes a stab at classifying people according to their personality. I just think that there are better ways to classify people.

The more scientific and reproducible system is called the Big Five personality traits. We break down personality into only five major factors. These factors can be remembered by the acronym “OCEAN”—

“O” stands for openness to experience: whether or not a person is open to new experiences or just wants to do things the same way they've always done.

“C” stands for “conscientiousness”: whether or not you are good at fulfilling your duty. [Do you] feel responsible to fulfill your duty or you just blow things off?

“E” refers to "extraversion", versus introversion. Are you a people person or are you more likely to turn inward, think about ideas and keep to yourself. It basically comes down to where you find your strength in the course of a day. Do you find your strength by being with a lot of people, or do you find your strength by being alone to recover from people? I would be more on the introversion scale. I enjoy people in small doses, but I come back to my own isolation when I want to return to center and find my strength.

The next one is “A” or “agreeableness”. How easy is this person to get along with? How agreeable are they? Obviously, a very agreeable person is going to be very flexible. They want to work with others. They want to see things move smoothly in social circumstances. Someone who is low in agreeableness is very difficult to get along with, is always creating new barriers and new dramas. So that's agreeableness.

“N” is “neuroticism”: how emotionally reactive you are to stimuli and how overreactive you are to some things. Someone who's high in neuroticism is going to be very picky. They're going to be very difficult to get along with because they have all sorts of [self-imposed] restrictions. They don't like this. They don't like that. They freak out about things. Someone who's low in neuroticism is pretty cool, pretty flexible and doesn't overreact to things. They still have emotions, but they have their emotions in check, and they can see things in perspective.

So those are the Five Factors and unlike the Myers-Briggs system, you can have value judgments about those factors. Obviously, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness and low neuroticism are good things. It's much better to be on those ends of the scale than on the other end of the scale.

Extraversion is a mixed bag. People should be somewhere in the middle of the extraversion scale. If they're totally extroverted, they're totally oriented to people, and they don't have much internal life. If they're totally introverted and not attuned to people, they don't get along very well socially.

So it's pretty easy now that we have this Five Factor model to look at a candidate for the parenthood core and say, “Okay, they're very neurotic. They're very reactive. They don’t take changes very well.” Obviously, they don't fit the criteria, and we have to reject them. If they're not open to experience, if they want to do things the same way over and over again, we need to reject them.

Conscientiousness is absolutely essential for this system. People need to internalize the rules of this system and follow them even when no one is watching and no one enforcing them. Someone low in conscientiousness would obviously not be suitable for this system.

Based on this Five Factor model alone, we can reject an awful lot of candidates for our post-nuclear family. A lot of adults, even if they want to participate, if they're on the wrong end of one of these scales, they have to be rejected.

There are many other systems for evaluating personality. Above all, you need to avoid evil personalities—people who are going to disrupt your system. These would be narcissists, psychopaths [and] people who are very low in self-esteem and have to react in various defective ways to protect it.

One of the ways to measure this evil component in personality is called the Dark Triad of three personality traits. [A single person] can share multiple of these personality traits, and obviously when you're selecting parents for your system you don't want to be anywhere near any of these traits.

So the three traits are “narcissism”—just thinking that you are better than everyone else and always seeking your own glory.

The second factor is “psychopathy”—whether or not you really care about people. You might assume that everybody cares about everyone else, but as you gain experience in the world, you realize that some people just don't care about you. It causes them no pain to see you or some weak creature in pain. This has a very heavy genetic component. Many children are born with psychopathy. They simply do not care about other people, [but] of course it can also be encouraged by life circumstances. A child who is abused is more likely to grow up to be a psychopath.

The third Dark Triad personality trait is called Machiavellianism. It's basically the ability to execute a [nefarious] plan. Very often, it is a is a long-term plan to assert yourself and destroy your enemies.

We've been able to talk about the Dark Triad more easily in public life because public life has got a few of them who are quite obvious. The most obvious possessor of evil traits is our recent president Donald Trump—clearly a narcissist who seeks his own glory above all else. And he's clearly a psychopath who cares about no one but himself. He would cause great pain to others without feeling any sort of empathy or pain himself.

The one thing that Donald Trump lacks is Machiavellianism. He's simply incapable of executing a long-term plan to destroy his enemies. Machiavelli himself would be embarrassed by Donald Trump, because Trump had all this power, and if he had been clever, he could have caused way more damage and created way more glory for himself if he had simply been able to follow a long-term plan. Trump obviously can't do this. He is 100% reactive, if someone insults him, he will react instantly to that insult by attacking that other person. Donald Trump's lack of Machiavellianism was the one thing that has saved our country.

Obviously if you're selecting a person for any kind of role in your life—be it the post-nuclear family or you're deciding who to employ or you're deciding who to be employed by or you're deciding on a romantic partner—you want to detect these evil traits as quickly as possible, and once you detect them, you've got to wall this person off from your life. That's the only way to do it, because like all personalities, these evil Dark Triad traits are already set by adulthood, and you cannot change them. All the love you can do devote to a narcissist is absolutely useless. It is just dumping resources away if you try to cure a narcissist or make them care, because they won't. So we've got to avoid these evil people.

Next, we can look at something called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which is fun reading. I've always enjoyed browsing this [book] looking for people I know. The main place to look in this big manual is the Personality Disorders. Anyone with any kind of identifiable personality disorder is not someone you need to be engaged with in any way.

I don't remember what all the personality disorders are. There's Narcissistic Personality Disorder. There's Borderline Personality Disorder—which I have way too much experience with. Obviously, if someone fits in any way with these personality disorders, you've got to reject them and make sure they don't have any power in your life—because they are they are driven by internal forces that are going to sabotage any project that you involve them with.

So evaluating personalities is an absolutely vital skill of life regardless of whether you have any interest in my post-nuclear family. If you are a human living on Earth and you are pretty functional yourself, it is absolutely vital that you learn how to identify toxic personalities and defective personalities and find a way to wall yourself off from them.

If you're going to be hiring someone, if you're going to be romantically involved with someone, or you're going to be choosing a boss, you've got to be keenly aware of personality traits and detect the signs early-on of a defective personality. That's an important life skill. You don't want to have to do it the hard way by actually marrying a narcissist. You want to be able to find ways to detect defective personalities and take remedial action as quickly as possible.

In a certain sense, if you're trying to find eight adults who fit certain criteria, it might actually be easier than just trying to find, say, one romantic partner. If you find one romantic partner, you're willing to make a lot of excuses for that person, because your own emotional needs are driving you, whereas if you're trying to select eight people, you can be more detached and distant about it.

There are lots of different aspects of personality, but the very first thing you need to do is “out-select”. [This] is a filtration project process for detecting defective personalities. There could be a hundred criteria, a hundred kinds of defective personalities that you should be able to detect at an early stage.

You can consult with certain clinical psychologists who can help you with this. Maybe someone can start a consulting practice where they advise post-nuclear families on candidates and whether they are suitable. If you're talking about assembling a group of eight people, and maybe doing it on multiple occasions, you can come up with systems for detecting defective personalities. Once you've eliminated these defective personalities—which might eliminate nine adults out of ten in society—then you're left with more subtle decisions about how well a person is going to support your system.

Number One is that a candidate for parenthood has to be motivated. They have to believe in the post-nuclear family and believe it is a good investment—because they, personally, will be investing an awful lot in the system, just like parents do today. Parents make vast investments in their partners and in their children. If you join a post-nuclear family, you would also be being making a vast investment—just not quite as much [as traditional parents], since you're distributing the tasks of parenthood across multiple people. So after you've eliminated all the defective personalities, you're left with more subtle distinctions of whether or not these eight people are going to get along with each other.

Going back to my podcast about the Biosphere 2 project in the 1990s: There were eight sort of astronauts who entered this sealed greenhouse in the 1990s, and there were personality conflicts. In particular, there was the doctor of the team who had his own quirky personality and tried to enforce these Draconian dietary restrictions on everyone and really disrupted the whole team. For some reason, he got by their filters, because they were looking for so many different things and were probably not really tuned into personality. They chose at least one defective personality who was not suitable to the project, and it helped bring down the project.

So that was the 1990s. I think in the 2020s, we're much better attuned. We have much better science of personality, and we can better detect defective personalities. I give Donald Trump some credit about this. Before Trump it was considered unethical for psychologists to [diagnose] public figures. It was a banishable offense if you tried to talk about the personality of a living President. That barrier has been smashed, and now psychologists are allowed to talk about public figures and their defective personalities. That's very helpful in advancing the science. I really think it is a science. There can be a science of personality and a science of selecting good people and deselecting toxic people.

So you can see why I'm not promoting the post-nuclear family as a solution for [national] demographic woes. There simply aren't enough adults in [any] society that are suited to this kind of system. It's only a tiny fraction. Maybe one out of 100 or one out of 1000 adults have the right personality to join a group like this.

Furthermore, they have to want to join a group like this. They have to be motivated to do it, enough so that they're willing to make this long-term commitment to make it work. That further reduces your pool of parents for this system.

So in the end, I see only a handful of these systems really forming. Once these systems have proven themselves over the course of 20 years or so, then you might find them proliferating. Others might look at the system and say, “That's a good idea. I want to join with seven other people and do it myself." You can also take these families and split them in the process I call “mitosis”, where you take a family of 18 kids and you split it into two families of 9 kids. It's a system that will help you preserve the way of life and the qualities of life that you feel are important, that are important to your community.

To do this, you have to be very selective about who you involve in your project. That's one aspect of why personality is important. The single most important factor in the success of this project is the adults who started it.

But that's not the end of the personality game. You've also got to deal with the personalities of your children. I propose that this be a genetically diverse group. We have eggs and sperm from a lot of different parents that are involved in making your children, so in the end you're going to get a lot of different personalities out. There's going to be some kids who are really good at technical problems, other kids that are really good at nurturing and leading others. Some kids are going to be introverts. Some kids are going to be extroverts. Your family system has to be able to accommodate all of them, so it has to be flexible.

There have to be rules. There has to be structure, but the family also has to be able to adapt to the various different personalities that emerge, and that's why you've got to have active management in the post-nuclear family. You've got to have parents who are constantly monitoring things and seeing where individual children are going, and [who are] doing various things to accommodate those different personalities.

Every child has to obey the rules. Regardless of their personality, they have to obey the rules of the house and the ethics of the house, but each child is going to do it in different ways. They’re going to take advantage of their opportunities in different ways. And the post-nuclear family has to adapt to those personality changes. Over time, that's going to change the nature of the whole family. If certain kinds of personalities emerge in this family, then over time, over the course of decades, it's going to change the nature of the family itself, so that different post-nuclear families have their own family personalities.

The other thing we've got to address with personality is that when our children go off into the world, they're going to encounter personalities they had no experience with in childhood. If this is a nice, warm, functional family, and your children go off into the world and get conventional jobs with the general population, they're going to start encountering these defective personalities, these people with mental disorders or the Dark Triad factors. We have to find some way, some sort of curriculum to train our children to detect these personalities, so they so that they don't get sucked into them and get victimized by them. If you grow up in a trusting environment, it's very easy to trust others to a fault, and we've got to prepare our children for this eventuality.

And of course, we have to consider personality when we decide which egg is going to unite with which sperm. I'm careful not to call this Eugenics. Eugenics would be when you're trying to deliberately breed certain traits. You want to create a master race or some other ideal, and I don't think that's possible. What is possible, however, is out-selecting certain genetic traits that you know from the start are going to be problematic.

[For example] it may be possible to associate a certain specific gene with a higher prevalence of schizophrenia, so it would be irresponsible not to avoid reproducing that gene in your offspring. This is an area that is open to new technology. We're only on the very primitive end of learning about genetics and the influence of genetics on a child's personality. I only insist that there's going to be a limit to it, that you cannot breed "superior" children. What you can breed is "non-defective" children for things that are very clearly tied to certain genetic profiles.

I still believe the most important thing in your group of children is genetic diversity—that you have a lot of different genes from a lot of different places, and that’s going to contribute to the overall health of your family.

So even if you don't have any interest in the post-nuclear family, you've got to be aware of personalities. You've got to be continuously researching personalities. There's a lot of great YouTube videos on things like narcissism and psychopathy. Just search for those terms, and you'll get a lot of qualified psychologists talking about these systems.

Regardless of what you plan to do with your life, it's going to involve interacting with other people. It's going to involve selecting other people and the people you're going to be associated with and the people you want to wall yourself off from. It is vital to understand their personalities and how their minds work so that you can make good decisions in this regard.

In fact, I think one of the most important tasks of life is being able to evaluate other people and decide how you're going to approach them. Either these are people who you know are going to be helpful to you, without great cost, or they are people like Donald Trump that you just want to get out of your life and wall off. Although you might not be able to put them in jail, you can create firewalls between you and these defective personalities, because the world is positively full of them.

Take any population of random adults, and you've got a lot of really destructive and disruptive people, and your job as a human being is to detect these destructive people and find a way to wall yourself off from them and keep them from destroying your life, because they certainly will. The defective personalities are so sucked up in their own problems that they will very easily crash your dreams and crush you under their thumb if you give them any power to do so.

To get started in this, I would go directly to YouTube, type in the word “narcissism” and listen to some psychologists talk about it. You very quickly realize, “Yeah, I know someone like that.” From there, you can branch off and learn about all the other personalities that you should be avoiding in your life.

———

Written, recorded and edited by Glenn Campbell. For annotations, links and corrections, see the description on the video version of this podcast. You can also leave comments there. See here for all my podcast scripts on this blog.

The transcript above is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. In general, I make only the minimal changes necessary for clarity. I have not re-checked the transcript below against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs, correcting grammar and removing repetitive words and phrases. More than the broadcast itself, this transcript is the authorized rendition of what I said. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are added words or minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell

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Transcript prepared at Beth Israel Hospital, Reisman 11 room 62, 15-16 August 2021

63. Post-Nuclear Family: Insulating Children from Parental Disputes — Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-07-16T09:57:00.001-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #63, released on 16 July 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (? minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com. See bottom for notes on this transcript and how it was generated.

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

BELOW IS THE RAW UNCORRECTED TRASCRIPT FROM YOUTUBE. I hope to edit it later.

in an episode i released yesterday i listed five reasons why parents should not live in the same household as the children in my proposed post-nuclear family and i woke up this morning and realized i had forgotten one there's a sixth one and i forgot to put it in and i debated whether i should just re-record the previous episode or add an addendum and it turns out this is an important enough issue that it really deserves its own episode so that's what i'm gonna do now what is the sixth reason that you don't want parents living in the same household as the children they're raising and that reason is to insulate the children from the parents disputes so this is a complicated management challenge you have at least eight adults trying to raise between nine and 18 kids without killing each other and i recognize that it's a huge challenge because each of those eight people each of those eight adults are going to have slightly different ideas about all sorts of things about how the children should be raised they should not clash on the basic principles because if they did not already agree on the basic principles they would not have formed this alliance to begin with but once the basic principles are decided then we have all sorts of uh policy disputes and and granular ex disputes about what we should do in general and what we should do in in specific situations this is especially important in this system where i'm proposing that you can be a on duty parent only one day a week if there if a parent comes in only one day a week and the parents are have different ideas about parenting then if a child can just go to the parent that they think they're going to get the best deal from so the parent on monday might seem very strict so you don't ask him for things uh that you know he's probably going to deny you go to the nicer parent on wednesday who's more likely to give you what you want and this is a challenge the the parents have to be on the same page they have to be in agreement on what the rules are otherwise you have what would be called parent shopping where children shop around among the parents to get whatever it is they want so this is a complicated situation the whole policy of of what we should be doing how we should be raising kids what privileges we should be giving them is a complicated debate and it goes on and on and on among the parents and my contention is it should all go on and on completely outside the hearing of the children so the children if they ask one parent something some sort of permit permission they should get exactly the same answer from that parent as they would get from another parent and that's because the parents should have worked it all out behind the scenes so if if you come in your day is monday you come in uh you're going to interact with your kids these are all your kids you're going to interact with them in in a special way you have your personality you have you click with some of the kids in ways you don't with others you're going to distribute your attention as you choose but when a critical question comes up from a child can i do this they should get the same answer ferment everybody and uh maybe they maybe the the parent doesn't know the answer uh the parent should at least know that okay this is something i can resolve on my own or this is something i've got to consult with the other parents about and and you could be quite explicit about that is someone asked to see a certain movie that you don't think is too appropriate well you have to say i'm going to have to consult with the other parents on this and that consultation happens outside the view of the children so they just get an answer they don't see the process the process can be kind of messy there can be a lot of heated debate about what should be done but it shouldn't happen within the view of the children likewise the relationships between the parents should be outside of the children's view now i suggested that one way to start this family would would be for four couples four romantically involved couples deciding to raise their children together what happens if one or more of those couples decide to get divorced decide they can't live with each other in a traditional nuclear family that would be just devastating to the children because their whole existence depends on mommy loving daddy if that's not going to be the case they they feel justifiably threatened in the case of the post-nuclear family that relationship takes place mostly outside the view of the children so instead of one there being one parent on any day of the week there could be a couple that comes in on a certain day of the week and at some point the couple can say you know we're not going to come in together we've decided to get a divorce you're still going to see us but you might not see us on the same day and the kids are gonna kind of shrug and say you know so what uh it's a lot different if the uh parents have their dispute have their pre-divorce dispute right there in the household with the children so it's a pretty good bet if you start out with four loving couples it's a pretty good bet that within the next 10 to 20 years one or more of them are going to split up there's going to be internal disputes among all of them that should not be visible to the children in any way now the disputes between parents i do not expect to be violent i do not expect major conflicts between couples i expect couples to say okay we we really don't want to live with each other but we're still friends and the reason i can expect that is there's a filtering process before these adults ever get together based on their personalities they already have certain personalities that are conducive to working with others to peaceful dispute resolution and finding diplomatic ways to solve problems that's expected of all the parents that's part of their personalities and in the next episode i'm going to dive into it what kind of personalities would be forming this consortium

———

The transcript above is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. In general, I make only the minimal changes necessary for clarity. I have not re-checked the transcript below against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are added words or minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell

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63.

62. Post-Nuclear Family: Why Parents Should Not Live With Their Children ⸻ Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-07-15T09:49:00.004-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #62, released on 15 July 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (? minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com. See bottom for notes on this transcript and how it was generated.

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

Today, I'm going to answer a simple question about the post-nuclear family—my theoretical system for raising children in some future world—and the question is: Why don't I want adults living in the same household as the children being raised?

A simple description of the post-nuclear family is that we have a large number of children spaced every one or two years living together in the same household raised by a consortium of parents who do not live in that household. In this podcast, I'm going to answer that last question: Why don't I want the parents living in the same household as their kids?

These children, at least initially, could be the biological children of the parents. I see at least four couples getting together, deciding they want to raise their children together and then producing those children in the traditional way. The only difference is that they're timing their births so that the children are evenly spaced.

My idea is these parents live elsewhere. There's a central house where the children live, and the parents live elsewhere a short distance away in their own homes or apartments or whatever. They come into the household to perform their scheduled duties, then they leave they go back to their own homes and their own lives. The analogy I draw is a community church, where you have a lot of adults in the community maintaining the church and coming in to perform various functions to help support it, but they don't live at the church.

So why wouldn't I want these parents living with their own offspring? I see five reasons. [There are actually six. The last one is covered in the following podcast: Episode 63.]

Number One is we want to preserve the nature of this household. We want to preserve the child friendliness of this household. The sort of place that you want to raise children is not the sort of place where adults would want to live because adults and children have different needs. For example, adults can watch movies that you don't want children watching. That's a problem if adults and children are living in the same household. It's not a problem if the children's household is sequestered—is quarantined, so to speak—so that only the influences that you want actually get in. So that's the first reason.

The second reason is that it helps the parents with their division of labor. The whole idea of this thing is that you should be able to raise children at a lower cost and with less overall portion of your time than you would if you and one other person try to raise children alone. The other side of that is that if you have too many people, too many cooks in the kitchen, they start stepping on each other's toes and the way to avoid that is you never have too many of those adults in the house to begin with.

My idea is that every day, there's one adult, one parent, or perhaps a couple, who is in charge of the household. They might come in in the mid-afternoon and leave in the evening. They don't necessarily have to stay overnight. So how would that work? We'll get into that later.

The third reason is kind of related to the first reason in that I want to isolate the children from their parents’ wealth. Parents in this family, at least initially, could be pretty well off, but you don't want to automatically have that wealth given to your children. I think that's toxic. They shouldn't necessarily get all the best clothes and have all the best experiences just because their parents are very wealthy.

If the parents live away, they can keep their wealth away. The children [should] live in an environment I call “benign poverty”—a place where everything is provided. There's plenty of food. There's plenty of attention. There's plenty of love, but not a lot of material resources, not a lot of nice clothes, not a lot of personal toys. A lot of the stuff in the household should be kind of well used and beaten up. A lot of the clothes should be hand-me-downs.

I don't think that children should automatically be given nice stuff. I think it interrupts with the childhood process, the child-rearing process. It is up to the consortium of parents to decide how much wealth should be allowed into the household, but in any case, you've got to control it. You've got to have these firewalls between the wealth of the parents and the wealth of the children.

Reason Number Four for not having adults live in the family is that you want to promote the independence of the children's household. As I’ve mentioned before, I expect children to perform a lot of the routine duties of maintaining the household. I don't believe that children should provide the food, but I believe that they should cook the food. They should prepare the food. They should clean up after. I believe that they can do most of the duties involved in raising infants. Keep in mind there's a wide range of ages in this household, ranging from 0 to 18. 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds are capable of an awful lot, and you'd be surprised at how much an 8-year-old is capable of in caring for others.

If there's always adults hovering around to intervene, the kids don't have an opportunity to take this responsibility. There's too many adults to run to. If there's only one adult on duty, they can't do everything for 9 kids. The 9 kids got to do a lot of the stuff themselves. If you had adults right there in the household, easily accessible, it really wouldn't work out very well.

The fifth reason is that it helps promote a life balance among the parents.

I think there's a healthy life balance that every adult should try to aim for. I call it a “Rule of Thirds”. One third of your waking life should be devoted just to survival, just to making enough money to support yourself and to pay your portion of the costs of this family. The second third of your life should be spent on improving yourself and pursuing your own interests, so that you're a better person in the future. And the final third of your life should be devoted to serving future generations. That's what parenting is. That's your long-term third. It's much easier to maintain these nice, neat divisions if you're not [in the household] when you're not on duty.

So those are the five reasons for not having the adults there. There are, however, two exceptions to adults living in the household. [One of them] is when an adult needs help needs, needs assistance, needs care. [This] could happen with a very old member of the family, or it could be a sick member of the family, or it could be a child who doesn't turn out quite right and needs lots of assistance, can't work on their own.

So those are the kind of adults who would live, if not in right in the household with the kids, than off on a wing of the household where they have easy access to the kids. The idea is that you're going to use the kids as a captive labor force to help take care of these sick people.

It's like your elderly grandmother living in a room off the garage. Your grandmother is right there. She needs help from time to time. A lot of that help can be provided by kids. For example, the kids can bring meals to grandma. Part of the culture of service of this family is that kids take care of younger kids, and they also take care of elders and sick members of their family.

The other reason you might have adults living right in the household, or very close to the household, is for physical protection. Imagine a kind of a post-apocalyptic universe, a Mad Max universe where everyone has to live in a walled compound with guards posted to keep out the savages. That's the point where you really want to circle the wagons and bring everybody in your family into this stockade for mutual protection. You may think that's ridiculous, that we don't need that in the modern world. I’ve seen an awful lot of the modern world, and there are places where you really do need that sort of thing.

Let me expand on that. Let me talk about the American model. Let's say we have a society that's more or less like American society today, when this consortium of adults decides to form, they can set up their household in one of the many McMansions in America.

In the 1990s, there was this building boom of these very big houses—like 5000 square feet—in the wealthier suburbs of big cities. They were called McMansions at the time. You would have a Baby Boomer couple and their one or two kids living in this humongous house. I’ve been inside a lot of these houses. They're really obscene. They make no sense for four people, but they ***might*** make a lot of sense for nine people, the nine children in the post-nuclear family. You generally got a huge yard. You've got a lot of common space inside. You can subdivide part of the house into bunk rooms. You might have a basement, a second floor, an attic. It’s an ideal resting place for my post-nuclear family.

In that case, I'm comfortable with the parents coming in, doing their duty, leaving late in the evening and letting the children fend for themselves overnight. That may seem frightening until you realize there’s a responsible 17- or 18-year-old in the household who has proven themselves and can handle anything that comes up until the morning. If they can't handle something, a parent is always on call. They can phone the parent, and the parent will rush over and deal with the situation, but ideally you want the 17-year-old to deal with the situation.

So that's the American model. Now I want you to imagine the South African model. You've probably never been to South Africa. I have. I’ve spent about two months total on several trips to the African continent. Every substantial house in Africa is a fortress, because you have such a disparity between rich and poor. So if you're moderately rich—what we would call Middle Class—if you have a home, you've got to have a wall around that home—an eight to ten foot wall literally topped by either razor wire or an electric fence. [You need it] to keep out the riffraff, to keep out the very poor people who would steal you blind.

This is a universal throughout Africa, not in just in South Africa, but almost every place I’ve been in Africa. Every house is a fortress, and you really wouldn't want to leave a family of kids alone at night in this environment. You want as many of the parents as possible to live within this compound, so it would be a family compound. It would be a big walled area with several buildings. The parents live in one building. The children live in the other building, but we still maintain this separation where the parents come into the main household only to serve their duties. So that's the South African model.

Since I'm planning this system for a future world over, let's say, the next century, it's entirely conceivable that we might need the South African model in America [or Europe]. You just don't know what the world is going to look like over the next century.

So I hope that answers the question of why I don't want the parents in the children's household.

I guess there's one other thing I would want to expand on, which is this environment conducive to raising children. A family is a sort of Disneyland created by the parents to be a safe place to raise children and there are a lot of different elements of this. You don't want indiscriminate use of electronic media. You need to have an electronic media policy, where you control how much access the children have to things like television and computers and video games. It's not just everything goes [like today]. The parents have to sit down and decide, “What are we going to let in, and how much of it are we going to let in? What is our policy on that?” And once you've established that policy, you need an isolated place [where] you can implement that policy.

And of course, you need physical protections that adults don't need. If you've got toddlers running around in this family, you need to have toddler-proof doors. You need to have all sorts of design changes to make sure this place is safe for toddlers. You spend a lot of time coming up with these systems, and you don't want adults living there because their needs are entirely different.

There's also a sort of cultural isolation that you want to develop. You want to teach morality and a lot of other lessons, and you kind of need a protected environment in which to do that. For example, I wouldn't want children using swear words. You can enforce that if there are no adults in the household using swear words. You can impose rules on the children that you don't try to impose on adults.

You shouldn't be in the situation where the children can say, “Why can't I do this when I saw this adult do the same thing?” If the adult is conducting his or her life someplace else, then the children never have a chance to make that complaint, because they don't see it.

So I hope I’ve covered everything. I will see you in the next podcast. I'm going to focus for a while on the post nuclear family, [because] that seems to be the most the important thing I can talk about. So we'll see what I talk about next time.

[This discussion is continued in the following podcast, Episode 63, with a 6th reason that parents should not live in the same household as their kids.]

———

The transcript above is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. In general, I make only the minimal changes necessary for clarity. I have not re-checked the transcript below against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are added words or minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell

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61. Babies in the Post-Nuclear Family ⸺ Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-07-09T11:44:00.001-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #61, released on 9 July 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (42 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com. See bottom for notes on this transcript and how it was generated.

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

In today's episode, i'm going to talk about babies in the post-nuclear family. The post-nuclear family is my hypothetical mind exercise for how you would go about raising more children in a world where it's very costly and very risky. If you were a potential parent who wanted children but didn't feel you could afford them, didn't feel you could take the risk, this is a system that might help you. [It’s] a theoretical system and i'm running through all theoretical threads of it.

The basic idea of the post-nuclear family is raising a bunch of kids together in a big family. I'm thinking at least nine children in one household. Nine children from various different parents. This system could start quite simply, with at least four couples deciding they want to raise their children together. They coordinate their births so that children come into the world in timed intervals every two years. Nine children, two years each, means you have a range of children between 18 and zero. And the idea of raising these children together is economies of scale. You can systematize parenting and develop cultural systems for it that a two-child family just can't do. I propose that the system go on forever that it always has nine kids.

Another important thing is that the parents do not live at the household where the children are raised. The parents live in their own separate abodes close to the main household but not in the main household.

This is one of the episodes where i'm just talking off the cuff. I decided spontaneously a couple days ago [that] i'm going to talk about babies. With all these off-the-cuff episodes, I could make mistakes. There could be a lot of repetition from previous podcasts. If I make any errors, you want to go to the description on the youtube version of this podcast to see if I confess to them.

So why am I thinking about babies right now? Well a couple of nights ago, I was on a red-eye flight from phoenix to boston—five hours—and there was a screaming baby on the flight. So we have 140 people on the flight and one screaming baby which means hardly anyone gets any sleep.

The baby's screeches seem to be perfectly designed to irritate adults. Probably evolution has designed a baby scream to irritate adults and demand action from adults, and my first inclination is go to the mother and say “make your baby be quiet!” And of course, the mother can't do that. There's no legal way you can make a baby shut up. So we all just had to go through this. For a couple of hours I was just staring out the window at the lights below and thinking, “what can I make of this experience?” This is a miserable experience [so] what can I make of it? And I started thinking about babies in my system.

Now in my system, you would never have a screaming baby on a cross-country flight, and why is that so? Because in my system the babies and young children are very solidly anchored to the house where they live. In the post-nuclear family, everything revolves around the house, which is a big home in the suburbs or in the countryside, and everybody comes to the home. All your relatives, all your older siblings, all the adults in the family, they come to the home, so there's never any reason to take a baby on a plane.

I propose that [young] children shouldn't go on planes. It's not valuable to them. It's not a valuable experience. [Visiting] the airport and looking out the windows at the planes, yeah that's kind of interesting, but it's way beyond a young child's head. You can take a child to europe or to some exotic location and if they're very young, if they're toddlers, the only thing that will ever register on their memory is some little detail like a playground or a ball pit or something that was really cool to them and the whole rest of the trip is over their heads. So I believe that [young] children should not travel beyond a few miles from their home. There's enough adventures within 10 miles of your residence to keep any young child occupied.

This isn't true for older children. Older children want to know more. They have more of the brain structure to be able to process travel. I think you've got to be 14 or 15 to comprehend an overseas trip, and you got to be even older to really take advantage of foreign experiences. In our family, a logical question is how do you take a vacation with nine kids? How do you get them all in in a car? And my answer is: you don't. The whole family as a unit very rarely leaves the house. The house is where everything happens.

As you get older and can process more experiences further away, well, maybe at age nine you can go on a bigger trip than a toddler would. Because the ages are so staggered—two years between each child—you don't have huge jealousy issues. If a seven-year-old can do something that a five-year-old can't, maybe the five-year-old is going to be upset, but everybody knows that you're going to grow into this position eventually. You'll be a seven-year-old and you'll have the same privileges to get on airplane that a seven-year-old might have.

So that's one thing I took away from my screaming baby experience: that in my system, there would never be a baby on a flight—so that’s solved. The other question that I had as I was staring out the window is: why is this baby screaming and the two or three other babies in the plane are perfectly content? I knew there were more babies on the plane because when the plane was getting ready to take off I could hear them burbling and gaggling, I could hear their voices making baby sounds, so I knew there was more than one baby, but [there was] only one baby screaming bloody murder for the whole flight.

So why is this? Why are, for example, some babies known as very easy, no problem at all, and some babies are known as colicky and very complaining and unhappy with everything. There could be two reasons for this: it could be nature or nurture. Some babies are born very calm, and some babies are born very uptight. This is part of their genes. And of course mother can have a huge influence. How mother interacts with her baby has a huge influence on the incentives that the baby might have to make a stink. Of course, it's very difficult to teach a mother this. Mothers themselves have their own inclinations, have their own abilities to handle things like that. Some mothers should have never been in the business.

So in in my post nuclear family, you have to take this into account: that each of your children is going to have their own personality, regardless of their gene pool. For example, in my genetic family, considering my siblings and my cousins and my nephews and nieces, the range of personalities of these people is immense, even though they all arose from my mother and my father [and grandparents]. This whole branching tree has a huge variety of inclinations and the most striking inclinations is are my twin cousins, fraternal twins born from the same womb, with completely different inclinations. One of them is very theatrical. He's flaming gay; he was from his earliest teenage years. The other one is very technical. He's into gaming he's into technical projects. He's not theatrical in any form. Completely different polar opposites in personality; yet they came out of the same womb and had the same environmental experiences in their early childhood. This must be accounted for by differences in genetics and how genetics interact with the environment.

So our post-nuclear family has to be able to accommodate a wide variety of personalities in the children that it brings into the world, and that's why it's very difficult to come up with fixed rules about how things are going to be structured, because we don't know what personalities are going to emerge. Some personalities are very nurturing, responsible. Some personalities, quite frankly, are psychopathic. They have no comprehension of caring for others—and you've got to accommodate that, too.

You also have to accommodate the fact that some children come out of the womb physically damaged. I mean, every time you mix an egg and a sperm, it's a crapshoot. There could be all sorts of birth defects that happened before birth, that are going to affect how functional this child is going to be, and the new post-nuclear family has to accommodate them, too. Someone might be confined to a wheelchair or be unable to work for their entire life. Well, the family is there to support them. It's much better if you have 10 adults supporting this dysfunctional child than just two adults. And that, to me, is the most terrifying reason that I would not want to have children: the risk that the child I produce might have some serious defect, that cripples them and cripples me. If you can distribute that risk among a greater adult pool, then it's not so hard.

So if you are a baby, what's it like growing up in this environment? I don't know how much of your babyhood that you remember. Basically, I think I was two or three before I had my first memory but you know you grow up being helpless. You look up around you, see faces above you, bond to those faces, but you really don't care who those faces are. Traditionally, it's a mother that you bond with. You look up, because your mother spends the most time with you, you bond to that person, and that's the person you run to for comfort.

Every baby has a mother, even in the post-nuclear family. Every baby has a mother, and you have a very special relationship with your mother. Your mother may breastfeed you for a year or more, and you have this special bond with your mother. You always know who your mother is. You don't always know who your father is, but you always know who your mother is, and it's good to have a firm bond with that parent.

In the post-nuclear family, we're not going to cut mothers off and say, “you can't see your baby,” but mothers do have the freedom to pull away. You've given birth. You've had nine months to give birth and maybe a year to raise the child personally, and then you're free to pull away and leave things in the hands of your siblings—um—leave things in the hands of the other children in the family, because we have this nice staggering of children.

You've seen pictures of big families where they arrange the oldest to the youngest. You can imagine one of those pictures with nine kids. The oldest is 18 the next oldest 16, and they get a little bit smaller and smaller. If you've got that graduated system, the older children can do an awful lot in caring for the younger children.

So if you're a baby looking up from your bed at the faces above you, yes, your mother's going to be there, but there's also going to be your siblings hovering over you and competing to take care of you. You're going to bond to some of those siblings just like they were your mother. An eight-year-old to a baby is for all practical purposes an adult. You will bond to that adult, and that eight-year-old adult will bond with you, so you don't have everything resting on the mother all the time. We're not going to deprive the mother of the joys of motherhood, but we can give the mother the opportunity to escape from some of the chores of motherhood, because I propose that children do all the major gritty care for an infant: changing diapers, making meals, teaching the child language—that should all be done by children.

And that's about as far as i'm willing to go with it. I'm willing to say that there should be a gradation of care. There should be a levels of care where an eight-year-old does everything that they can do to take care of the baby, and if they have a problem they can't handle, they go to their next older sibling who has more authority and more wisdom and can handle more complex things.

So we have might have a 14- year-old kind of managing the eight-year-old, who is doing the major care for the baby, but I'm not willing to get into more detail than that, and the reason i'm not is because of this personality thing. We don't know what the personalities of those children are going to be. Some eight-year-olds are very nurturing. They're very responsible. They take control. They know what to do with a baby. Others just couldn't care less. They just don't bond with the baby. They don't have an interest in taking care of the baby, so we channel them off into different things, different duties for the family, while the one who's very good at nurturing will take care of the baby.

The parties themselves determine this more than the adults do. The adults watch and see that certain parties are getting along better with each other. Certain parties have a natural affinity to each other, and adults shouldn't try to interrupt this. They should try to foster this. So although we have the children doing most of the work of the family—children are making meals. Children are cleaning house.—We do need adults in the family to orchestrate all of this, to direct people and to make sure things are getting done—and if necessary tell people to do things—but ideally you want to have a system in place. The idea of parenthood is to get a system in place where things take care of themselves for the most part.

As a baby, you may be very firmly bonded to your biological mother, but you're also firmly bonded to various other faces various, other characters in the family, so if your biological mother were to go away—even to go away for a very long time—you're not traumatized with it by it because you have all these other attachments within the family. So that's one issue addressed by the post-nuclear family: that having a baby doesn't have to be a an intense 20-year commitment. It might be an intense two-year commitment, and then mothers are free to go off and do their own thing.

Now, who are the mothers? I've discussed this in a previous podcast {where the babies come from}. The key question is, where do these babies come from? Who makes these babies? The initial post-nuclear family is a probably going to be a consortium of four or more couples—so eight people, conceivably more than that. These are fertile couples: the mother ideally can bear children. So the children in that case are going to come out of the mothers who are part of this initial consortium.

If you have the base level of four couples, you have four mothers, [and] they coordinate their births so they are producing a birth every two years, and that's fine for the first 18 years or so—what I would call the first generation. I consider a generation to be 18 years. For that first generation, [the babies] all come out of the original founding mothers, [but] then you've got the problem of what happens when the founding mothers lose their fertility around age 40 or so. Where do the babies come from then?

You've got these founding mothers that, say, might may have founded the family in their 20s and they get up toward age 40, where [are] the babies going to come from?

And even at age 40, it gets a little risky. A baby in your 40s has an elevated chance of various defects that you might not want to risk, whereas the healthiest the healthiest babies come from the youngest mothers. The youngest mothers have the most resilience to handle pregnancy. So if you're 21 or 22, biologically that's the ideal time to have a baby. Socially, it's a terrible time to have a baby. The ages of 18 to 22, socially, are a terrible time to have a baby because you interrupt your career, you interrupt your education, but biologically, that's the best time to have a baby.

So this is a question we have to work out after the first 18 years: where do the babies come from? Fortunately, you've got 18 years to think it over. After 18 years, you can decide, “should we keep this thing going? Do we want to keep nine children in the family forever?” I hope that you do, because by the time you've raised children for 18 years, you've learned an awful lot about it. You've come up with all these systems for managing this huge amount of children, all these very subtle customs—not only among the children but among the adults—for how to live this life, and once you've got a full brood of nine, do you really want to quit. Don't you want to just keep this thing going for as long as you [can]? That way, you can carry all this software that you developed over the previous 18 years into the next 18 years.

So if you're going to do that, you have to figure out, “where do the babies come from?” They can't come from the original mothers because the original mothers have lost their fertility. They've gotten too old. We could try to recruit new mothers, new young mothers, into your consortium, but you're increasing the size of your family. Let's say there's four couples in this original family, and then 18 years later you recruit four more couples. Well, there's a demographic problem here, because you're increasing the number of adults, and ultimately those adults have to be cared for in their old age. One of the functions of the post-nuclear family is to care for people when they can't care for themselves—for medical reasons or for old age—so there's a problem with just recruiting new mothers.

I propose that the people who bear the children for the next generation come from the family itself. As a young woman reaches the age of maturity, the age of consent—let's say 18 or so—she can be encouraged to bear a child for the family, bear two children for the family. It's sort of her community service. And although I'm suggesting this I have no idea about the politics, how this would be negotiated, or what the politics of this would be. You don't want to seem coercive, that you're coercing your daughters to have a child, so i'm staying clear of that. That's a policy issue.

But if this could be pulled off, then the young women of the family produce the new babies of the family from a donated egg. Although the mother is coming from the family itself, the egg doesn't need to be her egg. It's possible to donate an egg from someone else. The sperm? Where does the sperm come from? Well, ideally, you don't want it you don't want it to be installed in the usual way. The cleanest way for this to happen is a girl at age 18 decides she wants to do her duty by having a baby for the family [and] a fertilized egg is provided to her.

That's complicated enough: to get a young woman to consent to having a baby for her family using a donated egg. That’s messy enough. Politically, culturally that's complicated. The more complicated thing, however, is where does this egg and sperm come from? Whose egg gets united with whose sperm…. And that's where i'm just going to stay the heck out of it! It has been a major problem of humanity since the beginning. Which sperm connects with which egg has been a fraught subject since the beginning of time. Families negotiated among themselves. Men and women negotiated among themselves: which egg is going to be united with which sperm.

You can call it eugenics if you want, but it's eugenics that has been going on since the beginning of time: deciding who mates with whom. That subject is going to be no less messy with the post-nuclear family than it has been throughout all of history: which egg unites with which sperm.

I should caution from the beginning that eugenics, as it is classically formulated, doesn't work. It doesn't work in the sense that that you can breed dogs. You can breed dogs for certain characteristics, and that's why we have such a wide variety of dogs. You can't do that with humans. It's physically very difficult and the reason it's very difficult [is] a dog has a two-year period between their birth and when they can give birth themselves. Two-year latency period before they can give birth. For an adult [human], it's technically 15 or 16 years and practically 18 or 20 years.

Let's say you wanted to build a super race of hyper-intelligent people—like hitler might have wanted to do—by having all the smartest people mate with all the other smart people, according to whatever criteria you decide is smartness. The trouble with that is you've got to wait 20 years for each cycle. You've got to wait 18 or 20 years to find out what a child is really capable of. You know their brilliance might not really come out until they're 18 or 20. Then you can go and try to breed the smartest with the smartest, but even then it's a crapshoot. It's not guaranteed by any means.

Eugenics just isn't practical on a human time scale. The fact is, no organization, no family even, has enough organization over time to be able to build a master race. I think that more of what the genetic plan would be is to have a variety have children from a variety of gene pools/ I think variety is probably much more valuable to a family than trying to breed for specific traits.

Things you might want to breed for [are] general aptitude. Are the mother and father good members of the community? Are they resilient? Are they healthy?... Without nailing it down to any specific trait. You want the best people breeding. The people who are psychopathic, people who are not as functional in society, you might not want to breed them. You don't want to breed people who have obvious genetic defects. Intelligence doesn't boil down to a single gene that we can identify but there are countless defects in genes that we know cause problems, and we want to avoid reproducing those genes.

If this sounds like a really messy process, it is, but I would not call it “eugenics.” [The word] “eugenics” would apply when a government or an institution is trying to do it. When a family is trying to do it and individuals are trying to do it, then it's just “matchmaking”—matchmaking that has been taking place since the beginning of time. Which woman is going to mate with which man? Remember that for most of human history, a man and woman did not choose their own spouses. The choice was made for them, in terms of negotiation between families. It was an alliance between families and we're looking at both the man and the woman to decide: are these good breeding stock? That’s what matchmakers did back in the day. I propose bringing back the matchmaker, or at least the matchmaker function.

So you've got this big family with a lot of adults. When we get to the end of the fertility of the original mothers, we've got a crisis. We've got to decide how we're going to make new babies, and part of that decision is: where is the egg and sperm going to come from? [Maybe] you form a committee and that committee does a lot of wheeling and dealing. I don't know how they're going to do their wheeling and dealing. They can choose egg and sperm from within the family. They can trade with other families. They can look outward for egg and sperm. And they have to come up with some sort of criteria for deciding which egg merges with which sperm.

Who the mother is going to be is relatively simple. You just need a carrier. You just need somebody you could implant this embryo into. That's the easy part. The hard part is where the embryo comes from, and in advance, I can't give you any answers to that. It’s something that has to be worked out. I don't think even the mother—the carrier of the of the baby—should be given any discretion about the embryo she receives. The embryo just comes to her—like the stork brings the embryo—because if you did give the mother the right to choose her own embryo—boy! There would be politics! All reproduction would come to come to a halt. The fact is, human reproduction is a messy process. The negotiation of what sperm meets what egg is a messy process. It's an ethical minefield. The only way to eliminate all the ethical issues would be to eliminate all human reproduction.

So let me review a couple more features of the post-nuclear family that i've talked about before.

I think the ideal family size is nine children, spaced every two years. Every two years doesn't come out to nine children exactly because many children hang around into their twenties. Many children might leave the nest at 16. The important thing is spacing every two years. The reason for that is it allows every child to have a special place in the family, a unique position in the family.

Even though there are a lot of kids, your place is special. For the first two years, you are the focus of everyone's attention. The whole family is focused on you. After two years, you get a new sibling and suddenly you're not the center of attention anymore, and you have to learn to work with others more.

As you grow up, you gain more privileges, but not everybody gains the same privileges at the same age. Some children are capable of a lot more at eight years old than other children are, so you give them special privileges that maybe the previous eight-year-old and the next eight-year-old don't get. You manage to get away with it because of this gap between the children.

You know the big complaint that every sibling has is, "hey that's not fair! You're giving him this privilege and you're not giving me this privilege.” You reduce that by having the ages staggered every two years, [which helps] hides the fact that you are actually treating every single child differently, based on their actual affinities. One person is very good at math. One person is very good at nurturing. [We are] going to give treat [each child] specially based on their special skills, and because we have this this hierarchy of oldest to youngest the kids, don't really notice.

Ideally, the kids don't notice that they weren't treated exactly the same as their older sibling was, and that's why I think two years is the ideal spacing between childre—in current families and in future families—it gives everybody a special place, and it creates a hierarchy where older people can care for younger people.

I've also talked about having 18 kids in one family, which would be a spacing of every one year. That's only for a special circumstance [that] I call mitosis, where we're taking one family and dividing it into two.

Let's say for the first 18 years of the family, kids are spaced every two years you decide at the end of 18 years: number one, you want to keep the family going, and number two, you may decide that you want to expand the number of families. You want to split your family into two. That's mitosis. The reason you want to do this? I don't know. You have to come up with your own reasons. Why do you want to expand your footprint in the world? You've got something that you think works, and you want to expand it. I can't tell you whether you should or shouldn't, but I can tell you how to go about it.

How you go about it is you raise 18 kids. After the first 18 years, you start adding kids every year, which makes for a very crowded family. At the end of the next 18-year cycle, you take these families and you on “unzip” them. You separate them, so one family of 18 children is split into two families of nine children, each alternating years.

Now you've got two families of cousins. Maybe they live in the house next door, or maybe they live across town, but we've known this is going to happen for 18 years, so it's not a surprise to anybody. Your family is split. Now you have two families of nine children each. The important thing is, you have retained your family's culture—all these software systems that you've developed over time. When you split the family, those software systems are preserved in ways that couldn't happen otherwise.

So there is a potential for one of these families taking over the earth. Every 18 years, you split the family. You can grow your population if you feel that's something that should be done. All of this is motivated by what you think should happen.

I've talked a lot about antinatalism—the people who say humanity should just die out. “We don't need humans. They're a scourge in the planet. Let's get rid of them.” And the easy way to get rid of them is nobody has any babies.

If that's your philosophy, well, you can turn off this video, because it won't mean anything to you, but if your philosophy is “humans are important, and my culture is important, and I want to perpetuate my culture into the future,” then you might consider the post-nuclear family. 18 years later, you might consider splitting your family into two, then four, [then] eight over the course of the next century—and take over the world, if that's what you want to do.

The post-nuclear family is not saying. I'm very careful not to say certain things. The post-nuclear family just refers to nine kids in a big family raised by adults who don't live in the household. That's all it is. How you use it is a value judgment. Whether you use it at all is a value judgment that depends upon whether you think babies are important or not.

Whether you choose to have 18 kids so you can split the family, that's another value judgment—whether you think that your family should expand. You might see it as a survival thing. You might see that outside of your family is chaos, [and] to have a greater chance of your family surviving, you've got to make it bigger. You would make it bigger by having 18 kids and then splitting the household.

More than 18 kids would be a disaster. I contend that no two children should have the same age in the family, because then you get into direct competition, where one person gets all the goodies, and the other person gets left behind. That's not how families should work. In a family, everybody's got to be special, because there will be plenty of competition in the adult world. In the family you've got to be special. You have to have a special place, and the ideal way to do that is spacing every two years.

———

The transcript above is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. In general, I make only the minimal changes necessary for clarity. I have not re-checked the transcript below against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are added words or minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell

INTERNAL USE

{This transcript reconciled with actual broadcast: No

{Transcript backed up to email: 16 Aug 2021

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Forms of Infrastructure ⸺ a list to accompany Episode 61

2021-07-04T15:39:00.001-07:00

There are hundreds of forms of infrastructure. These are the main ones that occur to me...

Traditional Physical Infrastructure

These are the common services commonly labeled as "infrastructure" in law and politics. They are either sponsored by the government or heavily regulated by it.

Roads
Railroads
Public Transit
Bridges and Tunnels (carrying roads and railroads)
Power systems
Water
Sewer
Ports and Canals
Airports
Government Buildings (prisons, courthouses, government offices)

Government Organizational Infrastructure

Services provided by the government that may involve physical structures but that are mostly organizational in nature.

Monetary System
Law and Regulation
Law Enforcement
Prisons
Military / Defense
Fire/Emergency Response
Health Care Funding and Regulation
Post Offices
GPS
Air Traffic Control
Education
Parks & Recreation
Child Care
Social Services
Natural Disaster Response/Pandemic Response

Private Infrastructure

Services maintained primarily by private business interests, perhaps with some government regulation and funding. Almost every industry and organization has its own infrastructure system, which are too numerous to list here.

Broadcast Media (entertainment, news)
Data Systems (telephone, internet, cellphones, cable TV, etc.)
Product Distribution
Fuel Distribution
Solid Waste Disposal
Tourist Infrastructure

60. Things I Can't Predict ⸺ Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-06-14T05:57:00.007-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #60, released on 15 June 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (15 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com. See bottom for notes on this transcript and how it was generated.

This is the original script. It has not yet been reconciled with the final broadcast.

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

In this episode, I want to talk about the things I don't know—that is, the things that demographics and macroeconomics can not tell us—as illustrated by all the things that have happened over the past few years that I would have never predicted.

Of course, I couldn't have predicted the pandemic. It wasn't even on my radar until late January 2020. If you were an epidemiologist, however, you could have predicted that something like this was destined to happen; you just couldn't say when. Demographics and macroeconomics are sort of like that: You can predict that bad things will happen, but you don't know when.

Epidemiology is a little different, in that you're just waiting for a random mutation or a random jump of a virus between species. The risk has always been there, but it doesn't change much with time. In demographics and macroeconomics, the risks build up over time until things have to start breaking. It's like stretching a rubber band too far: The more you stretch it, the more likely it will break. We know, for example, that there is going to be a worldwide pensions crisis. This is the natural result of too many old people demanding their retirement benefits and not enough young workers paying into the system. I don't know what form this crisis will take when things come to a head, but you know there will be a day of reckoning—or maybe a few decades of reckoning.

There is a saying in economics: "Anything that can't go on forever will eventually end." This is called Stein's Law, from economist Herbert Stein. What he actually said was, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

Our current demographics and macroeconomics are filled with unsustainable systems that have to stop sooner or later. For example, a government can't keep spending more money than it collects in taxes, printing new money to make up the difference. That's what's happening right now and has been happening for years. Although nothing really bad seems to be happening at this moment, in mid-June 2021, you know it will.

A counterpoint to Stein's law is something I call "Keynes Curse" because it is often attributed to economist John Maynard Keyes, even though there's no evidence he actually said it. Keynes Curse says that "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." In other words, unsustainabilities can go on for a very long time. Anyone who has shorted the market or shorted Tesla stock lately has learned this the hard way. You can know for a fact that a system will fail, but if you don't know when and in what order, this information is pretty much useless to you as an investor.

So I can tell you with great confidence that the US monetary system will fail, but I can't tell you when. There's a fairly limited range of ways the system will break. There can be a massive asset crash that wipes out everyone's investments. There can be hyperinflation, which leaves nominal assets values in place but wipes out the value of the dollar. I can say with great confidence that middle-aged workers who think they have a solid retirement plan will find that it's not there when they arrive, either through inflation or an asset collapse. I can further predict that as some point in the future, the US government will either disintegrate or be forced to live within its means—which itself implies a lot of disintegration.

All of these things are likely to happen sooner or later, because "Anything that can't go on forever will end." I just don't know when or in what sequence or what the secondary damage will be. I just know the ship will sink.

The most serious failing of demographics and macroeconomics is that they can't predict human politics or human behavior. They may be able to predict when social tensions will be high, but they can't predict specifically how those tensions will be expressed.

For example, the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany was a fairly predictable macroeconomic event. If a government keeps printing money without restraint, eventually that money will become worthless. You could have also predicted with great certainty that the hyperinflation would lead to a lot of human misery and popular discontent. What no one could have predicted, specifically, was the rise of Adolf Hitler and where he would lead his country. While you can safely say high economic tensions tend to lead to radical populist movements, you can't say what form they will take.

To me, the great wake-up call to our economic tension was the election of Donald Trump in 2016. This was a pivotal event in my life—and maybe in yours—when I realized that my rational theories of the world didn't work anymore. You can quibble that he didn't win the popular vote, but the fact remains that roughly half the country thought that electing an obvious charlatan was a good idea. The election of 2020 was another harrowing event I never would have predicted. Even after four years of obvious incompetence, roughly half the US population was still willing to reelect him.

The trauma of 2016 is what launched my interest in demography and macroeconomics, but it also forced me to define the difference between what I know and don't know. I know a massive economic collapse is coming, but I can't say how human politics and human psychology will react to that event. I suspect that human politics will eventually trump macroeconomics. From our perspective today, the hyperinflation of Weimer Germany seems almost trivial compared to the World War that followed. That's the sort of thing I can't predict. I can't only live with the fear that another, more efficient Donald Trump could arise at any time.

The pandemic may have been an unpredictable Black Swan, in its specific appearance, but in general, you can predict that Black Swans will happen. They always have. You think you have things all worked out, and then some bolt of lightning hits you out of the blue. The effect of these Black Swans is usually to accelerate destructive processes that were already in play. Government debt, for example, was already a crisis before the pandemic hit, and now it's many times worse.

A few months or years from now, there is sure to be another Black Swan, and another and another. Although you don't know what each one will be, you know they will happen, and they will accelerate unsustainabilities that were already under way. You just don't know how.

Once I knew that a pandemic was brewing in China, little about how it unfolded was surprising to me. In early February 2020, I remember telling my elderly father that he might not be seeing me for a while because his retirement village would be locked down, and that's exactly what happened. It was easy to predict that the lockdowns would be Draconian and indiscriminate, because government response to a crisis is usually ham-handed.

You can hear my own real-time reaction to the pandemic in the podcast episodes I recorded in the early days, starting on February 3, 2020. The only significant error I'll admit to is that I thought fomites were a source of transmission. In other words: I thought you could get the disease if someone who had it touched a doorknob then you touched it and touched your own face. That turns out not to be true. Most transmission is through the air—by breathing in droplets breathed out by someone with the disease—yet we still have hand sanitizer everywhere. I think I was pretty accurate, however, in predicting the worldwide scope of the epidemic and its devastating effects on the economy.

There were three areas, however, in which I was way off the mark....

My first failure is that I never in a million years would have predicted that the pandemic would result in a rise in stocks and other assets markets. On the contrary, I predicted a devastating crash, which I thought was primed to happen long before the pandemic. It started to happen in March 2020, but then markets reversed course, surged to all-time highs and stayed there. This was a complete disconnect from the real economy, which was on life support.

The second thing I never would have predicted were race riots in the midst of a pandemic. Some cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin were utterly devastated. You can point to certain precipitating events, certain instances of police brutality, for example, but this is nothing new. Racial discrimination is nothing new, so why were these violent protests happening now—especially when gathering in large groups, breathing other people's air, was potentially devastating?

The third thing I never would have predicted were labor shortages in the midst of an unemployment crisis. If you drive down any commercial street in America right now, you see help-wanted signs everywhere, and the wages being offered are rising. The labor shortage is a significant burden to businesses right now, just as things are opening up.

In retrospect, I now have explanations for each of these three anomalies. I can record a whole podcast about any one of them. The point is, I never would have predicted three events before they happened, because neither demographics nor macroeconomics gave me adequate tools to do so.

No science can predict human behavior or the exact events of history. It's just too complex, and there are too many wildcards. In Weimar Germany, you knew that social tensions were high and that they were destined to be expressed in some way, but you couldn't have predicted Hitler, just like you couldn't have predicted in 2015 that Trump would be President in 2017.

The best that demographics and macroeconomics can do is predict the future of the whole package that were are travelling in—the trajectory of our whole spacecraft. As an analogy, imagine all of the things that could happen on Earth in the next 50 years. It's silly to try to predict world events in 2071, because there are so many factors involved; yet, astronomers can tell you exactly where in space our planet will be in 2071. That much is completely predictable.

Demographics and macroeconomics can place boundaries on our predictions even if they can't predict specific events. In particular, they can place an upper limit on how much future economic growth there can be. The last quarter of the 20th Century saw astounding economic growth. We were building shopping malls, high-rise office towers and new housing developments. Today's demographics can reliably predict that the same growth will never again be repeated, because we just don't have the bodies.

Macroeconomics can safely predict that tax revenue will never significantly grow, even though government debts have gone through the roof, and this means that one way or another government debt will fail. It is fair to say that most national governments will never again be solvent. They can only keep printing money until something catastrophic happens to make them stop.

The only thing demographics and macroeconomics can do is place a hard ceiling on long-term economic growth, and therefore on the sustainable value of assets and the payability of debt.

Below that ceiling, anything is possible.

———

The transcript above is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. In general, I make only the minimal changes necessary for clarity. I have not re-checked the transcript below against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell

INTERNAL USE

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{Visual version of this script backed up to Twitter on:

{Video posted on FB album/DD page:
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59. Making Sense of UFOs ⸺ Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-06-10T04:49:00.008-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #59, released on 10 June 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (36 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com. See bottom for notes on this transcript and how it was generated.

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

In this issue of my podcast, I'm going to talk about something completely different—UFOs! I'm going to talk about the relevance of UFOs to the subject of this podcast: demography and macroeconomics. Spoiler alert! Guess what? There is not any connection that I can find between UFOs and demography or macroeconomics, and that's the whole point here. That's why I’ve picked up the microphone. I want to tell you how much irrelevance UFOs have to the subjects I’ve been talking about, but I'm going to do it with some nuance and do it at length, because it's still an amusing topic, even if it's unrelated to my main topics.

So why am I talking about it right now? First of all, where am I? I'm in a car on the edge of a cornfield in South Carolina. It's 2am, and I just woke up and decided I should do a podcast on UFOs in my demography podcast. There are two things that prompted this: One was a recent news story from reputable outlets like the New York Times and 60 Minutes indicating that UFOs are real after all— that there seems to be some solid military evidence of craft operating in Earth's environment that far exceed anything that humankind is capable of.

These craft are described as “Tic-Tacs”—oblong white objects without any definition, about the size of a commercial airliner. Military equipment can get a lock on them, can see them. You have visual evidence and radar evidence they're real. They can travel at enormous speed in air and in water. After we've discussed UFOs for decades, now it turns out some of them might be real.

So that's one thing that prompted this podcast episode. The other one was that I bought a drone! About three weeks ago, I bought a drone. The drone technology has finally advanced to the stage where I feel comfortable buying one knowing that I'm not going to lose it tomorrow, because these drones are quite sophisticated about coming back home. I've started to explore my environment with this drone, which is mostly done through the controller. Once your drone goes up into the air, this thing has a huge range. It can fly for a half an hour, and it can go up to several miles away from where I am, and it can plop itself down in some other environment, just like a UFO. Just like an alien.

Something I did a couple of days ago is I saw some cows off in the distance from where I was sitting, so I launched my drone, and my drone went over and talked to the cows! And for the first time, I had some response to my drone. The cows looked up at my drone, and what I did is I came down in the field about eight feet above the ground, and the cows started to circle around me, and they looked at me and as they walked toward me, [they] wondered, what is this thing in their environment? From their perspective, it is a UFO. It is something that's there. My drone is definitely real. It's not a bird. It's operating a way that they've never seen before, and it's just fascinating to them.

But it's also far beyond their comprehension. I can never explain my drone to a cow. It's just impossible. They have no frame of reference to understand where this craft has come from or why it is there. All they know is that it is there.

My Ah-Ha! Moment just now is that this is what the UFO phenomena is like to humans. Those Tic-Tac objects seen by military pilots, they are pretty much like my drone. They have some sort of purpose, but it is way beyond our little cow brains to understand what that purpose is. It's almost futile to try, beyond just noting that these things exist.

You could have cows talking to each other and talking about what this this thing is, and some cows say to the other cows, “Oh, you're crazy! There's no such thing.” But we know that my drone definitely exists. It came down, and the cows gathered around, and I kind of responded to them, because as they're coming to look at me, I'm going down to look at them. So I'm exhibiting some form of intelligence. It's just [that] my goals in launching my drone and coming to visit them are beyond their ability to process.

So that is the final conclusion of my UFO investigation: Yes, they're real, but they're not relevant to our life on Earth—which is the whole reason I finally got out of UFOs in my own life. I'm speaking to you as someone who's been into it a lot more than most people have. There was a time in the 1990s when I called myself a UFO researcher, and I got some publicity and some renowned as a UFO researcher.

It started back in my youth, in my teenage years in the 1970s. I was into science fiction and got into the UFO literature at the time, which was really pretty thin. There were only a handful of incidents. I read all of the books that were available at the time, but I realized that as a teenager, really I got into the UFO thing for the same reason I got into science fiction: for the escapism. To escape from my dreary life in a small town, I got into science fiction and UFOs. As I grew up and emerged into the larger rural world, I discarded them as irrelevant, not important. They could be real, but they're not important to my real adult life, so I discarded them for a couple of decades.

I came back to UFOs around 1990 after I'd been reasonably successful in the software business and had some money and some time. I thought it would be cool to get back into UFOs again. I didn't see them as any more relevant than I did in my teenage years, but it was a fascinating mystery to me. It was like a puzzle to be figured out. I knew that 99% of the UFO claims were false, were misjudgments in some way by the human brain, but that didn't mean that there wasn't one percent out there that were real, and that one percent I saw as, you know, just the fact that any of this, any one instance is real, ought to be earth shattering.

So I got into it in the 1990s as a an intellectual challenge because I had time on my hands and I wanted to see if there was any signal in all of this noise. To cut a long story short, I was attracted to Area 51, which was supposedly a place where you could see UFOs on demand, on a scheduled basis. I went to investigate them, and this became my whole cause celebre for the next five years or so. I became an expert on Area 51, as much as anyone could be, and I was really much more focused on the human aspects of this very real place. I got some recognition. I got some fame for it. My 15 minutes of fame turned into 45 minutes of fame. I got along on a lot of tv shows, which went on for years, and it became a source of my identity—at least my public identity. That's how most of the world would know me, as this publicist for Area 51.

But the UFOs themselves I always kept at arm's length. My position on UFOs has almost always been: “They're just not relevant, [even if] they could be real.” Certainly, the vast majority of UFO reports are not real. A handful of them could be real, but even if they are, they're just not relevant to my life on Earth.

Eventually I exploited everything I could exploit at Area 51. I learned an awful lot about many human subjects. It was like a graduate level program on a lot of other things, like law and government and psychology and media. I learned so much about how media works. But it ran its course, and I withdrew. I moved on to other things.

And now UFOs are back, and they seem to be real. Some little sliver of the UFO literature seems to be real, and now what do I do about it?

I can only interpret UFOs in terms of what is important to me, and what is important to me right now is demographics [and] the demographic crises that we are facing—crises like not enough babies and not enough quality in our upbringing of babies, and all of the macroeconomic problems that arise from not having enough babies, which is the looming monetary crisis that is coming about—basically because our demographics are tapped out, [and] we don't have the demographic growth that we used to have.

So how do these Tic-Tacs operating in the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean, sighted by military pilots, how is that relevant to any of the problems I'm talking about—and it just isn't!

I'm like those cows. When this drone arrives, this weird alien craft arrives in their environment, I'm going to take notice of it. I'm going to note it down in my little cow brain, but when the object goes away again, I'm going to go back to munching grass, because that's what cows do. When there's no article in the New York Times about UFOs, well, I just go back to my version of munching grass, which is working on the human problems that humans have created and that only humans can solve.

So let's say that these aliens do have this fantastic technology that can do all these amazing things. It implies all sorts of technological advances beyond what we can do… [but it] doesn't have any relevance [to] our production of babies! It doesn't have any relevance to our monetary system. I can't even imagine any way that alien creatures could fix our economy or fix our politics.

Now, aliens could come along and knock out a couple of dictators. Let's say I had the power of the aliens at my disposal. There's a few dictators I like to dispose of, but I don't have any illusions that that's going to fix the problems of humanity. I won't name those dictators but you can imagine some of the dictators I'd like to remove, just to free their people and give their people a second chance, but I have no guarantee that by giving people a second chance, they're not going to create new dictators.

It's just not simple. The aliens just can't come in from space and zap somebody with a bolt of lightning and fix anything, because humans have created their own problems, and if the problems are solvable at all, only humans can solve them. We can't expect anything from aliens.

What relevance do they have to the military? Well, the military is a little bit more interested in UFOs because these things could be mistaken for adversaries. What if these UFOs reported are not alien craft but in fact are Russian or Chinese craft? Well, that's something we should be concerned about. The main thing that the military should be concerned about is that these aliens—which we have no reason to believe are threatening—are not mistaken for things that are threatening. So the military does have a stake in identifying at least whether or not this thing is a threat. Once it is determined that these things are not threatening, then it's not a military problem. It might be a scientific issue, but even there, what's more important. Is it more important to investigate UFOs or to investigate some medical issue that might actually save lives? You decide.

I don't think aliens are worth too much of my time, but, like the cows, if an alien flies by me or the New York Times reports on the aliens, I'm going to look up, and I'm going to at least take some passing interest.

So I’ve said a lot of other things about Area 51. If you want a capsule of my Area 51 research: I never saw anything or experienced anything that I couldn't eventually explain, but there were things that took me a while to explain. There were lights in the sky that took me a while to explain [but] I eventually did. There were incredible sounding claims made by people like Bob Lazar and Bill Uhouse, claiming to have worked with or seen alien craft.

I take the same agnostic position: I don't know if they're real or not real, but they're not worth my time to investigate. In the case of those two people, Bob Lazar [and] Bill Uhouse, these characters are so unreliable and so sociopathic that it's just not worth my time to investigate—even if they did hold all the secrets of the universe.

Instead of talking about any specific UFO case, I'd much rather talk about the philosophy of UFOs—or more broadly the philosophy of the unknown. The universe is full of unknowns. Imagine talking to a Roman of 2000 years ago. He came from a reasonably sophisticated society, but if you tried to explain our science and technology to him, he would just be blown away. He would regard much of it as paranormal, because it's just so far beyond his understanding.

There's plenty of science and technology yet to be discovered, and in fact it's pretty much a an infinite quest. Science goes on indefinitely. You can dump as much resources into science and technology as you have, and there will never be an end to it. Unfortunately, I don't have infinite patience for these infinite quests, especially personally. Following my cancer treatment and my near-death experiences over the past couple of years, I’ve entered what I call the “third half” of my life, and I want to make the most of the time I have left. One thing I’ve learned about UFOs is they will absorb all of your time and give you nothing in return, so for me, these kind of quests just aren't worth the effort. They're not worth my limited time.

And the same applies to paranormal phenomenon, paranormal research. There could be something. There have been a few inklings over the years that some psychic phenomena are real. For example, remote viewings seem to have promise for a while, but the more you study these things, the more they seem to just slip away.

One thing I can say about both UFOs and psychic phenomena is that they're not reliable. They don't perform on demand, so you can't really use them for anything. You might have a psychic hunch that prompts you to turn your head and look in a certain direction, and that can be useful in itself, but you can't use those psychic hunches to make substantial personal decisions, or you're going to get yourself into trouble. You have to rely on the things you know for sure. Until UFOs and psychic phenomena start becoming reliable, I’ve got to make my decisions based on concrete things, based on solid reasoning and evidence that I can verify.

One of the reasons I'm attracted to demography is that there are a lot of things that you can know for sure. For example, you can know for sure that there won't be more future adults on the planet than there are children right now. I also contend that there are things you can know for sure about macroeconomics—mainly that you can't spend more money than you make. No government or other entity can consistently spend more money than they make without something bad happening. You have to pay the piper sometime.

UFOs offer no such certainties. In fact, they yield hardly any useful information at, all even if you believe in specific cases. Let's say something weird happens and it is corroborated by a lot of different sources. Where do you go from there?

If you're a cow and you experience my drone for the first time—or even multiple times—what do you do with that information? Probably what you're going to do is you're going to twist it around in such a way that it's meaningful to you, that makes you the center of the experience. You're probably going to attribute to my drone some kind of intent that simply wasn't there.

A useful analogy here is the cargo cults of the South Pacific. This was a real phenomenon that took place during World War II. There were Pacific islanders who had hardly ever seen an outsider before, and all of that changed during the war. Soldiers arrived in boats, and they built airfields, and then the most fantastic UFOs would land on those airfields. Of course, we know what those UFOs were. They were airplanes involved in the war effort against Japan, but to the islanders, the planes were something totally alien—as were these pale skinned aliens in uniforms who operated the planes. So the airfield on this remote island might have operated for a year or two, and then the aliens just packed up and left, as swiftly and mysteriously as they arrived.

So if you're one of these islanders left behind, you're left to wonder, “What just happened?”—and that's where the cargo cults came in. People began to worship these aliens and worship these craft. They drew moral lessons from the aliens coming and the aliens departing, and they prayed to the aliens to come back.

These people [even] built their own planes. You can see them by googling for "cargo cult". Do a visual image search for "cargo cult", and you see the planes that these Pacific islanders built. They were built out of jungle materials, and they certainly wouldn't fly, but they looked like the planes that these people had seen, looked like the UFOs that these people had seen. The classic photos that you'll see online are these half-naked islanders sitting under the wings of the plane they had built, presumably waiting for the aliens to return.

In essence, they had created a religion from their anomalous experience, which is probably the way that most religions start. Something weird happens, and people interpret it in such a way as to serve their own emotional needs. If UFOs did not exist, we humans would almost certainly invent them, and we would imbue in them all of our hopes and fears. That's just the way humans work. They need paranormal beliefs. They need this means of wish fulfillment that allows them to carry on with their lives.

We as Westerners can look at those cargo cults and laugh, because we know what those planes are. We know what those alien craft are, and we know that they have nothing to do with the islanders. But we can laugh only because we see the big picture the islanders did not see. They just saw little bits of the picture and they filled in all the rest according to their emotional needs. When the aliens arrived, it must have been some kind of reward or punishment for what they had done, and likewise when the aliens left. When the aliens left it left a hole in their society and they filled it up with this cargo cult religion.

When a religion is born, certain individuals in the community are going to set themselves up as priests, because there's a lot of power in being a spokesman for God, and the rest of the people seem content in just following these priests. In the case of the cargo cults, priests would declare their power by wearing the uniforms of the soldiers who ran the aircraft, and you can see pictures of this on google as well. The highest priests would have a lot of metals on their chests, so they're reproducing all the symbols of this alien encounter without any of the underlying understanding.

Now the priests might genuinely believe that they have a special connection with the aliens, but this is also a golden opportunity for swindlers and con men. You can gain a lot of power in your community without a lot of work by just claiming to have a psychic channel to the aliens. Believe it or not many humans are liars, and some of them are really good at it. Realizing an opportunity to exploit others, they're quick to take advantage of it.

Other people aren't liars, per se, as much as confabulators. They fill in the blanks between the actual data and what they emotionally need to believe. These people are genuine in their belief in the aliens; they're just twisting things around to serve their own needs.

Most people, however, are simply followers. They look up to the experts in their community to tell them what to believe, and they're remarkably gullible in believing both the liars and the confabulators.

Of course, this whole thing has been happening in the UFO field for years. UFOs offer a big umbrella for all sorts of fantastic claims, only a tiny fraction of which can possibly be true. The field is a wonderful opportunity for sociopaths and wishful thinkers and confabulators of all kinds, because anyone can claim anything and it can't be easily disproved, because essentially you've suspended all the laws of reason and physics. That's what makes the UFO field so murky and dismissible: Virtually anything goes. Any genuine signal that might have been there is quickly overwhelmed by noise.

Science might have made a lot more progress on UFOs if the claims had been limited to objects identified by military hardware, but unfortunately UFO claims have come to include everything under the sun. What people see in UFOs is more a reflection of their own emotional needs than what's really out there. Conspiracists will see government conspiracies. Spiritualists will feel they're in psychic communication with the aliens. The hardcore mechanical people are going to be more interested in the hardware—the flying saucers or wherever—and they're hardly interested in aliens at all. It all depends on your personality and what your emotional needs are.

Attending a UFO conference is a mind-numbing experience, because unlike a genuine science, there are no standards for truth in the UFO field. Whatever comes out of people's mouths seems worthy of attention at a UFO conference. We have all these high priests each peddling their own theories with absolute certainty—usually with themselves at the center of the cult. Like any other convention, a UFO conference tends to revolve around these big names who get star billing and who the UFO believers come to see. So that's how people work: They come to see their high priests, and the phenomena itself is kind of lost between the behind all the religious ritual.

Personally, I'm more inclined to believe the military-style claims, which basically go: “We were out on patrol. We saw this thing. We recorded it on video, and we got a lock on it in our targeting system. This object responded to us in some way, and then it took off took off at enormous speed.” That's a lot like my drone encounter with the cows. That's how the cows would explain my drone encounter, and that's plausible to me.

I'm less inclined to believe the personal UFO stories. That's where someone says, “The aliens came and abducted me, and they came and communicated with me,” like I was some sort of really important person. That just doesn't hold water for me. It could be true. It's just not something I want to explore.

It's like the cows [and] my drone. As the operator of the drone, I'm the intelligence behind it, and I know what I'm thinking. I'm amused by the cows. I'm willing to play with the cows a little bit, respond to them, respond to what they do, but I'm not here for any particular cow. I'm not trying to communicate with any particular cow or appoint any cow my representative on Earth. Cows are all generic to me, and that's probably how the aliens see humans. Humans are all generic, and there's no one no human that's special, that deserves my attention.

So I may be inclined to believe some UFO reports and disinclined to believe others, but belief for me is not a binary condition. I don't see things as “true” or “false”. I take a more pragmatic approach. The only question I ask is, “Is this claim worthy of my time, compared to all the other things I could be doing with my time.” I don't want to pass judgment on the claim, and I'm not eager to tell someone that their claim is false. I'm just wondering what I can do with the claim and whether it's worth any investment of my own time.

In the case of Area 51, there were quite a few claims that we could do something about. For example, [Let’s say] someone saw a light in the sky above a certain military area. Well, at least we could investigate that area and determine what the humans normally use that area for. If it's for war games, then that light in the sky probably has something to do with war games.

But these days, I'm not even motivated that much. If someone tells me they saw [a] light in the sky over Area 51, I'm just not going to even bother investing in it, because I’ve got my own plan for the rest of my life. There are things I want to accomplish in non-paranormal fields, and it would take a huge inducement for me to deviate from that plan.

Now, if I'm driving along a highway and I see an inexplicable light up in the sky, I'm certainly going to pull over and check it out, and I'm going to try my best to photograph it, but I'm probably not going to go out of my way to deliberately hunt for these things. Personally, I’ve got more important things to do.

I think that's also the position of the military. Once it is determined that UFOs are not a military threat, it's really not a military problem anymore. Once you take away that anchor of military utility, any research program that you start is going to just absorb all your resources and not get anywhere. I think that's what doomed most of these military projects like Project Blue Book. It's not that they didn't have enough data. It's that they had too much data and nothing to do with it—nothing that really indicated a military threat.

So if I were a military leader—even a military leader who believed in UFOs—I would ask myself, “What are we doing in this field? This is not our business. Our business is defending the country, and if the UFOs aren't a threat to our defense, then it's not our business. It's someone else's business.

So the one thing you can say about the aliens is that they are keeping their distance. They seem to be obeying the Prime Directive of Star Trek, in that they're not intervening in our society in any obvious ways. All the problems of humanity so far seem to be human-generated problems, and the aliens have shown no inclination to either hurt us or protect us from ourselves.

They seem to be doing their own thing, and whatever that may be, I'm inclined to just let them do it.

———

The transcript above is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. In general, I make only the minimal changes necessary for clarity. I have not re-checked the transcript below against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell

INTERNAL USE

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58. Biosphere 2 and the Post-Nuclear Family ⸺ Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-05-26T09:48:00.009-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #58, released on 24 May 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (35 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com

This transcript is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. I have not checked the transcript against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

A couple of days ago, I saw a two-hour documentary while flying from Denver to Atlanta called “Spaceship Earth” about the Biosphere 2 project in the 1990s, where eight people were locked into a closed system in Arizona. They were locked into this utopian sort of spaceship in the Arizona desert to spend two years without any air or food coming into this system. Essentially, this was an experiment in an interstellar spacecraft, you could say. It just never left the ground. It's this very impressive architectural marvel north of Tucson. I've actually visited Biosphere 2 as a tourist. 2009 is when I visited, when it was already turned over to other parties.

This documentary described the project from the point of the view of the participants—the bionauts {I’m not sure if that’s the proper term.}—who took part in it and the people who organized it. At the time, I just thought of it as a rich man's vanity project—the rich man being Ed Bass, a billionaire who funded this project, but I see from the documentary, there's also a rich human story here.

The reason I want to bring this up and discuss it in this podcast is that it applies in some ways to my proposed project, the “post-nuclear family”, where you would take eight people, eight adults and in effect put them on a spaceship to raise a family together. I want to compare and contrast these two systems, and perhaps Biosphere 2 can give us some insight into how my system might work or might fail, because obviously the biosphere system failed.

To cut to the chase, they were supposed to lock themselves into this closed system for two years without any air being injected from the outside, without any food from the outside. They would raise their own food. They would produce their own oxygen by all the plants they had in there with them. The project was seen as a failure because eventually they had to add oxygen to this system. It was not a closed system. The carbon dioxide just kept building up and eventually they had to inject oxygen into it. And sooner or later, the whole project collapsed. It became a cultural joke, and eventually the original plan was aborted, and it’s now just devoted to conventional research. {Correction: The original 2-year mission was completed, but later missions were apparently cut short.}

I found my own visit to be very fascinating. I have lots of photos, and if you look at the YouTube version of this podcast, in the description, I have links to my own photos of Biosphere 2, which is a fascinating visual place, and links to a lot of other things. This is a podcast that I'm not scripting. Most of my podcasts I write out before I do. [In] this one, I'm just flying by the seat of my pants, so you should also look at the YouTube description for any corrections I may have about Biosphere 2, any mistakes I may have made.

There's all sorts of ways you can say why it failed. I mean, you can talk endlessly about why it failed. It was a big, showy project—very expensive, $200 million, I think—to build essentially a giant greenhouse with many different biomes. It had a desert. It had a rain forest, and it was obviously for show. They had all their eggs in one basket in this one project. You could have taken $200 million and distributed over a lot of little projects that would have accomplished a lot more scientifically, but this was a big, extravagant, showy project, and it's kind of obvious from the beginning that it would fail. That's how I felt in 1991 when I read the news stories: that this thing is going to fail in some way.

But the documentary put it all in a different perspective for me. I now see the human story of the things that led up to this project. It’s not just a rich man's project. It's a lot of little people, a lot of smaller people, who were engaged in this.

It was born basically in a commune in the 1960s. The group cohered around this one charismatic leader, and one of their first projects was to start a commune, essentially, in the desert of New Mexico. And from there, their projects just grew bigger and bigger and bigger. At some point, they hooked up with this Ed Bass, an oil billionaire from a rich Texas family, and he funded their expeditions.

Their next expedition after the communal farm was to build a boat. They built a ship themselves, obviously funded by somebody, probably by Ed Bass, and they sailed around the world in this sailing ship and engaged in all sorts of profit-making projects. One that comes to mind is they designed and built a hotel in Tibet (or was it in the Himalayas? Could have been Nepal.) so it wasn't entirely socialist. It was a Capitalist endeavor, to go around the world and engage in these innovative businesses. They learned how to execute big projects and eventually it grew into this giant Biosphere project.

Of course, it failed, and everybody went their separate ways. It's just very amusing to hear each individual story of the bionauts and the people who organized this thing. Obviously, many people chose not to participate. There's no interviews with Ed Bass himself. Some of the bionauts apparently didn't participate, but it's still a riveting story, and I'm kind of glad I was trapped on this two-hour flight where I just had just enough time to see this documentary.

So how does this compare to my proposed system? My proposed system as discussed in other podcasts is called the “post-nuclear family”. I'm trying to address a demographic issue, in that mankind, the developed world, does not seem to be able to produce enough babies, and it's obviously because, for individual parents, babies are not a profit-making enterprise. It's very expensive, very risky, to raise a child in the modern world, and my proposal is to distribute the risk by having a number of adults joining forces to raise children together.

My initial group of adults would be maybe eight adults, maybe four couples, which is a lot like the eight bionauts who entered Biosphere 2. I want to compare how my system, which hopefully would succeed, compares to this Biosphere system, which obviously failed.

I think the Biosphere failed because it tried to do too much. It tried to do everything all at once, instead of doing a lot of little experiments that would have added up to some scientific progress, they chose to focus on a single big, massive, showy project where they tried to do everything. They assembled everything of Earth under this dome and went around the Earth to decide what sort of plants and animals they're going to bring into their system. It was just too big. It had to fail. If it wasn't carbon dioxide, it would have been something else.

So that's the first lesson I would apply to my system: Don't make it too big. Don't try to do too many things at once, because if you do, it's just going to be too heavy. It's going to be too big. If the system is too complex, then some part of the system is going to fail. In my project, I'm just making little baby steps.

Right now, we have what is called the “nuclear family”. Where a man and a woman—or two men and two women—get together romantically and decide to raise kids. They raise one kid; maybe they raise two kids, but at that point, you're pretty exhausted, and the vast majority of families these days don't go on to three or four or five kids. So these few people who do produce babies, they're not producing enough of them.

My first step would simply be: Instead of four couples raising their children separately, maybe these four couples should join forces and raise their children together in one house. My whole system flows from that one concept, because once you decide to do that, it raises all sorts of questions, and I have to answer those questions as best I can. How are you going to organize these eight people? And how are you going to keep these eight people from killing each other—which the bionauts were on the verge of doing. At some point during their two-year project, as carbon dioxide built up in the environment, so too did tensions among the crew members, where they wanted to strangle each other and strangle their handlers in the outside world.

So how do you prevent that? First of all, these eight people would be cooperating on this one project but not necessarily anything else. What my project holds the promise of is that you can be a parent one day a week instead of eight days a week. When you have eight adults and can distribute the responsibilities among eight adults, then in theory, one adult can be on duty in the family on any one day, and the rest can go off and do whatever they want.

I'm not imposing any restrictions on what these people do in their private lives. It's a lot like a community church, where people come in for Sunday services or community events, and they all participate in the upkeep of the church, but when they're not in church and not participating in community events, they're off doing their own thing. They're pursuing their own careers. They have their own private and personal lives that do not have to mingle with the lives of the other adults.

[This] is a great contrast between with the Biospherians. The Biospherians were trapped with each other. They couldn't escape from each other, and in my system, I propose that there is an escape. As long as you perform your duties in the family, which might be 10 or 20 percent of your life, the rest of your life can be devoted to anything you want, without any restrictions. You can have any relationships you want. You don't have to spend all your time with the other adult participants. Maybe in this group of eight people, there are couples who choose to live with each other, choose to be married to each other, but you don't have to be. People can get divorced from each other and still support the family.

So that's my Number One lesson of Biosphere 2: Don't make it too big. Whatever utopian plan you have, you got to ease into it, step by step, you can't do too much at once. You can't take on wholesale changes to your life. You can only take on small changes. Small changes can add up over time. This system 50 years after it starts could be radically different from how this thing started, but you have to ease into it. There has to be a gradual evolution into this new way of life.

One of the ways that Biosphere 2 failed is that it tried to find solutions for all of humanity. It tried to be a model of sustainability for all of humanity, and I don't think the post-nuclear project should try to do that. The world has huge demographic issues. We're facing economic and political ruin because of our demographics, [but] it's not the job of any one family to fix society. One family should only try to achieve its own goals and fix its own society.

The reason you would want to participate in a family like this is because it serves your own needs, your own need to build something for the next generation and pass your wisdom on to the next generation. It has nothing to do with trying to save the Social Security system or save your country. You're trying to save yourself and the community you feel you belong to. That's the only reason to engage in this project. If you don't feel strongly enough about it—about saving some of yourself for the next generation—then you simply don't participate. This has to be a self-motivated project, [and] it has to be a self-funded project, because we can't count on an Ed Bass being able to fund this thing for us. We have to fund it ourselves.

So when these eight people get together and decide “We want to raise our children together,” that should be all you need. You don't need any government support. You don't need any permission from anyone else. You just need to find these seven other people that you're close enough to, that you trust enough, that you could engage in this project with. That's probably the single most difficult challenge of this project: how to find these other like-minded people who you trust and are willing to essentially engage in a lifelong commitment with.

You know, marriage is a lifelong commitment between two people, and the post-nuclear family would be a lifelong commitment between eight people, so there's a huge challenge there. How do you anticipate all the conflicts you're going to have in the future?

If you choose good people to start this project with—people who believe in certain principles of conflict resolution, certain principles of how children should be raised—and you make a good selection at the beginning, that's probably the most important thing for the success of the project on the long term. If you make bad choices, just like a bad marriage, things can turn horrible very quickly.

So if you think finding a good romantic partner is difficult, imagine trying to find seven good partners. The only saving grace here is that you don't have to be in perfect sync with your seven partners on everything. You don't have to live with your seven partners, you only have to agree on this one project. You only have to agree on the childrearing project and the essential philosophy of childrearing and the essential philosophy of dispute resolution. Other than that, you can go on and lead your own life, develop in your own way, change in your own way, as long as you continue to maintain and support the family.

The post-nuclear family should be guided by ideology. There should be a set of principles that you coalesce around, but they should be very simple principles, because the risk is if you embark on something that's too radical, that's too ideological, there's the risk is that your children, once they grow up, they don't want to do it anymore, because it's just too hard. It's just too strict, which has been the demise of many a religious group and religious cult. In the kibbutz system of Israel, for example, which raised children in its own way, it was just too hard, and the children themselves, once they became adults, didn't want to do it.

So whatever your ideology is, it's got to be simple. There should be, like, 10 commandments, 10 principles that children can recite and everybody can look at as guiding the family—certain principles of fairness and intellectual discipline and things like that, all boiled down to about 10 commandments that everyone has to live by and that can stand the test of time even as the world changes—because I see this family as something that should last forever, should last for hundreds of years.

Once you start a post-nuclear family with between 9 and 18 kids, you keep it up. You make sure there's always between 9 and 18 kids. Actually, 9 is my long-term target. So in the post-nuclear family, it's essentially just a big family like we have today. There are families with 6 kids, and that's not too uncommon in human history, to have 6 kids or 8 kids. And I'm proposing 9 kids, evenly spaced in age from 0 to 18, who do a lot of their own self-care. We have a lot of internal care, where older kids are taking care of younger kids, and we have an organizational system that does things like clean house and gets the meals made. This is all part of the family culture that you build over time. And you don't want that family culture to just vanish as kids age out, so as one kid becomes an adult and leaves the family, you bring in a new baby. You just keep the family going forever, even as the founding adults age and die. There will be new adults that were born in the family.

The ideal is to just keep this thing going, like a sort of spaceship. Think of it like an interstellar mission where it takes multiple generations to get to your destination. How would you organize it? And this is the way I propose organizing it.

A funny thing about the Spaceship Earth documentary is it never mentioned children. Not even once did it mention children {that I recall}. It was all about environmental sustainability and not one word about demographic sustainability. I suspect that the group just figured, since it was born in the 1960s when we thought there was a population explosion, I think the philosophy of the group would have been, you know, just no babies at all. In fact, in the entire two-hour documentary I saw only one glimpse, a two-second glimpse of two children playing. Other than that, it was all adults. Although they had obviously given a lot of thought to environmental sustainability, they didn't seem to give any thought to demographic sustainability, which I think is more important in the long run—that you have children to take over for you.

Of course, if you believe that the human race has no right to exist, that we are just a pox on the planet, then you don't care about having children, but if you do believe that humanity is worth something and it should be continued, then you have to find a way to do it. You have to find a way to bring new children into the world.

Right now, we're focused on the problems of nations—nations that have too many old people and not enough workers—and I see that problem is really unsolvable because nations can't do anything to encourage or force people to have more children. If it doesn't make economic sense to people, you can't get them to do it, no matter what tax credit you give them or what incentives you give them. It's just not going to work. So I'm not trying to solve the problem of nations, and this family should not try to solve the problem of nations. It should just try to solve its own problems, the problems of its eight founding members, who want to preserve something into the next generation.

One of the things I enjoyed about the Spaceship Earth documentary is it was very subtle. There was there's no narration. It's all the story is told by the participants, and there's little details here and there. For example, when the when the Biospherians were locked into their cocoon in September of 1991, there was great drama. It was a big press event where they walked into this portal and closed the door. The way the press portrayed, they just closed the door and sealed them in, but of course the door didn't close just right. We see them monkeying with the door, trying to get it to close, and from there on, of course, it just kind of…

Things were wonderful in the beginning. It was euphoria in the beginning, but then various problems would crop up. Of course, there was the carbon dioxide problem, too much carbon dioxide building up within the dome which deprived people of energy. They couldn't run anymore. It's like being at a very high altitude. They couldn't exert themselves. There was also not enough food. They were growing their own food, and they just weren't producing enough of it. And this was further hampered by the doctor.

The oldest member of the team was this 60-year-old doctor who had some ideas about longevity. He felt that people could live to be 120 if they just restricted their caloric intake. He was 60 years old, and he personally planned to live to 120, but he did not participate in this documentary because he died of natural causes at the age of 79. {He died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which I consider “natural causes”, because everyone dies of something.}

So not only was there not enough food, but they were being restricted by their doctor. The doctor was deliberately trying to restrict their caloric intake to try to extend their lifespans when they were just trying to survive {in the moment}. Not only did they need to survive and produce enough food, but they had to obey all these dietary restrictions. There couldn't be any refined sugar. [There were] all sorts of things that they had to do because it was a project that had to do everything all at once. [They] had to not only survive but have this perfect diet.

Eventually, as carbon dioxide rose and the food supply dwindled, of course everyone shriveled up, lost weight and they were snapping at each other, until the decision was finally made to introduce new oxygen from the outside, and suddenly everyone was revived again. Their spirits came back.

So thinking about how the post-nuclear family would fail, what are the equivalents of a carbon dioxide buildup? Well, there could be one member of the family of the founding adults who just starts becoming a problem. This one problem employee… you know, every office encounters them. You have one employee who makes everybody else's life difficult. How do you handle that? That's something you really got to handle on the fly.

But the Number One thing is: Who do you have going into this biosphere with you? Who are these seven other people? That's probably the single greatest contributor to the success of the project. If you've got the right people, then you can overcome any obstacle {just as conventional families do}. If you've got the wrong people, then one or two bad apples can utterly destroy the project.

Once you have these solid eight founding members, then it should be easier {in subsequent generations} because you are raising your next generation. You are raising the people who are going to replace you. The whole project of childhood is training them in your philosophy and training them in ways they can replace [you]. You don't have that option going in—You have to select existing adults.—but once you have your existing adults, the whole focus of the project is to raise good children who will carry on in your footsteps.

It's a big indoctrination program—as is every family. It is an indoctrination program in your way of life and your language and your way of looking at things. Children are like little computers that come out of the womb ready to be programmed, and childhood is this 18-year project to program them. You have to have an educational system. You have to have an ideology. And when parents come into this household {for their scheduled duties}, they are participating in this project. They're not just caring for the kids, because to a large extent, the kids will care for themselves. They are pushing an ideology on these kids. They are teaching lessons to these kids. And each of these eight people have different lessons to teach.

Let's say Biosphere 2 had a more ambitious plan: Not only would eight people go in and survive but they would produce children who would survive after them. That would be more like what I'm thinking of. So what it would be like to be a child born into Biosphere 2, who knew only [this] environment that was created for them. I think that's a fascinating story.

Imagine being born into Biosphere 2 and being able to play in the desert and the rain forest and the ocean, inside this closed system, and only gradually learning that there's an outside world beyond the Biosphere. You know they would eventually have to interact with it, and that's a good metaphor for childhood.

In childhood, you are creating an artificial environment. It's a sort of Disneyland for children, where all the morality works, all the rules really work, the whole system really works. It's an artificial environment created by the parents to transition their children from a very simple childhood to be being able to handle all the complexities of the outside world. This is what childhood is. It's an artificial world that you create.

In this case, we have eight people creating this artificial household. I am proposing that the eight founding parents do not live in the household. They live their separate lives in their own homes and apartments and only come into the household for their scheduled duties. Part of the reason for this is you want to preserve a kind of Disneyland, a kind of artificial ecosystem, within this biodome that is the family. Eventually, you're going to teach children how to get by in the outside world, but it starts out as an artificial environment. The family is, by its nature, an artificial environment, and by having the parents not live at the household, they don't corrupt the environment with their adult activities.

There are things that adults do that you don't want children to do. There are things that adults are exposed to in the outside world that you don't want children to be exposed to. The household is our sort of biosphere where we create this artificial environment with its own rules and its own internal culture that you want to try to preserve.

So I urge you to check out this documentary. It was released only last year, 2020. Spaceship Earth. I'm sure you'll find it on all your usual platforms for movies and things. [You should] think about utopias and how they work and how they don't work, and if you were to build a utopia, how would you do it?

———

INTERNAL USE

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Antinatalism: An Evolutionary Dead End ⸻ Video Transcript

2021-05-19T01:02:00.006-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Video released on 17 May 2019. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (64 minutes, with video). The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn's home page: Glenn-Campbell.com

This transcript was created two years later on 19 May 2019. It is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. This transcript has not been checked against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words.

One of the biggest problems of philosophy is antinatalism,or the philosophy that it is improper to have children, to have babies. Antinatalism is a problem that we have to deal with because if this philosophy takes over, well, we just don't have a human race anymore. So on this video I'm going to talk about antinatalism: what it is, what its position is, and I'm going to try to address it.

So antinatalism runs the gamut from what I call “mild” or “pragmatic” antinatalism, which is just an opinion that children are good, that the human race should survive, but it shouldn't be me that does it, because I just don't have the money to have children or the risk is too high. That's the mild form of antinatalism. The extreme form of antinatalism says that having children is actually immoral, that it’s a crime to have children, because you're bringing a life into the world that can only suffer pain, and that pain wouldn't happen if you didn't bring this life about.

So how do we address this? First of all, I basically agree with antinatalism. That's how I felt all most of my life, that it is improper to have children because you're bringing a huge risk into the world that didn't have to happen.

It's akin to driving drunk. You know, if you knowingly drive drunk and you kill somebody, well, you have committed a crime. And you've also committed the crime simply by driving drunk, even if you don't kill anybody, because you're taking an unnecessary risk. And think of how risky childbearing is. Raising children is every bit as dangerous as drunk driving, so how can we throw drunk drivers in jail and not throw parents in jail?

Just think about the birth defects alone, just the things that can happen up including birth. You know, thousands of different defects can occur, so you're really lucky if the child comes out okay, because there's a huge percentage that do not. So it's just drunk driving all over again. It's taking an unnecessary risk.

And then you have the risks that can happen after the child is born—you know, childhood leukemia. There can be all sorts of things that can go wrong during childhood that also would not happen if you did not have a baby. So taking that all together, and you think about this rationally, as you would any other kind of investment, you would say this is not a good idea.

But it's something we got to do because we need babies if intelligent people don't have babies then humanity will still make babies, because there's a plenty of unintelligent people, plenty of animalistic people who are just driven by their urges, who will have babies. So the problem is not just maintaining the human race but maintaining the best aspects of the human race, which means preserving the intelligent people as well as the stupid people.

So how do we deal with this this antinatalist problem? Well, nature has a solution, because nature is going to kill off all the antinatalists, guaranteed, because if you're not going to have children, then you have no one to pass your antinatalist views on to. So they're gonna die off. The only way antinatalists can survive is if they recruit new members from other belief systems.

So nature's going to take care of the hardcore antinatalists. The problem is that you're going to take out a lot of intelligent people as well, people who are not hardcore, but they're just softcore, who are just pragmatic antinatalists. But in terms of whether there's a dilemma here I don't think that there is, because you believe in antinatalism you're gonna die off. The only people who are going to survive are those who believe that life is worth living.

I want to illustrate this with an example from history. I'm going to take this little diversion into religious history, and I guarantee it will come back to antinatalism.

In the 19th century, the middle of 1800s, it seemed like everybody was inventing a new religion. There was a lot of religious revivalism, a religious fervor, and lots of religious groups came about then vanished. I want to talk about three of these groups in particular. One of them is the Mormons, who you've heard of, the Church of Latter-Day Saints. And another is the Christian Scientists, who are still around. You've heard of the Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper: that was started by the Christian Scientists.

And the Shakers. Now, you may not have heard of the Shakers. There aren't many of them left, but at the time at the middle of the 1800s, these three groups all had about the same number of members—three or four thousand members—all believing in Jesus Christ but taking a different path on how to worship him. They had differing philosophies, and more importantly, they had differing philosophies on procreation.

The Shakers were antinatalist. They believed that no one should marry, no one should have sex. You shouldn't have babies, because they were all preparing for the Second Coming of Christ, which they were sure was going to happen any day now. To their credit, they had a lot of equality among the sexes. Men and women were equal in this religion, and many of the leaders, including the one who brought them to America, were women. So it was an admirable of faith at the time, but they believed in celibacy, and they wouldn't have any children.

The Mormons, on the other hand, they did believe in procreation. It was part of their tenets that they're going to procreate as much as they could. And they had multiple marriages. They had polygamy at the time.

So what happened? Who won? Well, the Shakers right now have about two members left, two members still alive, and the Mormons have some 16 million members—not all of them born, some of them converted—but they were very successful in terms of numbers as a religion.

So that's what happens to antinatalists. They just die off, and the people who believe that life, at least the human species, is worth continuing, those are the people who are going to live and take over the earth.

Oh, and what about the Christian Scientists? There are about a hundred thousand Christian Scientists left, which is not their peak. They've declined quite a bit. They also had a philosophical angle. They believed in procreation, but they also did not believe in modern medicine. They were not allowed to see modern doctors, because they believed that the only way to cure illness was prayer—which is fine in the middle of the 19th Century when medicine sucked anyway and there's nothing you could do about people dying, but now in the modern age, to not be able to take your child to a doctor, that's a legal problem if not an ethical problem.

So the point is, what happens to antinatalists is they become extinct. They are evolutionary dead. So those hardcore guys, they can do what they want.

It's very hard to argue with an antinatalist. I tried, and it just doesn't work. If you argue that, well, if no one has any babies then the human race is going to expire, they say, “okay, that's fine. Humans are just another species, and they're not worth any more than all the million other species on the planet that humans have exterminated. The great whales are just as valuable as a human is. A tiny mouse is just as valid, so good riddance to humanity. Not having babies is a nice painless way to get rid of the human race.”

So that's kind of a conversation ender right there, but I can't argue with them. I can't say that their position is logically wrong. It's actually the position of making babies which is kind of suspect, and it's something that, for no other word, you need faith.

Arguing with an antinatalist is kind of like arguing with a suicidal person. I don't know if you've ever tried to do that, but if they're sitting on a ledge, and they're about to jump, and you try to convince them not to do it, and you try to use logic, they're not gonna go for it, because any logical point that you raise, they're gonna have a counter-argument. You could talk about all the joys of life, and they're gonna bring up all the miseries of life.

And after arguing with a suicidal person for a while, one of two things is going to happen. Either you're gonna get out there on the ledge with them, having been convinced of their arguments, or number two, suicide is going to be irrelevant, because you're gonna murder them before they get a chance to kill themselves—that's how frustrating their logic is.

So it's the same thing when you try to argue with an antinatalist. If they say that the human race is worthless and deserves to die, well, let them have their belief. They're not going to be watching this video, and they're not going to be carrying you on into the next generation, because they are an evolutionary dead end.

Why do you have children? How do you defeat this antinatalist position? It basically comes down to faith. I know that's a horrible thing. I'm not a religious person. I think that's a cop-out when you say, “well, you just have to believe,” but that's really the only way you can address the hardcore antinatalist issue is you have to believe that humanity is worth saving.

So personally over my life, I've accumulated some wisdom, and as I grow older in life and realize I'm going to die, a lot of my energy is focused on trying to pass this wisdom on to others and this only works if there are actually others you can pass this wisdom on to. If there's no one in future generations, no one intelligent in future generations, then my life right now would be kind of pointless, because there's no one to transfer my knowledge to.

So that's where my faith comes [in]. My faith comes from, well, I just believe in my heart that humans are worthwhile. They're worth saving. They are probably worth more than any other species on earth, and I want them to continue. I want them to continue for a greater good but also for my own relatively selfish reasons of having some sort of audience for whatever I produce during my life. I want people to remember me, and if there's no one to remember me, it's like I didn't really exist at all.

So that kind of deals with the hardcore antinatalist position. Then we're left with the pragmatic antinatalism that I just can't afford it. I can't take the risks involved in parenthood personally. I might not live long enough to see a child into adulthood, and all these are pragmatic. They aren't saying that humanity is worthless. They're just saying that it's really difficult to be a parent in the modern age.

Okay, those pragmatic issues are something we can deal with. We can negotiate. We can talk about them. We could look for ways that we can increase our birth rates—for example among people like us, as opposed to birth rates among people we don't agree with. We can think about ways to band together so we can distribute risk, so that all this burden of raising a child doesn't fall on just one or two people, that it falls on a community which can take the risks.

Look at birth defects. Maybe 10 percent of the babies born have some kind of congenital defect. That's absolutely devastating if you're an individual or you're a couple raising this child. It is not devastating for a larger community that has vowed to take care of these situations on a communal basis. If you have ten thousand adults raising several thousand children, they can afford to take the risk of bringing children into the world, because they have more resources—kind of an insurance plan to take care of the children that don't work out very well.

So we can talk about that now. We can set aside the antinatalists—they're not going to live anyway.—and we can just talk about how do we deal with the pragmatic problems of intelligent people raising children without breaking the bank.

[main talk is concluded.]

This is a state park in California: the Big Basin Redwoods State Park. There aren't many giant redwoods like there used to be, because the early pioneers cut them all down. They used to be all over the San Francisco area. Now they're only in a few little pockets—the really giant ones, the ones that have been around for five hundred years. And this is one of the places that they still hang out.

So let's go look at our cameras. I'm running four cameras on this. I'm running four cameras on this shoot. There's one… two… three… and four cameras right over there. I think I got enough cameras.

———

INTERNAL USE

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57. Introduction to Demographic Doom and the Post-Nuclear Family

2021-05-15T21:04:00.014-07:00

Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #57, released on 3 May 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (64 minutes, with video). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

In this episode of my podcast, I'm going to try to bring it all back to center, try to summarize everything I’ve talked about and everything that has motivated me in this project. What is Demographic Doom, and what am I hoping to accomplish here?

This is an unusual episode. If you're looking at the Youtube version, you can actually see my face in this episode. Usually you don't, and the reason for that is most of my episodes are heavily produced. I write a script for every episode and I sweat over that script for weeks before I record the podcast, and then I edit it. I very heavily edit my podcasts, and this one is different. It's totally off the cuff. You might might find a few edits in here now and then, but mostly I'm just spewing my theories without a script. I ought to be able to do this, because you should know your own theories, the theories you've worked on for four years. You should be able to cough them up on demand, so that's what I'm going to do.

So what is our Demographic Doom? I've named my project this. I've named my podcast this. My Twitter feed is called @DemographicDoom. So what is the Demographic Doom that we're facing?

Well it's complicated, and it's also very simple. Let's start with the simple part: What is the biggest crisis facing mankind right now? I think what you're going to say is climate change, and that's certainly a humongous crisis, but it's not the thing that is going to cause mankind the most pain, because even if we have screwed up the environment, mankind will adjust. People will move from place to place. They will adapt to the changing climate, just they like they've adapted to conditions in the past.

Our even bigger doom is something that we cannot adapt to, [that] we cannot negotiate at least in the short term. And the core of our doom is the lack of babies in the developed world. We're not producing enough babies to sustain ourselves, at least in the industrialized countries. And this is measured by something called the "fertility rate". It's a statistic that says how many babies each woman in a society is producing on average. They need to need to produce about 2.1 babies per woman. They need to produce 2, first of all, because men can't do it. Men are kind of deadbeats. They can't produce any babies, so an average woman has to produce 2 babies to make up for the average man. And that 0.1 is sort of like a fudge factor, because not every baby that you produce is going to go on to produce a child themselves. They could die in childhood.

So the commonly accepted "replacement rate", as it is called, is 2.1, and there is hardly any country in the developed world that is anywhere close to that. They've all fallen far below that, and I mean every country—every country that's safe to visit, let's say.

That includes China. China had this One-Child Policy, which seemed brilliant at the time, but now they don't have enough babies because they've achieved their goals of only one child per couple. China is peaking in population. But it's also true everywhere in the Western world, in Europe and North America. Europe is especially bad. It hasn't produced enough babies for some time now.

So this why is this a disaster? You know, an environmentalist is gonna say, "Well, that's great for Mother Earth. We're gonna reduce the population. There's gonna be less impact, less pollution, less carbon produced if we have fewer people." And that sounds wonderful except for the problem of getting there, because if you're going to have less than two babies per woman, the natural tendency then is to end up having too many old people.

If each generation produces half as many children as the previous generation, then what you have is an upside-down pyramid where old people dominate the planet. And that's bad news for the economy, bad news in all sorts of different ways. So why is it bad news? Well, it's bad news because old people get old, and at a certain point, you retire. But even if we make retirement illegal, at a certain point old people get sick. And they get sicker and sicker as they get older and older.

It used to be you just died at age 60. You'd have a heart attack, and you died. Now people live to 70, 80, 90, 100, and if you've got too many people on the top of the pyramid and not many people at the bottom of the pyramid, the whole economics of the world are unsustainable.

Just think of it within our current system: There was a time when there was maybe five or six workers for every retired person. That would have been back in the days when Social Security first started, and today we're getting to the point where there's barely one or two workers supporting one retired person [an exaggeration], and that's simply unsustainable. You can't keep going that way.

And there's other problems with a falling population, and those have to do with the commitments you've already made. Governments have made huge debt commitments, and if their populations were to fall by half, they can't make payments on those commitments, so those commitments have to go into default.

And there's the whole idea of institutions not being sustainable because they simply don't have enough bodies. There's certain economies of scale in having a lot of people. If you take, let's say, a community of 20,000 people, and you cut it down to 10,000 people, then you might not be able to support things like your sewer system and all your municipal services, because those are all set up for a much bigger population.

So in many different ways, a fall in population is a disastrous thing and at least in the medium term, it is not good for the environment. The simple calculus that environmentalists use is every human being is producing so much carbon, so you reduce the number of human beings, you're reducing the amount of carbon. And that sounds correct in a stable-state universe, in a place that is just like us, but it's not going to happen that way.

Once institutions start collapsing and government debt becomes unpayable, what you have is governments that become weaker and weaker and weaker and are less able to enforce environmental regulations. You know, if the US Government were to collapse—which is not impossible—the Environmental Protection Agency would also collapse, and suddenly people are going to be throwing stuff into the rivers because there's no strong governmental authority enforcing environmental rules.

So, yes, over time it's probably best that we have fewer people on the planet. We have 8 or 9 billion right now [officially 7.7 billion]. Maybe it's healthier to have 4 or 5 billion or even less. The whole problem is getting back there while still sustaining your society. So this is the core problem. The core of our Demographic Doom is not enough babies in the developed world.

Now we have all sorts of other little kinds of Doom all branching off of that one Doom. I would say that the Number Two Doom that we're facing—that is actually going to cause a lot more pain a lot more quickly—and that is economic collapse. And the economic collapse in our society really hinges on government debt. We seem to be coming out of a pandemic right now. This is May 2021, and we're coming out of a pandemic where the government has spent tons of money. The US Government alone has spent roughly twice as much money as it has taken in in taxes. In the past two years, in 2020 and 2021, it will almost certainly spend twice as much money as it is taking in.

Even before the pandemic, the government was borrowing one of every four dollars it spent. So governments have been are deeply in the hole. We haven't seen any major effects of this right now, but there will be, because to spend this money that the government doesn't have, the government is borrowing this money and ultimately it is printing this money. And this just can't go on forever. It didn't sustain Venezuela or Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany. You can't just print money forever. Sooner or later you have to pay the piper.

So this is the Doom that is bearing down on us right now. Within a very short period of time—it could be tomorrow, could be two years from now, it could be five years from now—but sooner or later there will be some kind of major monetary collapse when we realize that all the government all the money that the government has printed isn't good for anything. There's going to be devastating effects. I can't predict exactly what those effects would be. Will it be hyperinflation? Will it be a stock market collapse? But it's going to be big.

You may ask, well, what has this got to do with demographics? What it has to do with demographics is that our whole system was built for a different population profile. Our system rose up in an era when things were always growing. That's what America was always from the beginning. It's growing, growing, growing. And this was especially true in the late 40s and the 1950s, when we had the Baby Boom. We produced a lot of babies, and the population shot way up. Now the population is leveling off. Our whole system is built upon the idea that things everything would grow forever, and whenever everything doesn't grow forever, then we got a crisis. All of these economic assumptions that we've made during these growth periods become invalid and they have to crash. Things have to crash.

And I'm talking about a crash along the lines of the Great Depression or even worse because our government this time is the one that's deeply in debt. Government wasn't too badly in debt [at the start of] the great depression but now it is. And the government is the underpinning of the currency, the US dollar. If the government fails, in some form the US dollar has to fail as well.

So the immediate crisis is the Baby Boomers, the people of my generation who were born between 1946 and 1964, and there were tons of us. In my neighborhood, a lot of families had had four or five kids in the family. Now you very rarely see four or five kids in a family, but it was the norm back in my day.

All of these Baby Boomers fueled the economy. They were a drain on the economy initially in the 1960s and 70s, because they were using up educational resources. They were requiring government resources and not paying any taxes, because kids don't pay taxes. But then in the last quarter of the 20th Century and in the first decade of the 21st Century, those Baby Boomers came of age. They began to earn a lot of money and spend a lot of money, and they were the great engine that drove our economy.

What's happening to those Baby Boomers now? Well, they're retiring and instead of producing tax revenue and producing goods and producing stuff that powers our economy, now we're draining the government. We're draining the government of its resources. We're collecting on our Social Security. We're spending Medicare money. We're redeeming our stocks. We are now a drain on society.

And because we, as the Baby Boomers, didn't have many kids ourselves—and as a matter of fact, I’ve had zero myself—and our children, or the children I didn't have—aren't having many children. So we've got a top-heavy system with too many Baby Boomers retiring all at once [with] no workers to support them. Yet the government is still spending money like it was the boom times. The boom times I consider 1980 to 2008. Those were the big boom times. You may not remember them fondly, but in retrospect, they were a time of great economic growth around the world. And we're still spending money and making commitments as though that growth was going on even though it has ended.

So in 2011, the baby boomers started retiring, started reaching age 65, and they're just like a tidal wave—a tsunami of old people, a silver tsunami. That's kind of a one-time demographic issue. It's not so much that we don't have enough babies but that we don't have as many babies as we did in the Baby Boom. So to sustain our Social Security system and our pension systems, we would have had to keep making babies at the same rate we did it during the Baby Boom, which obviously didn't happen. Since 1964 until the end of the century, America was at least making as many babies as [people who] were dying. It was at least replacing the population, [but] now in the 2020s, especially with the pandemic, we're hardly making babies at all.

You can tell this if you live in America or Europe and you go out for a drive. How many kids do you see? Well, not many. By comparison, how many dogs do you see? It seems like everyone's got a dog, everybody's out strolling with their dog—their beautiful Labrador Retrievers or whatever—and they're doting on their dogs. But how many kids do you see? What is the proportion of dogs to baby carriages out on the street today? Depending on your city, I'll bet the dogs are five-to-one to baby carriages or ten-to-one. The past couple days, I’ve gone driving in the Boston area, and I see one or two baby carriages and only a handful of kids—actual human children—and tons and tons of dogs, because that's where everybody is putting their parental attention now. They're putting it onto their dogs.

Now I love dogs. I transport dogs for a living, and I enjoy hanging out with dogs, but as an investment, it's not really a good investment for society. You devote 10 years to a dog [but] what happens at the end of those 10 years? Well, the dog dies, and it contributes nothing to society, whereas if you had invested 20 years in a child. He would have contributed something to society.

Let's go back to the global situation. As I say, there's not enough babies in the developed world, but what about the undeveloped world? What about the poorest countries in Africa? There we have what was once called a “population explosion”. It's still happening in Africa. Nigeria and Niger and Congo—all these places are still producing a lot of babies, so their population is exploding.

The populations of the rest of the world are not exactly shrinking yet, because we still have some momentum built up. It's called “demographic momentum” where if you stop having babies right now, the population doesn't fall immediately. There's a lagging effect, but most of the countries of the world are coming to a peak.

China may already have reached that peak where their population doesn't grow anymore. After today it's going to start shrinking, and that's an obvious result of the One-Child Policy where couples were instructed to have only one child, and they did. It was wildly successful. But if every two people have only one child and you do that generation after generation for a whole society, sooner or later the population falls. There's been news stories lately that this is the year that the population has actually fallen. Some of the Chinese authorities dispute that, but if not this year, it's certainly close, and by some reckoning, 2011 was the date that the working population began shrinking.

The working population is the people between the ages of, let's say, 16 and 64 who are actually producing things for society. That number is what's really critical, because those are the people who are paying taxes to support all the other people, all the dependents. The young people and old people who can't work, they are called "dependents". And the people who work are the engine of society. The proportion of people who are dependent—the old and young—to the workers: That's called the “dependency ratio”, and that's just going up, up, up—meaning that there's more and more dependent people.

So what are the solutions? Well, we could just make retirement illegal. We could say, no, you can't retire at 65; you have to wait until 70—which Japan has done. I think you have to be 70 to earn your pension. But there's a limit to how much you can do that, because when people get old, they get sick. Their faculties wane, and that's something you can't negotiate with. Old age is a lot of failing systems all at once, and there's no magical elixir to make people live longer or to make people healthier.

It used to be, for example, that if you had a heart attack at age 60. You died. That's the way things worked for most of human history. It's only in the mid-20th Century that medical science learned to save people from heart attacks. So you save someone from a heart attack, and what happens? Well, they die of something else, but in the meantime you've got 20 or 30 more years of medical care you've got to spend on these people because they didn't die at age 60.

So we've got a medical crisis where we simply have too many old people getting sick, getting cancer, having coronary problems, having all sorts of things that require doctors and hospitals, and fewer and fewer people paying into the system in their prime working years. So just raising the retirement age won't do anything.

Someone has suggested robots. Robots will save us from our dwindling population. So what we do is we just build robots to replace all the workers who aren't working and we get just as much work done by having robots. That's great. That might solve any labor shortage, but there's one problem with robots, in that they don't pay taxes and they don't consume anything. An ordinary worker will work hard, make some money, pay that money to someone else to power the economy and pay taxes, but robots don't do any of that. Robots just build things, and it's really hard to tax them.

You could try to tax the corporations that build the robots, but that's been very difficult. Most of the US Government's tax revenue comes from individual wage earners. Corporations, as you might have guessed, don't pay many taxes, and it's really, really hard to get corporations to pay taxes, because they can always move things around, move things offshore, rearrange their profit structures so they don't have to pay taxes. So the people left paying taxes are the real workers, and right now there aren't enough real workers to come anywhere close to paying society's debts or the government's debts.

To look at the government: The US Government, as I said, is spending twice as much money in 2020 and 2021 as it is taking in in taxes. This is just like someone spending on their credit card twice as much money as they are earning in salary. There's all sorts of arguments that say, well, the government can get away with this because the government prints the money. Yeah, you can get away with it for a certain amount of time, but you can't produce value for a society by printing money. Sooner or later, something's gonna break, and when it breaks it's gonna be catastrophic.

In this moment when I'm recording this video, things don't look very bad. We're coming to the end of a pandemic. People are starting to poke their heads out into the real world. People are starting to travel and go to restaurants again, and things are beginning to look up.

And the stock market! You wouldn't believe the stock market in May [2021]—in fact, the stock market throughout the whole pandemic. At the beginning, in March of 2020, there was a stock market crash—as one would expect as news of the pandemic spread. But then the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates and pumped more money into the system, and stocks blew up.

The great irony of the pandemic is stocks hit all-time highs. I mean the pandemic destroyed the economy, laid waste to the economy, vast swathes of the economy, yet the stock markets rose, and other asset markets like residential real estate rose, and it's just insane! It doesn't make sense. It's like the last gasp of a bubble economy. At some point the stocks are going to crash [and] bad things are going to happen.

I'd be a rich man today if I could predict when it will happen. I would have predicted it would have happened two years ago, three years ago. In fact, I was making videos about the coming economic collapse back in 2010 [Here’s one.], and it hasn't happened. That doesn't mean it won't happen. I just don't have enough knowledge of the timing to become a rich man over it.

So back to the demographic part of things: We don't have enough babies, [and] it's a bad thing. If you don't believe me already—that not enough babies is a bad thing—I’ve got plenty of other podcasts about that. There's plenty of other writings about that—that not enough babies is a bad thing. If that's true, how do we bring the babies back? What's the solution to the baby bust? And my contention—and the reason I call this “Doom”—is that there is no solution. There's nothing a government can do to bring back the babies. Everything that you propose I can shoot down pretty quickly.

A tax credit? Let's give parents a tax credit for every baby that they have. Do you think that any parent gives a damn about a tax credit at the end of the year? No way! They're looking at the cost of having a baby, and the cost is just astronomical. Back in my day, back in the day when there were four or five kids in the family, the per child [cost] was not all that [high], because there [were] not so many rules to obey. Kids were just kind of let loose. They were cut loose to entertain themselves all day, and now you can't do that.

There's all sorts of rules. You have to supervise your child at all times. You can't leave your child unattended. You got to have certain mandated car seats, and how many car seats can you fit in a car? In my day, everybody piled into the Cadillac—you know, six or seven kids all piled into the Cadillac, and we all went somewhere, and you can't do that anymore. You gotta have a government-approved child seat in every car for every child, which means you've got to have a mammoth SUV or minivan if you plan on having more than two kids.

So child rearing has become extraordinarily expensive, and for parents the benefit is really emotional and nothing else. It used to be, in most of human history, that if you had a lot of kids, your kids were your retirement plan. They assured that you would be taken care of in your old age. Now we've replaced all that with pension systems, and kids are not expected to support their parents anymore.

So from a parent's standpoint, there's really no practical benefit in having a child. I mean there's an emotional benefit. Raising kids is fun, but, boy, is it labor intensive! And all those dreams you had, all those entertainments that you used to enjoy, like jetting off to the Caribbean, or, you know, doing things spontaneously with your spouse, you can't do that if you got kids. Kids are a huge drain in money and a huge drain in opportunities. It's called the “opportunity cost”. If you're raising kids, you can't be doing other things.

And it's an absolutely huge risk. Not every baby comes out of the womb in perfect shape. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, and in maybe 10 or 20 percent of births, in the end there's something that goes seriously wrong with that child, and that child becomes a burden to their parents—potentially a burden to their parents for life. So if you were a potential parent, you say, “Yeah I'd like to have kids someday,” but when you crunch the numbers and look at the cost of this thing and look at how unstable your own income is—You don't have lifetime employment anywhere anymore. Your life is financially unstable. You can barely care for yourself. Who in their right mind would have a kid these days?

Any government program that proposes to solve that just doesn't understand the immensity of the problem. A tax credit at the end of the year is trivial. You can even pay parents a bounty for every child that they produce, but that's trivial compared to the true cost of parenting, and you wonder if you have that bounty… if you say, "You make a baby [and] I'll give you five thousand dollars," well, you wonder what kind of parents would fall for that. Is that the best and the finest parents?

[How about] free child care? Is that going to solve it? Is that going to encourage people to have more babies? Free child care or more support for parents? There's evidence that this won't help either, and my evidence is the country of Sweden. Sweden offers all this stuff. The Nordic countries have a very strong parental support system with subsidized child care and all sorts of perks for families and parents, and their birth rates, their fertility rates are not much different from countries that don't offer any of that stuff like Romania or the United States. Just the fact that your government is supportive is not sufficient to encourage people to have more babies.

There's no way to do it. There's no no way to bribe people. There's no way to threaten people. It was really easy to threaten people into not having kids. The Chinese were very good at it. There [were] forced sterilizations, and there were all sorts of substantial penalties for people who had more too many kids. That part was easy. They can't just reverse the system now and punish people into having children. There's just no mechanism to do it, short of kidnapping women and impregnating them and forcing them to have babies in child labor camps—which I wouldn't put past the Chinese authorities. Anything short of that will not encourage parents to have more children

[Pauses to view himself on the camera monitor.] So I’ve got these interesting stripes on my face. You see I got the sun coming in on me. You think I should move? Or maybe I should just keep going. Let's just keep going....

So mankind is facing an economic crisis of not enough workers and the government not being able to acknowledge that and reduce its spending. Instead, it's printing money. That's the immediate crisis that's going to cause everybody a lot of pain in the short term. And in the long term we have this lack of babies, which actually started way back in the 1960s, and there's no way we can make more babies or encourage more people to have babies—at least within our current system.

This means that countries and institutions will collapse. I can't say how or when or why or exactly what will happen, but you can't sustain a country on a falling population. The Japanese have been pretty good at doing it so far, but even their system can't keep on. You can't keep producing 100-year-olds and 90-year-olds and not producing any babies without at some point running out of resources to take care of all those old people.

So I said there were a lot of other problems that branch off of this one core problem of not enough babies. We have too many babies in the underdeveloped world, so why can't we just take all those extra babies from Nigeria and bring them on over to Germany or the Netherlands? That only works when you're taking highly educated immigrants.

So we have all the countries of the western world going to Nigeria and raiding Nigeria for all of its talent—all of its doctors and nurses and engineers and people with skills that Nigeria has spent money training. Those are all sucked up by the Western world, sucked up by North America and Europe, and what's left in Nigeria are people raised in harsh circumstances, raised in poverty, raised without much education. You just can't take an uneducated person from a very poor country and bring them to France and Germany and expect them to function. They have no clue how to get along in a developed country.

So if you were to open the floodgates and let every Nigerian into into France, they would develop enclaves of Nigeria within France—which they've already done—and this would cause great tensions in French society—as it is already done—and it would not solve the core problem of not having enough talented workers, not having enough people to power French society. They're producing a lot of babies in Nigeria, but you just can't import babies because what the developed countries are lacking is not babies, per se. Babies are easy. What developed countries are lacking is parent—people willing to raise a child for 20 years. If you don't have that, then there's no point in importing babies from Nigeria.

So there's no solution. The fact that some of the some of the world is still exploding while most of the world is shrinking, you can't just transfer one to the other—not without causing huge problems. So immigration is not a solution. Government incentives are not a solution. There is no solution to the the birth crisis—within our system. The only solutions I see are when our system collapses in some form. Maybe some people will be open to different ways of producing babies and different ways of addressing these problems.

What has happened here is that we have neglected an infrastructure, and the infrastructure is our children. Countries of the western world have not invested adequately in the next generation. It's all been about profit right now, making as much money as possible right now, without any substantial investment in the future. What that means, just like neglecting any form of infrastructure, like not maintaining a bridge, it means eventually the infrastructure collapses and you've got to suffer the consequences.

So after that collapse, that inevitable collapse, then people might think about, “Well, what can we do to revitalize our communities and bring new children into our communities?” Knowing all of these barriers to it. And that's where I have my own solution. It's a theoretical solution. I'm not really sure I'm ever going to see it in my lifetime, but I have a solution.

My solution is called the “post-nuclear family”, and it's a system that allows more children to be raised at lower cost overall. My solution is actually pretty simple: I want to bring back the big family. Big families used to be the norm, especially in rural societies. You might have 8 kids in one family. I want to bring that back, but I want to start at 9 kids—9 kids evenly distributed—and perhaps as many as 18 kids all living in one in one household.

But no parent can support that. No parent can afford that. No parent wants to give up all the rest of their lives to raise children. So if you're going to have a big family of between 9 and 18 kids, it's got to be a group effort. You have to have a group of adults to do this. Let's say you had 8 adults or 10 adults and you had 9 to 18 kids, well you could distribute the duties of parenthood. It might be that you only have to be a parent one day a week, and you're distributing the risk. So if you have 9 kids and one of them turns out to have some serious birth defects, if you've got a lot of adults to distribute that risk over, it's not so devastating.

So the aim here would be a certain economy of scale by increasing the size of the family and increasing the number of parents. That's the core idea, and once I’ve proposed this core idea, there's all sorts of questions you're going to ask, and the bulk of my efforts right now are focusing on trying to answer those questions. How would you organize a group of parents to raise a bunch of kids? What is the organizational structure, and how well will it work?

So I’ve covered this in other podcasts. I don't know if I should… I'll just give you a few of the highlights here....

I call it the “post-nuclear family” because it's what happens after the nuclear family. The nuclear family is wonderful. I grew up in a nuclear family. A mother, a father, several kids—that's the nuclear family. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's not doing the job. It's not producing enough kids, the nuclear family.

What happens now is a couple, for emotional reasons, they want to have a kid, so they have a kid. They focus all their attention on that kid. That's it. They have one kid. They might have a second kid if they're really ambitious, [and] they stop at two. That's how the nuclear family works, and that's just not enough. It's not enough for all the people like me who have zero kids. So we've got to come up with some system to have more kids.

Now when I talk about “we”, I'm not talking about society as a whole, because I think society as a whole is doomed. The United States as a country is doomed, but your community—whatever you regard as your community, a community of like-minded people or a geographical community—your community is not necessarily doomed because you can organize yourselves in some way to make more babies.

And I propose initially that, let's say, four couples, four ordinary couples like you see today, who want to have kids but don't feel that they can afford to raise them, they decide to pool their resources, and they decide to raise all of their kids in one household. So that's the starting point. And my project from here, my inquiry from here is, okay, if that happens, what are all the implications?

First of all, I'm proposing that the kids be distributed in age so if you have a household of 9 kids, they're evenly spaced from age zero to age 18. It would be every two years if there are 9 kids. If there are 18 kids in the family, they would be spaced every year.

Where do the babies come from? Well, initially they would come from those four couples. Where they come from in the future, that's a big open question, but what I propose is that once a family is established with, say, 9 kids, it always has 9 kids forever. So as an 18-year-old graduates from the family, moves on, we bring in a new baby, and we keep the cycle moving. So this household—which is a physical house somewhere—always has between 9 and 18 kids. Always. And by doing that, what you're building is a sort of family culture, which we don't have today.

What we have today is a man and woman fall in love. They decide to have a baby, and they have one baby and stop, and they haven't had a chance to build a family culture, which is what you have in big families of 8 or 9 kids. You have this internal society where the older kids are doing a lot of the work of taking care of the younger kids, or watching the younger kids, or babysitting the younger kids, and you're developing systems that work.

There was a book, I think in the 1940s, called “Cheaper by the Dozen” about a couple that had a dozen or so children, and they talked about all the systems they use to manage this huge brood. These systems are sort of a software that you develop over time, and if you just have two kids or a handful of kids and you stop, every generation you've got to reproduce that culture.

You wouldn't have to do that if you continuously raise children one after the other. Then the culture and the systems that you build to manage this brood, they're perpetuated, they're preserved, because each child teaches it [to other kids]. There's a certain way that our household works, and each child teaches that way to the younger children.

So that's one element. The other element is that none of the parents that sponsor this group should be living in the household.

So picture a big house. It could be a mcmansion. There are plenty of unsold mcmansions in America. Let's turn that into a big Brady Bunch house. "The Brady Bunch", if you don't know, was a TV series of the 1960s or 1970s, where a divorced couple were raising 6 kids. [CORRECTION: In the show, whether the parents were divorced or widowed is never stated.] In my system I'm proposing raising 9 kids, maybe more, so it's not that too far off. You raise all these kids in one household, but the parents don't live there. The parents live in their own apartments, houses, just as they normally would, and they come into the household for scheduled duties. So if there are 8 parents, one of them can be on duty one day a week, something like that. There's some sort of division of labor. You come in to serve certain needs, to perform your duties, but you do not live there.

The reason for this is it preserves the integrity of the family, because the way adults live should not be the way that children live. If you're an adult and you collect fine china, well, you don't want kids running around in your house, because this hobby of collecting fine china is incompatible with kids. A lot of the things that adults do are things that you don't want kids to be exposed to. Adults can watch movies that you don't want kids watching and if you don't have any adults living in the household, then you can preserve the household as you want it to be—as a sort of protected environment where you control the inputs and the outputs. You control what comes in.

For example, the household can have an electronics policy that concerns how you use computers, what sort of electronics and online services you have access to. You can control that if it's a household just of kids. If you have a mix of parents and kids, it wouldn't work. So parents come in for scheduled duties, scheduled responsibilities and then they leave, and they go back to their own homes.

The analogy I use is a church—like the kind of church that I grew up in. All sorts of different members of the community come in to support the church. They turn up for church functions. They help maintain the church, but they do not live at the church. It's sort of a congregation. This is a family of kids being supported by a congregation of adults, who only become a congregation because they already believe in certain aspects of parenting. They agree on certain principles of how children should be raised.

This is something that requires no government intervention. In fact, you really don't want the government meddling in something like this. This is just 8 adults deciding, “We gotta do something. Our culture is being lost. Our community, everything that we value, is being lost. We gotta do something. We also gotta do something because there's no one to take care of us when we get old”—which is another aspect of my post-nuclear family. I propose that no adults live in the household except the elderly adults who need care.

So imagine a big house, big McMansion. The kids occupy most of the house, but there's a little wing where the old people live, the people who need care. What this allows is the children [can] provide a lot of that care, a lot of that routine care. Let's say you have an invalid grandmother. Well, the kids can at least bring the bringing the grandmother food.

I propose that the kids do as much as they possibly can of the parenting tasks themselves, which is another radical aspect of my system. Today, what happens is you have two parents. They're raising one or two kids. They wait on their one or two kids hand and foot. They make all the meals. They do all the cleaning. They change all the diapers of these one or two kids, and these kids grow up pampered, with high expectations, a high sense of entitlement, which is unhealthy in itself.

What I propose is if you've got a household of 9 to 18 kids, you can now start using the labor of older kids to care for younger kids. That's the way big families have all always worked. If you're a 16-year-old, there's an awful lot of things that you can do to take care of your younger siblings. You're legally capable of babysitting them, but you can also change diapers. And you can also spend all that time teaching a young child language and playing with a young child, which is now entirely falling upon the adults.

So if you grew up grow up in this family, from the moment you're conscious, you're aware that you have a lot of brothers and sisters, a lot of people hovering around you. And most of the people who are taking care of you turn out to be not that much older than you. They could be teenagers. A teenager can do almost everything that an adult can do in terms of the routine care for infants.

Kids can prepare meals. You don't need an adult to prepare meals. You need an adult to bring food into the house. You need an adult to pay the rent, but you don't need an adult to prepare meals. There should be a system among the kids to do that. And you don't need an adult to change diapers, because an eight-year-old can learn to change diapers. And an eight-year-old can learn to talk baby talk to a baby. You don't need a PhD in child development to talk baby talk to a baby.

So I propose that this family system is deeply focused on caring for one another. It's a system that trains children from the very beginning to care for one another. The care you provide to your siblings is dependent on your maturity, depends upon your age and your ability. So you don't have 8-year-olds doing things that they're not capable of doing, but you do want them to do everything that they are capable of doing. 8-year-olds can change diapers just as well as a 32 -year-old can change diapers.

If you're going to develop the system, you've got to have an educational plan. [If] you bring all these kids into your household, it's because you really want to program them. You're creating a household because you want to program kids in your way of life and your way of thinking, so there has to be an education plan. There has to be school.

This is all open as to what school will look like. I see it as homeschooling. The way I would do it is I would hire a professional teacher. If you've got a lot of adults supporting this this family, then maybe you can hire a professional teacher to come in Monday through Friday, 9-to-5, and manage the educational plan of these children—which doesn't necessarily mean teaching. It could be assigning resources. So if you want to teach a toddler how to sing his alphabet, you don't need an adult to do that. You could assign an 8-year-old to do that. You [say], “Johnny, can you can Susie her alphabet.” And you can monitor that situation to make sure it's getting done and to make sure certain benchmarks are met, but a teacher in this system it is more of a resource manager who is assigning resources and not really doing much teaching of their own.

Part of the educational system is formal teaching. You have a curriculum that all the adults have settled on—things that should be learned, books that should be read—and then you have the inherent education of training people to care for each other. So childhood is a training program where we should be training children to care for other children, other people. We should be training children to care for their younger siblings and for those old people who need care. So in this giant household of 9 to 18 kids, there's babies that need to be cared for, and there's also old people that needed to be cared for, and your job as a kid in the middle years is to care for all these people, is to care for one another. This is part of your culture that this family would be inculcating.

At some point, kids get old. They age out of the system. They turn 18. What happens to them? If this is a warm family with lots of interconnections, [I don't think] kids will be raging at the bit to get out. I mean, they want to go out and see the world, but they should also be closely connected to their family even after they turn 18. Part of the job of childhood is to build family loyalty, so that kids, when they're free to leave, to just walk away, that they do stay close and they do stay loyal to the family.

I propose that these children who graduate from the system are expected to support the family in very concrete ways. One of the ways they support the family is through family taxes. If you're a member of a family—either one of the founding adults or a graduate of the family—you are expected to pay a certain proportion of your income as family taxes to support the family back home. You can go and travel. You can take a job in a far distant country, as long as you're sending your family taxes back home. And you're expected to keep in touch with your family, and that's not a big thing. If the family really works in childhood, then people will always be coming back to their families.

And they'll definitely come back to their families when they get too old to take care of themselves. It should be natural that, after you've gone out and made a living and sent money back to your family and done your family proud, eventually you'll come back to your family and care for your family, because people who are in their 60s or 70s can make excellent parents. They're very experienced by then. They can serve their duty as parents in this family [because] they have a lot more time than someone would have in the middle years. Eventually when you get too old, where you need care, where you need assistance, that assistance should happen right there in the same household where you were raised. So obviously I'm talking about long-term thing here. Going from birth to old age, that's a span of 80 years.

I don't see this plan happening anytime soon—not before the collapse, not before the Armageddon, the economic Armageddon—because people aren't motivated enough. People don't see any problems.

You know, there's only a few people who really grasp the problems of underpopulation. Most people think we're still in a population explosion. A remarkable number of people think that we have a population crisis. They're still producing videos about that. This started back in the 1960s with a book called “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich, about how populations are exploding, that we're all going to starve because of it.

Well, it turns out we didn't starve. Most of us didn't starve, and populations fixed themselves all by themselves. They were already doing it by the 1970s, because we already had birth control. People were deciding to have babies instead of just having them. So we do not have a population explosion except in those selected African countries. It's almost exclusively limited in Africa now. Africa and India and a few countries around India are still producing more babies than they need, but that's slowing down, especially in India. Africa remains a crisis, but outside of Africa, we have an underpopulation problem, not an overpopulation problem.

The majority of world citizens just don't get that, just don't understand that [the population explosion] was last century. It's not this century. So only a few people really grasp how serious this is, and it will take a huge economic crisis for anyone to change, anyone to be so motivated that they would want to get together, want to find some like-minded people to raise children with. That could take 10 years or 20 years or 50 years.

Once you embark on this kind of adventure, you're in it for the long term. You want to not just create a family, not just raise kids together, but to create a system where you can continually raise kids, continually produce kids and sustain whatever way of life you believe is important.

———

INTERNAL USE

{Transcript reconciled with actual: No.

{Transcript backed up to email: 16 May 2021

{Visual version of this script backed up to Twitter on: 16 May 2021

{Video posted on FB album/DD page: 16 May 2021
{Video Description backed up by email:
{Video description backed up on Twitter:

{Video/audio copied to permanent backup:

Glenn Campbell's "Tweet Albums" — Master Index of My Photo/Video Collections on Twitter

2021-03-30T04:43:00.021-07:00

"Tweet Albums" are Twitter-based archives of my own photos and videos on my @BadDalaiLama account. Each "album" consists of a 🧵 of tweets organized by state, country or topic. Each album begins with a header tweet (tagged with #gpc_TweetAlbum) to which additional videos and photos are linked. Every thread is open-ended and I may add more to it at any time. [See bottom⇩ for more notes.]

A similar concept is followed in "Tweet Essays" which are text-based. They are listed in a separate Master Index of Tweet Essays.

My @BadDalaiLama Twitter Account contains a lot more that Tweet Albums. My bons mots go all the way back to 2010.

For more about me and access to my vast oeuvre, see my home page: Glenn-Campbell.com

📜 Album Index

📇 Album Master Index - #de_AlbumIndex 2021-03-19 ✓ - An album of albums. Every other Tweet Album is retweeted here once, generally in the order in which the album was created.
All #gpc_TweetAlbum header tweets, latest first.

🌎 Countries & Overseas Regions

France - 2021-03-28 ✓ - All my photos and videos from France.
San Lorenzo a Merse, Tuscany - 2021-02-07✓ #ge_ruffians

🇺🇸 USA States & Regions

Washington State - #de_usWA 2021-03-07 ✓ - Mainly Seattle and Puget Sound
Cape Cod - #de_CapeCod 2021-03-20
Florida (except the Keys) - #de_usFL 2021-03-21 .
New York City - 2021-04-02 #de_NYC
Massachusetts - 2021-03-24 #de_usMA

🐶 Topics

Abandoned Places - 2021-03-28 #de_abandoned
My Selfies - 2021-04-01 #de_selfie
Signs - #de_signs 2021-03-19 ✓
Dogs I Have Known - #de_dogs
Aerial Photography 2021-03-29 ✓ - #de_aerial - Photos and videos taken from planes
Airports 2021-03-31 - #de_airports
My Cancer Treatment - 2021-03-03 #de_cancer
My Personality - 2021-01-31 #de_glenn
Amazing Discoveries - 2021-03-31 #de_amazing
Kilroy Café Newsletters - 2021-03-31 #de_KilroyCafe
My Own Bons Mots - 2021-03-31 #de_bonmot - My own retweeted aphorisms

🎡 Local Attractions

Mt Olympus Resort, Wisconsin - 2021-03-01 #dd_usWI

🛫 Tweet Essays Concerning Travel

Car Camping - #de_carcamping 2021-01-19 ✓
My "Happily Homeless" Lifestyle - 🚫🏠 - #de_homeless 2021-02-27
Travel Hacks and Discoveries - #de_TravelHacks 2021-03-14
See separate index for all my other Tweet Essays.

📝Notes on Tweet Essays and this Index Page

Each entry below leads to the header tweet for that series.
Each header tweet has a unique hashtag beginning #de_ or #gy_. The provides an alternative way to find the header tweet if you don't have the URL. It could be useful for referring to the album in you own tweets or finding the header in case you have only a printed version of this post.
The date (2021-03-20) indicates the date when the thread was started, but tweets can be added long after. No Tweet Album is ever "finished".
A checkmark✓ indicates that the thread includes a link to the Master Album as well as to this Blog Index. I have also confirmed that it is included in the Master Album and has been retweeted on @DoomLite.
The short link for this blog entry is j.mp/gpc_tweetalbums
Album header tweets usually contain links to my relevant Facebook albums (dating to 2008) and Instagram hashtags (dating to June 2013). YouTube playlists and Twitter searches are usually provided in a separate tweet.
My Tweet Album format was started in March 2021, but material can be drawn in from anytime in the past.

Why I Created Tweet Albums

I created the Tweet Album and Tweet Essay format to draw together all of my past and present work from multiple social media and website sources. I am active on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Websites and many minor formats. Tweet threads are supposed to be a way to tie them all together.

Of all the social media formats around today, I think Twitter is most likely to last. (For example, I think Twitter is more likely to be around 20 years from now than, say, Facebook.) Although my own body will eventually give up the 👻, it is my hope that my Tweets outlive me.

56. The Zero-Inflation Theory: New Insight on a Collapsing Economy

2021-03-24T10:15:00.043-07:00

This is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #56, released on 30 March 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (39 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn's home page: Glenn-Campbell.com

This is the original script, written before recording, corrected after release to reflect the final version.

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations. I'm trying to view humanity from a distance, like aliens would see us from space.

In this episode, I'm looking at the giant elephant in the room that threatens us all: That's a massive monetary collapse caused by rampant government debt and money printing. I have a new theory about why there is no consumer inflation in spite of all this created money, and it suggests a mechanism for the final collapse.

My inspiration for this episode is the recent Biden Administration Coronavirus Package, which is supposed to provide aid to the most vulnerable Americans after the economic devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic. I'm not going to analyze the contents of the package except to note that it involves sending direct payments of $1400 to most US taxpayers and the fact that it costs $1.9 trillion. I'm mainly concerned about that cost. How it's going to be paid for, and the bottom line is: It won't be paid for—not now or ever.

This $1.9 Trillion is borrowed money that can never, ever be repaid. It is physically impossible, because the government hasn't balanced its budget in 20 years, let alone paying down its debt.

There was a time, around the turn of this century, when the government did balance its budget, albeit briefly, during the Clinton Administration, but it can't do it again due to our deteriorating demographics. Twenty years ago, the Baby Boomers were at the peak of their earning power and their taxpaying power, and today they're just a drain on us all, paying less tax and drawing on more government services, so the idea of a balanced budget just isn't possible anymore. This condition is destined to persist indefinitely: that is, there are going to be too many old people and not enough young people to replace them, and as long as that's true, the government can't balance its budget and the debt just grows and grows.

Official government debt has grown from about $22 trillion before the pandemic [correction: ~$24T] —already an unsupportable amount—to something like $27 trillion now and certainly well over $30 trillion by the end of 2021. In addition, there’s unofficial debt, called “unfunded obligations”, which is debt that we know is coming down the line at us but that isn't on the books right now. By some accounts, the US government is $50-100 trillion in the hole, with that debt growing rapidly, and its income is only about $3 trillion—that's the [annual] amount it collects in taxes. In the end, all this debt will be funded by money printing—that is, the government or Federal reserve just inventing money out of thin air.

Every government that issues its own currency is tempted to print more money to pay its bills. This sin dates back to the Roman era, when the currency was silver coins called the Denarius. Back then, the government cheated the system by progressively reducing the silver content in the Denarius, replacing it with base metal—in other words, a physical debasement of the currency. 20th Century governments did the same by simply printing more paper currency to pay their bills, and in modern governments, money is created electronically without the inconvenience of actual paper.

Historically, this has always resulted in inflation, even hyperinflation, as happened in Venezuela, in Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany and countless other banana republics. In our banana republic, inflation hasn't really happened yet, at least in consumer staples, and it has been a bit of a mystery why not, since the US government is printing money on similar scales.

That's where my theory comes in. I call it the "Zero Inflation Theory" because it proposes that large amounts of money can be printed without inflation. Now I'm not talking about Modern Monetary Theory here, which seems to propose endless amounts of money can be printed with no negative consequences. I am suggesting disastrous consequences for money printing, but it doesn't have to involve consumer inflation.

The alternative would be a massive asset crash. Imagine stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets all collapsing at once or in rapid succession—I mean like falling 60% or more in dollar terms. This would be devastating for the people who own the assets, but it would not result in the debasement of the currency. On the contrary, it could result in the strengthening of the currency as investors desperate to get out of the market scramble for cash instead.

Under this theory, all the new money the government has printed has flowed into assets markets—like stocks, bonds and real estate—creating these huge asset bubbles instead of consumer inflation. The end game is that all those asset bubbles is that they simply pop. Markets will collapse just like they did at the beginning of the Great Depression.

Now this isn't a new prediction. I've been making the same prediction on this podcast since the beginning a year and a half ago, and many experienced investors have been doing the same. Due to policies of the Federal Reserve—including both money printing and artificially low interest rates—stocks and other assets are vastly overvalued right now, at least by any traditional metric. Whenever assets are overpriced, there's going to be a reckoning—a crash of some kind—where prices return to reasonable and supportable levels.

My only new insight came to me about a week ago. I'd like to say I was in my bathtub when it happened and I jumped up and cried, "Eureka!" but I don't know where I was, and I haven’t taken a bath in a bathtub for ages now.

My insight was, "Eureka! That's where the money is going to die: in the stock market!" So what will happen is that everybody and his brother will put all of their money into the stock market, as they are doing now, and all of a sudden prices crash and everybody's money goes away. It's like—Poof!—by magic, all that money that the Federal Reserve printed suddenly goes away. It vanishes.

So in other words, to avoid inflation, you have to have a balance of the creation and destruction of money. If something creates money, then some other process has to destroy money, or you get inflation, because you've got more money chasing fewer goods.

Now we know that the government and Federal Reserve create new money, but they generally don't destroy it. The Federal Reserve is capable of destroying money, by selling bonds it already owns, but the Fed isn't the only entity capable of [it]. And you and I can destroy money simply by burning it. Let's say you take all the paper money in your wallet, crumple it up, set fire to it, and—Violá!—you've done your good deed for the day by reducing the money supply.

Of course, people won't burn their own money voluntarily, so the markets have to do it for them. Another way you can destroy money is to put it into stock markets just before the markets crash. I had friends who did this just before the Dot-Com bubble and the Global Financial Crisis. I remember trying to warn various friends when they talked about the hot stock market they were into, and I don't think they heard me. The Siren's call of a rising stock is too powerful for the average investor to resist.

Traditionally, what's bad for one asset is good for another, but I think it's possible for all assetsto crash all at once. Imagine stocks, bonds, real estate, gold and even bitcoin all collapsing simultaneously or in rapid succession. Given all the creation of money, a corresponding destruction of money needs to happen to restore stability to the monetary system, and this is how it could occur. If the Federal Reserve doesn’t have the discipline to to it, then Nature will step in and an asset crash to take care of things neatly.

In the sort of broad-based crash I’m proposing, nearly all investors lose, but the buying power of the US dollar holds steady, because the fall in assets would effect remove from circulation all the new money the government has created.

How would a crash happen? All you really need for it is a stock investors lose faith, which can happen in an instant. There may be precipitating events—some sort of world crisis—but that main thing that fuels financial collapses is shift in thinking by investors—from greed to fear, so to speak—and this can happen rapidly and without warning. I could even happen in a period that looks optimistic on the future, like the one we're in now.

Right now, in late March 2021, it appears that the pandemic is drawing to a close, with vaccines being widely distributed. I got mine about a month ago as a former cancer patient, and soon everyone will be eligible. This ought to be good news, right? The assumption now is that life will go back to normal—but only in the sense of the animals returning to the forest after the forest fire. The Covid Relief Bill is supposed to help get the country back on its feet by providing various forms of direct and indirect aid to Americans.

For example, most Americans and their dependents are getting $1400 direct payments—added to their bank account or sent to them in a check. This is what economists call "helicopter money", where money is dropped from figurative helicopters to try to stimulate the economy. The most important issue to me is the fact that the $1.9 trillion is completely unfunded. None of it is coming from collected taxes. It is 100% borrowed, and that money theoretically has to be paid back by future generations.

So how much is $1.9 trillion? First of all, let's be honest call is $2 trillion, which is close enough for government work. No government program even comes in under budget, so $2 trillion is the minimum the government can be expected to spend, above and beyond what it normally spends in a pre-pandemic year.

For perspective, before the pandemic, the US Federal government spent roughly $4 trillion every year while collecting $3 trillion in taxes. That means that the government has been borrowing $1 trillion every year, even in supposedly good times. In 2021, as in 2020, the government is on track to spend roughly twice as much money it collects in taxes—that is, spending about $6 trillion on a tax income that's barely $3 trillion, and the entire shortfall is borrowed and ultimately printed.

The mechanism for this is that the government issues bonds—or pieces of paper promising to pay in the future—and investors buy those bonds, giving the government cash in return. Sometimes, the Federal Reserve will buy the bonds itself and issue new currency in exchange, and this is formal money printing, but to me this final step is inconsequential. In my view, the money is created the moment the bonds are issued [see caveats in video description], because investors trade these bonds among themselves as though they were cash—like $10,000 bills. You hardly get any interest on them, so that's all that bonds are nowadays: $10,000 bills where you can store your cash in a supposedly "safe" form.

Since the government had been spending more money than it makes for two decades now, a mystery among experienced investors and economists is why there hasn't been any consumer inflation, and that’s the question I’ve been pondering for months now.

Now in my own little world, my own gauge for inflation is the Dollar Tree stores that I visit every few days while traveling. Everything in the store is one dollar—absolutely everything—and these stores have been selling roughly the same products since the 1980s. If there were significant consumer inflation, they'd have to change their pricing model, which they haven't had to do so far. In fact, Dollar Tree stores seem to be prospering. There's more of them now in America than McDonald's restaurants, and they are especially well patronized in bad economic times like these.

My latest theory says that Dollar Tree will NOT have to change its pricing plan anytime soon. Eventually it might have to, but not on the near term. Although the government is printing money at breakneck speed, an asset crash will soon take care of the excess, and dollars themselves—at least the paper kind—will hold their value.

Now I remember inflation from my own youth, when I saw the price of a standard candy bar, like a Snickers, go from 5 cents to 7 cents to 10 cents to 25 cents, and eventually stabilize at about $1 at the checkout, or a lot less if you buy in bulk. That's where prices have stayed for consumer goods since the 1980s, as long as you shop at Walmart and not some high-priced neighborhood supermarket.

On that other hand, there has been substantial inflation in things like rent, health care, higher education and assets like stocks and bonds. The cost of buying a house or renting an apartment has gone through the roof, at least in the most desirable cities, so it isn't accurate to say there's been no inflation, just no inflation in mass-produced consumer goods.

And this is a key distinction. Consumer goods have held steady, while anything that you might buy and hold for investment purposes has inflated. Assets like stocks, bonds, real estate, fine art, gold and bitcoin have all exploded, and rents are high mainly because landlords have had to pay huge prices for their properties. All of these investable assets have gone up, commensurate with what you'd expect with all the money creation. Asset prices are in Zimbabwe territory, even if Dollar Tree prices haven't changed.

Symbolic of asset inflation is stock prices. As I speak, US stock indexes like the S&P, remain near all-time highs, in spite of the pandemic that has severely depressed the underlying businesses that the prices are supposed to reflect. Of course, that may not be true by the time you listen to this podcast, sometime in the future, but it's true as I speak.

So the economic disaster of the pandemic has led to the counterintuitive rise in stock prices, which I never would have predicted when the pandemic began. When stocks first dipped in March 2020, I was thinking, "This is it—this is the crash I was expecting," but the rout didn't last. Stocks didn't just rebound from their lows but surged to all-time highs. It was utterly insane.

So why has there been inflation in assets but little in consumer goods? I think I finally have a mechanistic theory to explain it, and to explain my theory to you, I want to go back to those $1400 checks that the US government is sending out to people.

The theory of helicopter money is that once people receive it, they're going to go out and spend it in the consumer economy, thereby stimulating it and putting people back to work. As a side effect of all this spending is supposed to be moderate inflation, since more moneywould be chasing fewer goods.

But I believe that's not how real people are spending their $1400 checks. Most people are doing one of two things with their $1400: either they're paying down existing debt, or they're investing money in assets like stocks and bitcoin, neither of which simulates the economy or generates inflation.

Now for the sake of this argument, either you're rich or you're poor, and I define rich and poor in this context by how you use your stimulus check. Poor people have stayed alive during the pandemic by going deeply into debt. They've charged food to their credit cards, or they've paid for food by delaying on mortgage or rent. When their $1400 comes through, they're not going to buy more food. They're going to use their money to pay down back rent or pay down their credit cards. In fact, that's what I'm going to do, because I charged up my own credit cards during my cancer treatment last year. The $1400 is not going to change my buying habits, which remain pretty frugal.

Now this is something that has changed since the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, consumers did not have access to credit. If they didn't make any money, they starved. They didn't have credit cards to charge the food onto. They didn't have mortgages to a large extent. They had rent, and if they couldn't pay the rent, they got thrown out in the street.

Today, what is different is everyone has credit, so in hard times everyone spends up their credit cards, and things don't work like traditional economists think they should. You've got this credit card buffer. So when the government sends out $1400, people just apply it to their credit cards and it doesn't stimulate the economy.

Now if you happen to be rich, you don't need the $1400 check, but it comes in anyway. Your credit cards are already paid, so what are you going to do with the money? You could spend it on something frivolous, like a vacation, but people are still hunkered down now and aren't taking many vacations yet. Spending even among the rich is pretty conservative right now. So what are these people going to do with the extra money?

Well, they're going to invest it, of course. "Investment" is seen to be a good word, because it implies that you are being sensible with your money and saving it for a rainy day. Today, it actually implies the opposite. It implies speculation: You're putting even more money into markets that are already in bubble territory.

These investments can take various forms: You can put your money into the stock market, which is easier than ever thanks to idiot-friendly apps like RobinHood. You can buy gold or bitcoin or some other vehicle that is supposed to preserve value—although it's still only the perception of value, since you can't eat gold or bitcoin or do much else with them. Even if you just leave your money in a bank account, you're making a speculative investment of sorts, because you're really loaning money to the bank so they can speculate with it.

Alternatively, you could take your $1400 out of the bank, turn it into 14 crisp $100 bills and store them under your mattress. Even this might seem like a speculative investment because you're gambling that $100 holds its value and will continue to buy you the things that it always bought you, but I'm actually beginning to believe that's the safest place for your money, as crisp $100 bills stored under your mattress.

There's a risk that inflation will diminish the value of those bills, but I think an even greater risk is that the institution you trust with your money simply collapses and you don't get your money back. This isn't supposed to happen with regular bank accounts, because they're insured by the government, but what if the government fails and can't fulfill its obligation? I say that's not out of the question, and failure is certainly certainly possible for any kind of investment fund, which has no insurance by the government.

I think the mindset of the average citizen right now is to put their money into stocks. They see the huge recent price gains and think, "I want a piece of that!" In theory, stocks are a hedge against inflation, because as the price of consumer goods goes up, so should stock prices. I can't give you a percentage, but many of the so-called rich people who don't need the $1400 are going to be putting it into stocks or bitcoin or something else ridiculous. Even some no-so-rich people are going to do it because of the huge apparent gains of recent months. It seems so much sexier to put your money in places where it can earn huge returns, rather than just pay off your debt. Some people are even borrowing money to play the stock market, and we all know where that usually leads.

So what will all this new investment do to the stock market? I say it's going to inflate it even more! In the next few weeks, as the $1400 hits people's bank accounts, I'm expecting even more stock market highs. The simple fact is, there are only so many marketable assets you can buy, and if there's more money chasing those assets, naturally prices are going to rise.

The destination of those $1400 checks gives me insight into why government money printing causes asset inflation but not consumer inflation. Money printing over the past decade has put more cheap cash into the hands of the investor class, who are tempted to speculate with it, while artificially low interest rates have pushed people out of so-called "safe" investments like bonds and into more speculative ones. The money gets plowed into various assets markets, from stocks to Bitcoin. So the speculative mania has been going on for several years, and now the government is making things even worse by sending out these $1400 checks.

I don't think there's any mystery about where manias end: They always end in tragedy. You just don't know when. Could be tomorrow. Could be months from now. Certainly the rise in stock markets in 2020 was something I never expected, and it has delayed the timeline, but it's still going to happen. Now in the past year, I've learned my lesson and now refrain from predicting when assets will crash, only that they will. As the old adage goes: "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

My only insight lately is that now I see how a market crash—when it happens—can neutralize inflation by destroying money. The government creates money and asset markets will soon destroy it. We certainly have plenty of things to worry about when markets collapse, but I don't think inflation is one of them—at least at the beginning. Now after markets crash, if the government keeps printing, then there could be inflation, but during a panic, cash will be king.

And I have a related prediction: I'm thinking that there could be a shortage of paper currency coming soon, coinciding with the crash in markets. In fact, there was a shortage of coins a few months ago, near the start of the lockdowns, and many stores were asking people to use exact change or credit cards. That shortage seems to have been abated lately, perhaps as people get out more and start spending coins from their piggy banks. In any case, I don't see signs in the stores anymore asking for exact change.

What I'm looking ahead to is a time when paper bills—especially $100 bills—are in temporary short supply. This would happen when some store or other entity offers to give you more than $100 in value for your $100 in bills. For example, stores might charge one price if you pay by credit card but give you a substantial discount if you pay with paper cash. Some gas stations have been doing this for years, because it helps them avoid credit card fees, but if there's crisis, this policy could become a lot more widespread.

The reason I'm thinking this way is that when there's a panic, there's a race by investors to redeem their assets and turn them into cash, and if you’re really scared [and] you don't even trust your bank, you're going to want cash-cash, or paper money you can hold in your hands. That's when the $1400 you saved under your mattress might command a premium.

That's not deflation, per se, because eventually the Bureau of Engraving and Printing will crank up the physical printing presses and produce more $100 bills, but there could be short-term shortage of paper currency in a time of panic.

So what kind of panic am I predicting? An 80% drop in stock prices is not implausible. It has happened before—from the Roaring 20s to the midst of the Depression—and it can happen again. The key issue to me is that there is far more perceived wealth in the world than actual wealth.

I've discussed this in earlier podcasts—like Episodes 52, 40, 20, 7... If you think you're wealthy, it's because you own virtual title to money-producing assets, like rental property or ownership in a company or a government bond. And these things realistically cannot produce the future income that the current price implies. It's like a stock selling for 40 times annual profits when 10-20 times is more the norm. Sooner or later, markets have to settle back to a rational price, and it typically happens in a disorderly way—in other words, in a panic.

One of the factors that could help accelerate the panic is the ascendency of index funds—also known as passive investing—where people put their money in a single fund that buys all the stocks of a certain index, like the S&P 500.

These funds are supposed to mirror the performance of the index—which might have been true when they were a tiny portion of the market. Today, roughly 50% of stock market investments are now held in these kinds of vehicles. [See correction in video comments.] I repeat: roughly 50% or half of all investments in the stock markets are held in index funds. That's a huge amount. That means these funds aren't mirroring the market anymore. They are driving the market.. Their presence greatly amplifies any shift in prices—for better or worse. Index funds helped inflate the market during the past boom, and they will help sink the markets in the coming bust.

So if you don't know about index funds, let me give you a little primer. They hold only the stocks that constitute a market index, like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average. If you put your money into these funds, the fund managers have no discretion. They have to go out and buy the underlying stocks, regardless of the price. Presumably, they do this on a daily basis, based on the cumulative inflows and redemptions on that day. Their demand for stocks in the index has nothing to do with how well each of the individual companies are doing. It's strictly a function of new investments comin into the fund. That's why it's called "passive" investing. No one is making any decisions—compared to active investing where a fund manager is looking at the actual performance and prospects of the company they are buying.

In the past few years, passive funds have vastly outperformed active ones. I think it's because active managers see how irrational current markets are and are sitting on the sidelines while passive funds are completely blind. The index funds form a self-reinforcing loop. As long as these funds go up, small-time investors keep putting money into them, forcing these funds to buy more stocks, which continues to inflate the prices of those stocks far beyond any normal valuation.

This is great for index fund investors in the upward side of the roller coaster, who experience these huge gains on paper. They don't realize that the same thing can happen in reverse: As soon as investors get a scared and start pulling money out of index funds, these funds will be forced to sell, which will accelerate the downward trend. As the market falls, more investors get scared and pull their money out, which forces more sales and further depress prices. It will be a self-reinforcing cycle that could really, truly end in a 80% collapse.

So that's what I confidently predict will happen. I just can't tell you when. One scenario says it will be soon. The pandemic generated a paradoxical asset boom, and solving the pandemic could do the opposite: triggering a massive bust in all asset classes. Huge amounts of wealth will be wiped off the face of the Earth, but in the process, a semblance of equilibrium will be restored to the monetary system.

What this would mean, in effect, is that all the past deficits of the US government will eventually be funded by the investor class, in the form of loss of wealth. All the rich people with asset investments will suddenly become a lot less rich—maybe 80% less rich. In effect, this will be their involuntary contribution to the US deficit.

There may seem to be some poetic justice in this—seeing the rich get their just desserts—but there will be plenty of collateral damage among the poor and the nation as a whole. First of all, asset markets aren't just funded by the rich. Your parents and grandparents probably have their retirement savings tied up in asset markets, mainly stocks and bonds but also the house they're living in. Think of the terrible position they'll be in if all of their investments crash by 80%.

Even bonds will not be immune. As I speak, bond markets are also in a bubble. This is represented in ridiculously low yields for both government and corporate bonds. For example, the interest rate you might expect to earn on a 10-year government bond in times of low inflation is 5-6%. Today, it's less than 2%, or right around the official inflation rate. In other words, if you loan the money to the US government, you're getting virtually no return on it, despite the substantial risk of inflation sometime in the future.

A bond is little more than a $10,000 bill that you can store under your mattress, yet it's even less secure than a $100 bill, because the market value of a bond can fall. For example, you can buy a $10,000 from the government for $10,000 today but if the market yield subsequently goes up—say to 5%—the book value of the bond you already hold will go down to something below $10,000. So if Grandma and Grandpa are invested in government bonds instead of stocks, they could still lose money in a crash, just not as fast. And if they're invested in corporate bonds, the issuer could default altogether, and Grandma and Grandpa lose everything.

Once the crash begins, the end game is also hard to predict, but I'd say that a good reference point is the historical bond yields and asset prices of a fairly sane period, like the mid 1990s. Back then, yield for a 10-year bond was about 5-6% and stocks were trading at normal PE ratios—let's say between 15 and 20 times earning compared to about 35 or 40 times earnings today. That's what we can expect in a "rational" world, and it is not unreasonable to expect markets to eventually revert to that rationals level, and that means today at least a 40-50% drop in stock markets.

The trouble is, a rational world has simply become unsupportable now. For example, the current level of Federal debt is sustainable only if interest rates remain 2% or below. If the rate the government pays rose to the historical norm of 5-6%, most of the government budget would go to interest payments alone—dwarfing other expenditures like the military or social spending. Personally, I think the government should be paying even more than 5-6%, because it's a dodgy creditor. It's not that the government would default, because it can always print money to pay off creditors, but eventually there will be inflation, enough to wipe out at 5-6% interest rate.

My Zero Inflation Theory only suggests that there may be little inflation during a crash. There could be inflation after the crash, if the government keeps printing money, because it has no other way to fund itself. When all confidence in the government is lost, that's when you're in Zimbabwe territory.

The key issue is what happens to the US government if it doesn't have access to dirt-cheap credit. How will the government survive if it can't borrow affordably anymore? What happens if investors begin to realize what a dodgy creditor the government is? In that case, the government won't be able to rescue anyone anymore, and it won't even have the money for its normal operations.

Governments have gone through crises like that before, and it hasn't been pretty. There's Weimar Germany before the rise of Hitler. There's Argentina, Venezuela and most of the countries in Africa at some point. Right now, the prospect of a government debt crisis is a little too much for my overloaded brain—and maybe yours, too—so I'll put it off to another episode. What happens to ordinary Americans and society at large if a government truly can't pay its bills and can't borrow money anymore.

The only thing I can say right now is, that according to my Zero-Inflation Theory, rising prices may not be an immediate crisis. Inflation is always possible, but I would bet that the Dollar Tree stores will continue to sell the same range of products for only a dollar, at least for as long as assets markets are crashing. Once everyone is wiped, then inflation might be along to finish us all off.

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INTERNAL USE

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55. Jim Rogers on the Next Economic Crisis — Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-02-18T13:38:00.010-08:00

This is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #55, released on 19 February 2021. The definitive version of this episode, with annotations, is housed on YouTube (19 minutes), with the audio-only version at Podbean. Available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. See the description on the YouTube version for extensive annotations, links and corrections. You can also comment on this episode there. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com

This is the original script, written before recording, corrected after the recording to reflect what was actually said.

In this episode, I'm going to return once again the dire monetary collapse that is heading our way. I probably won't be saying anything new in this episode, just repeating what I've said before, but this time I'm going to give you someone else's perspective—that of Jim Rogers, a well-known investor.

Why do I keep harping on this? It's like I'm on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. I know the ship is sinking, even if most of the other people haven't caught on. I have countless interests on board the ship, but my attention keeps coming back again and again to the fact that the ship is sinking and all my interests are going to be swamped.

And it's not like I'm even trying to warn people, because there's not a lot anyone can do. My audience right now is miniscule, but even if I had a million listeners who all agreed with me, there's little we can do to stop this. You can't negotiate with a sinking ship. It's still going down.

We've been in a pandemic for about a year now, and we're still recovering from the trauma of the Trump Administration, but all of that pales in comparison to the freight train that's coming down the track at us. It's a massive monetary collapse that will change everything. It will totally disrupt society and will make the pandemic look like a mere appetizer of disaster.

But don't just take my word for it. I'm going to start off by playing a 4-minute clip from Jim Rogers, a well-known 78-year-old investor. I don't know where the interview comes from, but it was apparently recorded in mid-2020, when the pandemic was less than 6 months old. I've done some editing to to it make it more compact.

So here is Jim Rogers...

This certainly has been the worst in my lifetime. We've had a huge rally because governments everywhere have printed and spent staggering amounts of money. But it just means the next time it's going to be worse still. You know, unless you think we'll never have economic problems and market problems again, the next one's going to be worse because [of] the debt.
In 2008, we had a problem because of debt. Since then the debt has skyrocketed—skyrocketed!— everywhere in the world. So unless you think we're not ever going to have problems again, then the next one is going to be worse. People say it cannot get [worse]. It can get worse!
The printing presses are running at unbelievable speed. Every day, the Bank of Japan goes to work and cranks up the printing presses, and as he said, we will print unlimited—that's his word “unlimited”—amounts of money. That's happening all over the world.
I mean if you get into trouble, you just call up and say, “Help me, help me, help me, save me!” And somebody comes along and saves you. No, we haven't had any gigantic problems yet, but the debt is building up everywhere.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this time is different. Maybe the world has learned a solution so that it’s different this time, but I doubt it.
Six months ago [probably late 2019], the United States was the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. Never had anybody been so deep in debt. Since then, the U.S. has increased its debt by trillions—with a “t” trillions—more.
You know if you give me a few trillion dollars, I will show you a very, very good time. We will all have a wonderful time with a few trillion dollars, but somebody eventually has to pay the price, because somebody has to worry about paying it back. You know, these days are not good for old people. They are not at all good for young people. I have young children. Oh my gosh, America is leaving them a terrible, terrible legacy which they're going to struggle with all their lives.
Whenever there's a problem in the world, people look around for an easy way to solve the problem. Once upon a time, there was a guy named “Marx”, Mr. Marx. Mr. Marx had a wonderful theory, and many people accepted it and tried it for a long time. Nobody believes in Mr. Marx anymore. We found that it didn't work.
But right now, there's another one called “More Money Today”—MMT. Give me some money. More money, free money. Well, everybody loves it, so many people are starting to try it. Nobody's saying it out loud, but the British are doing it, some people [in] China, the Japanese are doing them. So we're going to find easy ways. Politicians always find easy ways. Will it work in the long term? As I said, being a young person in America right now is not a good thing to be. All of us peasants know. We may not have studied economics at an Ivy League university, but we know that when you print money and borrow money, subconsciously, we know this leads to problems.
As I said, watch Kitko news. You will see that the world is really doing strange, unusual things. Never before in the history of the world have interest rates been negative. Never before has a major bank like the Bank of Japan said: “We will print unlimited amounts of money.” Sure, Zimbabwe prints unlimited amounts of money. Countries have done it, but now you have major people doing it. So, yeah, this could turn into a huge bubble.

So I like his folksy manner, but it's entirely calculated. This is a guy who was educated at Yale and Oxford, so I think that whole "peasant" bit is a bit contrived. But a folksy manner is just what you need right now to explain this thing because it's really quite simple. The US government and others around the world have been spending far more money than they're taking in. This was true before the pandemic and it's doubly true now.

The only way governments can cover this shortfall is by printing money. They effectively print it simply by issuing bonds. Some of those bonds are purchased by central banks like the Federal Reserve, which creates new currency in return, but to me, whether it's bonds or cash is immaterial. As soon as a government issues a bond, money is effectively created, because investors trade bonds among themselves as though they were cash.

As Jim Rogers points out, this money printing just can't go on. You can construct all sorts of fantastic theories like Modern Monetary Theory—which he calls "More Money Today"—but you can't defy the laws of physics for very long. If you keep printing money, bad things are going to happen that put a stop to it.

In Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany, the bad things were pretty straightforward: If you keep printing money, the value of each unit of that currency will fall, leading to hyperinflation. You can't get something for nothing. There's no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, even though they've tried to do it again and again. Some of really look good, these perpetual motion machines, but they always fail in the end.

And the question comes up again and again: If the government can just print unlimited amounts of money with no ill effects, then why does anyone pay taxes? Logically, that's where things are leading: No one pays taxes and the government just prints money to give out to people. You know, intuitively, that cannot work, so the system has to break somewhere along the line.

In the case of the US dollar, the dynamic is much more complicated and unpredictable than it was for Zimbabwe. For example, I would have never predicted that a worldwide pandemic would lead to an all-time high in stock markets. Economic historians will be dissecting that for ages, writing books and papers trying to explain why it happened, but it's just not normal. It's not a healthy response to an obvious economic injury. What is feels like, anecdotally, is the government has printed all this new money, and it's all going into asset inflation rather than into consumer inflation.

It's easy to get sucked into the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what is happening right now, but I'd rather look at the end result. The end result of runaway money printing is that your currency is debased, devalued, and that process is going to cause a lot of other bad things to happen all thoughout society and the economy. I'm not willing to predict what will happen and when, because I've been burned too many times by that. I'm only predicting "bad things". When things blow up, they can blow up in unpredictable ways.

Think of the Trump administration. That Trump would get elected in 2016 was entirely unpredictable and outrageous two years earlier, and lots of events come out of the blue like that. They will eventually seem to make sense in the hands of any competent historian, but they couldn't have been predicted before they happened. The fabric of history is like that: In a complex system, you don't know the exact ways things are going to interact.

What you can predict with some certainty is what happens to packages of things. Take Planet Earth. I have no idea what human society will look like in 500 years. I can't predict the news stories or the human events 500 years from now, but I can predict—or at least astronomers can—exactly where in space Earth will be 500 years from now. It's a very simple calculation, even though life on Earth is very complex.

Likewise, I can't predict how the economy will evolve over the coming months or what world events will happen. What I can predict is that the current economic model is unsustainable and has to collapse is some dramatic fashion. Whether you're a government or an individual, you can't keep spending more money than you make. You know the end result: a debased currency and a gutted government. You just don't know what sort of crazy things humans on board the ship are going to be doing as it is going down.

Stock markets right now are a reflection more of human sentiment than a reflection of fundamental value. In the end, fundamentals will win, but in the short term, stock markets can do some crazy things, as they've been doing over the past few weeks. Even today, as I'm recording this, the S&P 500 is near its all-time high, even as the pandemic continues. This bubble may have popped by the time you listen to this episode, but it's inflated now, and I would have never predicted that a year ago.

One thing you can predict about money printing is that the government will eventually lose the ability to borrow. Either the government will default on its bonds, or inflation will erode their value, in which case no one will want to loan money to the government at affordable rates. The end-game for the US government it that either will collapse altogether, or it will have to find some way to live within its means, spending only the taxes it actually takes in. That sounds like a good idea, but it's far messier than it seems, because you can't just cut the government budget in half without major political upheaval.

The other thing that you can reasonably predict is a massive evaporation of wealth. Essentially, wealth consists of paper promises, as I described in Episode 52. For example, you could have pieces of paper that are redeemable for chickens, and those pieces of paper are only perceived wealth. It is only perceived wealth, not realized wealth, because you don't actually have the chickens in hand. You only have a promise of chickens.

The general state of the world right now is that there are far more promises outstanding than can possibly be redeemed. That's what Jim Rogers means by too much debt. For example, there are far more government bonds than the government can ever pay off. That's simple mathematical reality, especially if there is no more significant population growth to fuel the economy.

Wealth evaporation happens when markets realize that all those pieces of paper aren't worth nearly as much as people think they are. If you thought you had a piece of paper that promised you a thousands chickens, but it's really only good for a hundred chickens, then you've lose wealth as soon as that fact becomes known. Until that time, you can trade your piece of paper as though it was worth a thousand chickens, but once we know it's not possible, then wealth evaporates.

And I think that's what's coming down the line for anyone with assets, be it a house or fine art or a 401K plan invested in the stock market. Suddenly, during some unspecified future crisis, people are going to discover that they're not nearly as wealthy as they thought they were. Vast amounts of wealth can vanish almost overnight and have done so in the past—for example when a stock market crashes. All it takes is a change of attitude from investors, shifting from greed to fear. In a panic, people's portfolios of promises can be devalued in an instant.

Not just wealthy investors are affected, but anyone with an IRA or a bank account. And onnce people start losing this wealth, they're going to stop buying things, especially those things they don't really need, as I describe in Episode 41. This passes the crisis along to people who do not have any assets, who are living paycheck-to-paycheck, because they'll lose their job in these non-essential businesses.

The late 20th Century was a period of globalization, where the world become increasingly integrated. I predict the 21st Century will be a period of localization, or fragmentation, where all sorts of big systems like governments break down and people have to rely more and more on local solutions. The pandemic has already started the ball rolling, confining everyone to their own country. Even if all those restrictions are lifted tomorrow, people have become more localized now and more conservative in their spending and may not want to travel. In any case, we will never again have the same level of global integration we had in the 2010s. Increasingly, it will be every country and region for itself, trying to find solutions to its problems within its own borders.

I take the Fall of Rome analogy very seriously. At its peak, the Western Roman Empire linked most of Europe together into a unified system. But it was an economically unsustainable system that eventually collapsed on itself. It took a lot longer to collapse than I would have predicted at the time, but it did collapse. What emerged in its place was a lot of independent fiefdoms fending for themselves.

When the big collapse comes, in whatever form it takes, humans will continue to survive, just as they survived after the Fall of Rome, but they are going to do it in ways we can't predict right now. There will be a lot of compromises on the road to survival that we aren't willing to make today. They will be forced upon us.

But we will survive. Humans always do. We're clever. We're resourceful. When pushed to the wall, we'll figure things out and come up with new ways to organize ourselves. It's just going to be a very painful journey getting there.

———

{Above reconciled with actual: 2/19/21}

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{Visual version of this script backed up to Twitter on: 2/19/21}

54. Parentification in the Post-Nuclear Family — Demographic Doom Podcast Script

2021-02-13T09:43:00.012-08:00

This is the script for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #54, recorded and released on 13 February 2021. The definitive version of this episode, with annotations, is housed on YouTube, with the audio-only version at Podbean. Available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. See the description on the YouTube version for extensive annotations, links and corrections. You can also comment on this episode there. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com

This is the original script, written before recording, corrected after the recording to reflect what was actually said. There may be minor discrepancies between the script and the actual broadcast.

In this episode, I'm continuing my discussion of my proposed post-nuclear family, where a large number of children are raised in a single household. It is kind of like a village church, where a number of adults contribute to the upkeep of the church but none of them actually live there. The idea is to reduce the costs and risks to individual parents while raising better children overall.

Today, I'd like to address the issue of “parentification” of the children, which I acknowledge is a critical part of my system. We have older children caring for and essentially raising younger ones, while simultaneously helping to care for their elderly relatives.

If you have any experience in child welfare, “parentification” is a bad word. The typical situation is that Child Protective Services comes into the home and finds a 13-year-old in charge. They are serving as the parent to their parent, because their parent is strung out on drugs or alcohol. They may also be serving as the parent to their younger siblings, getting them dressed and fed and off to school because the real parent is somehow absent or disabled. This is usually considered child abuse, and the children may be taken from the home.

My plan sounds similar, at least on the surface. I am explicitly saying that older children should care for younger ones. I'm not proposing that they care for their own parents, but I do think it appropriate for them to help care for their elderly relatives. Their "job" as children is caring for others in their family, in whatever capacity they are capable of at their age. I see this not just as a labor-saving device but as an important part of their socialization, instilling in them a culture of service. Childhood shouldn't just be entertainment and formal schooling. Every kid should have important real-world responsibilities, and there's no more natural responsibility than caring for other family members.

In my system, adults do not prepare meals. Kid's do. Adults provide the kitchen. They provide the raw ingredients, but kids put it all together and make it happen. Adults may "help" with dinner, just like a kid would, but they don't plan it or manage it. There's a teenager who's responsible for dinner, and the adults are expected to follow their instructions.

In my view, nearly all repetitive, time-consuming household tasks should be performed by children, not adults. This includes the changing of diapers and other routine care of infants. When it comes to the laborious task of teaching a child language, older children can do the job just as well as any adult with a PhD, so let's put this labor force to work. The older children gain skills almost as much as the young children do, and the adult with a PhD can use their own skills for something more valuable.

The difference between this and what CPS sees is that in my system there's usually a responsible adult present and actively monitoring the family. Adults are the high-level managers assuring that everything gets done and that the system runs smoothly and that things don't go off the rails, but they tend to delegate authority rather than doing things themselves. If everything is running smoothly, they can back off and let the kids handle things.

Wherever possible, adults don't tell kids what to do. They "partner" with the kids to get things done. If this is Laundry Day, the adult may be participate in the sorting and folding of clothes, but they aren't directing the operation. Laundry Day has been going on since the beginning of time, so the kids ought know what to do. Sometimes, they even tell the adult what to do. If everything is running fine, the adult is just one of the kids, but if a complex issues arises, the adult can step up and take responsibility. Maybe the washing machine breaks down. This is something the teens probably can't handle on their own, so an adult has to take over.

Parentification aside, a family does need adults. It needs adults because if children are left to their own devices they're going to eat pizza every night. You need adults to guide the operation and to veto any lamebrain schemes, but the general goal is instill in kids the ability to make sound judgments on their own, and they need to be given the space to practice that.

The on-duty adult has the power to order kids to do things, but ideally they rarely need to use it. If there's a real crisis, like a fire, the adult snaps into management mode and issues orders; otherwise negotiation is the preferred way get things done.

So, yes, I'm turning children into parents. I see this as healthy for all the parties involved. The younger children have daily access to their parental figures, just like kids today, but their perceived parent might be a teenager. This teaches the teenagers responsibility while freeing up the adults for more high-value tasks, like protecting the whole household.

Now, the mother of the child is a special case. As I discussed in Episode 50, I think the most efficient source of babies would be the family's own daughters who give birth in the late teens and early 20s. In that case, your mother is still your mother for life, as it has always been. As a matter of ethics, I think child and birth mother should never be forcefully separated. At the same time, I want to shift the parental bond to the siblings whenever possible. A new mother can mother can cuddle and talk to her infant all she wants, but she doesn't have to change diapers and might even be discouraged from doing so. Any of the tedious tasks of parenting can be handed off to someone else.

This seems to me like the best of all possible worlds for the mother: They get all the joys of parenthood and few of the responsibilities. Most of the diaper changing, the story reading, the feeding, the running of baths and the putting to bed can all be handled by the mother's trusted younger siblings, who she herself helped raise. After her childbearing duties end—say, around age 22—she has her whole adult life ahead of her with few responsibilities. She has a lot of exciting things to do, and the family won't hold her back, because she has done her duty, and her babies are in good hands.

The post-nuclear family is designed to foster strong bonds among the siblings, especially those who spend their formative years in the same household. These are the people, in adulthood, who you turn to for advice, or for help in times of trouble. The bonds with ones siblings are going to wax and wane in adulthood, but you're probably always going to be drawn back to your brothers and sisters. You'll go off into the outside world and do things, but when you eventually become old and weak, you'll probably want to come back to the household of your youth and reconnect with the siblings who are still part of your nervous system. Even today, a lot of elderly adults are like that. They want to return to their roots, and the post-nuclear family gives them that option.

The family—and any good family—isn't just a childrearing unit. It's a lifelong support system and eventually an old age home. Elderly people can be a great resource for the family. They've got plenty of time and, theoretically, they've got a lot of hard-won wisdom to share. I think they would make great on-duty parents, while young and middle-aged adults can be focused more on their careers. They can go off and travel the world—pretty much without restriction so long as they pay their family taxes.

The point here is that parentification isn't just a cost-saving device. It's an essential training mechanism for the healthy socialization of children. In the society that I'm in right now, the pendulum has swung far too much in the direction of individuality. In today's society, every child is expected to be a rock star, and they're crushed when it turns out they can't be. Loyalty to their family and contributing to the family's future are very low on their current priority list. It's quite normal for today's young adults to head out into the world and see their parents only once a year. Their families are dissolved once they leave the nest, and this makes for a lot of very unhappy and rootless people.

In my system, I want to bring the focus back to the family. Now, I'm no traditionalist. I'm no Christian, but I think there's merit in the position that society has lost its family anchor and needs to get back to it. This could be especially important as society disintegrates, as I see it doing in the coming years. That's an issue I talk about in other podcasts: Monetary systems are destined to collapse, and perhaps governments with them. They future, as I see it, will be more locally centered, and people may need to draw together into a family tribe just to survive.

The pandemic has given us a taste of this, where people can't travel internationally. Maybe in future disasters, it will be hard to get out of your home region. I take the whole Fall of Rome analogy quite seriously. What happens if the US government can't function anymore? Well, then local fiefdoms may take over, and the most basic fiefdom of all is the family. It has to be a strong one and a large one if you hope to survive.

The post-nuclear family is designed to build the bonds of family loyalty from an early age, perhaps even more so than families of the past. If children spend 18 years not just in close proximity with their siblings but actively caring for them, you're going to have some powerful lifelong bonds. Sure, in adulthood, you're free to go anywhere and do anything, but most people in a well-bonded family are probably going to stay pretty close to home. They may travel, and you want them to, but there may be more of a sense of "What can I find out there that I can bring back to my family?"

While ever individual can have goals and dreams and need their own property and identity, the family should probably still be the core of their existence. No one can truly go it alone. You have to have this core source of strength and structure that the family provides. Maybe you go off and become a rock star, but it's not for your own glory. If the prizes you win are to mean anything, you have to bring them home to your family.

———

{Above reconciled with actual: 2/14/21}

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53. Fifteen Defining Features of the Post-Nuclear Family ⸺ Demographic Doom Podcast Transcript

2021-02-03T09:13:00.022-08:00

This is the transcript for my Demographic Doom podcast Episode #53 recorded in Eastham, Massachusetts on 3 February 2021 and released the next day from Provincetown, Mass. The audio master for this episode is found at Podbean and a video version is on YouTube (below). Also available on all major podcast platforms like iTunes and Google Podcasts. See the description on the YouTube version for extensive annotations, links and corrections. You can also comment on this episode there. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com

This transcript was derived from the automatically generated YouTube transcript, reformatted and lightly edited for clarity.

For the past few days, I've been working on a series of web pages on the post-nuclear family trying to nail down some of its specifics. In this episode I'm going to give you a little dramatic reading of one of those web pages defining the main features of this system.

If you don't know what the post nuclear family is you might want to go back to my Podcast #46, which is the first time I describe it. But even if you haven't listened to that podcast, this web page I'm going to read is probably a pretty good introduction, because I'm starting off from scratch and just telling you what the system is all about.

On this webpage, I've listed 15 features that I believe define the post-nuclear family. I may come up with other features, but these 15 seem pretty stable. I've come up with a dozen other features I don't regard as essential but I think that they're strongly implied, so I'll read those features after the first 15.

And then finally I'm going to give you a third list which is the items that need to be resolved by policy. These are things that the founding parents are going to have to determine on their own. I can't tell you, for example, what you should be teaching your children, in this family or any other. That's something that you have to work out. I have my own ideas, but they aren't part of the definition of the post-nuclear family. In this final list I can only list the questions that need to be resolved. I can't give you the answers, because that's for you to figure out.

So the webpage I'm reading from is currently located at demographicdoom.com/postnuclear — that's all lowercase with no dashes or spaces. Obviously, if you've already read the webpage you may not need to listen to this dramatic reading, but I could add some nuances or additional information that's not in the in the webpage.

So here is my dramatic reading of that web page…

The Post-Nuclear Family: Main Features.

The post-nuclear family is a system of collective parenting where between 9 and 18 children are raised in a single household by a group of cooperating adults who do not live there. The children are evenly spaced in age with a baby born into the family every 1 to 2 years. This wide spectrum of ages means that older children can care for younger ones and teach them basic skills, which relieves the adults of many routine tasks.

The household is supported financially by a system of family taxes levied on adult members, similar to a church tithe where members give 10% of their income. Children who age out of the main household can live however they choose and are free to move elsewhere, so long as these family taxes are paid. Their incentive for paying them is the promise of ongoing family support and eventual care in old age.

The post-nuclear family addresses five main issues:

➤ Number 1: How does my community or culture produce enough children to sustain itself.

➤ Number 2: How do we raise our children economically so we can afford to do it.

➤ Number 3: How do we raise them intelligently and consistently so that they can achieve their potential.

➤ Number 4: Who will care for me when I get old or sick and can't care for myself.

➤ Number 5: Who will support me emotionally and be there for me when I get in trouble.

So to address these five issues I've come up with a system of parenting that I call the post-nuclear family. The goal of the post-nuclear family is to raise a large number of children at a low per child cost without compromising the quality of their upbringing. The ultimate aim is to sustain and expand a local community or culture whose existence is otherwise threatened by low birth rates and the high cost of parenting.

This plan is not presented as a solution to the demographic woes of a whole nation, and it does not require government sanction or support. It is instead an independent plan for raising children by any small group of adults who choose to form an alliance.

The post-nuclear family is intended to preserve and perpetuate your culture, whatever you consider that to be. For a culture to survive beyond a single lifetime, it needs new members, ideally raised within that system from their earliest days. The post-nuclear family, like traditional families, is a vehicle for acculturation and character formation, as well as a safety net when members get in trouble.

To entertain such a plan, you would have to see your culture as valuable and worth preserving beyond your own lifetime. You would have to be willing to make a substantial lifelong investment in this project, but it shouldn't be as costly in time or money as a traditional nuclear family is. Costs and risks would be distributed across multiple adults so no individual or couple is bearing an excess of burdens.

The post-nuclear family can be started as a simple parenting collective. For example, three or more couples, producing children in the traditional way, could choose to raise their children in a single shared household. The founding adults would not live in the shared home but would take turns as on-duty parents on a scheduled basis. This scheduling of responsibilities is intended to reduce competition among parents and grant more autonomy to the children.

Children are expected to perform all of the routine tasks of the household that are within their ability, like preparing meals, cleaning house, changing diapers and teaching younger kids basic skills. The children are evenly distributed in age, from 0 to 18, which allows older children to care for younger ones.

If the system is founded by three or more heterosexual couples, the original mothers would bring a new baby into the family every one to two years. The system becomes more complex when the fertility of those original mothers runs out, some 10 to 20 years after the collective is formed. To preserve its cumulative wisdom and culture, the post-nuclear family is intended to be a permanent institution, continuously raising children in perpetuity. If the system is to continue beyond the fertility of the founding mothers, decisions would eventually have to be made about where the next generation of babies come from, but initially they come from the traditional means of a loving couple making babies in the usual way.

This system is not a commune or a kibbutz or a group marriage. Apart from clearly defined responsibilities in support of the household, adults of the family can live any way they choose and retain all of their own assets. Like members of a church, they live away from the main household but close enough to it to perform their duties. They remain free to accumulate their own wealth and aren't expected to share it with other family members, except at their death. While alive, their only obligations to the family are taxes based on income and the sharing of parenting tasks according to a predefined schedule. Furthermore, they have to be available to devote special attention if some unexpected crisis arises.

So these are the 15 defining features of the post-nuclear family—the ones I've identified so far…

➤ Feature #1 is that between 9 and 18 kids are raised in a single dwelling.

And here are a few notes I have on that…

A large family allows economies of scale and systems of mutual care that aren't possible in smaller families. It also discourages any sense of entitlement, because no child is a prince or princess in a large family. They all have to cooperate to get what they want. If nothing else, a large family means lower childcare costs, because one on duty adult can manage all nine kids.

Nine kids is considered the norm, but 18 kids is the target size when the family seeks to expand. Eventually, they would split into two families of nine kids. Although nine children is unusually large by today's standards, it's not implausible. It is similar to a very large blended family today or a traditional farm family of the past.

You can imagine the Brady Bunch, a popular TV show, where there were six kids. Well, this is only 50% higher than that.

➤ Feature #2: Children are evenly spaced in age, born every 1 to 2 years.

This spacing is intended to reduce direct competition between kids and to create a natural hierarchy among them. Older kids have more privileges responsibility and authority. Since every child is a different age, each of them has a special place in the family and can be expected to be to be treated differently. This reduces claims of unfairness, because every child knows that he will eventually grow into the privileges that his older siblings get.

Older children, once they learn a useful skill, can teach it to younger ones without much adult intervention.

If the intention is to split the family in two at a later date, then new babies are added every year; otherwise every two years is considered the norm. The only kids that are likely to be the same age are twins born at the same time.

If family members are spaced every two years and average longevity is 80 years, the total size of the family—that's kids and adults—will eventually stabilize at about 40 members. This is consistent with a large extended family today.

➤ Feature #3: Children themselves provide most of the routine labor of the household, children prepare meals, clean house and care for younger children. A child is given important household responsibilities at the earliest age when they can reasonably handle them. At age 17 or 18, a teenager can manage the whole family for short periods without an adult present at all. This might happen, for example, overnight. Adults are needed to supervise the tasks of the home, and they may pitch in to help, but the ultimate goal is a self-regulating system that needs little adult intervention for routine tasks. Freed of these repetitive tasks, adults can focus on higher level functions.

➤ Feature #4: Adults provide supervision, education, mentoring, financial support, logistical support and long-term planning. They supply the physical dwelling and protection from outside threats—all the complex things that teenagers can't reasonably be expected to do.

As a general rule, adults don't perform duties that children and teens are capable of, except, perhaps, to show how it is done or to share in those tasks on an equal footing. Adult interaction with the family should emphasize quality time that makes maximum use of their skills and creativity.

The adults also define and enforce the policies and rules that the kids and adults have to follow.

➤ Feature #5: Adults come into the household for assigned duties and social visits but they do not live there.

They live separately in their own homes in any arrangement they choose. This gives the kids more autonomy and helps prevent adults from stepping on each other's toes.

Although adults cooperate on the raising of children and supporting the household, they retain their own property, lifestyle, relationships and careers, independent of other adults in the group. This is not a commune, as I said. It's not a group marriage—unless the adults choose it to be. It is people living their lives as they do today but just cooperating on this one shared project.

The system is analogous to a community church, where many members contribute to the church and its functions, but no one lives in the church, and parishioners lead separate lives outside of it. The household may have an open-door policy where adult family members can visit anytime they want, but at any particular time, only one adult is in charge.

➤ Feature #6: Childrearing never ends.

As teenagers age out of the core household, new babies are brought in. Where the babies come from is a policy decision and not part of the core definition of the post-nuclear family.

➤ Feature #7: Most basic knowledge, culture and training is passed from older children to younger ones. For example, language is taught primarily by older children to younger ones. Adults step in only to fine-tune these basic skills, teach advanced skills and provide a system of formal education.

➤ Feature #8: Admission to the initial group of founding adults is highly selective.

Before they form the collective, these adults have to have high confidence in each other and have to be in general agreement on all the basic principles of parenting.

➤ Feature #9: Once a child is born into the family, they are a member for life.

This is just like families today under normal circumstances. No one gets to choose their family, but once you're a member, you are a member forever. Now, people are certainly free to leave their families, and they do it today, but that's not human nature. Human nature under normal circumstances is that you remain connected with your family and your parents for life. Members can be excommunicated from a family, but they have to really do something bad. It's highly unusual in both today's families and in families of the future.

➤ Feature #10: the family is a lifelong support system—just like families of today ought to be.

If you get in trouble as an adult, you know your family will do what they can to help you, usually without pay. Pride and mutual respect keep you from taking advantage of this system, but if you do get in trouble, you have your family to call on.

➤ Feature #11: All adult members of the family are expected to support the family financially through a system of family taxes.

This is similar to a church tithe where a percentage of your income is given to the group.

➤ Feature #12: The family provides lifelong health care for its members.

For example, they would provide health insurance in the U.S., and they provide appropriate care when a member gets sick or disabled. This includes care for the elderly when they can no longer care for themselves.

➤ [Feature #13:] Unlike other adults, sick or elderly family members may live in the same household as the children or in lodging nearby.

This allows the children to participate in the care of these elders, for example by providing meals

➤ Feature #14: Adults choose their own leadership structure and governing system.

The system of governance is initially determined by the founding adults, perhaps in a written charter. That charter can be modified later by an established process. Authority among the adults is clearly defined. At any given time, one adult is clearly in charge, and they are probably going to elect a leader as well.

➤ Feature #15: One household can be split into two through a system of mitosis, which is making two households from one while preserving the family's culture and institutional memory.

So what happens here is a new dwelling is prepared a short distance from the original home, and children of alternating ages are moved into the new household. It's kind of like the undoing of a zipper. This increases the number of households from one to two and grows the community while preserving the family's internal systems—their cumulative wisdom.

In preparation for this division, the original family would be increased from 9 to 18 kids over the preceding 18 years—that is, a baby would be added every year instead of every two years. After the families are split, there would be two families of nine kids, each spaced every two years. The adults connected to the original family will also split, with half of them being assigned to the new family.

This change need not be traumatic for the children, since they would have known about it for years. The new household could initially be located close to the old one to allow continued daily communication. You wouldn't lose contact with the people you've considered your siblings. It's just that they become cousins now. After a period of adjustment—maybe two years—the new household could be moved further away, as it becomes appropriate.

This whole process of mitosis takes about 20 years, from the time the original family starts producing children every year to the time of division 18 years later, and then another two years for the system to stabilize.

So those are the 15 core features, the defining features that I don't think the post-nuclear family can do without.

Now I'm going to give you a list of what I call “implied” features—things that I think are likely but are not an essential part of the definition…

➤ So one implied feature is that children are homeschooled under the supervision of a paid professional teacher. If you're going to go to all the trouble to establish this system, you're not going to turn its most important function over to a public school. You're going to do it yourself. You're going to establish a curriculum, and the contents of this curriculum is going to be a matter of a lot of debate and negotiation among the adults, because it's so important. The curriculum is the plan for what the children are going to learn and when, and it's not static. It's a continuously evolving organism that is going to be adapted to changes in the world and changes in philosophy.

The teacher is assigned exclusively to this task. This is not a shared position. It's an exclusive position, and that's why you should be paying someone to do this. It can be one of the founding parents, but it doesn't have to be. He or she works a standard Monday-through-Friday schedule, managing the education plan of one family or maybe several of them.

The teacher is really more of an educational manager than a teacher, per se, because they assign educational resources more than they actually teach. They will directly teach students only when other educational resources don't work. The educational resources they have available might be online learning, kids teaching other kids, textbook learning, standard exercises and any new options that technology might bring about. Formal education is going to be a on a fixed schedule during the day just like school today. During certain hours during the day, you are at school, you're doing your job of learning.

➤ Another implied feature is that children of the family are genetically diverse. That means they come from a lot of different biological parents. I'm not declaring in advance where the babies come from, but it makes sense to have genetic diversity, because this allows a lot of talents to emerge and it encourages overall resilience in the population.

Genetic diversity is a lot easier to achieve than some sort of genetic plan, which might be known as eugenics, where you're trying to breed a certain kind of person. Eugenics is a political minefield and ultimately, it's impractical. I think it doesn't work. The problem with trying to breed humans is their lifespan is so long, and it's so difficult to identify and isolate the traits that you want. How, for example, do you breed for intelligence? It's not just one gene that you can select for.

Dogs can be bred only because their time to reproductive maturity is short—that is, maybe two years—and the traits we expect from dogs are very simple. With humans, it's much more complicated. So rather than get into the whole eugenics thing, it's a lot easier just to seek out diversity—that is, a lot of different gametes from a lot of different parents.

Where the babies come from is a policy decision, and it's not part of the core definition of the post-nuclear family. Whatever method you choose for making babies, there's going to be a lot of controversy. There's a lot of politics. There's a lot of negotiation. That's the way humans make babies. That's always been true, and it's going to continue to be true. What sperm is going to be united with what egg? That's always been a fraught topic, and it will continue to be.

➤ Another implied feature is that the family should be evenly balanced between girls and boys, with roughly the same of each, ideally alternating. So in a 9-child household, the ideal sequence -would be boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl. If you have an 18-child household, intending to split it, the ideal sequence would be boy-boy-girl-girl-boy-boy-girl-girl. That way, when you divide the family, you get the traditional sequence of boy-girl-boy-girl.

In theory, you don't need males at all. As a male, I'm allowed to say that. I mean, what good are males after all? you just collect a little bit of sperm, and that sperm goes a long way. So an all-female society is theoretically possible, but I just have the feeling it would be dangerous. I think it’s probably not a good idea unless you really know what you're doing. Nature has this 50-50 ratio, and I think you probably should stick with it.

➤ Another implied feature: The primary parental bond between a young child and their parent is not going to be between a young child and an adult. It's going to be between that child and the person who cares for them most of the time, which is probably a teenager. So, yes, young children will have a firm parental bond, or maybe several of them, but it will be with their older siblings, probably not with the adults, because the adults only come in one day a week.

I don't want to predetermine who bonds with whom, or who a child runs to for comfort, but generally speaking, a young child bonds with the person who is caring for them, who is there every day, who's talking to them. that's who they run to for comfort, and that's who they look to as a reference point as they're exploring the world.

These roles could be emphasized by calling adults “aunts” and “uncles” rather than parents. For example, you could refer to one person as Aunt Mary and someone else is Uncle James when they come in to care for you—unless, of course, you know who your biological mother and father are. In that case, you can call them Mom and Dad, but your primary bond is going to be with this older sibling who cares for you.

Every child has a biological parent, at least a biological mother, and if that mother is known, you are allowed to have a special bond with your mother. They will always be your Mom, presumably because they nursed you and brought you into the world and breastfed you and have a special bond with you. I don't want to deny that to anyone. But these biological parents should not be allowed to give their child any kind of material benefit that other children don't get. They can have a special relationship with them, but they shouldn't be giving them special gifts that other children don't get.

➤ Here's another implied feature: Most resources within the core household are shared. That includes food, clothing and toys and other equipment. A family naturally is a communistic system. You can't get around that, but children would also be allowed to own their own property. The way this would work is that your property has to fit into a defined space. I think it should be a footlocker that's at the end of your bed. Everything that's inside your footlocker is yours. For example, you go to the beach, and you collect some shells. Those are your shells, and you can keep them as long as they fit in your in your footlocker. That's a nice way to regulate private property. It all has to fit in this defined space.

Individual kids cannot own pets, and the rationale here is that a pet isn't going to fit in your footlocker. Individuals can't own a dog, but the whole household can own a dog, and it's shared by everybody. Outside the main household, adults are not required to share, any more than you, as an adult, would share with your adult sibling [today]. You may share with them, but you still retain all your own assets. You don't give your brother or sister everything you own. The walls may come down a bit if your brother or sister gets in trouble and needs you. In that case, you may give them more of your resources than you normally would.

➤ Another implied feature: Regardless of the family's wealth, children should be raised in conditions of what I call “benign poverty”, where resources and privileges are relatively rare and have to be negotiated for. Toys, for example are going to be very well used, and most clothes are going to be hand-me-downs.

This is another reason why adults should not reside in the house itself. Their accumulated wealth can corrupt the children. The sort of resources children get is a subject of negotiation and control, and it's something you want to be very conscious about. There's going to be plenty of healthy food supplied to the household from the outside. The kids shouldn't have to worry about where the food comes from, but it may not be exciting food. There may not be a lot of gourmet items or a lot of sweets. That stuff could be controlled. That's all a matter of policy.

➤ Another implied feature is that children must obey an “Electronic Media Policy”, with the policy being determined by the adults. Electronic media could be television. It could be computers or video games. All of that stuff is so addictive and potentially destructive that it has to be very closely controlled. Since technology is rapidly evolving and its effects may not be fully known right away, this policy is always changing. It's always evolving. Books, I would imagine, are generally exempt. You can read any book you want at any time, but watching a movie, that’s a matter of negotiation. It's not automatic that you would watch any movie you want any time you want. And the same would apply to any other electronics. Once a child reaches adulthood they have access to everything, but up until that point, there's a gradation. There's a system for deciding what media you have access to.

➤ Another implied feature is community service. So once a teen reaches the age of adulthood—whatever that's deemed to be—they enter a period of family service or community service for several years, which is similar to military service of some societies today. This labor can be used for a variety of purposes for the family or the community. It can also be used for child bearing, if that is deemed to be the policy. In other words women between the ages of 18 and 22 may bear babies for the family.

➤ Another implied policy: After a young adult has completed their community service, they can conduct their lives any way they want. They can travel. They can live anywhere in the world. They can form any romantic relationship. They can pursue any career. There are no restrictions on people who graduate from the family, except that you have to pay your family taxes.

You're also expected to keep in contact with the family, but that that comes naturally to most people. You always want to keep in touch with the people you grew up with.

➤ Another implied feature: When a graduate of the family eventually reaches retirement age at 65 or 70, it's generally expected that they will come back home. They will return to the family and serve as active parents and live out their final days with their birth family. This isn't a requirement it's only an expectation, but I think it's normal for most people even today. Retired people tend to have a strong desire to return home in their final years.

➤ Another implied feature: The family is generally indifferent to the sexual relations of its adult members. You can marry. You can divorce. You can have a boyfriend, a girlfriend. You can do anything you want in adulthood, and it's not going to faze the family. The family really isn't interested because this all takes place outside of the main household. You can associate yourself with other people any way you want—as long as you're still paying your family taxes, as long as you're still attentive to your family obligations.

The family is only going to draw the line at childbearing. If you go off and have a tryst and produce a baby with someone else, there's not an automatic guarantee that your family will take that baby into its system, because this is something that has to be controlled. This is something that's a subject of negotiation. It's not a a matter of whim. When you produce a baby, it's produced on a plan, so this family's going to be very sensitive about you going off and having a baby without their permission.

Due to something called the “Westermarck Effect”, sexual relations within the family are unlikely, because people naturally are not sexually attracted to their siblings. That's part of evolutionary psychology that was first discovered in the Kibbutz's of Israel. In the Kibbutz's of Israel, where you have a lot of children raised together from different parents, they very rarely married with each other. They always sought partners outside of the family.

If you do get married, your spouse or romantic partner is certainly welcome to visit your family, but they are not automatically part of your family. In other words, they're not entitled to care in their elder years just because they married you. That's something that may be possible, but it has to be negotiated. It's not automatic, because obviously this other person hasn't paid into the system the way a normal family member would.

➤ Another implied feature: When a child of the family grows old and eventually dies, it is expected that they will leave all of their assets in their will to the family. So all of their accumulated wealth should be transferred to the family, which is what happens today in most families, and in the post-nuclear family it would be expected as well.

So that's my list of implied features that I think are likely based on those 15 original features. I'm probably going to add more implied features later, but in my final list I want to give you a list of things that I cannot determine in advance, that the founding parents and the adults of the family are going to have to determine. And here are those things…

➤ How the family starts—how you're going to form this family. Initially, I have an idea that it should be three or four heterosexual couples joining together in this parenting collective, but that's just one option. It could be started in a lot of different ways, and that's not something that I'm not going to dictate.

➤ I'm also not going to dictate where the babies come from. Initially, if you start this as a parenting collective, then the babies obviously come from the founding mothers, but when their fertility runs out, where do the babies come from? Well, that's not something I'm going to determine. I've recorded a podcast about it—I think Episode 50—but basically it's none of my business where the babies from. That's something that the parents have to negotiate.

➤ The parents also have to negotiate how duties and financial responsibilities are assigned among the adults. All of that scheduling has to be worked out.

➤ The family also determines the rules the children must follow and the rules the adults must follow. It has to write that Electronic Media Policy.

➤ It [also] has to define, more broadly how the world is presented to the children. What a family is, is protection from the outside world. No one as a baby is exposed to the full brunt of the outside world. They are protected from it in a sort of Disneyland, which is the family, and it's a topic of negotiation how we let the outside world to come into the family, just like the electronic media policy.

➤ There [will] have to be systems developed for how disputes are resolved, and that includes disputes between children and disciplinary problems with children and disputes among adults. How are we going to resolve them? There should be some very clear procedure for doing so.

➤ And of course we have to come up with an educational curriculum. We have to decide among ourselves what we're going to teach our children and on what schedule we're going to teach that. What books are we going to require them to read? All of that is part of the educational curriculum.

➤ And we have to decide how the family is going to be managed. How it's going to organize itself, and who's going to lead the family.

➤ We obviously have to decide where the family lives. What part of the world do we start our family in? What kind of dwelling do we choose? Do we build a dwelling from scratch? Do we buy an existing dwelling? Where should it be located? Should it be in the city? Should it be in the country? That all has to be negotiated.

➤ And we have to negotiate family taxes. We have to figure out how we're going to fund this thing, and if we're going to assess taxes from family members, how much should the tax rate be? When will they be paying their taxes? How will these taxes be enforced? That all has to be worked out.

➤ And in the happy situation where you producing more taxes than you have expenses, how are we going to spend our additional funds? How are we going to do this?

➤ And when are we going to divide the family? When should we take our family and divide it into two families? That has to be decided.

So these are all the features that I can think of right now regarding the post-nuclear family. I'm sure I will come up with more, but for now I hope you enjoyed this dramatic reading of my web page. If you want to see if I've come up with any new items, you can look at the webpage itself: demographicdoom.com/postnuclear

———

Written, recorded and edited by Glenn Campbell. For annotations, links and corrections, see the description on the video version of this podcast. You can also leave comments there. See here for all my podcast scripts on this blog.

{This script backed up to Email on: 2/10/21}

{Visual version of this script backed up to Twitter on: 2/10/21}

{Above reconciled with actual broadcast: No}

The Failure of Government Birth Incentives ⸻ A Tweet Essay by Glenn Campbell

2021-01-25T08:07:00.009-08:00

Below is an unformatted transcript of my Tweet Essay on "Failure of Incentives", based on this Original Tweet Thread (#de_incentives). Also see my Master Index of Tweet Essays.

Go to the original thread to use links.

⦕ Failure of Incentives ⦖ #de_incentives

👉My claim: Economic incentives will have little effect on low birth rates. You can't bribe people into having more babies.

👶📉 + 💰 = 👶📉

Explored in a #dd_TweetEssay 🧵⇩

🕺🏻 #dd_incentives #dd_BabyBust #dd_d #dd_e

➤ This 🧵 was prompted by an article in an official 🇨🇳#dd_cn news source. A professor laments the Chinese demographic crisis and offers the usual platitudes. Article

His suggestion: Maybe the birth crisis can be "solved" with tax breaks for parents.

Um, no. 🤦

➤ Government #dd_incentives for baby-making can take the form of—

① Tax breaks

② Direct cash payments ("baby bonus")

③ Subsidized daycare and other family-friendly services.

Nearly all such "solutions" require tons of 💰 that most governments don't have.

➤ Incentives don't work because people aren't dumb. Given the huge costs, risks and lost freedom of raising a child, anything the government can offer is a pittance.

What might work: Paying mothers a full salary for childrearing. But no government can afford that.

➤ Anyone who WAS swayed by a financial incentive might not be an appropriate parent.

e.g. 🇷🇺#dd_RU offers a $8K bonus for a 2nd child. What is to prevent parents doing it for the money and neglecting the child thereafter?

➤ Evidence that incentives work is dubious, because there is no control group. There is only cherrypicking coincidences.

e.g. Incentive offered in 2013; birth rates rose in 2014

There's no proof one caused the other.

If rates fell in 2014, the government would have kept quiet.

➤ Couples who were ALREADY planning to have a second 👶 are happy to take the government's money, but there is little evidence that the incentive actually changed anyone's mind.

➤ Here is my 3-minute video on the subject from 2017: https://youtu.be/TWCP0qGVgKY

"Do government incentives improve birth rates?"

Filmed at Wayside Inn, Sudbury #dd_usMA

🕺🏻 #ddv_incentives #dd_incentives #dd_video

➤ My January 2020 podcast episode on Government Birth Incentives (Episode 26, 25 min) youtu.be/SxDolYxrox8

🕺🏻 #ddpc26 #dd_incentives #dd_d #dd_video #dd_audio #dd_BabyBust 🌎 #BabyBonus #BirthIncentives #BirthIncentive #ChildTaxCredit

https://twitter.com/DemographicDoom/status/1222241006902341632?s=20

➤ My 8-minute video from January 2017: "Can better government services improve birth rates?" https://youtu.be/ZDN-HgGT5YU

Talking about child care, etc.

Man dancing #ddv_childcare #dd_incentives #dd_childcare #dd_f

➤ 🔎 All my past Twitter mention of "Incentives"

Many articles on various government efforts to encourage births. Quite a collection! (Includes some unrelated #dd_perverse incentives.)

Standard hashtag: #dd_incentives 👴#ddoom_incentives

➤ The useless attempts continue...

🇨🇳 Chinese government to create a “good matchmaking environment" 🤦 Article

🕺🏻 #dd_incentives #dd_cn #dd_scmp

➤ 🇨🇳 One thing China could do that other countries can't is abduct women, inseminate them and force them to have babies. The children could be raised in ☭#BabyFarm's.

I wish I could say they would never do a thing like that, but their track record suggests they are capable.

➤ Short of forced childbearing, any incentive program is likely to fail in China like it has failed everywhere else.

➤ 🇨🇳👶🏭 #BabyFactories are real in China, but they are criminal enterprises producing babies for adoption. No indication yet of state sponsorship. Daily Mail Article

🕺🏻 #dd_babyfarm #dd_adoption #dd_dailymail #dd_cn #dd_d 🌎 #BabyFarm #BabyFactory

{Formatting completed:
{This blog post referenced in Tweet essay: 1/25/21}
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{This blog post visual backup to Twitter: 1/25/21}

Video Index for Demographic Doom

2021-01-25T06:03:00.003-08:00

Below is an ongoing index of all my (non-podcast) YouTube videos in the Demographic Doom project, latest first. A #Hashtag indicates a hashtag on Twitter. A j.mp references means there's a short link for this video.

2019

03-03 Do government incentives improve birth rates? 3m
⸻ j.mp/ddv_incentives #ddv_incentives (filmed January 2017)
03-03 Can better government services, like free daycare, improve birth rates? 8m
⸻ j.mp/ddv_childcare #ddv_childcare (filmed January 2017)
X

Can other people use my "#dd_" hashtags?

2021-01-24T14:03:00.004-08:00

Can other people use my special "#dd_" hashtags? I have no strong feelings about this right now, but I have created a this blog entry in case I do have any strong feelings later.

No one can "own" a hashtag on Twitter, so I can't tell anyone to not use the hashtags I invented. It sounds like a good idea in principle: other people can add their own references to the database so that is remains alive even without me. I would only ask that you use my hashtags according to the rules I have demonstrated. (You'll have to devine most of the rules because I can never put them all into words.)

What is to prevent a Troll👺 from trying to corrupt my system with spurrious hashtags? Nothing really, but this troll would have boundless energy and care an awful lot about what I am doing. If nothing else, I can overwhelm him with sheer volume.

If all else fails, a user can restrict their hashtag search to just my Twitter accounts. To search only for the hashtags I've used, insert this string in the Twitter search box along with your desired hashtag (#dd_sample below).

(from:demographicdoom OR from:baddalailama OR from:bdlnotes) #dd_sample

Glenn Campbell
24 January 2021

Urban Planning: Is It Dead? 💀 ⸻ A Tweet Essay by Glenn Campbell

2021-01-23T05:56:00.009-08:00

Below is a formatted transcript of my Tweet Essay on Asset Valuation, based on this Original Tweet Thread (#de_urban). Also see my Master Index of Tweet Essays.

⦕ 𝓤𝓻𝓫𝓪𝓷 𝓟𝓵𝓪𝓷𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰 ⦖ — Is it dead? #de_urban

Prompted by @JuliaGalef, I listened to Ep4 of 🎙"Order Without Design" #OWD_04 by @DevonZuegel, interviewing an #dd_Urban Planning super-couple, Marie-Agnes & #AlainBertaud

🔊#4: Episode 4 Podcast and Transcript

My 🤔💭 in 🧵⇩

➤ 🇪🇬 Cairo traffic is 𝖎𝖓𝖘𝖆𝖓𝖊!😱 #dd_eg

Cairo has 2 million cars and 𝙣𝙤 [🔴🟡🟢]s! (At least I saw none.) At intersections 🚗🚛 just push in and sort themselves out.

I will 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 return to 🇪🇬. Not just traffic but the general sense of lawlessness & chaos. 👉🔊#kcpc04

➤ 🇫🇷 It sounds like Paris🗼 will soon be suffering the #dd_Exodus disease, like NYC, SFO & Chicago.

Liberated from their offices by the 🦠, many Parisians may flee the high costs of 🗼 for the gentle life of the provinces🍷🍇🧀, leaving 🗼 in dire economic straits. #dd_fr

➤ 🇫🇷 We'll always have Paris... or will we?

If enough people leave, it may start a #dd_DoomLoop of urban decline. Remember the 🗼 riots of Dec. 2019? They could be back if economics get more out of whack.

🕺🏻 #dd_unrest #dd_fr #dd_exodus

➤ 🤔 The Golden Age of #UrbanPlanning may be past.

#dd_Urban planning happens mainly when cities are growing, not shrinking. Some are still growing but the ⭐s are fading (NYC, SFO, London...)

You can't (rationally) redevelop a waterfront if there are no new tenants to move in...

➤ 🇺🇸 E.g.—This project strikes me as unlikely to succeed: Morton Salt☂️ in Chicago. #dd_usIL

Chicago is shrinking & primed for #dd_bankrupt'cy. Office space is already distressed.

#dd_MyPrediction: Failure. Either failure to fund🚀 or failure to rent.

Chicago Tribune Tweet

➤ 💀 What passes for #UrbanPlanning in a dying city is often desperate and expensive taxpayer-funded redevelopment projects intended to reverse the #dd_Exodus. The blind faith is "Build it and they will come," but no one has a clue if they will, and they probably won't.

➤Case in point: Dying Gary, Indiana 💀 built a gleaming convention center to try to revitalize its downtown. Didn't work, and it's been a burden to the city ever since. #dd_usIN

The "Bargaining" stage of the #FiveStagesOfGrief can be very expensive.

Chicago Tribune Article

➤ 🇯🇵 The only realistic #UrbanPlanning for most #CitiesOfTheFuture🚀 is orderly downsizing.

...Like the Mayor of graying & shrinking #Toyama, Japan—mentioned in the 🎙—who wants to shut down the expensive suburbs and move the 👴👵 to the center city. That makes sense.

➤ 📉 Demographic trends:

⸻ 👶📉

⸻ 👴👵📈

⸻ Young people fleeing provinces for city

⸻ Lucrative taxpayers fleeing headline cities for smaller, cheaper ones

Losers: headline cities, small towns, rural areas

No so losers: mid-size cities

➤ 🏠🏠 Suburbs are in a weird place. They're still desirable places to live, but they are infrastructure 🔥𝖍𝖊𝖑𝖑🔥 because there is so much space between buildings. Cost to maintain aging roads/sewers/etc is huge.

You can see 🇯🇵Toyama mayor's position.

Link to Ponzi Scheme Thread

{Formatting complete: 1/23/21}
{This blog post referenced in Tweet essay: 1/23/21}
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Ponzi Schemes Of The Biden Era 😎⁴⁶ ⸻ A Tweet Essay

2021-01-22T05:45:00.017-08:00

Below is a reformatted version of my Tweet Essay started on the morning of Joe Biden's 😎⁴⁶ Inauguaration (20 January 2021). Begun before dawn in Key West and continued as Biden was sworn in. See Index of All My Tweet Essays

Red ➤ indicates later tweet inserts out of its original order.

➤ ⦕ 𝓟𝓸𝓷𝔃𝓲 𝓢𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓶𝓮𝓼 ⦖ at the time of the Biden Inauguration - #de_ponzi

🏆My new #dd_TweetEssay listing the 😱 economic crises #dd_Biden 😎⁴⁶ is facing.

➤ 📆 Today we’ll get a normal President, and soon—we hope—a normal post-pandemic world…

And then we’ll find that “normal” isn’t normal anymore. No economy, market or monetary system is sustainable. All the Ponzi schemes will start collapsing, and the bills will be coming due.🧵⇩

➤ 😎 This is a terrible time to be a responsible president. There are no “solutions” to anything, only costly no-win mechanisms to delay the inevitable. 🙁

➤ 🌎 The world is now an interlocking system of #Ponzi schemes: stocks, gov't debt, etc.

A #PonziScheme ▲ is a false investment where early investors are paid off by later ones. All these schemes collapse eventually—but when?

In this 🧵 I will try to inventory some of them...

➤ 🔊 In my latest podcast #DDpc52, I discuss the general mechanism of "overpromises", or selling more chickens than you produce 🐓 http://youtu.be/RiO0MadMlo0

If you sell more future 🐓s than you can deliver, eventually someone gets stiffed, and in this case "someone"="everyone". ✂️↓

▲ The Ponzi schemes and overpromises range far and wide in the current economy.

In fact, it's hard to find any corner of the economy that 𝙞𝙨𝙣'𝙩 infected by a ▲ scheme. They're interrelated and one often 🩸s into another.

Here are the main ▲s I've identified. 🧵⇩

▲№1⸻Stocks

A stock is the promise of a 🍕 of the future profits of a company. As of now, US markets are at ALL-TIME HIGHS despite a 🦠 that has devastated the real economy. Pure🦇💩🤪!

Argue about "why" all you want. US stocks are in a massive 🎈 and have to 💣💥 eventually.

▲№1.1⸻Stocks⸻Exhibit "A"

Can making money be as easy as this couple suggests? 📺⇩

Just buy low sell high. Reminds me of the advice every shoeshine boy had in 1929. Get in now or you're gonna miss out! 🎉🥳💃

🤦 Source: https://tiktok.com/@chadandjenny?lang=en

➤ Re ▲№1

🎈 One way to judge the relative #dd_Bubble of #dd_Stocks is #MarketCapToGDP. Today it’s a massive 190%. If stocks were overpriced when 🤡⁴⁵ took office, they are 50% more overpriced now.

🕺🏻 #dd_sven #dd_e 🌎 #MktCapToGDP

▲№2⸻US Government Debt

In 2020, 2021 & maybe beyond, the US Gov't is spending ~2x what it collects in taxes. Even in pre-🦠 "good times" of 2019, it was 💰📤 >25% more than 💰📥. The rest is borrowed and can never, ever, EVER be repaid or even paid down. It only GROWS. 👹

▲№2.1

The US Gov't can 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 again balance its budget because—

① Demographics: Too many costly 👴👵. Not enough active 👷👨‍🍳🧑‍🚒🧑‍🏭 paying taxes. Few 👶s in pipeline.

② Politics: Balancing the budget would mean cuts to "essential" programs that voters wouldn't accept.

▲№2.2

The budget was balanced 1998-2001 only because the #BabyBoomers were at the peak of their earning power. Now they're 👴👵🦽 and draining gov't resources.

The happy #DemographicDividend of many taxpaying 👷️👨‍🍳🧑‍🚒🧑‍🏭 and few taxdraining 👴👵 will never again be repeated.

▲№2.3

Technically, the US Gov't can never "default" on its debt because it can print more 💵s, but that's not a real solution. It only screws up the rest of the economy—and the gov't itself—in ways we're only beginning to understand.

🤔Inflation? Yes, but it's a twisted road.

▲№2.4

Bottom Line ധ____

If you buy a 10-year Gov't bond today (at ~1%) it won't be worth what you think it will upon maturity. Either through inflation or default, this paper will not return full value. Once the market assimilates this, all hell will break loose.

▲№2.5

All it would take to bring down the government would be a modest rise in bond rates to their historical norm of 5%. The gov't couldn't pay even the interest costs.

The #FederalReserve avoids this by holding rates low and printing new money to buy bonds—which leads to...

▲№3⸻Currency Bubble

In any 🍌 republic, printing as much 💵s as the Fed has would lead to rampant consumer inflation. The fact that it hasn't so far should not be reassuring.

Something will go bad. It has to. No government can print new money indefinitely to pay its bills.

▲№3.1

I'm not gonna go down the 🐇🕳️ of #MMT. That's 🤪-talk.

If unlimited 💵 printing were possible, you have to ask, "Why pay taxes at all?"

⚙️⚡ There is 𝗻𝗼 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆. Every #PerpetualMotionMachine has its fatal flaw, and it will be known soon enough.

▲№4⸻Residential Real Estate

As of this writing, commercial real estate is taking a bath but 🏠s, like stocks, are flying high.

Commercial 📉 reason: 🏠-bound workers during 🦠 don't need offices.

Residential 📈 reason: 🤷

Won't go on forever. Something has to break.

➤ Re: ▲№4

Chart shows 🤪 surge in 🏠 prices since mid-2020.

🕺🏻 #dd_realestate #dd_graph #dd_CrashLunacy

▲№5⸻Infrastructure Bomb

Build it and they will come⸺

and come

and come,

until whatever you built wears out and needs to be repaired.

Lots of those projects are coming due, and if the work isn't done soon, stuff will start falling down. 🌉s collapse. 🛣️s turn to rubble.

▲№5.1

Infrastructure is easy to skimp on because it can always be put off. Roads only 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 deteriorate until something really bad happens.

Local gov'ts don't have the 💰 for repairs, so the Feds must step in, using—you guessed it—borrowed money. (See ▲№2)

▲№5.2

The single-family suburbs are a special kind of infrastructure 🔥𝖍𝖊𝖑𝖑🔥 because their streets and sewer lines are long relative to tax revenues.

New subdivisions <20 years old are all gravy. Older ones—like 👴👵—are a net drain on local government resources.

▲№6⸻Urban Flight

Many workers who have been freed of a fixed office by the 🦠 are fleeing Big💰 cities like NYC, LA, SFO, Chicago for lower cost ones, leaving them in dire straits.

Local gov'ts can't print 💵 like the Fed, while raising taxes just ⇧s the 🛫. No way out!

▲№6.1

Premiere cities are facing a #dd_DoomLoop: The more people move out, the worse life gets, encouraging more to flee. (This may not 🔲 with ▲№4 yet, but it will.)

These cities have huge debts, which will become unpayable as tax base shrinks. They'll need Fed bailouts...

▲№6.2

…with borrowed money, of course, and the urban decline will be chronic.

Even if the 🦠😷 ends tomorrow, the damage is done. Freed now to "phone it in", few knowledge workers need a Manhattan apartment anymore🏙️

Or a California pad🏖️ Who needs it? You can always visit.

▲№7⸻Wealth Inequality

More a ⏳💣 than a ▲ scheme. In the computer era, efficiencies of scale have made the rich richer and poor poorer.

e.g. Once there were 1000s of inefficient but profitable 🚖co's. Now there's hyperefficient Uber/Lyft. Only execs make money. ...

▲№7.1

The 🦠 has widened the wealth gap. 1000s of small businesses have been wiped out while many big ones have thrived. Jobs are still available from the big guys, but they are mostly low-paying "fulfillment" positions—like Uber/Lyft drivers, fast food, etc—with few benefits.

▲№7.2

As of now, jobs are available everywhere in USA! I see it as a traveler. 𝙀𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮 fast food restaurant, everywhere in 🇺🇸, has Help Wanted signs—but these are unhappy jobs to those who have built their lives on a higher wage. A whole nation can't live like this. 🍔🤮

▲№7.3

Unhappy workers are bad for society.

They get 🤬.

They cause unrest.

They vote for populist charlatans.

Perilous to democracy is a populace whose personal lives are consistently getting worse.

Workers are another form of infrastructure we're not adequately maintaining.

➤ Also see my related Tweet Essay:

⦕ The Big One ⦖

on the coming economic collapse.🧵⇩

Master Index of Tweet Essays: http://philosophy.baddalailama.com/2021/01/tweetessays.html

{This post backed up to email: 1/22/21}

{This post blacked up to Twitter as image: 1/22/21}

A Parable of Asset Values 🚛🍎 ⸻ A Tweet Essay

2021-01-21T13:04:00.004-08:00

Below is a formatted transcript of my Tweet Essay on Asset Valuation. Based on this Original Tweet Thread. Also see my Master Index of Tweet Essays

⦕ 🚛🍎= A Parable of Asset Values ⦖

If you've got a 🚛 of 🍎s and you sell one to a 🚶 for $1, it doesn't imply you can sell the whole 🚛 for $1 each. Every sale is unique and limited. It depends on the market at the time and may not predict the price when you come to sell.

➤ Investors make this mistake all the time. They look in the 📰 to see the latest sale price of whatever asset they hold and treat it as "money in the bank" when it's not.

Today's prices reflect a small volume of sales and the mindset of the handful people doing the deal.

➤ For your 🚛 of 🍎s, a lot of things can happen before you sell—

① Your🍎s can go 🤮
② 🍎s can 📈 due to short supply
③ 🍎s can 📉 due to surplus
④ You selling all your 🍎s at once can flood the market, 📉 the price.
⑤ People lose their taste for 🍎s
⑥ A better 🍎 comes along

➤ You selling one 🍎 to one 🚶 for one 💵 suggests that there may be a demand for your product, but it doesn't prove the value of your whole 🚛load.

The only thing that proves the value of your whole 🚛 is actually selling it.

➤ 🤦Common mistake:

Day1: You sell an 🍎 for $1
Day2: You sell an 🍎 for $2
Day3: You sell an 🍎 for $3
Day4: You hoard your 🍎s, waiting for $4 📈
Day5: No sales
Day6: No sales
Day7: Your 🍎s go bad

👩‍🎓 Lesson: Most "trends" are a lie. Just like in 🎲🎰

➤ I might buy the whole 🚛 of 🍎s from you, but certainly not at $1 each, even if recent verified sales were $1. That's because I am considering all the risks above. I am expecting a "risk discount" (or #RiskPremium) to compensate me for my gamble. Otherwise, you can keep them 🍎s.

➤ 🤦 Another mistake:

Elon #dd_Musk is said to be the "richest man in the world" right now, "worth" ~$185 trillion, but most of his "wealth" is $TSLA stock, which is—um—a bit speculative.🤪 In 1 year it rose ~8x with little change in business fundamentals. Forbes Article on Musk's Wealth

➤ It's a long road from #dd_Musk being wealthy "on paper" and wealthy in cash he can do something with. In fact, he acknowledges being #CashPoor. He supports his lifestyle by borrowing against his $TSLA stock—which sounds a little scammy and bubblicious. What if $TSLA tanks? 😱

➤ Who determines that $TSLA is worth 8x what it was a year ago? Investors who trade it. This is limited to people who FERVENTLY BELIEVE IN $TSLA 👍. Those who DON'T BELIEVE 👎 don't trade it. IOW: Only the True Believers are setting the price of $TSLA. ...

➤ Trading by True Believers can be sustained for a while, especially if volumes are small, but ultimately every business must be proven by PROFITS, which are currently scarce at $TSLA.

To prove its price, not only must $TSLA sell it's 🚛 of 🍎s, but each must be golden.💰💰💰

➤ Gentle reminder: I'm sure #CharlesPonzi and #BernieMadoff would have been considered among the "richest in the world" at the peak of their scams.

Just sayin'.

{This blog entry added to Tweet essay: 1/21/21}

{This blog entry backed up to email: 1/21/21}

{This blog entry visual backup to Twitter:

52. A World Without Money: An Allegory For The Coming Collapse ⸺ Demographic Doom Podcast Script

2021-01-17T13:33:00.012-08:00

This is the script for my Demographic Doom podcast episode #52 recorded in Key West on 18 January 2021 and released on 19 January 2021. It may differ slightly from the final broadcast. This episode is available on major podcast platforms like iTunes and Google Podcasts. The audio master for this episode is found at Podbean and a video version is on YouTube (below). See the description on the YouTube version for extensive annotations, links and corrections. You can also comment on this episode there. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography or the study of human populations. I'm trying to view humanity from a distance like aliens would see us from space.

In this episode, I want to take another stab at explaining the messed up macroeconomics of the world in the simplest possible terms. I've tried to do it before on other episodes, but it's so important that I'm going to try it again from a different angle.

This time around, I want you to imagine a world without any money. That's my rhetorical device of the day. If we lived in a world without hard currency, like dollars or yen, would the economy be as screwed up as it is today, and the answer is, Yes, it could be, because there are other things that stand in for money, and they can become just as distorted as money can.

Imagining a world without money shouldn't be too hard, because humanity has lived most of its existence without it. In a medieval village, for exampl, most people might not have had access to currency, so what did they do? They bartered, of course. Barter is the only truly honest monetary system. If one farmer has an excess of chickens and another an excess of beets, they can trade with each other and both parties win, at least gaining a more balanced diet.

You can barter anything for anything, like goods for services. For example, you can work in the fields for a farmer, and he might pay you one chicken for each day of your labor. If you don't happen to need a chicken right now, you can trade it to some other villager for something you do need. If you're a blacksmith, you take raw metal and add value to it by turning it into a useful tool, which you can then sell for chickens or beets. Whether you grow a vegetable, raise an animal or form a raw material into a tool, you are creating value that that can be traded for other things.

I call this an honest monetary system because you always know the value of things, and the objects you are bartering are right in front of you and can't easily be faked. The only problem, of course, is that trading chickens and beets and tools can get really awkward, given all the merchandise you got to carry around with you. It would be much easier if you could trade your chickens and beets for something more compact, like little disks of various kinds of metal. Then you wouldn't have to carry around all those chickens.

And that's how money was born. Initially, it still would have been an honest system, because the disks of metal would have had value in themselves. In the days before mass production, copper and iron would have been mined and smelted by hand and would have been quite valuable even as a small disk. Those disks of metal in your pocket could be melted down to make nails or hinges. Even when being used for trade, the metal itself was worth what it was being traded for. It was just more convenient than the chickens or beets.

This isn't really "money" yet, at least not as we now know it, because those disks being traded were intrinsically worth something. There is a long history of how metal disks inherently worth their face value turned into paper bills and computer entries worth nothing at all, but we're going to skip that history in this episode. We are assuming, for the sake of argument, that money was never invented.

So if you have a civilized society and no money, how do you trade with others—that is, without carrying around a lot of chickens. A chicken has intrinsic value, in that you can eat it, but it's hard to to use as a medium of exchange, at least in its physical form. You can't stick chickens in your pocket, and they're a pain to maintain. So how do you remedy this problem? How do you make a chicken more portable.

Well, it's pretty easy. Let's say you know you're going to need to a chicken in the future, say for a chicken soup party you're having a month from now, but you don't want to house and feed the chicken for a month. You just want to assure a future supply of chicken, so you pay a bushel of beets to the chicken farmer, and the farmer gives you a piece of paper promising to give the bearer of that paper a chicken one month from now,

So what can you do with that piece of paper? Well, you could cash it in a month from now for a physical chicken, or you can trade it to someone else for something else you might need right now, like a sword. The sword maker can then turn the paper for a chicken.

So you don't really need a government issuing a currency, which is the standard definition of "money". Any merchant or product manufacturer can issue a promise, a sort of de-facto currency that can be traded just like it was money. Merchants used to do this all the time in the 20th Century: issuing various coupons or gift certificates that consumers could trade among themselves and eventually redeem for stuff. For example, McDonald's only had gift certificates that could be redeemed for hamburgers, which kids can trade with other kids to get other things they wanted.

Even there is no money in the world, in the traditional sense, you can still have a vibrant economy just dealing in these paper promises of things. Here's a piece of paper; it can be redeemed for one chicken. Once you have this coupon in your hands, you can trade it like a dollar bill for the things you really want. I call this a "representative economy", which is when you trade symbolic tokens that represent other things. You don't need government money because the token is the money, with no government involved.

An this is essentially how most of our present economy works. What financial markets do is not trade things, per se; they trade the promises of things. That's what a stock is. It's a piece of paper that says you own a certain share of the future profits of a company. It used to be that you'd physically own a piece of paper, a stock certificate, that you kept in a safe and that proved your ownership. Nowadays, we've dispensed with the paper itself, but the same ownership system still holds. If you own a company's stock, you're holding a promise of future profits—or future chicken—that's eventually going to come your way.

Money is just an intermediate medium to facilitate these transactions. Most investors don't hold onto their money for very long. Instead they turn it into promises for things. They can buy a stock, which is a promise of future profits, or they can buy commercial real estate, which also promises future profit. A bond or other debt instrument is a promise that someone will pay you its face value at a certain future date. Even if you deposit your money in a bank, you are exchanging cash for the promise that the bank will eventually pay you back.

All this representative trade in the promises of things doesn't need a currency. A currency is certainly convenient but not essential. I can trade chicken futures for beet futures without any intermediate currency involved. If currency didn't exist, we could just hand pieces of paper to each other. And this is what would probably happen if the US dollar or other major currencies broke down. Someone would set up an online clearinghouse where promised of chickens could be traded for promised of beets or anything else you wanted. Anyone could create a promise of something, like future chickens, and trade it for a promise of something else. Merchants would be expected to actually deliver on their promises, or they'd be booted off the platform. In fact, this could very well be where things are headed if currencies collapse.

But before we get to that stage, we need to think about how this system could possibly go bad. What could be wrong with trading the promises of things. The problem is actually quite simple. It had happens again and again throughout human history, wherever a market has sprung up for promises. The inherent risk of any promise-based system is that people promise more than they can deliver.

Think of the chicken farmer, issuing promises of future chicken. If he finds himself in a financial bind and needs resources right away, it is going to be very tempting to him to issue more promises than he has chickens. At the least, he may use the most optimistic estimate when predicting his future chicken production, which assumes that everything goes right in the chicken business. At worst, he can just make up imaginary chickens that he know he can't deliver, maybe because he hopes to flee the country or come up with another plan before the promises come due.

Wherever a system of promises exists, overpromising is bound to creep in, because the temptations are huge. This is especially true when there are big financial pressures in the present and the promises don't have to be fulfilled for years. And that's exactly the problem with the economy today. There are far more paper promises in the world than can possibly be fulfilled.

In other words, in a variety of realms, there are far more chicken futures in the world than there are chickens, and sooner or later, the people holding those futures will realize the chickens can't be delivered, and the market for these futures is going to crash. And this is going to happen all over the economy, because everywhere you look, there are too many promises.

This overpromising is obvious in the stock market which, at the time of this episode, is flying higher than ever before in spite of the pandemic. Those stocks are a promise of future profit that, in most cases, will never justify the current price. It is not necessarily true that anyone has lied. Companies are required by law to be honest about their profits. It's just that naïve investors have bid up the prices too high.

There are all manner of other debts and assets in the world that can't possibly fulfill their promise, but the one example I keep coming back to is government debt. To talk about government debt, I should probably throw in some currency, because everything ultimately gets valued in terms of dollars or euros or yen. To avoid complicating things, let's just assume there's no inflation. A dollar will always be worth a dollar and will always buy you, I don't know, a hamburger or something.

Any debt, be it a consumer loan or a government bond, is a promise to pay dollars in the future. And these paper promises are a sort of currency that can be traded between investors as though they were cash. Technically, only the Federal Reserve can issue currency, but in practice, the US Government does it whenever it issues a bond. The bond is traded among investors as though it were cash. When an investor buys a 10-year bond at something around 1%, they are buying into the belief that 10 years from now, the government will pay off on that debt and that inflation won't erode its value—both of which are huge assumptions.

The fact is, there's no way the U.S. government can pay off its debts—ever. Even if there's no inflation ever again and interest rates remain close to zero, no paydown is ever possible, because there's no way the government can ever again balance its budget. Things are too far gone. Like the chicken farmer promising more chickens than he has, the government has promised more future value to bond holders than it can possibly generate.

The government's chicken is called "taxes" and in 2020 and probably 2021, the government is spending roughly twice as much as the taxes it is taking in. Think of it as taking in 3 trillion chickens a year but spending 6 or 7 trillion chickens. This isn't just a result of the pandemic. In 2019, in nominally the best of times, the government was borrowing one of every 4 dollars it spent—or one in every four chickens, to use our analogy. So even if we get back to 2019 normalcy, the debt is still impossible to service. The government just can't pull a trillion chickens out of a hat. The best it can do is promise people a trillion chickens they can never deliver

All around the world are people and institutions who hold this debt, who think they have a $10,000 bond that they can redeem for $10,000, but they really hold nothing but paper promises, promises of chicken that can never be delivered. So far, the government has been able to make good on its debt. Every maturing bond has been paid off—so far—but that's only because the Ponzi scheme hasn't collapsed yet. And that's what this is, a Ponzi scheme: earlier investors being paid off by later ones. Like any other Ponzi scheme, there's not viable business plan in the works. There's no plan just to break even, let alone make a profit that can start paying down this debt.

Investors say, "The government can never default because it owns the printing presses and can print as much money as it wants." Well, yeah, but what are we talking about here: chickens or the promises of chickens. The government can always print more promises. What it can't do is print more chickens. The chicken inflow—meaning the actual value coming into the government—is limited to the actual number of chickens collected in taxes, which is limited to the number of chickens the economy actually produces.

I don't know how to count chickens here, but it is basically the core output of the economy that can be taxed, and that remains fairly constant over time. The government has income of about $3 trillion a year no matter how much it promises.

Printing more chicken promises than that $3 trillion encourages just a different kind of default, called inflation. The risk here is, you buy your $10,000 bond now, turn it in and get your $10,000 back, but that $10,000 buys only what $2,000 buys now. Maybe $10,000 only buys you a hamburger.

I take no comfort from the fact that, at the moment, $10,000 still buys 10,000 hamburgers. It will not always be so. The fact that there's little consumer inflation right now doesn't comfort me. You can't just keep printing money forever. Someday, the dam will break and all the inflation will come spewing out.

A representative economy, an economy of paper promises, is a relatively recent thing. It's been supercharged by the computer revolution which has made the trading of promises incredibly fast and easy. Humanity just hasn't had the time to develop the wisdom to manage it. You can't keep the farmers from selling more chicken than they've got, and in the case of government bonds, you've got the government regulating itself with no hope of restraint.

It's just so easy to sell paper promises. That's what every politician in the world is doing right now. Many of them won't even be around with the bills come due, so there's no incentive to balance the books. No one's addressing the debt right now. They're trying to save lives during the pandemic, which is admirable. It's just that those saved lives will be living in a very bleak world.

So what does it mean, in a practical sense, when there are too many promises in the world. It means that the perceived wealth of the world is much greater than the actual wealth.

Think about how someone measures their own wealth. To figure out how wealthy they are, they're going to inventory all their assets—all their stocks, bonds, real estate, gold, etc.—and then they are going to look on the internet to see what the current market value of each of those things are worth. You see that the value of a stock is currently "X" dollars a share, and you look at Zillow, and you see that a house in your neighborhood similar to yours recently sold for "Y" dollars. And you add it all up, and you get a net worth of eleventy-seven million dollars.

That's what you think you're worth, but it's an illusion, because it's only what you'd get if you sold everything today and the value of a dollar remains fixed. What can happen almost overnight is that the bottom falls out of an asset market, so maybe you can get only half of what you expected to get, and you're really only half as wealthy as you thought you were. That's an evaporation of wealth, and it can happen almost in an instant, as soon as people realize, "This promise isn't worth what I thought it was."

And with every oversold promise, they day of reckoning always comes, sooner or later. You don't know when, but it will come. Every Ponzi scheme collapses, and the world is an interlocking system of them right now, starting with the government Ponzi scheme of selling far more bonds than it can ever repay.

In a world without any money, you know the system has collapsed when you take your chicken coupon to the farmer, and he can't redeem it because he's run of chickens. In a modern economy, it might happen in a variety of different ways. A formerly high-flying stock can collapse to zero. Inflation can eat away at the value of an asset, even if the nominal prices doesn't change. Certain unique assets like real estate might not be sellable at all.

The only thing certain when promises collapse is that the holders of those promises—the owners of the stocks, bonds and real estate—will find they've lost all or part of their wealth.

There were just too many chicken promises and not enough chickens to pay them off.

———

{This script backed up to Email on: 1/20/21}

{Visual version of this script backed up to Twitter on: 1/20/21}

{Reconciled with actual: 1/20/21 - after the above}

The Coming "Big One": Economic Collapse and Why It Must Happen ⸺ A Tweet Essay 🧵 by Glenn Campbell

2021-01-16T05:27:00.019-08:00

Below is a reformatted version of my tweet essay called #de_BigOne, starting on 16 Jan 2021, . This long series of tweets is merged into a single document here for ease of reading. The beginning of most tweets is marked by ➤. Text in [brackets] was added after the original tweets.

➤ ꧁ The Big One ꧂ #de_BigOne

The economic “Big One” is coming.

The crash to end all crashes.

The collapse of the modern economic system.

I can’t tell you when it will happen, how it will happen or what it will look like. I can only offer the humble #dd_TweetEssay below. 🧵…

➤ The biggest story on the 🌎 right now is not the 🦠. It is unrestrained money printing by the #dd_Fed and other central banks, partly in response to the 🦠.

➤ The 🦠 has broken the back of any fiscal restraint. The US Government no longer has any hope of balancing its budget or paying its debts—ever! The debts are too large and the shortfall too great.

➤ The debts of the US Government are transferred to the #dd_Fed:

The government issues bonds.

The Fed is obligated to buy those bonds to keep markets from tanking, “printing” money to pay for them.

➤ In effect, the government is funding its operations by printing money—either money created by the Fed or bonds traded by investors as though they were money.

In 2020 and probably 2021, roughly half the government budget is “printed” instead of collected in taxes.

➤ This system can’t work forever.

If it could, it would be a sort or perpetual motion machine providing “free energy” without any energy input.

If the government can print its way out of any crisis, the logical question arises: “Why pay taxes at all?”

➤ Money has no value in itself. It is “representative” of value. It’s an intermediary device instead of directly trading, say, bread for chickens.

You can’t create more 🍞 or 🐓s just by printing more 💵. Instead, you are devaluing the 💵...

Eventually.

➤ The traditional equation is: money printing = inflation. That’s what happens in any 🍌 republic.

Our situation is more complex. We’ll get inflation at the store someday, but in the meantime we are passing through some unexpected intermediate steps, like asset inflation.

➤ The greatest economic absurdity of the Microbe era is that US stock markets have 📈 not 📉 ⸺ reaching ALL TIME HIGHS!

It’s 🤪!

Even an attempted coup on #dd_Jan6 caused markets to rise, not fall. 🤦

This is not normal investor behavior.

➤ For now, stock valuations seem to bear no relation to the profit-generating capacity of the represented companies.

They are speculative assets propped up solely by Fed intervention in the economy.

Stocks rise on bad news because investors assume it means more Fed intervention.

➤ To try to keep the economy afloat, the Fed (and #dd_ECB) has vowed to keep interest rates near 0% for the foreseeable future.

This has the perverse effect of forcing investors out of “safe” investments like bonds and into speculative ones like stocks, inflating asset values.

➤ There is no conspiracy here.

The Fed and ECB aren’t part of some omniscient cabal manipulating the economy in favor of a ruling elite. That’s giving them too much credit.

They are as helpless and incompetent as everyone else.

One rule rules them all: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

➤ Fed 💵-printing is a #dd_Ponzi scheme that WILL fail, but no one knows when or how.

The saying goes: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.“

I call this #KeynesCurse and I have a 🧵 on it.

➤ Like any other Ponzi scheme, the endgames for the economy and government are knowable. What is not knowable is how we get there.

➤ The Endgame🔚 for government bonds is they can’t be redeemed for their full value. Either—

① The government defaults, or

② Inflation erodes their value

Government debt is a true #PonziScheme where early investors are repaid by later ones until 💣💥

➤ The Endgame🔚 for assets like stocks or real estate is that they collapse at least to a value consistent with the realistic future profits of the underlying business. 📉

➤ The Endgame🔚 for currencies 💵💶💷💴 is inflation, even #hyperinflation, as the value of money is rationalized with the growing money supply.

➤ The Endgame🔚 for large governments is either—

① They collapse entirely, or

② They learn to function at a greatly reduced level on the taxes actually collected.

The latter is hard because there’s no political will for the Draconian cuts required.

🎲 I’m betting on ①

➤ If large governments collapse, humanity will persist, just as it did after the Fall of Rome™, but many services we take for granted could be lost.

We can only speculate about what those lost services may be. Aqueducts? 🚰 Roads? 🛣 Public order? 😱

➤ The economic "Big One" is like the coming Big One on the San Andreas Fault. Every year, it builds up tensions. You know it has to snap sooner or later, but you don't know when.

This tweet essay, like others, could resume in the future.

{backed up by email: 1/16/21

{backed up as a giant image on twitter: 1/16/21

Africa & Middle East ⸻ Index of Glenn Campbell's Social Media Resources

2021-01-14T13:02:00.002-08:00

This page is intended to be an index of all my social media resources from Africa and the Middle East, including about 13 countries. This page is an ongoing project that will be built over time.

For all Facebook albums, always check the "Feed View" for hidden posts.

Africa

Tweet Index - #gy_africa
Africa Videos - playlist
Facebook Album: 2017 Africa Visits (see Feed View)
Facebook Note: General Travel Advice for Africa

Morocco

Facebook Albums: Tangier, Marrakech

Kenya

South Africa

Kenya: Nairobi

Ethiopia: Addis Ababa

🔊 KC5. The Tyranny of Ideology: Why Free-Speech Has Its Limits

2021-01-13T05:31:00.006-08:00

Below is a Script for my Kilroy Cafe Podcast, Episode #5, released on 13 Jan 2021. It may differ slightly from the final broadcast.

This episode is available on major podcast platforms, including Podbean and a video version on YouTube. See the description on the YouTube version for extensive annotations, links and corrections. You can also comment on this episode there.

I'm Glenn Campbell, and my Tweet of the Day is this:

There is no ideology that won't eventually lead to tyranny.

This tweet that I just posted was inspired by events of recent days. This is January 13, 2021. On January 6, a week ago, President Donald Trump incited a riot at the US Capitol. You know about it. It's in all the history books.

In the ensuing days, Trump, with only a few days left in his term, was banned from Twitter and virtually all other mainstream social media—along with many of the groups that were touting his claims. I think even PornHub banned him, theatrically at least. This has raised concerns among free speech advocates that this sets a dangerous precedent. You can't ban speech just because it is distasteful. All opinions deserve a platform.

And my position is, No, not all positions deserve a platform. Everyone has the right to free speech but not the right to be heard or broadcast. If Trump had been banned back in 2015, the country might have avoided the four disastrous years of his reign.

But I can also see the free-speech position. Once you start censoring people, where do you stop? When a government or a giant social media company censors information in the name of "safety", there's a huge potential for abuse.

For example, in another news story today, the government of Uganda has blocked all social media in the run-up to their elections. I haven't looked into this in detail, but I'm pretty sure the government has some kind of self-serving motive for this, and I'm also pretty sure that they're using Trump's Twitter ban to bolster their position. The free-speech advocates will say, "You see, this precedent is already having a chilling effect around the world," but I suspect that the Uganda government was already prepared to censor social media. Trump's Twitter ban just gave them a new excuse.

My higher-level take on this is that there's no ideology that won't eventually lead you into trouble, be it free speech or free markets or globalization or any other theory that people get hooked into. There's always a point where you've gone too far and you have to pull back.

There has to be a good term for this, and I don't really have a good one yet. It's related to the Cobra Effect: No matter what your theoretical framework is, there's a good chance it is going to go bad when it's put into practice, because the real world is complex and can easily subvert you intentions.

In the case of free speech, it works pretty well among intelligent people, who should be able to evaluate ideas on their own and choose the one that works best for their. They naturally want an open marketplace of ideas, with none of them excluded.

But then you have the non-intelligent people who believe everything they're told. Instead of evaluating information on its own merits, they evaluate the person providing the information. If the person is perceived as part of their tribe, they're going to believe everything that comes out of that person's mouth. That's why some people believe Trump no matter what he says. He's perceived as part of their tribe.

And you can see the evolutionary value in this. early humans survived because they pulled together with tribe. They defended their tribal leader, whether he was right or wrong, and this may have given you an advantage in passing on your own genes to the next generation.

So any modern society has to accommodate not only for the intelligent people who can evaluate information and the idiots who can't, and that's why free speech can never be absolute. At a certain point, those who control social media have to say, "That's enough. You can't say that here."

Frankly, I think it should have been done long ago, back in 2015, because we came perilously close to the abyss this time. Joe Biden won the 2020 election by only a very thin margin, and if only a few votes had changed, our country would have been in a terrible place.

Free speech is important but its not worth losing your life or country for.

———

{This post backed up to email: 1/16/21