Petrarchive – Demoraphic decline is subtly haunting

This is something I think a lot about too.

If you use attention span as an analogy, like fiscal resources but instead cultural, then as time goes on an increasing amount of it will be taken up entirely by old people.

Places people could live in are replaced by care-homes, businesses in town centres that should cater to all sorts are instead just used for old person knick-knacks, what could be a modern restaurant scene is just left as a choice between a mediocre old persons cafe chain (imagine olive garden but for coffee drinking euroboomers*) or mcdonalds, and all cultural offerings are replaced with bingo night.

I live in a town that can basically be described as "two extremely large carehomes and the shops around it" so I feel it a lot, and you're right, in 10-20 years all that will be left is an unattractive town with nothing to offer anyone because it'll have been slowly consumed by a huge but ever shrinking demographic.

No one will want to move in because there's nothing there, nothing will be there because no one will move in. Is there anything planned around this? No, so we just get to sit back and watch chunks of society disappear as people literally or socially (via becoming shut-in pensioners with no mobility) "die off" and stop partaking in it.



*(regarding those cafe chains, please don't imagine some quaint italian old town and old men in linen suits watching the world go by, anyone American believing the grass is greener on the other side, i assure you german/dutch/polish post-war suburbs are as dull, fake, and car oriented as anywhere in oklahoma, and all parts of europe suffer from this age problem equally)

There's only so much carrying capacity. It was going to happen eventually. It is interesting to think of it geographically though. Densification is accelerating a ton, I bet.

So, are you saying we should start killing boomers and (((migrants)))?

>>7372
>what could be a modern restaurant scene is just left as a choice between a mediocre old persons cafe chain (imagine olive garden but for coffee drinking euroboomers*) or mcdonalds, and all cultural offerings are replaced with bingo night.
What you imagine old people to like and consume is actually what poor people like and consume.

>>7376
Well it may be that old people and poor people are synonymous in mein country, what with how unattuned to investing they were only left with small state pensions and a 1960s flat (that they've rented forever with no equity) after retirement

I think the more interesting thing about demographic collapse is how it implicates a lot of programs that lefties care about -- especially universal health care programs.

Take this however you want, but I think that the reason that all the technocrats across the developed world have thrown in entirely with immigration is because of a specific case of "importing cheap labor." The specific problem they're attending to is related to what are known as "Baumol's cost disease."

Basically, we can distinguish between the wages that are paid to people with few high-paying options and the wages paid to people with lots of high-paying options. The first group gets paid shit and the second group gets paid a lot. There's lots of things that contribute to people being sorted toward one extreme or the other. People with fragmented social networks, with poor educational history, etc. get sorted toward the "no options" end of the spectrum, and people with vibrant social networks and good educational history get sorted toward the "lots of options" end of the spectrum. In general, the stuff that gives people lots of options is normally considered good policy AKA "human capital development." In this model, people get education, good-paying jobs with good working conditions, and personal mobility. The only problem is that it becomes much more costly to run certain types of businesses in an economy where everyone attains really high levels of development.

The traditional response to this problem is to mechanize and automate things that used to be produced by human labor. Automate the shit-work and leave the high-paying stuff to the highly developed humans. This works in lots of fields and for lots of applications. If you look at agriculture in a country like the Netherlands you'll see lots of mechanization, lots of precision, and not very many farmers producing a volume of ag products with a really disproportionate market value because they're really high-quality. Automate the steelworks and let the people with high degrees of education invent robots and do the design work.

Now before I specify what kinds of businesses I mean, it's easy to respond that those types of businesses are essentially exploitative and don't deserve to exist. And I think that's a strong case. But the details are important. Care work and education are two fields profoundly shaped by Baumol's cost disease. And there's not promising evidence that we can mechanize or automate our way out of these. There aren't robots that can reliably wipe buttcracks in the same way that human hands can, and even if there were then people would probably not trust a robot over a nurse.

In much of the developing world, a lot of care work and education is done by people without options -- in many cases, women who are shut out of the rest of the economy. This arrangement provides abundant, cheap care at low standards of reliability. In the developed world, with contemporary standards of quality and reliability for caring professions, a person in such a caring profession -- like a physical therapist, or a psychologist, or a registered nurse -- has options. To get to those positions, a person has to show a strong educational history, and in general that means such a person has a lot of options. You see this same dynamic play out between red states (generally with lower human development) and blue states (higher): daycare is cheaper in South Dakota than it is in Massachussetts. It's not that the capitalists have just chosen to play nice in some states but not others. The difference is because South Dakota has a lot more poor women trapped in a culture that's some degree more misogynistic, and so they get sorted into the "fewer options" end of the pile and paid less.

So when your economy is in the dumps it's cheap to start programs that provide universal access to medicine, education, and other forms of care. It's worth noticing that a lot of the cool social programs of the developed world started when center-left governments were overseeing some version of an economic catastrophe. But when your economy gets rich, the cost of those programs increases as a proportion of the budget because of the labor costs. And that's when center-left governments -- even the same parties -- start cutting those universal programs.

So one way to square the circle here is to keep delivering nice human capital improvements to a native population and import people to do low-paying work in caring professions to keep prices down on universal care programs. This arrangement lets an Obama- or Trudeau-style center-left technocrat keep legacy promises of universal care programs AND keep costs down. This, in turn, prevents a revolt by the billionaires and keeps the center-left in power.

>>7396
>South Dakota has a lot more poor women trapped in a culture that's some degree more misogynistic, and so they get sorted into the "fewer options" end of the pile and paid less
You are being condescending towards the women of South Dakota. Everyone earns less in poorer states. Earning less results from having fewer options, because of IQ or simply choosing to live differently for whatever reason. You have cause and effect confused.

"care work" can be a reasonable choice. Have you met women who nurse olds? Those who care for the richer old folk, and so are well compensated, do not seem unhappy.

It makes sense that when women are not pressured by feminazis into dull office work, they might choose nursing. Are Massachusetts women happy?

>nice human capital improvements
??? examples please. GDP per capita in the West is stagnant outside of America

>import people to do low-paying work in caring professions to keep prices down on universal care programs
This isn't what is happening in Western countries. Importing nurses looks like the Thai and Filipina waves to Japan and Korea. A little of this does reach the West, but the big groups are Hispanics, Indians, Africans. The routes are illegal, refugee, family reunification, Canada-style student visas, diversity visas, and others.

The West also grants permanent residency and citizenship much more liberally than Korea and Japan. Those imported nurses then claim the same care entitlements as natives.

Finally, healthcare is not necessarily cheaper in those countries with liberal immigration policies. You can check this for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita

The Czechs are on average older than Canadians. They have not had a great amount of immigration, unlike the latter. Yet their healthcare costs per capita are less.

This is not the reason for the immigration policies of Western countries.

>>7398

I'm not going to give a point-by-point defense until you articulate a real thesis. Hiding behind "This is not the reason..." is not worth engagement.

>>7402
Making a claim
>all the technocrats across the developed world have thrown in entirely with immigration is because of a specific case of "importing cheap labor."

means the first task is on you to defend it.

That's the rule of argument.

Both are long, technical posts. Putting a new argument for what is the #1 cause of the immigration avalanches landing in the West, will send the thread in another direction from healthcare costs being the reason.

Come out from behind your bad faith and trust in a counter thesis appearing as the arguments are presented

>>7371 (OP)
>right-wingers like to talk about replacement and death of nations and cultures. It's not that it's all bullshit
False, populations are demonstrably getting replaced. What right-wingers usually don't mention in this context is the fertility decline that is a major cause for this, they mostly just mention mass immigration, which is the second major cause. None of this changes the fact that e.g. Germany is getting more and more Muslim, and that the Muslim immigrant population tend to have higher fertility rates than the native populations, so the trend will continue.

>>7411
There's plenty of discussion about fertility rates in conservative publications like the Claremont Review of Books or on numerous Substack blogs.

The Average Joe rightist isn't interested because it requires understanding decimal numbers.

You have to compare like with like.

The Average Joe leftist doesn't care about the history of socialism, that would mean knowing more words than slavery and zionism/fascism.

Yet it's arguably the prestige subject of Jacobin

>>7411
why should people be forced to pop out extra kids if they just want a quaint less populated country