You are a Utilitarian from the top of your head to the souls of your feet. Having grown up in poverty and found the meaning of my life to be in personal development rather than property, I have had ample reason to enjoy my life even though I live in two rooms with six thousand books and hundreds of internet friends. I live six blocks from an amazing Lincoln Center. Have been on of the 2% who can and have made their living performing music in America and I can walk to get anything that I need. I have a four star restaurant downstairs in my building and can occasionally eat dinner there but an exceptional breakfast is almost as inexpensive as the store. I don't see the issue with population being replenished because there are 100,000 people in a ten square block area around me. The upper West Side is bigger Tulsa and my block is more than my hometown population. Being a former member of the Armed Forces I have exceptional government health care although my wife's private health care is junk. I own no automobile. I don't own a house. I don't own a country house. We have a community Stompground in the country where all of us can go when we have the money for transportation. As for the goods and services available to me, you can ask Mike Gurstein. We had lots of fantastic meals of every type of cuisine in the world all with a ten mile radius and Mike has a car. I have the greatest Performing Arts Library within four blocks and one of the great World Libraries are forty blocks away. I have two world class parks within four blocks on either side. One on the beautiful Hudson River and the other Central Park. I am truly wealthy although my cash doesn't say that and according to the Utilitarians I am miserable because I am property poor and property is supposed to give them their great pleasure. Oh me!
As far as I'm concerned, we could do with about half this many people but I hope I will still live in a city where I can go to any culture's restaurant and eat when I wish. Where I can go to enjoy live complex Art and ticky tacky entertainment on every level and from every world culture. I'm an American Indian living in all of the cultures of the world with 18 million people within a hundred mile radius of the city. However, If I worked in a factory. Had to go to church for my entertainment and had buckets of kids, that would be awful. Indian people when faced with that life often opt to take the first boat out of this one in hopes they will choose better next time. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2010 2:14 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] *****SPAM***** The partial answer of the 0.00001% The really fascinating question which even the most intelligent people are in total denial about is: Why is modern life not worth living? Intellectually, this is a ridiculous question. "Of course it is," is the scathing response of most. Genetically, however, it isn't a ridiculous question. Left to themselves, modern parents in "advanced" industrial countries have not been replenishing themselves for several decades. The Total Fertility Rate, far from being a necessary 2 is now fast approaching 1 in all advanced countries -- and could well go below that in the coming years. Without net immigration of uneducated agriculturally-experienced people, the population of every single advanced country is either declining, or will do so in the next generation when the present crop of oldies dies off. Intellectually, the above question may appear to be superfluous. After all, the world is obviously still suffering -- already -- from gross overpopulation to the tune of several nutritionally-deprived, undersized, billions. Agricultural cultures of more than three or four children per pair of parents have still not adjusted to the industrial age. They are now urbanizing rapidly and having smaller families but it will still take another two or three or four generations before stabilization ensues. It is no use saying that -- with better methods of growing grain -- even the present world surplus population could be fed adequately. They can't be. For one thing, there isn't enough freshwater for much more agricultural production. For another, the more prosperous part of the world's population wants -- and will take -- a great deal of those carbohydrates to feed to cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens (and, recently, farmed fish). A protein-eating Westerner needs ten times the agricultural acreage than a mainly vegetarian Third World person needs. Will the people of the advanced world voluntarily adjust themselves to a nutritionally-poor, mainly carbohydrate diet in order to share the whole agricultural crop with the starving billions of the world? Of course not. Genetically we are selfish. Human nature doesn't do this. Charity begins at home and stays very local. International aid is guilty conscience at best and political manipulation at worst. Back to the first question. Only a very small proportion of the world's population can possibly begin to answer it. Let us say -- at a pure guess -- about 0.00001%! These belong to the profession of evolutionary biology. And not all of these good souls -- for career and research-funding reasons -- will go so far as to pose the question publicly. The answer -- or, rather, the partial answer -- is that when the population of a species is in decline it is because it is experiencing overwhelming stress, subtle or ostentatious. The population of a species will decline until the stresses disappear or reach manageable levels. If not, it goes extinct. So the other part of the answer -- which even evolutionary biologists cannot yet be precise about -- is: What are the stresses of living, working and commuting into and within cities and suburbs in which 90% of advanced populations happen to exist? Most of those have consumer-goods wealth far beyond anything that Queen Victoria ever possessed. She was the Empress of a quarter of the earth's land surface and lived only 100 years ago. Besides our fantastic possessions, each of us has 50 times the equivalent of personal services than even Queen Victoria's flunkies -- John Brown and all! -- could supply. A partial part of the partial answer is that, somehow, cities -- and perhaps consumer goods and services as presently experienced -- are not good for us. At least, we probably need to regress to smaller communities in which we've spent 99.9% of our genetic existence. But, apart from that guess, there will be stresses somewhere in our urbanized way of life. And, more than anybody else, evolutionary biologists will one day certainly determine precisely what those crucial stresses are. Until then -- if I were to live long enough -- I would keep my eyes open to see whether any particular part of an advanced country population has, or decides to have, more than two children per family. It could be the Old Amish of America. Or it could be what I call the meta-class -- that generally highly educated minority (including the most successful business people, the best research scientists, etc) who have a great deal of freedom where they live and work. If this sub-species exists, or comes into existence, they will be the survivors. So far, the rest of us are going extinct for reasons as yet unknown. Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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