Thanks Keith. I always enjoy your thinking although I often don't agree. The root of the disagreement could be about geography. This summer I took my first trip to Europe ever. I always had an image of Europe as a place consonant with its Art and the impact of its Art on the rest of the world.
Just as the first Americans to go to China with Nixon and to find the sheer stunning numbers of people overwhelming or my experience of moving to NYCity and finding the weight of the buildings, their size and immense number to be beyond my experience, the trip to Europe was different. I was struck by the smallness and local feeling of all of Europe. The low buildings, small transportation systems and of course the great beauty. Yes the Art is there and it is unbelievable in its sheer amounts and scope. There are big airports but basically I was struck by important cities with airports not much bigger than Oklahoma City except Oklahoma City then spreads over 100 miles of prairie from the airport. The airport at Florence was like a mid size American city airport. The road systems run through beautiful countrysides but essentially everything is in miniature. The old Cherokee Nation was the size of the modern state of Oklahoma and Oklahoma is the size of modern France. Germany is the size of two Wisconsins and Britain is....... well..... an island after all is said and done. In the countries where miniature geography houses large mono racial populations and serious modern economies it makes sense that evolution would begin to downsize due to the sheer minimalism of the gene pool. Multi-culturalism is a threat to their personal gene pool and identity. Some of these groups struggle to maintain their identity through inner marriage in the culture but these same cultures maintaining their identity here, suffer from serious health issues as they do elsewhere in the world and the problem is old blood. I suspect that all of the new Muslim immigrants in Europe is a genetic cry for fresh blood just as the American Indian Nations here used to raid their neighbors for wives and children to keep the gene pool, within the clan systems, viable. I know that Europeans who immigrate here often speak of the liberty of anonymity because of the sheer space. I've heard the same from immigrants to Canada. They love the Art and the look of their home culture but when they buy a house there they suffer from a personal kind of claustrophobia and a loss of identity which the crystallize in the word "liberty." REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 3:09 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] The ONLY solution Never before -- in the 200,000 year history of mankind -- have populations decided to go extinct. But that is exactly what might happen in more than a score of advanced countries in Europe. By deciding to spend their incomes on the full standard kit of consumer goods, services and leisure experiences rather than two (increasingly expensive) children per woman, populations will go into steep decline once the present crop of excessively old people dies off. Whether European countries will completely re-stock their numbers in the years to come by continuing to encourage the poor of Asia, Africa and the Middle East to immigrate remains to be seen. For the last 30 or 40 years, this has been the surreptitious policy of senior politicians and civil servants in order to maintain a sufficiently large taxation base. But whether they'll continue to get away with it remains to be seen. Even while indigenous populations are declining, they may also decide to elect extreme right-wing governments or even old-fashioned dictatorships which will finally erect efficient barriers. If this happens, then, at some future stage, European adults might decide to have more children and thus stabilize their populations (albeit at much smaller numbers than today). Stabilization of populations would only occur, however, when the twin trends of ever-increasing automation and ever-increasing growth of specialized skills balance up. That is, when the size of the consumer market matches up with the necessary jobs which provide the market with desirable goods and services, and maintain the basic infrastructure. This is the natural equilibrium of what has occurred during, say, 190,000 years of our existence. During the most recent 10,000 years of our agricultural and industrial eras, this self-balancing act has only been interrupted for brief periods by mass warfare. Sooner or later, the poor of mankind -- such as they might exist -- will begin to reach a European standard of living and go through the same balancing process as we are now starting. Of course, the whole of mankind might be wiped out by an unforeseen asteroid or a killer virus that will have such a long gestation period that it will be undetectable even as it spreads around. But, unlike Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College Cambridge and past President of the Royal Society, who doesn't give us more than a century's future existence, I remain optimistic. I believe we have at least a few centuries yet until we reach the only possible solution. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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