<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:verdana,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div>I'm not so certain about number 3. It seems to me that a common problem in many developing nations is stagnant or declining population growth. The number of people in an economy is irrelevant as long as the money continues to move from person to person. If population were a problem, China would have crashed long ago. There are plenty of resources available and I'm pretty certain that the ecosystem can handle many more. <br><br>Problems occur in the economy when money stops moving. Those who have the money hang onto it. The only real way to get it going is to get that money out of those who are holding it and into the hands of those who will spend it. You can do this a number of ways. The simplest is the redistribution of wealth which I know is not popular here. The money then is moved to those who
spend it and it works it's way back up the chain in the form of profits to be redistributed again. Another way is to incur debt and spend that money. A third way is to provide an incentive for those who have the money to do something with it other than hold it. This means creating conditions where those holding the money can spend it in anticipation of a reward that is greater than had they held it. <br><br>I'm sure there are other ways as well, but these are the first that come to mind. <br> <br></div><div style="font-family: verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Keith Henson <hkeithhenson@gmail.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> ExI chat list <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Tue,
January 11, 2011 12:05:00 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> [ExI] Fwd: Conflict, was Tea party hypocrisy<br></font><br>
Forward from another list.<br><br>On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Florin Popescu<br><<a ymailto="mailto:florin.popescu@first.fraunhofer.de" href="mailto:florin.popescu@first.fraunhofer.de">florin.popescu@first.fraunhofer.de</a>> wrote:<br><br>snip<br><br>> What is relevant about political extremism, in the US and elsewhere, is the risk of global conflict spurred by an ever growing class of people with some means (time, transportation, external funding) but ever declining self-esteem and social mobility angst. That’s a discussion I’d be glad to follow, if we can stay ‘professional’ about it.<br><br>1. Humans are top predators.<br><br>2. The ultimate control on the number of top predators is other<br>members of the same species. Talk to lions about this.<br><br>3. Human numbers that stress the ability of the ecosystem (and now the<br>economy) to sustain them result from reproduction in excess of the<br>death rate.
(Obviously)<br><br>4. Humans are social, i.e., they normally do just about everything<br>including killing each other in groups. Spreading memes about the<br>nastiness of some other group is the way they are synchronized to act<br>in concert. (I.e., go to war or related social disruptions.) This<br>amounts to a high gain group behavioral switch.<br><br>5. Humans are sensitive to *relative* changes. So poor people who<br>have historically been poor are much less likely to get into wars or<br>revolts than people who have been doing well and the future prospects<br>start looking bad.<br><br>6. Fighting other humans is a dangerous business. Unless the<br>ecosystem/economy is stressed or projected to be stressed and the<br>alternative to war is worse, humans are strongly inhibited against<br>war. However, being attacked causes the attacked group to instantly<br>switch into war mode. (Pearl Harbor, 9/11, countless
stone age<br>attacks.)<br><br>6. While this model applies best to hunter gatherers, the effects of<br>long term selection in the stone age applies to current humans.<br><br>So (using this model) why the rise of the Tea Party?<br><br>While the US GDP has been rising, the income has been concentrating in<br>a small fraction of the population. One of the results has been<br>stagnant or declining wages for the bulk of what used to be the middle<br>class. A large fraction has been sliding into the lower class and the<br>prospects for them and their children do not look good. So it is<br>understandable (in terms of this model) that this sub group of the US<br>population with "ever declining self-esteem and social mobility angst"<br>gets infested with radical memes and tends to support external wars as<br>well. (Shades of what happened in Germany about the time the Nazies<br>rose to power.)<br><br>What to do to repair this problem is
obvious, put the bulk of the US<br>population into an economic growth mode where the future looks bright.<br><br>*How* to do this is another question entirely.<br><br>Keith Henson<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>extropy-chat mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br><span><a target="_blank" href="http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat</a></span><br></div></div>
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