magnax1
3yr ago
I don't expect that either are outliers. I suspect boards pretty closely match upper middle class demographics of whatever region predominates their recruiting pool. Go google Microsoft's board. I bet it's mostly white people because Seattle is very white. Likewise, I bet Ford is very white because midwestern upper middle class people are almost all white.
magnax1
3yr ago
Society won't collapse because a few companies might lose out to French, Japanese or maybe Chinese companies, and then have to reform, create new organizations, or limp on as a second rate economy (like Europe has been doing for 50+ years without a sign of collapse). The gap between where the US is now and collapse is monumental. It is the most powerful, rich, and culturally dominant nation in human history. It basically has to conjure up boogiemen to create competitive incentives. Undoubtedly the US will collapse someday, just like every other civilization or nation ever, but woke won't be the cause.
Btw I'm not saying woke stuff is good. It's just an exaggerated threat to terminally online right leaning types. You could realistically go a month in a wealthy suburb living out your life and never have it affect you at work, home or your kids school's. One of the actual biggest issues in America right now is a huge gap between the perceived importance of a problem (Global warming, school shootings, woke, or whatever) and actual significant problems.
magnax1
3yr ago
There's a pretty gaping chasm between "You will have to hire x% women and x% minorities or you'll be blacklisted" and "The payment companies won't let kiwi farms use their services." I don't think payment systems should be weaponized, but blacklisting kiwi farms was not about wokeness, diversity quotas, etc.
magnax1
3yr ago
Most top European talent also immigrates out. Its impossible to start a new industry upending business in Europe because of regulation. Spacex, Uber, and many others could never have started anywhere in Europe because they would have been regulated out of existence.
magnax1
3yr ago
Someone should tell Musk that since he sure doesn't seem to care and is the richest man alive.
The nasdaq and banking sector are themselves part of the free market. I also suspect you overestimate the rigidity of these guidelines anyways (someone look up Walmarts board real quick and tell me when they're going to be blacklisted), Either way, the banking sector itself has a lot of competition internationally and internally. Most startups don't finance themselves off bank loans.
magnax1
3yr ago
Neoliberal is definitely not woke. Neoliberal is Reagan and Thatcher and maybe Tony Blair if you're stretching it. Only in fringe online circle (like the reddit neoliberal sub) does neoliberal have anything to do with woke. When the average person uses neoliberal, usually in a pejorative sense, they mean "Those bad people who supported free market reforms at the expense of unions or the coal miners (or whatever)"
magnax1
3yr ago
This assumes there is no such thing as a free market. Sure, a single company can suicide by keeping a significant dead weight in its workforce, but they'll just be outcompeted by companies who don't, or maybe even countries who don't. Markets are just entropy, and entropy always wins out.
By European standards no growth since 06 is excellent. That's second best record, basically tied with France and behind Germany (And Russia, but their economy is trash anyways) Most of Southern Europe hasn't grown since ~1990.
Edit: I'm only referring to the major economies here. There's still limited growth in the nordics and small eastern euro countries.
magnax1
3yr ago
Yes, the anti-individualist argument would be against allowing them to take hormones, dress up, etc. I'm not aware of any significant cohort who wants to do that in North America.
magnax1
3yr ago
I'm not sure if I wasn't clear, but that 1% (which definitely extends far beyond just forcing the use of pronouns and includes conforming to all sorts of norma) is basically the whole political disagreement. As I said,
I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children)
magnax1
3yr ago
Forcing individuals to accept outside group cultural norms out of some moral imperative seems very communal, not individualistic. We should note that almost all of the debate about trans issues are their ideological normalization in society. If this were an individualist issue, you would expect one side to be against their very existence. I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children) Almost all the debate is over forcing people to take part in their image of themselves.
magnax1
3yr ago
Basically all industrialized countries went through the modernization that led to declining birth rates post WW2, but France definitely lagged behind Germany and the UK economically before the 2nd world war.
magnax1
3yr ago
Earth is nowhere near its carrying capacity, and the human population is more realistically limited by the resources of the solar system on any time scale where the Earth's carrying capacity is an issue. If Human population was about to trend to 40 billion, then Malthusian carrying capacity might become an issue. 9 billion? Not even close.
The biggest issue right now is that modern welfare systems are basically ponzi schemes. The eventual solution will be obvious--drastically cut spending, but that's difficult to achieve in democracies where the people paying are outnumbered by the people being paid.
Russia and France modernized post WW2. Qatar is currently modernizing and therefore is only just now dropping below replacement. It's where France was in the 50+ years ago in the cycle. Obviously modernization is the main trend here that dominates all other, but Qatar doesn't seem to be an outlier at all. UAE is already sub 1.5. Saudi Arabia seems to be behind on the curve, but its still quickly trending below 2.1. It may be the case that in 20 years Qatar's TFR will still be 1.80, but it doesn't seem that way.
magnax1
3yr ago
Definitely not true, because I'm a YIMBY and am totally opposed to dense urbanification. You could call most of the republican party functionally YIMBY (anti construction regulation) but anti urbanification, they just don't use those terms. There's a pretty clear connection between how red an area is and its lack of housing regulation.
magnax1
3yr ago
If we accept that NIMBY policies lead to lower density, then sure. I don't think that's the case. Very few places have an incentive to build up and not out, but regulations increases costs for both.
magnax1
3yr ago
Religiosity doesn't seem to have much correlation in general. There are exceptions (mormons, like you said, but even they are trending down fast) and the most religious countries in the world, the Arab peninsula states, have low birth rates that are trending down fast.
magnax1
3yr ago
I cannot express just how confident I am that the price of a square foot of housing in the United States is not an important driver of low fertility rates
You are absolutely wrong. Population density and it's associated costs are maybe the biggest difference in variation between tfr of developed countries.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693032/
This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
You can easily see this within the US as well. Places like NYC have abnormally low birth rates, especially among native populations.
magnax1
3yr ago
It seems to me that people associate and conflate nimbyism with multiple different issues. It's understandable, maybe even beneficial, that people might oppose things like housing projects in areas with lots of families. One could argue those things need to go somewhere, but I think ultimately housing projects in modern urban america have been failures. Its time to try something else.
Then there's the more common somewhat related problem of regulatory burden, where people oppose construction of basic housing, apartments, businesses, or infrastructure, through arcane laws that basically upend the function of property rights (I can do with my property as I will). This seems less defensable and ultimately is one of the main cruxes of the housing crisis in high cost west coast cities.
Then there's this recent left leaning obsession with dense urban living that gets thrown in (without any logical connection IMO). The claim is that it's more environmentally friendly, would lead to more equitable or equal outcomes, and also just seems to be an aesthetic choice. The method to achieve this seems to be scrapping suburban infrastructure, regulating away cars, and generally centralizing government authority so people cannot resist. There are a lot of obvious reasons not to do this (dense urban areas have poorer outcomes than suburbs in income inequality, mental health, self reported happiness, crime and basically every metric you can think of outside of average income, which may or may not still exist when adjusted for cost of living) If it isn't obvious I think the value of this argument approaches nill, and is just signal boosted by the location and recruiting pool of media conglomerates. If anything, as the internet makes your location more and more economically irrelevant, it seems that dense urban living makes less sense than ever.
magnax1
3yr ago
I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think.
I don't think they're separate. Like I said-
the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden
But civil rights suits and so on are not the biggest burden. It's one of many burdens, and the burdens become bigger and more arbitrary the bigger the company.
magnax1
3yr ago
I think you're misreading companies' regulatory burden for fear of wokism. Google et al are holding back for the former, which is much more central to its daily life. In fact, the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden via law suits supported by old civil rights law.
Google saw that openAI got away with releasing tech without the feds slamming down arbitrary regulation (so far) and were like "okay, maybe it's safe." This is all at best tangentially related to wokism. Never forget that the federal government's regulatory apparatus is the #1 concern of any large corporation.
magnax1
3yr ago
No, I'm just saying some of what chatgpt puts out is pretty much garbalygook. "What's the joke?' is a question without an answer.
Yes. The deep south cash crop states were not the only slave states. You pointed out border states yourself, many of which are quite temperate in climate. There was no reason for them to be so undeveloped compared to new england, and even some of the relatively underpopulated great lakes states. Virginia is actually an ideal place for industrialization--lots of cheap coal, lots of riverways that can transport coal and then power industry in cities, and lots of amazing places for huge ports. Yet, Virginia never really industrialized.
Studies have actually been done, although the veracity will always be fuzzy with 150+ year old data, they never suggest the effects are "not very" large.
A lot of borders are arbitrary, but the outcomes are not. The policy of a state and culture of a region are maybe the most important single factor for economic development. Slave states vs non slave are maybe the best example outside of east and west germany.
Some are easier than others. Mass shootings are a very easy problem to dismiss. If you are less likely or roughly equally as likely to be harmed by something as a lightning strike, then it is a non issue in my view. Mass shootings are within the rough range of lightning strikes. Children drowning in pools is a much bigger issue, albeit also a total non issue in relative terms.
Other problems are indeed more complex. I don't really want to go into detail on global warming right now (I've spent way too much time on here today, I need to get work done), but I think it's quite easy to see that if you do a very pessimistic estimate of economic and technological growth on the timescales where global warming might be devastating (100+ years) and then include the opportunity cost of the measures taken to deal with it (which are all basically growth dampening) then I think it's quite clear that its at best a non-issue and at worst the policies are significant cost to society with little to no benefit. It seems to me very similar to the panic in the early late 19th and early 20th century about malthusian population collapse. It probably would not have taken much of a leap in 1890 to take an extremely pessimistic economic model, look at it, and say "This is fucking dumb, we're going to be too rich for this to matter."
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