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I'll try by best not to sound like a raging sociopath here. In pure economic terms, curing cancer has little benefit to society. Cancer is not any one specific

I'll try by best not to sound like a raging sociopath here. In pure economic terms, curing cancer has little benefit to society. Cancer is not any one specific disease. It's a class of diseases, of which there are thousands (or more) of variants. We may stumble on some amazingly technologically advanced cure to some forms of cancer but the more rare the form, the less likely there will ever be a treatment. Most people get upset when you talk about humans as assets because we're indoctrinated at a very young age to value human life above all else. If you can, in fact, speak about humans in economic terms of supply/demand. We have an overabundance of people, and nothing useful to give them jobs to do. It's like the current oil market. Oil was highly valued due to the inelasticity of supply. Now that there is a glut of over supply and inelasticity greatly reduced, the value has dropped dramatically. The supply of humans capable of doing useful work used to be somewhat constrained. Now, we have more people than can be reasonably assigned to do useful work without essentially paying them to warm a chair. Yet, like the oil market nothing is stopping people from having more kids and increasing the supply. The government even directly subsidizes people for the number of children they have due the persistent belief that GDP is directly dependent on population. People can increase their value proposition by earning many degrees and racking up huge amounts of debt but, unless you're going to work in the industries that are thriving, it's a buyers market for employers. Business owners have their choice pick of the herd. They can keep wages as low as possible and skim more cream off the top because there's a line out the door of people waiting the replace a worker who quits. Who knows, maybe this is just the supply limit (ie in environmental science terms) as it applies to the human population. Poverty and misery is the expected result of making too many people before we can come up with enough useful reasons to sustain them.

roymurdock 11y ago
I've been thinking along similar lines recently. One counter to this argument is that as this process of overpopulation (relative to useful jobs) begins to happen, standard of living decreases.* As standard of living decreases on average, people start to have less children. So the imbalance is somewhat self-correcting, it's just that human lives are getting to be longer while the time between inventions that obviate the need for human labor seems to be getting shorter. Longer average lifespans (with the same legal retirement age for social security, medical benefits) exacerbate this problem. But there is always one industry that can be fueled by human lives and that looks great on an economic balance sheet - war. It decreases surplus labor, increases nationalism and social cohesion (if people generally see the necessity of the war), and injects a huge stimulus of demand into the economy through gov spending on all sorts of goods for the war effort, as well as investments in R&D that adds to the country's infrastructure base. If the latency between idle/restless/poor/disenfranchised population and meaningful/useful jobs gets to be too large, then all it takes is a spark to start a protest, rebellion, or war as people have nothing else to really live for. * I would use GDP/capita to have a more quantifiable benchmark, but I find GDP to be almost completely useless when accounting for things that matter to actual human beings such as quality of social cohesion, potential social mobility, amount of pollution, etc.
- greggman 11y ago
  > As standard of living decreases on average, people start to have less children That seems counter to all actual evidence doesn't it? The places with the poorest standards of living have the most children and visa verse.
  - nrb 11y ago
    I think he's talking about people who are at a decent standard of living that becomes reduced, thus the potential parents not "wanting to bring a child into this troubled world."
    - mjevans 11y ago
      I believe I fit squarely in to that category. I'm just old enough to have seen the fall of 'corporations who hire for life' in to 'everyone for themselves' employment. It is a disheartening drop in live stability.
- ehnto 11y ago
  You may find that the relationship between birth rate and standard of living is the opposite of what you described. We actually have some pretty good existing examples to draw from to conclude this. Japan has arguably the highest standard of living, but also a decreaseing birth rate. Women in Australia and America are having children later in life, and having fewer of them as well. Meanwhile in developing countries where access to birth control and education are more limited, birth rates are sky high.

roymurdock 11y ago

I've been thinking along similar lines recently. One counter to this argument is that as this process of overpopulation (relative to useful jobs) begins to happen, standard of living decreases.* As standard of living decreases on average, people start to have less children. So the imbalance is somewhat self-correcting, it's just that human lives are getting to be longer while the time between inventions that obviate the need for human labor seems to be getting shorter. Longer average lifespans (with the same legal retirement age for social security, medical benefits) exacerbate this problem. But there is always one industry that can be fueled by human lives and that looks great on an economic balance sheet - war. It decreases surplus labor, increases nationalism and social cohesion (if people generally see the necessity of the war), and injects a huge stimulus of demand into the economy through gov spending on all sorts of goods for the war effort, as well as investments in R&D that adds to the country's infrastructure base. If the latency between idle/restless/poor/disenfranchised population and meaningful/useful jobs gets to be too large, then all it takes is a spark to start a protest, rebellion, or war as people have nothing else to really live for. * I would use GDP/capita to have a more quantifiable benchmark, but I find GDP to be almost completely useless when accounting for things that matter to actual human beings such as quality of social cohesion, potential social mobility, amount of pollution, etc.

greggman 11y ago
> As standard of living decreases on average, people start to have less children That seems counter to all actual evidence doesn't it? The places with the poorest standards of living have the most children and visa verse.
- nrb 11y ago
  I think he's talking about people who are at a decent standard of living that becomes reduced, thus the potential parents not "wanting to bring a child into this troubled world."
  - mjevans 11y ago
    I believe I fit squarely in to that category. I'm just old enough to have seen the fall of 'corporations who hire for life' in to 'everyone for themselves' employment. It is a disheartening drop in live stability.
ehnto 11y ago
You may find that the relationship between birth rate and standard of living is the opposite of what you described. We actually have some pretty good existing examples to draw from to conclude this. Japan has arguably the highest standard of living, but also a decreaseing birth rate. Women in Australia and America are having children later in life, and having fewer of them as well. Meanwhile in developing countries where access to birth control and education are more limited, birth rates are sky high.