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Eventually you reach a point with any person where they're incapable of doing anything economically productive due any number of factors including age, mental capability, health, etc.

Only a few heavily handicapped people are actually completely incapable. The rest may not be employable on commercial terms, but if you're the government you don't care since they're on your "payroll" anyway. That's what happen to everyone under 30 on our "last resort" program here in Norway. You don't get to play PlayStation or work black labor, you'll do community service all day and in return you'll get a subsistence wage. Basically unpaid interns but only for a limited time per workplace and obviously if they find work they're gone. So if you need any sort of skill or experience it's better to employ them, it's only if you need a revolving door of totally unskilled - and in some cases, unreliable and unmotivated - labor that they actually replace an employee.

First, if people are being replaced by machines, it means overall labor capacity has either increased or remained the same at a lower cost so it isn't going to economically ruin the economy.

Only if the economy is a closed loop and robots are an international market. If I fire my local cleaning lady and replace her with a robot from China that could be very detrimental to the local and national economy.

The only other policy you'd need would be similar to China's one child policy so you don't have unproductive individuals spawning large numbers of children they're probably not well equip to care for

Actually Europe is far below a stable reproduction rate, Japan too. We actually need more people willing to pop out 3+ children to avoid de-population issues. The world is now very close to "peak child" as Hans Rosling called it. The remaining population growth is mainly the current population aging and "filling out" the age pyramid.

That is not the whole story.

The US health system is more like a layered cake of expenditures with private money coming on top of public money.

see https://ourworldindata.org/fin...

The US governement actually spends per capita as much as Germany, Belgium or France. These spending are then doubled by the private sector. All that to end up performing way lower than these countries (and about all the other rich countries in the world) in terms of life expectancy (4 years), child and maternal mortality.

see https://ourworldindata.org/the...

I think a much deeper problem is at works here : the twisted chain of accountability that separates a doctor from his patient. US is the only country I know of where you get a health insurance through your job, the health insurance contracts with an hospital, the hospital hires doctors which you end up consulting with because of the job you got in the first place.

In Belgium or France, the patient choses his Doctor. Much simpler relationship, much better results

That is not the whole story.

The US health system is more like a layered cake of expenditures with private money coming on top of public money.

see https://ourworldindata.org/fin...

The US governement actually spends per capita as much as Germany, Belgium or France. These spending are then doubled by the private sector. All that to end up performing way lower than these countries (and about all the other rich countries in the world) in terms of life expectancy (4 years), child and maternal mortality.

see https://ourworldindata.org/the...

I think a much deeper problem is at works here : the twisted chain of accountability that separates a doctor from his patient. US is the only country I know of where you get a health insurance through your job, the health insurance contracts with an hospital, the hospital hires doctors which you end up consulting with because of the job you got in the first place.

In Belgium or France, the patient choses his Doctor. Much simpler relationship, much better results

2/3 of the population of rich countries in the past worked in agriculture. 2/3 of the population in some poor countries still do.

After automation and technological improvements, now only 5% (or less) of the population of rich countries work in agriculture and food is cheaper than it ever was, to the point no one starves because no one can afford to feed them, but only when there is someone preventing food from physically reaching them.

We've been down the path of massive automation before and it's resulted in better lives for everyone. Please now show us a counter-example of where automation and technological advance affected a massive number of people's jobs and those people are still around without any ability to earn anything or starved to death as a result.

Read some of the questions posed by the community which the self-proclaimed "pro-science" community has dubbed "anti-science."

Why do insist on telling lies? None of the questions you listed are deemed "anti-science" by anyone with any credibility.

They want to know to what extent climate change is influenced by man's activities and to what extent it is a natural phenomenon. Is it 90/10? 50/50?

100/0, except in a few specific years where strong El Ninos have a temporary warming effect that exceeds the natural cooling trend.

We don't know the answer.

You may not, we do. That's one of the settled questions.

They want to know what, short of abandoning society, we can do to keep earth safe and hospitable.

No one serious is recommending that we abandon society. There are so many things we can do that listing them all here would be prohibitively long, but the single biggest thing is reducing consumption of the fossil fuels that release CO2 (and other green house gases) into the atmosphere.

What would be the measurable effects of our mitigating activities, what would be the cost, etc.

That depends on which mitigating activities, but in total the cost of mitigation is estimated to be at about 1-2% of GDP, which for reference is about the same as it costs the world's cities to maintain their sewer infrastructure.

They want to know what we can expect in terms of weather change and when such changes will be quantifiable. I've actually seen some lively discussion on this last point, and scientists in this community agree we don't have a statistically significant data set re: extreme weather and have no basis for proving/disproving AGW/extreme weather hypotheses at this time.

Such changes are already quantifiable, there was an article about that just a few weeks ago. Weather events are effectively random, however, climate change influences the frequency, distribution, and severity of those events.

I guess they're "science deniers," right??? :D They should quit asking questions so we can "get some work done" right???

I did say stupid questions. Of course, several of your questions are pretty dumb including the "how much of the warming trend is natural" question because it's been answered so many times before, and the "what can we do other than abandon society" question, because you are implying that's what other people want you to do, and it's likely you're doing it so you can feel validated in doing nothing because you imagine other people's solutions are inherently impractical. As an example of why people grow tired of answering the same questions over and over and over and over, I've personally answered the how much of the warming is natural question on Slashdot over 20 times.

Still, there are lots of wars going on:

https://ourworldindata.org/war...

Doesn't look like "nation state conflict" is too dangerous, too me.

First, the top 1% 30 years ago are a mostly different set of individuals than the top 1% currently.

Non-sequitur is non-sequitur.

Second, however defined, they didn't get 99% of new wealth.

Close the fuck enough

Sensationalist trash like this perpetuates misunderstanding of polyamorous people.

... It's not a mistake to believe that it will cause problems if there are no mates for many men. Denying them the opportunity to partner leaves them with a hole in their life. They're going to fill it with something.

Please explain China and its overabundance of young men who have no mates, nor will ever have any prospect of one. Why is there no civil unrest (or at least none to upset the balance of power) there? Answer: There are more than just a perceived imbalance in mating relationships that is at the core of civil unrest/war. Poverty, resource allocation (food, money, ...mates etc ) all contribute. Political ideology is also a factor but only if one side can see themselves as disadvantaged and need to "right the balance". Power hungry madmen who gain control over other men. guns etc is another factor. It is simplistic to boil war down to one or two factors.

Here to wishing that people wake up. The need for war is diminishing rapidly as the worlds poorest standard of living is increasing like never before. Lets hope it continues Link

For instance, automation of agriculture drastically reduced agricultural employment.

Not quite as simple as that actually. Total employment in agriculture in the US increased dramatically from 1850 to 1900. It has fallen since then but the total number of people employed in agriculture has only in the last 20 years or so fallen below the number employed in 1850. In 1850 about 3.5 million people in the US worked in agriculture. It wasn't until about 1970 that the number fell below 3.5 million again. In 2000 the number was around 3.1 million. Per captia numbers in agriculture have been falling since the 1400s but total employment actually seems to have peaked around 1900, well after automation started having serious impacts on the industry.

Automation in agriculture was a major factor in enabling the industrial revolution. If the majority of us still had to tend the family farm then technological progress would have happened much slower and chances are good you're not using the computer you are reading this post on.

This is why I'm not particularly worried about those proclaiming that automation is going to take away all our jobs. It won't. It will just change what we do and what we reap economic benefits from. Anyone who is programming computers for a living owes their livelihood to the jobs that were CREATED by automation. The problem is that it's hard to see what those jobs will be ahead of time because many of them haven't been created yet. There is an entire economy around the smartphone in your pocket that didn't exist at all 30 years ago and would have been hard to predict in any but the most general of ways.

I disagree. I believe there is plenty of evidence over decades that the MASSIVE drop in the total number of wars on the planet is directly a result of the UN brining nations together to talk first and shoot second. Did it end war? No. Did it reduce it substantially? Yes, OMG, yes.

Presenting an argument that the UN is responsible for the drop is a huge undertaking, beyond the scope of this comment. Sorry, I cannot cite sources for that aspect, but I beg you to go research the history and impact of just meeting to talk and do nothing has had on incident after incident. The drop in wars and violence is well documented. This site has one of the most complete set of graphs and cited data on the matter that I know of: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/

Are you sure?

https://ourworldindata.org/sli...

If the world is truly in decline, then how do we explain the unending rise of the Military Industrial Complex?

How do we explain the Incarcerated States of America?

How do we explain the continued militarization of our civilian police forces?

My original statement stands, because ruthless Greed created this shit. Warmongering is a proven for-profit business, which is why ruthless Greed continues to sustain it. The sick part about that is putting a price tag on human lives to define profit.

Also, it's a bit difficult to believe the statistics you've presented when the constant metric (global population) has been on the rise since the dawn of time, thus perpetually watering down the results.

Are you sure?

https://ourworldindata.org/sli...

As much as I would like to disagree with you (as nukes are disagreeable), the fact remains that combat deaths, and the number of conflicts worldwide, has dropped dramatically since nuclear weapons were invented.

I'd like to see the stats to back up that claim.

Here you go: https://ourworldindata.org/war...

Indeed. Knee-jerk cynicism about the future on a website billing itself as news for nerds has always struck me as ridiculous.

But what do I know? I'm just distracting my dumb brain with sex and drugs in this brave new world and the rest of my energy is spent trying to scrounge up some soylent green.

The future is always bleak. I guess no one wants to risk being accused of being naive when they suggest the future might be better instead of worse. Diseases have fallen to unthinkable levels, worldwide poverty is steadily going down, the population is showing signs of coming to a manageable steady state, people are living longer as a result of easier lives, violent crime is dropping, democracy is increasing... but no, it's all going to hell in a handbasket because robots gonna take all out jerbs!

Have you thought that maybe it's even harder to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop reproducing?

No, I haven't thought that and I'm a little amazed that you are thinking that since so many were convinced before you were even born.
Graph 1.3 is worth a look:
https://ourworldindata.org/fer...

I know it was a trendy topic of authors in the 1970s ("Future Shock" etc) but it was already well out of date by then.

Why do you think there are so many civil wars over the world?

There aren't.

It's actually heading that direction. It's hard for us as Americans to feel it because we've started getting involved in more wars, but overall the world has been improving and improving.

One way of looking at it is, "rich people aren't willing to risk their lives in war" and as the world gets richer and richer, fewer people are willing to fight in battles.

What we need is good public schools, not a giant money transfer to for-profit companies, which is what a voucher system would very quickly degenerate into.

It wouldn't "degenerate into" that, that is what it is designed to do. That is, it is intended to encourage for-profit companies to offer better education than public schools at the same price. If for-profit corporations cannot offer better education than public schools at the same price, then parents will not send their kids to private schools. If for-profit companies succeed at offering better education at the same price, then parents will take their kids out of public schools, send them to private schools, and we can shutter the public school system.

In fact, it is crystal clear that there is no significant relationship between per student spending and educational outcomes beyond a minimum [1] [2], and all policies trying to improve public school performance have failed. Public schools, a one-size-fits-all scheme subject to massive lobbying, is intrinsically limited in the quality of education it can deliver.

The opposite approach would actually do much more to improve education - a complete ban on private schools would motivate parents with more resources to push for improvements instead of pulling their kids out.

Coming from a country that tried that, I can assure you: it doesn't work. The wealthy and powerful simply send their kids abroad, and the public school system is intrinsically incapable of improving no matter what politicians do or how much money they throw at it.

It might be a stupid story, but not for the reasons you point out, if you look at the world GDP trend and current distribution it's clear that we're converging. The 1970s when there was a grand canyon between the extremely rich "first world" and the extremely poor "third world" isn't coming back. For sure, right now that machine might fall in the gap where it's worthwhile in the US and not worth it in India. But it's a factor of 10:1 in GDP today and getting less, India's GDP grows by 5-9% and the US by 2-4% per year. Sure there's still expensive and cheap labor, but that they will work for next to nothing is becoming a thing of the past.

And to be honest, one order of magnitude is not much when you talk about automation. Cheaper CPU/GPU/RAM, better/cheaper sensors, downpaid software, mature design and economics of scale often means that if version one works for the US, version two will operate at double the speed at half the purchase/maintenance cost and the whole first world will buy. And when version three rolls around doubling speed and halving cost again even India is in trouble. I think you're either stuck before version one where it's not practically feasible at all or it'll zip past and become something computers/robots do instead of people.

That, and it seems like every time you read something written by people who are clinically depressed, they always talk about how people are getting poorer and poorer.

https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

https://ourworldindata.org/the...

Mmmmm... so you say we should stop all scientific advances until we solve all the other, more basic problems? We should concentrate the whole planet on working only to eliminate poverty? Or maybe some of the advances we make at the top of Maslow's pyramid will someday serve the ones struggling for the bottom of it... I mean, like 3D printing. Right now, it's still a novelty, in use for a very small fraction humans. Someday, maybe it's going to be the cheapest way to have a hamburger, and our African friends will be able to have one everyday. Not that it won't cause other problems though, it it will solve one. Also have a look at this, rethink your answer. As the world goes forward in scientific advances, poverty recedes.

It's a good thing trickle-down problem-solving works, because it's common knowledge that trickle-down economics does not.

The estimate in that wiki article is nonsense. :D so why should I check that. That is actually a no brainer.

https://ourworldindata.org/wor...

As you can easy see, the amount of population in history was absurd low.

In the first shown graph all people that have lived from 1750 till 2010 barely come to the same amount as the people that do/will live from 2010 till 2100.

You/wikipedia only had point if you count all specimen of humans together and still then wikipedia would be off by a factor of 1000.

The second graph gives an estimate about how the population evolved over the last 12000 years.

Basically at any given time in history, the amount of people living at that time was greater than the sum of all people that have lived before.

Mmmmm... so you say we should stop all scientific advances until we solve all the other, more basic problems? We should concentrate the whole planet on working only to eliminate poverty?

Or maybe some of the advances we make at the top of Maslow's pyramid will someday serve the ones struggling for the bottom of it... I mean, like 3D printing. Right now, it's still a novelty, in use for a very small fraction humans. Someday, maybe it's going to be the cheapest way to have a hamburger, and our African friends will be able to have one everyday. Not that it won't cause other problems though, it it will solve one.

Also have a look at this, rethink your answer.

As the world goes forward in scientific advances, poverty recedes.

Please count the number of casulaties that have fallen in those 'minor' wars for the resources that make our financial elite even more rich than they already are, and then tell me again it's only 'minor'.

It's worth doing that exercise. The author of the linked webpage claims about 22 million war deaths including genocide and non state-based warfare from after the end of the Second World War through to 2007. That's about what the First World War killed in four years (not counting the 1918 influenza epidemic which was greatly expedited by the war). And of course, the Second World War killed at least three times as many people in an eight year period.

If we look at per capita, war deaths in the current period of peace are even more pronounced. The Second World War is thought to have killed at least 3% of the people alive at the time. That would be well over 200 million people now. We are nowhere near that.

Do the numbers. See for yourself.

The problem is the trend, starting from the early 1800s, is actually quite steady, even though population growth (and co2 emissions) has grown exponentially.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...

https://ourworldindata.org/wp-...

This smells like the thorny attribution problem.

Ugh. Just because you can calculate a "linear trend" doesn't mean the actual trend is linear. You can also calculate a "linear trend" for population.

The problem is the trend, starting from the early 1800s, is actually quite steady, even though population growth (and co2 emissions) has grown exponentially.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...

https://ourworldindata.org/wp-...

This smells like the thorny attribution problem.

The first chart on https://ourworldindata.org/wor... shows both the growth rate and the population.

What I find interesting is that the growth rate was at its maximum 2.1% in the 60's and it is now at 1.2%.

During the same time the world population went from 4 billions to 7 billions which means that the raw growth went from 4e9*0.021 = +84 millions/year to 7e9*0.012 = +84 millions/year. So the raw growth was basically constant during the last 50 years.

The current expectation is that the growth rate will continue to decrease and that the population will eventually reach a maximum around 9 billions but be aware that a decreasing growth rate is not a sufficient condition for that. For instance, 1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+.... is well known example of an infinite sum with a decreasing growth rate. Similarly, 1/2+1/4+/1/8+1/16+... is not an infinite sum (it tends to 1) even though its growth rate remains strictly positive.

Look, you stated, without evidence, your beliefs that "Human development has a inverse correlation with violence.

You even agreed with this "We have had a massive decline in gun violence, both in the US and abroad".
So you agree that violence is down overall, so the thing you could possibly dispute is that prosperity is up over similar time frames?
And you need evidence for this? Really?

I thought this was so obvious even a fool wouldn't question this, but here you go, just for the special people... https://ourworldindata.org/Eco...

It does not require "blind faith" to believe that the tomorrow will be more-or-less like today.

Have you visited Colorado? The weather changes every 15 minutes, nevermind this "tomorrow" business.

The world is different, the economy is different

Basic economic principles apply just as much today as they did in the past.

But the economy is different. In America, there are both men and women in nearly every profession. 100 years ago, far more women were homemakers. People rarely moved out of state for college and then across the country for work. And as for (our understanding of) economic principles, they've certainly changed in the past 100 years. Keynes, Friedman, stagflation, supply-side economics. Shall we continue?

corporations are larger and more powerful

No they aren't. A century ago, the largest corporation, Standard Oil, was 2% of the economy. Today, the largest corporation, Apple, is a tiny fraction of that. Concentration of power in corporations has greatly diminished.

The makeup of the economy has shifted significantly. Work that used to be done within the family is now outsourced. For example, most people buy most of their food, rather than growing it. 100 years ago, childcare was not the giant industry that it is today. 100 years ago, the majority of Americans lived in rural areas; now they live mostly in cities. Because of these and many other changes, I don't think Standard Oil vs Apple is a relevant rebuttal.

we have globalization.

As a percentage of the economy, international trade was higher in the spring of 1914 than it is today. Two world wars and a great depression changed all that, but today's globalization is not new.

Citation please? https://ourworldindata.org/int... pegs 1914 international trade around 30% of world GDP and over 50% today.

How could you not think this time will be different?

I don't see any reason to believe that "this time is different", and I also don't see any evidence. What is happening today is just an extrapolation of trends that started centuries ago.

If today is simply an extrapolation of trends, then the future should be easy for you to predict, and you should be an incredibly wealthy individual.

Your link doesn't really back up your claim. . .

Someone who has learned enough economics to use terms like "diminishing return" should also have been taught that knowledge capital does not apply. Does lighting someone else's candle diminish your own lit candle? It is as if you are saying that water boils at 100 C, so evaporation can only occur at 100 C. I could go to the trouble to explain/prove everything myself, or I could just point you to the textbook ("Authority") saying otherwise for brevity. At the end of the day, the onerous is on you to prove that generally accepted facts and theories are wrong.

If you could go back in time and ask people in the early 20th century what the early 21st century would be like I think they'd be surprised not by all of the technology that looks like magic to them, but with how little has really changed.

Thanks, this goes back to my point of, "If they are so advanced, then where are their giant horses!?" Technological advances have occurred in the most important areas for them to occur. That people have failed to realize where these were going to be in the past is merely a testament of their limited knowledge/foresight and says nothing of the technological progress that has taken place. Your comment here says more about yourself than anything else.

Some technologies (like nuclear) are extremely centralized, government regulated, and monopolistic. Then there are technologies that are on the opposite spectrum. The latter is improving exponentially .

The causality itself is also quite uncontroversial: It is known that exposure to lead means lower average IQ, and lower average IQ means more violence.

That would seem pretty simple to test. All you have to do is look at the IQ scores over time (controlling for changing difficulty of the tests). If your hypothesis is correct, then the rate at which IQ scores were increasing should have increased after the 1970s when leaded gasoline was phased out.

A quick Google search turns out that the rate at which IQ has been increasing has been pretty constant. There is no characteristic jump in scores in the Americas after the 1970s when leaded gasoline was phased out. Indicating your hypothesis is false. In fact, aside from Africa, the rate at which IQ scores have been increasing has slowed down slightly since the 1970s. This is actually a negative correlation with your hypothesis, meaning if we are to assume the mechanism you describe is correct, leaded gas was actually helping to increase IQ scores, not depressing them.

http://ourworldindata.org/data...
http://marginalrevolution.com/...

The data doesn't support your assertion. The centuries-long trend is a decline in homicide rates. It appears that, on the whole, our "intelligent brains" are quite capable of choosing to be a non-homicidal member of society. The homicidal deviants you mention are an inconsequential percentage of the total population.

http://ourworldindata.org/data...

I found this chart to be especially interesting. The US homicide rate was roughly constant throughout the 20th century.* At first glance, this contradicts the overall trend, but it's more encouraging when you look at the demographic changes. In 1900, there were 75 million people, and 40% lived in urban areas. In 2000, there were 280 million people, and 80% lived in urban areas. Urban areas have much higher homicide rates than rural areas, so it's quite impressive that the per capita homicide rate didn't rise dramatically.

*The drop from 1940 to 1960 was a combination of the Great Depression and WW2. Young men commit most murders, and you won't have many young men if your families are too poor to have kids or your young men are off fighting a war. Predictably, the homicide rate shot back up when baby boomers started becoming young men.

http://ourworldindata.org/data...
http://marginalrevolution.com/...

The data doesn't support your assertion. The centuries-long trend is a decline in homicide rates. It appears that, on the whole, our "intelligent brains" are quite capable of choosing to be a non-homicidal member of society. The homicidal deviants you mention are an inconsequential percentage of the total population.

http://ourworldindata.org/data...

I found this chart to be especially interesting. The US homicide rate was roughly constant throughout the 20th century.* At first glance, this contradicts the overall trend, but it's more encouraging when you look at the demographic changes. In 1900, there were 75 million people, and 40% lived in urban areas. In 2000, there were 280 million people, and 80% lived in urban areas. Urban areas have much higher homicide rates than rural areas, so it's quite impressive that the per capita homicide rate didn't rise dramatically.

*The drop from 1940 to 1960 was a combination of the Great Depression and WW2. Young men commit most murders, and you won't have many young men if your families are too poor to have kids or your young men are off fighting a war. Predictably, the homicide rate shot back up when baby boomers started becoming young men.