Charging people the maximum the market will bear isn't a free market.
It's always a sign of a broken market-- usually involving collusion or a real or artificial monopoly.
In a free market, any time you grossly overcharge for a product, someone else is free to produce a similar product and sell it for less.
With multiple sellers competing, they must eventually lower the price to the point where they can't lower it any more and stay in business.
In markets with real competition, the price difference is frequently under 1%. Buyers quickly detect large differences and sales collapse for the expensive variety unless they've managed to create a "brand" which people will pay a premium for. The problem there is that most of the better brands have now cut costs and are no longer the quality level they were 10 years ago. For example, whirlpool water heaters *frequently* break in under 12 months. Insane for a product that is supposed to last 12-15 years.
---
People try to create "brands"-- like "Horizon" organic milk so they can sell it at a premium ($4/half gallon). But then "Promised Land", and "Kroger Organic" and "Randall's Organic" milk enter the mix and very soon, all of them are selling for ($2.99/half gallon). There seems to be evidence that's a bottom, because when a given store starts having oversupply and milk going bad at $3/half gallon, soon afterwards they simply stop carrying organic milk.
The reason things cost less there is a combination of them buying U.S. bonds to hold their currency down (India, Russia, and China own tremendous sums of U.S. debt to keep their profits from weakening the dollar and strengthening their currencies) and naturally lower prices due to excess labor and less expensive land costs-- in part due to historical problems which made it very hard to do business in those countries.
Despite their best efforts the dollar is weakening (which is playing havoc with the value of the huge piles of bonds they have outstanding-- want 3% on an asset that is declining 8% in 6 months relative to your currency?).
Once the corporations successfully drain the life out of the U.S. which historically was a strong "rule of law" country, then they'll be faced with China-- which more than once has simply taken corporate assets and Russia which has repeatedly shown no respect for contract law (they have fun selling multiple exclusive contracts to the same area for example- or just ignore contracts they don't like). I'm unclear on why india had such problems as they seem to be a country with rule of law and good contracts but I have heard that they had an unbelievable bureaucracy until quite recently.
Exactly... We are not in a free market for products. So why should we remain in a free market for wages?
Either way, the situation is going to resolve itself within a decade. Wages in America will stagnate and drop towards indian levels. Wages in India/China will inflate terrifically fast.
At some point, the voters in America start voting against business (oh wait.. they've already started). At some point, there will be no excess wealth to mine in America and people will not be able to buy products at inflated prices on credit (oh wait... that's already happening).
You can pass all the laws in the world that I can't buy a movie for $2.49-- with 9.2% reported unemployment and real employment of 15% with about 6% having run out of benefits and now have no job and no money and underemployment ($100k workers working for $32k at Walmart) bringing that total up to about 24%-- people are not going to buy movies for $15 and prices will drop.
And it's starting in areas like "generic" clothing-- JC Penny's has cut the price on them by about 50% in 12 months. Malls all over america are failing anyway (the largest mall real estate holding company just went bankrupt)-- because no one can afford these prices.
Health care is next-- there is no reason Canada should be 30% cheaper for the same drugs-- and certainly no reason India should be 90% cheaper.
India and China better get their internal economies working because the goose that laid the golden eggs is about dead now.
The lower labor wages is a very natural process-- I'd have no complaint about my wages stagnating and dropping if not for the unnatural process around prices of goods.
---
And all this matters little since we are extremely close to a drop in demand for labor by 90%. Probably a couple decades at most. General use Robots-- buy one for $50k and pay no benefits, no vacation, no salaries.
In free trade, if the pills are sold for 10 cents, then I could go there, buy 20,000 pills for 10 cents, bring them back and sell them for 4.90 profit-- or sell them for 4.40 profit at $4.50.
I'm being required to pay high prices-- but the companies that are doing that are refusing to hire me at high wages. This is going to be a *VERY* temporary situation.
*DVD regions and such are there to help reduce illegal duplication.
This gross mistake typifies your post.
Dvd regions are there so the movie companies can sell the movie in the US at a high price, in Europe at a higher or lower price, in India and China at a lower price. it has nothing to do with copy-protection / preventing copies. It's the government giving a legal monopoly to the movie companies so they can sell the movie for 2.50 and prevent people from logically, going to china- purchasing 100 copies of the movie for 2.10EU, returning to Europe and selling them in Germany for 21EU (2100EU) covering the cost of their vacation, and making about 500EU profit.
You can't sell apples on one street for $15 and 10 blocks over for $1. One of two things is going to happen. Either people are going to go for the $1 apple (and people are starting to travel to India for health care-- it's $15k vs $100k for procedures). Or, more often, some bright young lad is going to buy $1 apples, walk 10 blocks and sell them for $14. Then another bright young lass is going to buy them for $1 and sell them for $13. This iterates fairly quickly until there are no $1 apples and apples are selling for $5 everywhere.
It's called supply and demand- the invisible hand.
It doesn't apply when the police keep you from buying the apples or when the government manipulates the value of the dollar or other violations of free trade.
I agree with another poster in this thread-- generic product prices are dropping sharply in this market. Izod is $25 down from $40-- generic shirts are $10-- down from $25. At some point, shirts will settle at a fair price.
You can't indefinitely charge the 1st world, 1st world prices while denying them employment at 1st world prices.
So right now, I compete with someone who makes 1/10th of what I do-- in part because I'm subsidizing research on his health care and his movies and entertainment.
By your logic, billionaires should pay 2 million bucks for the same shirt that you and I buy for 20 bucks. Cable TV should cost a billionaire 100k a month.
Prices are not relative-- it's only because of gross sellouts and artificially protected regions that such *extreme* price differences are maintained.
Within the U.S. competition brings down prices rapidly-- but between the U.S. and India, it doesn't.
Drugs-- $5.00 here, $0.10 there DVD's-- $19.99 here, $2.49 there (and in reality about.50 at the local markets-- but $2.49 full copyrighted retail). Clothing-- $1 or less there--- $19.99 here.
There is *no* reason the clothes, drugs, movies, songs, etc. etc. should have that extreme of a price difference. In a normal capitalistic society, we would be allowed to buy the 10 cent pills there and import them here and resell them for 20 cents.
We have all this dvd regionalized shit, and protected trade zones, and other restrictions on free trade.
Our declining wages would not matter so much if we really were getting the benefits of free trade.
But the wealth here is literally being pumped out of the country- and the jobs too.
The last code delivered by Infosys was functional... but had to be ripped back out of production.
The next bit of code didn't follow any of our published standards. It took several days to fix the obvious problems, then it got booted out of testing for a week's corrections.
They used to be a lot better back in 2003.
The biggest problem right now is that they won't say "no" to management about anything. Insanely crazy schedules-- "Sure, we can meet that". Grossly abbreviated testing... "Okay- we can mitigate that risk".
I think most of the super sharp guys are now management there. The actual coders are now getting down to low experience yes men/women who are not as clever and rush things without following standards.
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
It doesn't matter if you have the right to download it. You don't have the right to upload it.
However, for most books and music over 28 years old, you can make a strong argument that you have an ethical basis for downloading without payment.
And any terms which request the artists life + 50 years could be violated without guilt.
Remember that it's illegal (remember lots of things were illegal that are now legal-- legality != morality)-- so don't be an idiot and rub it in the powers that be's faces.
Immoral societies have been murdering, raping, enslaving and imprisoning their members and others "legally" (and in some cases -- morally by internal standards) for thousands of years.
The latest way to enslave is to set prices so you must work 40 hours a week to get a living space and health care despite the fact that productivity is up 20x in a generation. (so we should be working 10 hours a week to have a place to live, food, and medical care).
The hosts file sounds sort of equivalent to adblock.
The flash and javascript sound more painful. The flash prompts would drive me crazy- I currently get an indicator flash is there and if I want to play it, I click on it. Otherwise, I do not have to do anything. For javascript, once I approve a page, it stays approved. It still is annoying occasionally-- I wish it had a crowdsourced "approved" pages-- only overridden if I said to block a page. Right now everything has to be approved at least once by me-- but that's probably safe. My email is whitelisted that way.
"The City Council unanimously passed a bill yesterday that would sharply increase fines for people who steal recyclable material from curbsides -- to $2,000 from $100 for a first offense, and $5,000 for each subsequent offense within a year."
Note... $2000 and $5000, not $1 million and $2 million.
This case is equivalent in that if you stole 12 soda cans, they fine you $24,000 or $60,000 instead of $2000 or $5000.
Crimes for other thefts are similar but there are different (usually lower) fines for $5 of merchandise, $125 theft and $250 theft (felony starts there-- in a ludicrous inflation non-adjusted harshly increased penalties from when felony theft laws were first passed a century ago).
If you adjust for inflation-- felony theft should probably start at about $2500 ( paperback novel when these things were passed was 50 cents-- now it is $8.50).
So even if infringement was theft (which it is not), you should have to steal 100 albums worth of material before facing felony prosecution. This is why we have so many people in jail. So many that now we are now unable to incarcerate them all and are jailing them in their homes with remote tracking collars.
It's incredibly fascist and pathetic that our country is turning this way.
I agree with you that the judges are more focused on their own lives than their replacement by a long shot.
I disagree on the trend. The republicans really screwed up badly. They sided very visibly with about 10% of the population over the other 90% and then drove the country into the ditch. While productivity has skyrocketed, employee pay hasn't- but executive pay has.
I voted for reagan and bush sr. I'll probably never vote republican again until they start caring about someone besides the elite.. or as Bush, jr. called them, "his base".
I occasionally have to use I.E. and I see no way to customize it to a) ignore ads from selected addresses. b) disable flash unless I tell it to play. c) disable javascript unless I authorize it. d) capture media playing through the browser e) selectively zoom in/out text, images, text & images (speaking of which-- when are we going to be able to zoom in/out WINDOW text in windows. I can change title bars, menus, etc, but not the one font i need to change most.) f) massively collect all files of a similar type at a location.
---
Lack of these features is frustrating on the occasions where i have to use IE. So how can i do this in IE 8? I'm sure it will be forced on to my laptop before long since it is a vista box.
Actually, I think inherent rights are those which there is no way to take away.
Prisoners have a right to try to escape. People have a right to try to find (pursue) happiness. People can say whatever they want to (you can punish them afterwards). The right to rebel against the government (they can kill you in return of course).
Creators have an inherent right to try to stop people from copying their stuff. People (especially poor people) have a right to take those creations (especially medicines).
If the social contract is perceived as fair, then people will respect the granted rights of others. Society has been getting increasingly unfair since the late 1970's.
Our productivity is supposedly way up, yet it takes 2 people to run a household now.
Wow-- you really crammed "stealing" into that article [stealing] about copyright infringement as many times as possible without adding [stealing] some subliminal messages.
It's not stealing-- it's copyright infringement.
Most of the people infringing copyright couldn't afford to buy the product anyway so a lot less money is being lost than is claimed.
The set of humans who have fewer children in areas with higher standards of living are being outbred and supplanted by sets of humans who are not affected.
It only takes a small subset who are immune to the industrial value meme (personal pleasure in exchange for having fewer kids).
In the US it is hispanic catholics. In Europe it is Islamics.
High living standards lowering the population is like hitting bacteria with an antibiotic. It only takes 1% surviving the antibiotic and soon the entire population can ignore it. You are assuming high living standards are 100% effective at reducing population growth.
---
Don't underestimate the black plague. Huge reaches of Europe were abandoned and went back to forest.
With regard to the H1N1 or other possible super-bug proposed, we have two challenges- increasing population density. Increasing health care expense.
I could see this exploding in areas like Detroit. It doesn't take much to overwhelm the health care system and I don't think our doctors and nurses are as willing to die as those back in the 1918's were. I think they'll stop showing up to work if they are faced with something aggressive and fatal.
Slashdot Mirror
Charging people the maximum the market will bear isn't a free market.
It's always a sign of a broken market-- usually involving collusion or a real or artificial monopoly.
In a free market, any time you grossly overcharge for a product, someone else is free to produce a similar product and sell it for less.
With multiple sellers competing, they must eventually lower the price to the point where they can't lower it any more and stay in business.
In markets with real competition, the price difference is frequently under 1%. Buyers quickly detect large differences and sales collapse for the expensive variety unless they've managed to create a "brand" which people will pay a premium for. The problem there is that most of the better brands have now cut costs and are no longer the quality level they were 10 years ago. For example, whirlpool water heaters *frequently* break in under 12 months. Insane for a product that is supposed to last 12-15 years.
---
People try to create "brands"-- like "Horizon" organic milk so they can sell it at a premium ($4/half gallon). But then "Promised Land", and "Kroger Organic" and "Randall's Organic" milk enter the mix and very soon, all of them are selling for ($2.99/half gallon). There seems to be evidence that's a bottom, because when a given store starts having oversupply and milk going bad at $3/half gallon, soon afterwards they simply stop carrying organic milk.
The reason things cost less there is a combination of them buying U.S. bonds to hold their currency down (India, Russia, and China own tremendous sums of U.S. debt to keep their profits from weakening the dollar and strengthening their currencies) and naturally lower prices due to excess labor and less expensive land costs-- in part due to historical problems which made it very hard to do business in those countries.
Despite their best efforts the dollar is weakening (which is playing havoc with the value of the huge piles of bonds they have outstanding-- want 3% on an asset that is declining 8% in 6 months relative to your currency?).
Once the corporations successfully drain the life out of the U.S. which historically was a strong "rule of law" country, then they'll be faced with China-- which more than once has simply taken corporate assets and Russia which has repeatedly shown no respect for contract law (they have fun selling multiple exclusive contracts to the same area for example- or just ignore contracts they don't like). I'm unclear on why india had such problems as they seem to be a country with rule of law and good contracts but I have heard that they had an unbelievable bureaucracy until quite recently.
I just did a little calc check and wow- you are right.
No way they make $15 an hour.
It is very likely the vast majority of walmart employees make under $20k a year.
Exactly...
We are not in a free market for products.
So why should we remain in a free market for wages?
Either way, the situation is going to resolve itself within a decade.
Wages in America will stagnate and drop towards indian levels.
Wages in India/China will inflate terrifically fast.
At some point, the voters in America start voting against business (oh wait.. they've already started).
At some point, there will be no excess wealth to mine in America and people will not be able to buy products at inflated prices on credit (oh wait... that's already happening).
You can pass all the laws in the world that I can't buy a movie for $2.49-- with 9.2% reported unemployment and real employment of 15% with about 6% having run out of benefits and now have no job and no money and underemployment ($100k workers working for $32k at Walmart) bringing that total up to about 24%-- people are not going to buy movies for $15 and prices will drop.
And it's starting in areas like "generic" clothing-- JC Penny's has cut the price on them by about 50% in 12 months. Malls all over america are failing anyway (the largest mall real estate holding company just went bankrupt)-- because no one can afford these prices.
Health care is next-- there is no reason Canada should be 30% cheaper for the same drugs-- and certainly no reason India should be 90% cheaper.
India and China better get their internal economies working because the goose that laid the golden eggs is about dead now.
The lower labor wages is a very natural process-- I'd have no complaint about my wages stagnating and dropping if not for the unnatural process around prices of goods.
---
And all this matters little since we are extremely close to a drop in demand for labor by 90%. Probably a couple decades at most. General use Robots-- buy one for $50k and pay no benefits, no vacation, no salaries.
what you are describing is not free trade.
In free trade, if the pills are sold for 10 cents, then I could go there, buy 20,000 pills for 10 cents, bring them back and sell them for 4.90 profit-- or sell them for 4.40
profit at $4.50.
I'm being required to pay high prices-- but the companies that are doing that are refusing to hire me at high wages. This is going to be a *VERY* temporary situation.
*DVD regions and such are there to help reduce illegal duplication.
This gross mistake typifies your post.
Dvd regions are there so the movie companies can sell the movie in the US at a high price, in Europe at a higher or lower price, in India and China at a lower price. it has nothing to do with copy-protection / preventing copies. It's the government giving a legal monopoly to the movie companies so they can sell the movie for 2.50 and prevent people from logically, going to china- purchasing 100 copies of the movie for 2.10EU, returning to Europe and selling them in Germany for 21EU (2100EU) covering the cost of their vacation, and making about 500EU profit.
You can't sell apples on one street for $15 and 10 blocks over for $1. One of two things is going to happen. Either people are going to go for the $1 apple (and people are starting to travel to India for health care-- it's $15k vs $100k for procedures). Or, more often, some bright young lad is going to buy $1 apples, walk 10 blocks and sell them for $14. Then another bright young lass is going to buy them for $1 and sell them for $13. This iterates fairly quickly until there are no $1 apples and apples are selling for $5 everywhere.
It's called supply and demand- the invisible hand.
It doesn't apply when the police keep you from buying the apples or when the government manipulates the value of the dollar or other violations of free trade.
I agree with another poster in this thread-- generic product prices are dropping sharply in this market. Izod is $25 down from $40-- generic shirts are $10-- down from $25.
At some point, shirts will settle at a fair price.
You can't indefinitely charge the 1st world, 1st world prices while denying them employment at 1st world prices.
The fair price is 10 cents in both places.
Under real free trade, you couldn't prevent it.
Prices are not relative under real capitalism.
So right now, I compete with someone who makes 1/10th of what I do-- in part because I'm subsidizing research on his health care and his movies and entertainment.
By your logic, billionaires should pay 2 million bucks for the same shirt that you and I buy for 20 bucks.
Cable TV should cost a billionaire 100k a month.
Prices are not relative-- it's only because of gross sellouts and artificially protected regions that such *extreme* price differences are maintained.
Within the U.S. competition brings down prices rapidly-- but between the U.S. and India, it doesn't.
That's the thing--- it hasn't.
Drugs-- $5.00 here, $0.10 there .50 at the local markets-- but $2.49 full copyrighted retail).
DVD's-- $19.99 here, $2.49 there (and in reality about
Clothing-- $1 or less there--- $19.99 here.
There is *no* reason the clothes, drugs, movies, songs, etc. etc. should have that extreme of a price difference.
In a normal capitalistic society, we would be allowed to buy the 10 cent pills there and import them here and resell them for 20 cents.
We have all this dvd regionalized shit, and protected trade zones, and other restrictions on free trade.
Our declining wages would not matter so much if we really were getting the benefits of free trade.
But the wealth here is literally being pumped out of the country- and the jobs too.
I think the problem with corporations is the same as the problem with copyright.
Both were created for the public good- not for the private good.
The primary stakeholders in each has lost sight of the fact that their special privileges were created for the public good.
When it gets bad enough, those rights can be taken back.
The last code delivered by Infosys was functional... but had to be ripped back out of production.
The next bit of code didn't follow any of our published standards. It took several days to fix the obvious problems, then it got booted out of testing for a week's corrections.
They used to be a lot better back in 2003.
The biggest problem right now is that they won't say "no" to management about anything. Insanely crazy schedules-- "Sure, we can meet that". Grossly abbreviated testing... "Okay- we can mitigate that risk".
I think most of the super sharp guys are now management there. The actual coders are now getting down to low experience yes men/women who are not as clever and rush things without following standards.
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
It doesn't matter if you have the right to download it.
You don't have the right to upload it.
However, for most books and music over 28 years old, you can make a strong argument that you have an ethical basis for downloading without payment.
And any terms which request the artists life + 50 years could be violated without guilt.
Remember that it's illegal (remember lots of things were illegal that are now legal-- legality != morality)-- so don't be an idiot and rub it in the powers that be's faces.
Immoral societies have been murdering, raping, enslaving and imprisoning their members and others "legally" (and in some cases -- morally by internal standards) for thousands of years.
The latest way to enslave is to set prices so you must work 40 hours a week to get a living space and health care despite the fact that productivity is up 20x in a generation. (so we should be working 10 hours a week to have a place to live, food, and medical care).
Thanks...
The hosts file sounds sort of equivalent to adblock.
The flash and javascript sound more painful.
The flash prompts would drive me crazy- I currently get an indicator flash is there and if I want to play it, I click on it. Otherwise, I do not have to do anything.
For javascript, once I approve a page, it stays approved.
It still is annoying occasionally-- I wish it had a crowdsourced "approved" pages-- only overridden if I said to block a page. Right now everything has to be approved at least once by me-- but that's probably safe. My email is whitelisted that way.
Yes...
Stealing is bad...
That's why there are fines for theft... such as...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E0DB1430F935A1575AC0A9619C8B63
"The City Council unanimously passed a bill yesterday that would sharply increase fines for people who steal recyclable material from curbsides -- to $2,000 from $100 for a first offense, and $5,000 for each subsequent offense within a year."
Note... $2000 and $5000, not $1 million and $2 million.
This case is equivalent in that if you stole 12 soda cans, they fine you $24,000 or $60,000 instead of $2000 or $5000.
Crimes for other thefts are similar but there are different (usually lower) fines for $5 of merchandise, $125 theft and $250 theft (felony starts there-- in a ludicrous inflation non-adjusted harshly increased penalties from when felony theft laws were first passed a century ago).
If you adjust for inflation-- felony theft should probably start at about $2500 ( paperback novel when these things were passed was 50 cents-- now it is $8.50).
So even if infringement was theft (which it is not), you should have to steal 100 albums worth of material before facing felony prosecution.
This is why we have so many people in jail. So many that now we are now unable to incarcerate them all and are jailing them in their homes with remote tracking collars.
It's incredibly fascist and pathetic that our country is turning this way.
Okay.. while i wait for a reply to this (expected one by now)....
Are these things possible in Opera? I'm considering trying Opera out (the web server option has me interested).
Any "gotchas" or drawbacks I should know about Opera? I assume it plays well on a multi-brower system?
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I agree with you that the judges are more focused on their own lives than their replacement by a long shot.
I disagree on the trend. The republicans really screwed up badly. They sided very visibly with about 10% of the population over the other 90% and then drove the country into the ditch. While productivity has skyrocketed, employee pay hasn't- but executive pay has.
I voted for reagan and bush sr. I'll probably never vote republican again until they start caring about someone besides the elite.. or as Bush, jr. called them, "his base".
I occasionally have to use I.E. and I see no way to customize it to
a) ignore ads from selected addresses.
b) disable flash unless I tell it to play.
c) disable javascript unless I authorize it.
d) capture media playing through the browser
e) selectively zoom in/out text, images, text & images (speaking of which-- when are we going to be able to zoom in/out WINDOW text in windows. I can change title bars, menus, etc, but not the one font i need to change most.)
f) massively collect all files of a similar type at a location.
---
Lack of these features is frustrating on the occasions where i have to use IE.
So how can i do this in IE 8? I'm sure it will be forced on to my laptop before long since it is a vista box.
They tie to a computer, not to a person.
And in many cases, they don't even do that.
Or terrified enough.
North Korea (and several african states)
---
It is possible to keep a dictatorship your entire life despite the will of the people.
You just have to be willing to be brutal enough.
Look at which other species have fingerprints.
Is it just apes?
Do dogs/cats have individual paw prints?
Do Horses have hoof prints?
Do the tip of our nails have nailprints that would distinguish them if we looked close enough?
Do octopus suckers have fingerprints?
It could just be background noise.
They could be vestigial.
They could be an echo of the growth process since they are on the tips of our fingers and toes.
Would we find similar swirly distortions on the tips of dog tails, fish flukes?
Actually, I think inherent rights are those which there is no way to take away.
Prisoners have a right to try to escape.
People have a right to try to find (pursue) happiness.
People can say whatever they want to (you can punish them afterwards).
The right to rebel against the government (they can kill you in return of course).
Creators have an inherent right to try to stop people from copying their stuff.
People (especially poor people) have a right to take those creations (especially medicines).
If the social contract is perceived as fair, then people will respect the granted rights of others.
Society has been getting increasingly unfair since the late 1970's.
Our productivity is supposedly way up, yet it takes 2 people to run a household now.
Wow-- you really crammed "stealing" into that article [stealing] about copyright infringement as many times as possible without adding [stealing] some subliminal messages.
It's not stealing-- it's copyright infringement.
Most of the people infringing copyright couldn't afford to buy the product anyway so a lot less money is being lost than is claimed.
And they don't.
Society grants them a temporary right so they will create more which will go into the public domain.
As Corporations have started to make a lot of money off of I.P. they are changing the rules of the road to extend copyright to forever (less one day).
I've had problems with the "+" rocker controllers.
Wii is more of an entire hand motion and the pain seems to be related to raising the fingers.
It's mainly mouse-- I put my hand in a mouse shape and it instantly starts tingling.
No that would be "Swinehund" flu.
The set of humans who have fewer children in areas with higher standards of living are being outbred and supplanted by sets of humans who are not affected.
It only takes a small subset who are immune to the industrial value meme (personal pleasure in exchange for having fewer kids).
In the US it is hispanic catholics. In Europe it is Islamics.
High living standards lowering the population is like hitting bacteria with an antibiotic. It only takes 1% surviving the antibiotic and soon the entire population can ignore it. You are assuming high living standards are 100% effective at reducing population growth.
---
Don't underestimate the black plague. Huge reaches of Europe were abandoned and went back to forest.
With regard to the H1N1 or other possible super-bug proposed, we have two challenges- increasing population density. Increasing health care expense.
I could see this exploding in areas like Detroit. It doesn't take much to overwhelm the health care system and I don't think our doctors and nurses are as willing to die as those back in the 1918's were. I think they'll stop showing up to work if they are faced with something aggressive and fatal.