Boundless Reads #120: Caring, Greed & Birth Rates
Boundless Reads #120: Caring, Greed & Birth Rates
Five things worth reading this week
Greetings from Taipei. Read anything good this week?
Five Good Reads
#1 Taking Care of Each Other: This beautiful essay was the best thing I read this week and talks about our need to be cared for and care for others:
I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs.
#2 Deep Questions: Some questions to liven up the conversation (or make people run away).
#3 More = Wanting Even More: This research argues that higher class people have a stronger desire for wealth. This also may indicate why policies pushed by the upper class often fail to have the effects they imagine:
compared to people in the lower‐class group, those in the upper‐class group express a stronger desire for wealth and status.
#4 Economic Policy: Our current economic policies are changing the social dynamics of the world.
These policies of inflating asset prices are rewarding the elderly and institutions who own the bulk of assets over the young adults who are being penalized with record rents, home prices, insurance, medical costs, daycare costs, and student loans, etc.. All this is further delaying marriage and family formation and only pushing fertility rates toward the low variant. The global population is set to peak far sooner and more dramatically than the UN's current 2100'ish date.
The post is titled “How This Plays Out?!? Deceleration, Distortion, Debt-Deflation, Depopulation, Default, & Depression.” Doom and gloom gets the clicks, but some of the data they offer is eye-opening. Check out the following chart which shows how the “consumer” populations are projected to shrink:
Whats the big deal? “these (consumer) nations represent 90% of the global income, savings, and access to credit. They consume 90% of the energy and purchase 90% of the global exports”
#5 Marriage: I don’t have a take on this longform Atlantic article against marriage, but this quote jumped out:
getting married is still “the most prestigious way to live your life.”
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