Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
I've never been convinced by this demographics are destiny stuff.
After 2012 Obama reelection an autopsy found was the only way for the GOP to win was to win over more Latino voters by moderating on immigration. Guess what? Trump went further right than any previous GOP candidate and won more wwc voters than ever before whilst Clinton won a supermajority of Latino voters. She still lost.
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
Well yes, unless you earn over £100K like I did when my son was a qualifying child in which event you don't get it or have to pay it back.
It's not even £100k, it's £80k.
The way marginal taxes work in this country, particularly as a parent, between £50k and £125k is crazy. As is the universal credit taper at the other end.
Ironically there is much they can do with the universal credit taper because any changes to the taper will drag even more people into universal credit.
That's fine. Just do it. Universal income for all. 40% flat tax for all.
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
Yeah, I was surprised when we got child benefit for the third child. Of course, I then had to pay most of it back again, but still (we actually get to keep most of it now, with the new band and salary sacrifice for pension).
I think I was responsible for that photo appearing on Newsnight last night. I sent it to Bonnie Greer on Twitter a couple of days ago, and she retweeted it. It then appeared on Newsnight yesterday at the precise moment she started talking, which must be more than a coincidence.
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
Well yes, unless you earn over £100K like I did when my son was a qualifying child in which event you don't get it or have to pay it back.
It's not even £100k, it's £80k.
The way marginal taxes work in this country, particularly as a parent, between £50k and £125k is crazy. As is the universal credit taper at the other end.
Ironically there is much they can do with the universal credit taper because any changes to the taper will drag even more people into universal credit.
That's fine. Just do it. Universal income for all. 40% flat tax for all.
Sorry for going off-topic (although slightly related to the last thread discussion), but isn't a major problem simply that equality doesn't work well for romantic matches, hence rising singleness?
What I mean by this is that women have equality in the workplace. That's a good thing. Women also tend to want to marry up. The economic circumstances of a man matters way more to a woman than the economic circumstances of a woman do to a man.
But that's a problem because equality means roughly the same earning potential so lines drawn according to economic circumstance will average out to being horizontal between men and women. Hence, middle and lower income chaps find things very difficult, because the desire line of marrying up just cuts out a ton of men.
This tallies with what's been remarked upon here before, that overall frisky time is the same as ever, but guys at the top are having tons whereas men at the bottom are getting none. But on a societal level that's no way to reach a standard of stable families and most people being happily married with kids.
Anyway, that's some sleepy waffling psychological rambling, but it might have something to it.
The Taiwan article I posted in the last thread suggests a different paradigm.
https://alethios.substack.com/p/unexplored-unsaid ...Curiously, TSMC stands apart here. Their Taiwanese workforce accounts for a staggering 1.8% of births in Taiwan (and growing quickly, up from 1.4% in 2019), despite being just 0.3% of the population. After adjusting for demographic differences, I estimate10 that TSMC employees have 2.8x more children than the national average, giving a TFR of around 2.45 children per woman. This is especially noteworthy since every statistical indicator predicts lower-than-average fertility. Employees are overwhelmingly urban, highly educated, irreligious, work long hours, and have a 2:1 skew in gender ratio - all of which would predict lower fertility than the Taiwanese average...
What's TSMC?
Probably one of the most important companies youve never heard of.
They make all the most sophisticated semiconductors that run the world around you.
TSMC is an interesting company I only learnt recently it was created, owned and controlled by the Taiwanese state govt
RoC not exactly playing fair in the free market like US/UK do !!
US and eu are now spending billions trying to bring back some semiconductors for military security
I think you have a somewhat inaccurate understanding of "the free market".
The US semiconductor industry was built with much the same kind of government funding. Only in its case, via the military, and the Apollo program. TSMC was also quarter owned, at the outset, by Phillips - who provided start up finance, and the required technology licenses, in exchange for about a quarter of the company. (US companies turned them down.)
And TSMC probably wouldn't have existed in its current dominant form had Texas Instruments made Morris Chang their CEO back in the 1980s.
Yes. The American tech industry was effectively an arm of the government in the early years*. Which why all this bilge about 'picking winners' frustrates me. Sometimes you're on to a good thing and its best to keep the finance shysters from squandering it.
*Arguably even now with all the ex spies and huge gov contracts
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
But we also have an ageing population. Many of them will age into Tories
No doubt, but the evidence so far is that Millennials are not doing the traditional shift to the right as they get into their 30s and 40s.
True. Why would we when we have no property or even prospects of owning property like our parents.
And you accept that the main reason for this is that the population is 10 million higher than 25 years ago? Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s the population hardly increased at all.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I think that's a slightly extreme example. Most 46 year olds didn't look quite as old as this heavy-drinking (and probably smoking) football fan in 1975.
I was going to demur. But then I remembered Wheeltappers' and Shunters' Social Club. Have you ever seen it? I urge you to watch a bit of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jChufJu7fo This particular episode starts with Bernard Manning singing, for some reason - he looks not unlike that fella and he was 44. Now obviously everyone wasn't Bernard Manning. But the most interesting thing about WASSC (apart from what we considered entertainment in the 1970s) is the audience. People just don't look like that any more. Obviously I don't know how old the audience were, but I suspect largely the same generation as the loud football fan.
I stick to my point, for now: people in the 1970s and before looked much older before their time than we do now.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I think that's a slightly extreme example. Most 46 year olds didn't look quite as old as this heavy-drinking (and probably smoking) football fan in 1975.
Dunno, for reasons unclear to me the 1960-70s seem to have been a period of disproportionately aging badly. See footballers who should in theory be examples of youthful athleticism. More than a few Scottish players in there I'm forced to admit.
But we also have an ageing population. Many of them will age into Tories
No doubt, but the evidence so far is that Millennials are not doing the traditional shift to the right as they get into their 30s and 40s.
They also haven't got their own houses in the same way.
Coincidence?
Probably. I had a go at proving that using the data from the last few elections but failed - probably because people with mortgages also swung massively against the Tories!
Housing is a big issue, but I'm not sure how salient it is for party politics. Do people really blame the Conservative party? Do they make that direct link?
I wouldn't dismiss other things like tuition fees, climate change, the "culture war", freezing of tax thresholds, the cost of motoring for young people. The general vibe is more important than any particular topic, I'd guess. A pot of discontent.
But we also have an ageing population. Many of them will age into Tories
No doubt, but the evidence so far is that Millennials are not doing the traditional shift to the right as they get into their 30s and 40s.
True. Why would we when we have no property or even prospects of owning property like our parents.
And you accept that the main reason for this is that the population is 10 million higher than 25 years ago? Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s the population hardly increased at all.
No.
The main for reason for this is the barriers to constructing new homes.
The UK's population has grown through most of recorded history. But when the population grows you're supposed to build new houses with it, not complain that new houses will spoil your view.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Ha, me too. I may have aged better than my counterparts a generation or two back, but human knees are the same knees that they were 100 years ago. Worse, probably, because of the added weight they have to bear. Very fortunately, knee technology has improved and through medical science knees can be maintained beyond the wildest dreams of our forebears. But we are putting a lot of strain on them. My right knee had to be largely internally reconstructed after a rugby injury aged 19 - all I did was attempt to change direction while running. It still does a job but it is the part of me which most reminds me of my age.
But we also have an ageing population. Many of them will age into Tories
No doubt, but the evidence so far is that Millennials are not doing the traditional shift to the right as they get into their 30s and 40s.
They also haven't got their own houses in the same way.
Coincidence?
Probably. I had a go at proving that using the data from the last few elections but failed - probably because people with mortgages also swung massively against the Tories!
Housing is a big issue, but I'm not sure how salient it is for party politics. Do people really blame the Conservative party? Do they make that direct link?
I wouldn't dismiss other things like tuition fees, climate change, the "culture war", freezing of tax thresholds, the cost of motoring for young people. The general vibe is more important than any particular topic, I'd guess. A pot of discontent.
Housing is by far the biggest data point.
If people are paying rent they are impoverished compared to those who are not, on the same income.
Especially with our current twisted economic system where a young graduate pays a higher rate of tax, while renting, than a retired person on the same income with no mortgage pays.
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
Give over, its over.
There's only one party now with a doddery, demented old fool on the ticket - and its not the donkey.
Yup the Democrats managed to get rid of their tending-towards-unfit candidate, whereas the Republicans are in full-on personality cult with their totally unfit for any kind of office candidate. That shows a big difference between the two parties. Leon struggles with this because he loves Trump. @Leon what was it that first attracted you to racist sexist narcissistic man-baby Donald Trump?
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Relying on the elderly and economically active for most of their vote is unhealthy for the country and our politics, but wasn't necessarily strategically dumb, up until the point where - somewhere between Brexit, Johnson's behaviour, f*** business, the housing crisis, and governmental incompetence - middle aged people stopped becoming Tories as they got older, leaving them with a core vote mostly 70+.
If it takes two elections to get back into power, a third of their current voters will be dead by then, and likely over half of the members who are about to choose the leader to take on the task.
The challenge for the LibDems is to bed in as the party of the settled middle classes in the Home Counties, hoping that the Tories stick with their anti-business, anti-Europe, anti-BBC, anti-judges, anti-universities and anti-modernity nonsense for as long as possible.
The Tories need to become the the party of aspiration, the party of growth and the party of business to construct a winning coalition.
That would squeeze out the Lib Dems in the south as people vote for an alternative government. And potentially rediscover their appeal in the red wall.
Labour will mess up eventually. And the above is a formula that offers a positive economic alternative to working people when they do.
'Ignore the boomers' as a strategy will take a lot of getting used to, but I think it's necessary if they want to rebuild a sustainable coalition of voters.
But we also have an ageing population. Many of them will age into Tories
No doubt, but the evidence so far is that Millennials are not doing the traditional shift to the right as they get into their 30s and 40s.
They also haven't got their own houses in the same way.
Coincidence?
Probably. I had a go at proving that using the data from the last few elections but failed - probably because people with mortgages also swung massively against the Tories!
Housing is a big issue, but I'm not sure how salient it is for party politics. Do people really blame the Conservative party? Do they make that direct link?
I wouldn't dismiss other things like tuition fees, climate change, the "culture war", freezing of tax thresholds, the cost of motoring for young people. The general vibe is more important than any particular topic, I'd guess. A pot of discontent.
Housing is by far the biggest data point.
If people are paying rent they are impoverished compared to those who are not, on the same income.
Especially with our current twisted economic system where a young graduate pays a higher rate of tax, while renting, than a retired person on the same income with no mortgage pays.
I don't disagree. I just couldn't nail that down using the results of the election.
On pretty much every issue conceivable, including housing, the Conservatives are on the wrong side of Millennials.
The one other issue is the NHS, which harms their vote for older people. A short term strategy would focus on health, a long term one on home ownership and taxes.*
* Though people are keener on better public services than lower taxes at the moment..
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Yes, same here.
PB has a knee problem! hah
i actively protect my knees now. I won't do shit that might age them even quicker, like jogging. (if I could) Or squash. Or anything impacting
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Fair point regarding 25 years; the header is only looking ahead 5 years though.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Am I the only person who thinks the Loyd Grossman pre-2003 version of Masterchef was better than the post-2003 one?
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I think that's a slightly extreme example. Most 46 year olds didn't look quite as old as this heavy-drinking (and probably smoking) football fan in 1975.
Dunno, for reasons unclear to me the 1960-70s seem to have been a period of disproportionately aging badly. See footballers who should in theory be examples of youthful athleticism. More than a few Scottish players in there I'm forced to admit.
People in their mid forties in 1975 were born in 1930. A huge proportion of them would have been undernourished in infancy. Then traumatised in their adolescence. Then started working under rationing. It's a wonder they looked so youthful.
Lead authors on the deep ocean oxygen paper are from The Scottish Association for Marine Science. The work was (slightly ironically) part funded by ocean mining companies - whose proposals it might hinder somewhat.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Ha, me too. I may have aged better than my counterparts a generation or two back, but human knees are the same knees that they were 100 years ago. Worse, probably, because of the added weight they have to bear. Very fortunately, knee technology has improved and through medical science knees can be maintained beyond the wildest dreams of our forebears. But we are putting a lot of strain on them. My right knee had to be largely internally reconstructed after a rugby injury aged 19 - all I did was attempt to change direction while running. It still does a job but it is the part of me which most reminds me of my age.
My knees actually making clicking noises. It's not a great sound, TBH
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
But we also have an ageing population. Many of them will age into Tories
No doubt, but the evidence so far is that Millennials are not doing the traditional shift to the right as they get into their 30s and 40s.
They also haven't got their own houses in the same way.
Coincidence?
Probably. I had a go at proving that using the data from the last few elections but failed - probably because people with mortgages also swung massively against the Tories!
Housing is a big issue, but I'm not sure how salient it is for party politics. Do people really blame the Conservative party? Do they make that direct link?
I wouldn't dismiss other things like tuition fees, climate change, the "culture war", freezing of tax thresholds, the cost of motoring for young people. The general vibe is more important than any particular topic, I'd guess. A pot of discontent.
Housing is by far the biggest data point.
If people are paying rent they are impoverished compared to those who are not, on the same income.
Especially with our current twisted economic system where a young graduate pays a higher rate of tax, while renting, than a retired person on the same income with no mortgage pays.
The direct link between the Tory party and home ownership is because home owners tend to move towards the Tory party because they have assets they wish to protect.
If people never get the chance to own any assets because they are spending a lot of money to rent a house from someone else they will trend towards parties other than the Tory party...
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Fair point regarding 25 years; the header is only looking ahead 5 years though.
Indeed, but note I also expect change to ACCELERATE
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Yes, same here.
PB has a knee problem! hah
i actively protect my knees now. I won't do shit that might age them even quicker, like jogging. (if I could) Or squash. Or anything impacting
Look after your knees and your teeth, kids
Ah... So this is why people of a certain age were so against the taking the knee movement
Relying on the elderly and economically active for most of their vote is unhealthy for the country and our politics, but wasn't necessarily strategically dumb, up until the point where - somewhere between Brexit, Johnson's behaviour, f*** business, the housing crisis, and governmental incompetence - middle aged people stopped becoming Tories as they got older, leaving them with a core vote mostly 70+.
If it takes two elections to get back into power, a third of their current voters will be dead by then, and likely over half of the members who are about to choose the leader to take on the task.
The challenge for the LibDems is to bed in as the party of the settled middle classes in the Home Counties, hoping that the Tories stick with their anti-business, anti-Europe, anti-BBC, anti-judges, anti-universities and anti-modernity nonsense for as long as possible.
The Tories need to become the the party of aspiration, the party of growth and the party of business to construct a winning coalition.
That would squeeze out the Lib Dems in the south as people vote for an alternative government. And potentially rediscover their appeal in the red wall.
Labour will mess up eventually. And the above is a formula that offers a positive economic alternative to working people when they do.
'Ignore the boomers' as a strategy will take a lot of getting used to, but I think it's necessary if they want to rebuild a sustainable coalition of voters.
Why should anyone be 'ignored'? A rising tide lifts all ships, and everyone, including the retired, should share the fruits of a growing economy and an efficient, effective state. This nonsense about 'baby boomers with houses' is pure divide and rule. The problem is a state that is out of control, Governments that range from ineffectual to positively malign, and an economy that is deeply stagnant and being picked off bit by bit by foreign competition. These are major structural issues - they won't be solved by rinsing the oldies.
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
But this is irrelevant to the question of child poverty. Universal Credit exists to ensure people get enough to eat. More mouths need more food. Child Benefit is given to all children and is not means tested. It is the relatively small amount of £28 a week. The minimum requirement to make ends meet as assessed by UC is £330 or £288 per child per month after child benefit. This is withheld by the cap from the second child.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
That's a fair point, tho I think that is specific to culture and that is more about culture stagnating in the west, after a period of dramatic improvement, innovation and energy after WW2
Inside those similar-seeming homes the people are living entirely different lives to the lives led by their parents. They live through their screens, and in those screens they speak new languages and have strange new thoughts. See the terrifying stats on how much PERSONAL human interaction kids do. They don't do it any more. They do it via screens
But that's not visible if you stare at a suburban street
My sense is that this invisible but enormous change will soon become visible
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Are knees fixable now? I do hope so
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Are knees fixable now? I do hope so
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
DYOR but I believe knee replacement has a very good success rate now.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Diet and exercise
Even in professional sport that has been massive changes in the levels of training and behaviour.
And as others have pointed out up thread - middle age used to be, time to give up and sit on park benches.
So, my wife is still technically in Queen's Med A&E , coming up for 48 hours (albeit now in the Urgent Treatment Unit in a cubicle). There is no bed available on a ward for her and they also want to keep her away from genpop. The doctor thinks it is bacterial meningitis and they started treatment (steroids/painkillers/antibiotics via a drip) late on Sunday night after blood tests and she's been hooked up ever since and to be fair, she's now really very perky. Just around the corner is the madhouse that is A&E proper. As I left last night, the place was full, 3 coppers had a bloke in handcuffs on the floor while his hangers on were recording it on their phones. The staff said it was quieter than usual!
Oh dear that all sounds rather horrible. Best wishes to Mrs Firestopper on a full recovery.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
The music has got worse ! Joking aside I think you have a valid point -
Any 25 year period in the 20th century. Was life in 1225 markedly different to life in 1250 ? The head honcho of the latest crusade to Jerusalem is French rather than of Sicilian stock but farming methods haven't changed much in that time.
The 20th century was probably the time of greatest change in human history - the norm is for it to be much slower so we're probably regressing to the mean now - though I think it'll still be quicker than change was prior to the 20th century. The changes in the previous 25 years, rise of the smartphone and trillion dollar corporations to name a couple are quite minor compared to almost any 25 year period of the 20th century as you point out.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Fair point regarding 25 years; the header is only looking ahead 5 years though.
Indeed, but note I also expect change to ACCELERATE
The rate of technological change stopped accelerating in 1969. We're still in a period of very rapid change of course but it's getting a bit slower every year now. And that's the truth.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Are knees fixable now? I do hope so
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
DYOR but I believe knee replacement has a very good success rate now.
My father in law had a knee replacement in 2022. Few weeks of recuperation, plenty of physio and he was back to walking beaches and small hills within a few months (something that had been severely curtailed in the preceding 2 years due to the knee troubles - even when permitted by Covid rules).
He also thought it was going to be a bit of a horror show compared to his two hip replacements, but it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as feared.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Are knees fixable now? I do hope so
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
DYOR but I believe knee replacement has a very good success rate now.
Though since the Peace Process, Northern Ireland has dropped down the rankings of joint replacement.
Time was, when international sports people would got there, for the world beating knee replacement skills.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Are knees fixable now? I do hope so
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
DYOR but I believe knee replacement has a very good success rate now.
Are they like hip replacements, where the eventual outcome depends significantly on how much effort you put in after the surgery?
If I were in the Trump camp I'd be slightly concerned that the lead over Harris is only 2% before the campaign has really started. She doesn't seem to be as unpopular as we've been led to believe.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Fair point regarding 25 years; the header is only looking ahead 5 years though.
Indeed, but note I also expect change to ACCELERATE
The rate of technological change stopped accelerating in 1969. We're still in a period of very rapid change of course but it's getting a bit slower every year now. And that's the truth.
If you want to pinpoint an exact date, 20th July 1969 is probably it.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Are knees fixable now? I do hope so
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
DYOR but I believe knee replacement has a very good success rate now.
Are they like hip replacements, where the eventual outcome depends significantly on how much effort you put in after the surgery?
Keep moving!
I believe so - my 92 y.o. father-in-law had one of his knees done last year and followed the post op physio to the letter, with good results.
Tbf, he's still not going to run a marathon but gets about with no pain now which is a big plus.
F1: considering McLaren for the title at 2.06 on Betfair. backed them at 4.1 on Ladbrokes.
Also, turns out I backed Norris at 29 for the title. No idea if I tipped that or not. If so, can be laid at 6.6, or Verstappen backed at 1.24 (Betfair) but I might just let it ride.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Fair point regarding 25 years; the header is only looking ahead 5 years though.
Indeed, but note I also expect change to ACCELERATE
The rate of technological change stopped accelerating in 1969. We're still in a period of very rapid change of course but it's getting a bit slower every year now. And that's the truth.
If you want to pinpoint an exact date, 20th July 1969 is probably it.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Fair point regarding 25 years; the header is only looking ahead 5 years though.
Indeed, but note I also expect change to ACCELERATE
The rate of technological change stopped accelerating in 1969. We're still in a period of very rapid change of course but it's getting a bit slower every year now. And that's the truth.
If you want to pinpoint an exact date, 20th July 1969 is probably it.
15th November 1969 is when colour TV started on BBC1 and ITV.
Radical preacher Anjem Choudary has been found guilty under UK terror laws of directing the banned group Al-Muhajiroun (ALM) and encouraging support for it through online meetings. Choudary was convicted on Tuesday of taking a "caretaker role" in ALM after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court.
If I were in the Trump camp I'd be slightly concerned that the lead over Harris is only 2% before the campaign has really started. She doesn't seem to be as unpopular as we've been led to believe.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Luckily, that's fixable now.
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors: - Long-term smoking. - Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection. - Poorer air quality.
Are knees fixable now? I do hope so
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
Some good, too. It depends how bad the damage. If it's just cartilage repair, then it can be pretty successful.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
If I were in the Trump camp I'd be slightly concerned that the lead over Harris is only 2% before the campaign has really started. She doesn't seem to be as unpopular as we've been led to believe.
I suspect, as I’ve said before, that women, especially younger women, are going to be both supportive and motivated to vote. And we must recall that the President isn’t elected by a simple majority vote. It’s more complicated.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Yes, same here.
PB has a knee problem! hah
i actively protect my knees now. I won't do shit that might age them even quicker, like jogging. (if I could) Or squash. Or anything impacting
Look after your knees and your teeth, kids
I think a certain amount of "impacting" can trigger bone-strengthening and put off osteoporosis. As in most things, moderation.
Above all, keep active.
BTW - I chanced to see a bit of daytime TV yesterday. The 85-year old "Green Goddess" of 80's fame came on to be interviewed. Extremely well-preserved and while no longer svelte, she was still able to put the presenters through their paces. It can be done.
If I were in the Trump camp I'd be slightly concerned that the lead over Harris is only 2% before the campaign has really started. She doesn't seem to be as unpopular as we've been led to believe.
I suspect, as I’ve said before, that women, especially younger women, are going to be both supportive and motivated to vote. And we must recall that the President isn’t elected by a simple majority vote. It’s more complicated.
Harris' home state being California probably means the electoral college is more tilted toward Trump than ever. Still 2% behind isn't bad but it's just one poll.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
That's true - I'm thinking more of what it actually looks like. A sitcom from 2024 doesn't look that much different to a sitcom from 2000. A sitcom from 2000 looks quite different from a sitcom from 1975. But the tech is certainly different. Technologically different but culturally the same.
Relying on the elderly and economically active for most of their vote is unhealthy for the country and our politics, but wasn't necessarily strategically dumb, up until the point where - somewhere between Brexit, Johnson's behaviour, f*** business, the housing crisis, and governmental incompetence - middle aged people stopped becoming Tories as they got older, leaving them with a core vote mostly 70+.
If it takes two elections to get back into power, a third of their current voters will be dead by then, and likely over half of the members who are about to choose the leader to take on the task.
The challenge for the LibDems is to bed in as the party of the settled middle classes in the Home Counties, hoping that the Tories stick with their anti-business, anti-Europe, anti-BBC, anti-judges, anti-universities and anti-modernity nonsense for as long as possible.
The Tories need to become the the party of aspiration, the party of growth and the party of business to construct a winning coalition.
That would squeeze out the Lib Dems in the south as people vote for an alternative government. And potentially rediscover their appeal in the red wall.
Labour will mess up eventually. And the above is a formula that offers a positive economic alternative to working people when they do.
'Ignore the boomers' as a strategy will take a lot of getting used to, but I think it's necessary if they want to rebuild a sustainable coalition of voters.
Getting noticed while being sensible in opposition is always an ask - sensible oppositions usually have to wait for a government to seriously f**k up, first. Meanwhile they have a membership and activist base sh****g itself about Farage. A combination that will surely push them into being less than sensible, with any luck.
Half a million households cancelled their licence fee last year as the BBC struggled to connect with younger audiences drifting away to Netflix and YouTube.
The stark extent of the BBC’s challenges are set out in the corporation’s annual report, which shows the total number of British households paying the £169.50 licence fee fell to 23.9 million, suggesting a growing number of people feel able to go without BBC services.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Fair point regarding 25 years; the header is only looking ahead 5 years though.
Indeed, but note I also expect change to ACCELERATE
The rate of technological change stopped accelerating in 1969. We're still in a period of very rapid change of course but it's getting a bit slower every year now. And that's the truth.
If you want to pinpoint an exact date, 20th July 1969 is probably it.
15th November 1969 is when colour TV started on BBC1 and ITV.
They used tech to land on the moon in those days. Now they use even more powerful computers for dick/cat pics (delete as preferred), and for screaming vulgar abuse at strangers.
At least some of us are still interested in the bloody rockets. Even if they look a lot better than they did in 1969.
If I were in the Trump camp I'd be slightly concerned that the lead over Harris is only 2% before the campaign has really started. She doesn't seem to be as unpopular as we've been led to believe.
It could go either way I think. Which suggests Trump is overvalued and Harris undervalued. I suspect the values reflect that Trump is a known quantity while Harris largely isn't, despite having been VP for the past four years.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
That's true - I'm thinking more of what it actually looks like. A sitcom from 2024 doesn't look that much different to a sitcom from 2000. A sitcom from 2000 looks quite different from a sitcom from 1975. But the tech is certainly different. Technologically different but culturally the same.
Attitudes towards gay people has changed markedly for the better in the past 25 years.
I'm still failing to understand why Gary Lineker gets paid so much compared to many who have a higher (and arguably more important) workload.
He really doesn't seem that outstanding when compared to other sports/football presenters.
Is this just that he doesn't have most of his pay off-book to service companies?
Nope - he just has a very good agent and I suspect there are clauses within the Premier League highlight deal that results in certain presenters being required and so are paid well.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
That's true - I'm thinking more of what it actually looks like. A sitcom from 2024 doesn't look that much different to a sitcom from 2000. A sitcom from 2000 looks quite different from a sitcom from 1975. But the tech is certainly different. Technologically different but culturally the same.
Depends what you watch. Kdrama pre and post about 2012 is like night and day in terms of sophistication of script, clothing, cinematography etc.
Relying on the elderly and economically active for most of their vote is unhealthy for the country and our politics, but wasn't necessarily strategically dumb, up until the point where - somewhere between Brexit, Johnson's behaviour, f*** business, the housing crisis, and governmental incompetence - middle aged people stopped becoming Tories as they got older, leaving them with a core vote mostly 70+.
If it takes two elections to get back into power, a third of their current voters will be dead by then, and likely over half of the members who are about to choose the leader to take on the task.
The challenge for the LibDems is to bed in as the party of the settled middle classes in the Home Counties, hoping that the Tories stick with their anti-business, anti-Europe, anti-BBC, anti-judges, anti-universities and anti-modernity nonsense for as long as possible.
The Tories need to become the the party of aspiration, the party of growth and the party of business to construct a winning coalition.
That would squeeze out the Lib Dems in the south as people vote for an alternative government. And potentially rediscover their appeal in the red wall.
Labour will mess up eventually. And the above is a formula that offers a positive economic alternative to working people when they do.
'Ignore the boomers' as a strategy will take a lot of getting used to, but I think it's necessary if they want to rebuild a sustainable coalition of voters.
Getting noticed while being sensible in opposition is always an ask - sensible oppositions usually have to wait for a government to seriously f**k up, first. Meanwhile they have a membership and activist base sh****g itself about Farage. A combination that will surely push them into being less than sensible, with any luck.
Keeping my fingers crossed for Kemi (who undoubtedly from your perspective would be "less than sensible" at the least - but I really want a computer scientist in charge of govt to see what happens)
Am eligible to vote so will do so, either for her or if unavailable then to keep Jenrick/Braverman out... and then resign membership cause why would I want to fund Tories longer than strictly necessary...
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
That's a fair point, tho I think that is specific to culture and that is more about culture stagnating in the west, after a period of dramatic improvement, innovation and energy after WW2
Inside those similar-seeming homes the people are living entirely different lives to the lives led by their parents. They live through their screens, and in those screens they speak new languages and have strange new thoughts. See the terrifying stats on how much PERSONAL human interaction kids do. They don't do it any more. They do it via screens
But that's not visible if you stare at a suburban street
My sense is that this invisible but enormous change will soon become visible
The stats on personal interaction are certainly alarming. But while I don't want to trump the evidence with anecdata, it doesn't necessarily chime with my personal experience. My oldest two kids (14 and 12) have childhoods which look surprisingly recognisable to someone who grew up in the 80s. They basically like nothing more than hanging around in person with friends. They celebrated the end of terms by hanging around in a field and mooching around the Trafford Centre respectively. They like sport and clubs and outdoor activity. They have just got back from the gym. My youngest probably has a lot less interaction with peers than her counterparts 30 years ago. Primary school age kids get a lot less freedom; they don't just go and knock on for a friend. That used to make me sad. But give it a couple of years; she'll basically be organising her own social life like her sisters do. I can't deny that they consume TV in a different and more private way. There's little we watch as a family. But we enjoy it when we do.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
I usually cite my grandfather in this context, who was born in 1885 into an era of horses and carts (or shanks's pony, in his case) but lived to watch men walk on the moon. He drove steam locomotives on the old GWR, which to modern eyes seems as antiquated as Gray's weary ploughman but in its day was at the cutting edge of technology. He could bore for Britain on the superiority of Nigel Gresley over George Jackson Churchward and had a collection of magazines with blueprints of piston heads in support of any argument. He lived on the edge of a railway cutting and after he retired his former colleagues would toot their whistles as they passed. The demise of steam and the dreary fog horn of the DMUs that replaced them was a bitter blow in his later years. The moral of this story is that change is great when you're young and believe you own it, not so great when you're old and it owns you.
If I were in the Trump camp I'd be slightly concerned that the lead over Harris is only 2% before the campaign has really started. She doesn't seem to be as unpopular as we've been led to believe.
It could go either way I think. Which suggests Trump is overvalued and Harris undervalued. I suspect the values reflect that Trump is a known quantity while Harris largely isn't, despite having been VP for the past four years.
One thing about the Biden announcement is that it has totally blocked the momentum that the Trump campaign was garnering as a result of shooting/convention/Vance. It looked for a bit as if it could have been runaway for the Reps and irrecoverable. But no longer.
It's all now about Kamala, her Veep-choice, and the forthcoming Dem convention. Quite a turnaround.
Her big problem is the WWC. The one thing about Biden, is that he would not have looked out-of-place having a beer with ordinary working Americans. This cannot remotely be said of Harris. Her VP choice needs to address that.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
I usually cite my grandfather in this context, who was born in 1885 into an era of horses and carts (or shanks's pony, in his case) but lived to watch men walk on the moon. He drove steam locomotives on the old GWR, which to modern eyes seems as antiquated as Gray's weary ploughman but in its day was at the cutting edge of technology. He could bore for Britain on the superiority of Nigel Gresley over George Jackson Churchward and had a collection of magazines with blueprints of piston heads in support of any argument. He lived on the edge of a railway cutting and after he retired his former colleagues would toot their whistles as they passed. The demise of steam and the dreary fog horn of the DMUs that replaced them was a bitter blow in his later years. The moral of this story is that change is great when you're young and believe you own it, not so great when you're old and it owns you.
If I were in the Trump camp I'd be slightly concerned that the lead over Harris is only 2% before the campaign has really started. She doesn't seem to be as unpopular as we've been led to believe.
It could go either way I think. Which suggests Trump is overvalued and Harris undervalued. I suspect the values reflect that Trump is a known quantity while Harris largely isn't, despite having been VP for the past four years.
One thing about the Biden announcement is that it has totally blocked the momentum that the Trump campaign was garnering as a result of shooting/convention/Vance. It looked for a bit as if it could have been runaway for the Reps and irrecoverable. But no longer.
It's all now about Kamala, her Veep-choice, and the forthcoming Dem convention. Quite a turnaround.
Her big problem is the WWC. The one thing about Biden, is that he would not have looked out-of-place having a beer with ordinary working Americans. This cannot remotely be said of Harris. Her VP choice needs to address that.
She could go for Biden as VP. A bit like Putin and Medvedev back in the day.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I don't know if I look younger than that guy, but I definitely look healthier
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
Yes, same here.
PB has a knee problem! hah
i actively protect my knees now. I won't do shit that might age them even quicker, like jogging. (if I could) Or squash. Or anything impacting
Look after your knees and your teeth, kids
I think a certain amount of "impacting" can trigger bone-strengthening and put off osteoporosis. As in most things, moderation.
Above all, keep active.
BTW - I chanced to see a bit of daytime TV yesterday. The 85-year old "Green Goddess" of 80's fame came on to be interviewed. Extremely well-preserved and while no longer svelte, she was still able to put the presenters through their paces. It can be done.
Also, I can heartily recommend what the surgeon can achieve nowadays. I've heard many more good experiences than bad. I have had knee surgery twice and both times it has been transformational. My mother had a knee replacement at the age of 70 and it has also been transformational; she walks miles now. I fully recommend @Leon to find a knee specialist and consult. You don't have to live in pain or discomfort. (I'd recommend one directly, but he's in Manchester which I suspect is a bit outside your orbit.)
Actually, what you might do is find a physio first to see if there are non-surgical solutions. But if there are not then a physio will likely be able to recommend a surgeon.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
That's true - I'm thinking more of what it actually looks like. A sitcom from 2024 doesn't look that much different to a sitcom from 2000. A sitcom from 2000 looks quite different from a sitcom from 1975. But the tech is certainly different. Technologically different but culturally the same.
Attitudes towards gay people has changed markedly for the better in the past 25 years.
Really? I don't recall 2000 being particularly homophobic. The last 40 years, certainly. But I'd say most of the change in attitudes was 1985-2000. Still, not a gay person so what do I know.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
That's true - I'm thinking more of what it actually looks like. A sitcom from 2024 doesn't look that much different to a sitcom from 2000. A sitcom from 2000 looks quite different from a sitcom from 1975. But the tech is certainly different. Technologically different but culturally the same.
Attitudes towards gay people has changed markedly for the better in the past 25 years.
Really? I don't recall 2000 being particularly homophobic. The last 40 years, certainly. But I'd say most of the change in attitudes was 1985-2000. Still, not a gay person so what do I know.
There was a big change for the better from 1985 to 2000 but its improved much better since.
In 2000 it was considered preposterous to suggest gay people could marry the person they love. And people still (though increasingly rarely) used f*g etc as an insult.
It was only just becoming OK to have people out of the closet. TV shows including gay characters was newsworthy.
Worth noting on Friends as a comparison point. While the comedy has held up well as a whole, some of the LGBT jokes in particular are rather cringe nowadays - and that was modern for its time in even having LGBT characters in it, but they were more often than not the butt of a joke.
ON topic, the thesis of the threader is predicated on Things Staying Basically the Same
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
Right, I'm quibbling for the sake of it here - but I would argue that it is shocking how little things have changed since 2000. I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today. Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
Not commenting on the others, but TV and film have changed immensely in that period. Not only have all people got digital TV with many more channels compared with 2000, but the way it is consumed has gone through a revolution. No longer are there "water cooler" moments. We watch TV on catch up, recordings, and interactive online services. Many films are made for Amazon and Netflix with at most a week or so in the cinemas. Aside from sport, younger people including children barely watch linear TV.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
That's true - I'm thinking more of what it actually looks like. A sitcom from 2024 doesn't look that much different to a sitcom from 2000. A sitcom from 2000 looks quite different from a sitcom from 1975. But the tech is certainly different. Technologically different but culturally the same.
Attitudes towards gay people has changed markedly for the better in the past 25 years.
Really? I don't recall 2000 being particularly homophobic. The last 40 years, certainly. But I'd say most of the change in attitudes was 1985-2000. Still, not a gay person so what do I know.
You may be right, my memory might be deceiving me.
Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland are on trial at Southwark Crown Court this week after throwing a can of soup over Van Gogh's Sunflowers in 2022. The judge is Judge Hehir, who sentenced the "Whole Truth Five" to 4-5 years in prison last week.
Phoebe has been repeatedly done for her activities already.
Comments
Because you're right. With the very notable exception of increased weight and obesity, people are generally fitter (giving up smoking is perhaps responsible for people being fitter AND fatter)
My Dad basically gave up serious physical exercise about age 40-45, and it showed. I hike, swim, scuba, ride horses, and drag my luggage around the world many years after that. Ins'allah that continues! And likewise for you
One thing that has gone, tho, is my knees. Think I fucked them up doing mad things in my youth, like dancing on Ecstasy and falling - knee first - onto hard concrete. I can walk 15 miles quite easily, but I can't run more than 100 yards. Hurts my knees
After 2012 Obama reelection an autopsy found was the only way for the GOP to win was to win over more Latino voters by moderating on immigration. Guess what? Trump went further right than any previous GOP candidate and won more wwc voters than ever before whilst Clinton won a supermajority of Latino voters. She still lost.
(Adjust figures to add up)
Coincidence?
*Arguably even now with all the ex spies and huge gov contracts
Rachel Reeves
@RachelReevesMP
The Tories signed away billions of pounds to Covid fraud and waste.
That money belongs in our public services - and we want it back.
Will any former ministers be arrested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jChufJu7fo
This particular episode starts with Bernard Manning singing, for some reason - he looks not unlike that fella and he was 44.
Now obviously everyone wasn't Bernard Manning. But the most interesting thing about WASSC (apart from what we considered entertainment in the 1970s) is the audience. People just don't look like that any more. Obviously I don't know how old the audience were, but I suspect largely the same generation as the loud football fan.
I stick to my point, for now: people in the 1970s and before looked much older before their time than we do now.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-11670789/Can-guess-age-footballers-Twitter-account-reveals-throwback-snaps-players.html
Housing is a big issue, but I'm not sure how salient it is for party politics. Do people really blame the Conservative party? Do they make that direct link?
I wouldn't dismiss other things like tuition fees, climate change, the "culture war", freezing of tax thresholds, the cost of motoring for young people. The general vibe is more important than any particular topic, I'd guess. A pot of discontent.
The main for reason for this is the barriers to constructing new homes.
The UK's population has grown through most of recorded history. But when the population grows you're supposed to build new houses with it, not complain that new houses will spoil your view.
If people are paying rent they are impoverished compared to those who are not, on the same income.
Especially with our current twisted economic system where a young graduate pays a higher rate of tax, while renting, than a retired person on the same income with no mortgage pays.
That is almost certainly not going to happen. Consider how the world has changed in the quarter century since 2000. From 9/11 to the smartphone to social media and the pandemic. The rise of China. The rapid DECLINE in birthrates. The return of the red kite. Masterchef
About the only thing that stayed entirely the same in that time is Gareth Southgate being a loser
Now extrapolate forward another quarter century. Change will probably accelerate (it usually does). The young people in the threader might not own their homes - not because of price rises - but because they have become geloid electro-blobs living in deep undersea vats watching on 5D screens as Gareth Southgate loses
Will these people be "Tories"? Green? A kind of humanoid amphibian?
My guess is today's political terms will be laughably dated, irrelevant and arcane, it will be like us looking back to the politics of the 14th century to see if the Lib Dems benefited from the Black Death
That would squeeze out the Lib Dems in the south as people vote for an alternative government. And potentially rediscover their appeal in the red wall.
Labour will mess up eventually. And the above is a formula that offers a positive economic alternative to working people when they do.
'Ignore the boomers' as a strategy will take a lot of getting used to, but I think it's necessary if they want to rebuild a sustainable coalition of voters.
On pretty much every issue conceivable, including housing, the Conservatives are on the wrong side of Millennials.
The one other issue is the NHS, which harms their vote for older people. A short term strategy would focus on health, a long term one on home ownership and taxes.*
* Though people are keener on better public services than lower taxes at the moment..
i actively protect my knees now. I won't do shit that might age them even quicker, like jogging. (if I could) Or squash. Or anything impacting
Look after your knees and your teeth, kids
A huge proportion of them would have been undernourished in infancy. Then traumatised in their adolescence. Then started working under rationing.
It's a wonder they looked so youthful.
The work was (slightly ironically) part funded by ocean mining companies - whose proposals it might hinder somewhat.
Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8
I look out at my suburban street, and it could be any time in the past 25 years. Culturally, we have stood still. Clothes, cars, pop music, film, television - yes, they've changed a bit, but not that much. Imagine travelling back in time to 1999 and stepping outside and having a wander about; turn the radio on; watch a bit of telly. A bit of an 'oh, that's different', but not much. Now imagine being in 1999 and time travelling back to 1974; or being in 1974 and travelling back to 1949; or being in 1949 and travelling back to 1924. And so on. If they tried to make Life on Mars now, it wouldn't work, because 25 years ago is so unremarkably different to today.
Yes, tech has changed. Geopolitics has changed. But culture has changed remarkably little compared to any previous 25 year period.
If people never get the chance to own any assets because they are spending a lot of money to rent a house from someone else they will trend towards parties other than the Tory party...
Trump 48.2%
Harris 46.2%
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-harris
Trump 1.63
Harris 2.86
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.176878927
Popular vote winner
Harris 1.78
Trump 2.7
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.178165812
Re people looking older in past, I reckon there were three big factors:
- Long-term smoking.
- Working or at least spending more time outside without sun protection.
- Poorer air quality.
Inside those similar-seeming homes the people are living entirely different lives to the lives led by their parents. They live through their screens, and in those screens they speak new languages and have strange new thoughts. See the terrifying stats on how much PERSONAL human interaction kids do. They don't do it any more. They do it via screens
But that's not visible if you stare at a suburban street
My sense is that this invisible but enormous change will soon become visible
I've only ever heard horror stories from people who had knee surgery or knee replacement or whatever it is
Even in professional sport that has been massive changes in the levels of training and behaviour.
And as others have pointed out up thread - middle age used to be, time to give up and sit on park benches.
Any 25 year period in the 20th century. Was life in 1225 markedly different to life in 1250 ? The head honcho of the latest crusade to Jerusalem is French rather than of Sicilian stock but farming methods haven't changed much in that time.
The 20th century was probably the time of greatest change in human history - the norm is for it to be much slower so we're probably regressing to the mean now - though I think it'll still be quicker than change was prior to the 20th century. The changes in the previous 25 years, rise of the smartphone and trillion dollar corporations to name a couple are quite minor compared to almost any 25 year period of the 20th century as you point out.
He also thought it was going to be a bit of a horror show compared to his two hip replacements, but it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as feared.
The odds should now really be evens, I suspect. It's a coin toss.
Time was, when international sports people would got there, for the world beating knee replacement skills.
Keep moving!
Tbf, he's still not going to run a marathon but gets about with no pain now which is a big plus.
IANAE though.
Also, turns out I backed Norris at 29 for the title. No idea if I tipped that or not. If so, can be laid at 6.6, or Verstappen backed at 1.24 (Betfair) but I might just let it ride.
Huw Edwards' BBC pay increased by £40,000 last year
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4ng8glnljyo
https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history-colour-tv-uk
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx72w0l9vjdo
It depends how bad the damage. If it's just cartilage repair, then it can be pretty successful.
Per OFCOM a couple of years ago, people aged 16-24 watch a third of the linear TV the equivalent generation watched ten years earlier, and 90% of that generation "head straight to streaming, on-demand and social video services" when looking for what to watch. They tend to watch on phones, computers, and the like rather than TVs.
And we must recall that the President isn’t elected by a simple majority vote. It’s more complicated.
Above all, keep active.
BTW - I chanced to see a bit of daytime TV yesterday. The 85-year old "Green Goddess" of 80's fame came on to be interviewed. Extremely well-preserved and while no longer svelte, she was still able to put the presenters through their paces. It can be done.
But the tech is certainly different. Technologically different but culturally the same.
The stark extent of the BBC’s challenges are set out in the corporation’s annual report, which shows the total number of British households paying the £169.50 licence fee fell to 23.9 million, suggesting a growing number of people feel able to go without BBC services.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/jul/23/half-million-households-cancelled-bbc-licence-fee-last-year
At least some of us are still interested in the bloody rockets. Even if they look a lot better than they did in 1969.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx1iluQsJdE
I'm still failing to understand why Gary Lineker gets paid so much compared to many who have a higher (and arguably more important) workload.
He really doesn't seem that outstanding when compared to other sports/football presenters.
Is this just that he doesn't have most of his pay off-book to service companies?
James O’Brien is on a week-long break from presenting LBC and he has a surprising stand-in on the airwaves: Suella Braverman.
Kdrama pre and post about 2012 is like night and day in terms of sophistication of script, clothing, cinematography etc.
Cultures change at different rates.
Am eligible to vote so will do so, either for her or if unavailable then to keep Jenrick/Braverman out... and then resign membership cause why would I want to fund Tories longer than strictly necessary...
Hey! That's a perfectly sensible policy long advocated by that bastion of centrism: the Morris Dancer Party.
My youngest probably has a lot less interaction with peers than her counterparts 30 years ago. Primary school age kids get a lot less freedom; they don't just go and knock on for a friend. That used to make me sad. But give it a couple of years; she'll basically be organising her own social life like her sisters do.
I can't deny that they consume TV in a different and more private way. There's little we watch as a family. But we enjoy it when we do.
No way Trump will agree.
vs Chris Sutton - £194,999
Where as footballer, is never off the bloody radio that for.
She should call his bluff and agree, while mocking him.
See also the law of unforeseen consequences.
It's all now about Kamala, her Veep-choice, and the forthcoming Dem convention. Quite a turnaround.
Her big problem is the WWC. The one thing about Biden, is that he would not have looked out-of-place having a beer with ordinary working Americans. This cannot remotely be said of Harris. Her VP choice needs to address that.
Edited extra bit: anyway, I must go and perambulate with the hound. Play nicely, everyone.
Actually, what you might do is find a physio first to see if there are non-surgical solutions. But if there are not then a physio will likely be able to recommend a surgeon.
In 2000 it was considered preposterous to suggest gay people could marry the person they love. And people still (though increasingly rarely) used f*g etc as an insult.
It was only just becoming OK to have people out of the closet. TV shows including gay characters was newsworthy.
Worth noting on Friends as a comparison point. While the comedy has held up well as a whole, some of the LGBT jokes in particular are rather cringe nowadays - and that was modern for its time in even having LGBT characters in it, but they were more often than not the butt of a joke.
Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland are on trial at Southwark Crown Court this week after throwing a can of soup over Van Gogh's Sunflowers in 2022. The judge is Judge Hehir, who sentenced the "Whole Truth Five" to 4-5 years in prison last week.
Phoebe has been repeatedly done for her activities already.