Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?
I know this might not be a popular opinion, but: late-stage capitalism. Not (necessarily) from the &#x2F;r&#x2F;latestagecapitalism everything-sucks capitalism-sucks stance, but more fundamental than that.<p>We&#x27;re living in an era of human history where core growth has effectively halted; and most &quot;growth&quot; since the 80s-90s has been synthetic. Real growth overwhelmingly comes from one place: rising population rates. The net rate of growth of our population, in the economies that matter to our global perception of the world, has effectively hit zero since the 70s; the excess deaths caused by multiple back-to-back recessions and COVID-19 close the gap on any small lead the birth rate may have had over the death rate.<p>Some people say &quot;efficiency gains from automation will help close the economic gap caused by a declining population&quot;. Barely, but keep hope alive. Automation is <i>extremely</i> expensive, requiring complex machinery, complex software, smart engineers to build it, and smart operators to keep it running. All of those components have dozens of steps in the supply chain to get from raw material or babies to an effective, non-brittle system. The jump from &quot;farming by hand&quot; to &quot;a tractor&quot; is FAR more capital efficient than the jump from &quot;a tractor&quot; to &quot;a tractor that drives itself&quot;. Why are Ubers so much more expensive than Cabs? Because Uber has to fund a massive engineering and logistics effort to automate the delivery of its services; cabs don&#x27;t.<p>The more pertinent point to try and answer is: Why is the birth rate declining? There&#x27;s a ton of proximate answers to this question, but the root cause of all the problems is really: declining growth in raw resource deposits and virgin land. This decline in growth has caused material things, and thus services, to all become more expensive over time.<p>These are the four things that keep an economy running effectively: People, Resources, Land, and Automation. When they fall out of balance, too much or too little, things start falling apart in both obvious and insidious ways. Wars are fought over countries having too much land and resources. Too little of them, and people can&#x27;t afford to reproduce. Automation can help close some of the gap, but too much of it leads to expensive, brittle systems and non-productive bureaucracy to support them. An imbalance stresses the system; it stresses the people in it, it forces them to do counter-productive things like resort to robbery, it causes hormone imbalance which can lead to aggression, which influence the polices&#x27; default response from friend to foe, its a forcing function on today-over-tomorrow in businesses meeting demands from customers, taking shortcuts like not fully researching the harms of deploying some new chemical in food processing or dumping waste into the ocean or not properly responding to carbon emissions. Macroeconomics influences everything; it can raise people out of poverty, but it can also destroy them.<p>There&#x27;s a few good things on the horizon that may improve the situation, though we&#x27;re talking timescales of decades.<p>* There are large parts of the population whose labor has been under-exploited by the capitalist system. As China declines, SE-Asia is picking up some of the slack; and there&#x27;s an entire content of people in Africa. Continuing industrial-scale exploitation of these people will help sustain us a bit; we&#x27;ve got a good start with e.g. diamond and cobalt mines in sub-Saharan Africa, and I expect we&#x27;ll see even more over the next decade. The birth rate in these countries is still a lot healthier than the West&#x2F;East; but, naturally, it won&#x27;t stay that way as industrialization and fighting for workers rights happens, leading to improved standard of living; they&#x27;re just a few decades behind us, but they&#x27;ll catch up.<p>* COVID-19 reduced the population pretty substantially. Global warming will continue that trend into the next thirty years, killing and displacing in the eight to ten figures of people. Contrary to some previous points; this will actually be good for the short-term economy, though quite bad for the long-term one. Reducing consumption will be good. Mass migrations of desperate people will be good to keep the labor supply going. More deadly natural disasters will give the government the credibility it needs to spend money without triggering concerns about inflation or insolvency (similar to COVID-19). Just watch out for natural impacts to raw resources in the supply chain, like flooding in the US bread basket or wars in eastern europe over natural resources (ope).<p>* Space, I guess. If we, as a species, can start sustainably living, producing, and reproducing in space, either independent of gravity wells or within other ones; that&#x27;s basically the only out without a massive disruption to civilization. Of course, there&#x27;s challenges with space; but the sheer amount of resources should pretty easily overwhelm most of those challenges. If you&#x27;re paying attention to what is happening and will continue to happen in the world: building technologies that will push forward the colonization of space destinations proximate to resource rich areas is <i>the</i> single most important thing humanity should be working on right now. There&#x27;s nothing else. EVs are cool and important; but not the most important. Ad technology isn&#x27;t important. Stopping climate change is long-past being attainable; but we&#x27;re not talking about &quot;escaping to space and leaving earth behind&quot;, we&#x27;re talking about finding more balance, being able to send resources back to earth, creating optionality.<p>Late-stage capitalism not from the sense that capitalism always terminates in a world where we&#x27;re living today. But from the sense that no global economic system is sustainable without growth. We can find more growth, or we can live in isolated communes at a thousandth the population size and subsistence farm (though given global warming this probably isn&#x27;t an option anymore).