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corranh | 1 month ago

Population is declining in many parts of the world while productivity is increasing. That doesn’t sound like a world of scarcity. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/business/china-population...

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beeflet|1 month ago

We live in a world that is largely still pre-cloning and pre-surrogacy. It will take a couple generations for these new sexual strategies to propagate (for example https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire...).

I would describe the current state of disaster, where reproduction is limited by sexual competition and not by resources as similar calhoun's rat utopia. In the western world, it is also driven by market factors such as land ownership and cultural expectations around that. Whereas in china there are population limits resulting from the one-child policy (anti-malthusian policy). I maintain that my position in my previous comment is true in the large despite these local effects.

In countries where you have a welfare system, you tend to see new strategies emerge after a couple of generations. In the USA, a significant number of african-american households are dependent on EBT. In Israel, the population of "Haredi" ultra-orthodox subgroup is subsidized and has grown year over year (https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA). I suggest that it is largely a social effect, because it is effected by the rate of cultural diffusion between the welfare/reproduction maximizing subgroup and the broader society. But it still represents an adaptation.