Reproduction

June 25, 2025

Brief

• Explain motivations for reproduction
• Classes of future people who will reproduce
• Shorten the education-employment loop and other suggestions
• Necessity for group feeling given increased automation and concentration

Introduction

Reproduction happens when there is enough. Enough health, community, and feeling you are in a place that is suitable, contingent upon each person’s own perception. During WW2, reproduction was suppressed due to uncertainty.

Due to increased transportation in the economy (nobody feels they are stuck forever when a plane ticket is a few hundred dollars), the right environment feels just out of reach. They don’t want to stay and settle where they are, increasing the education-employment loop.

While someone of ability might be okay with settling in a small town, the personality of those around them causes difference. It is nothing intrinsic about the size of a place but rather the people. Of course, there lies friction in misjudgments of one’s own ability and others of their potential.

The next generation and its classifications

We will see something like this:

• Wealthy and have enough to educate their children well
• Still trying to get to the right place, not having children
• Not in the right place, but choosing to have children despite the costs (this will not be a big group due to downward mobility and unlikely to be in early/mid 20s)
• Choosing not to have children due to being like children themselves
• Those unaware of their poverty and never left their hometowns because it always felt okay to them, so they still have children

Since the health and nutrition influences the quality of a child (and vegetable oils/processed wheat/other chemicals are causing great harm, combined with an increasing age of childbirth) and the education-employment loop is getting people increasingly older, future generations will be less energetic, perceptive, capable, and in all factors able to thrive.

Knowing that you may birth a child unable to deal with the vagaries of the world, or even one with disability, is a death sentence. To maintain something compatible with industrialization, we may need to:

• Shorten the education-employment loop (a lot of schooling is a waste of time, especially for fast learners)
• Build social structures that increase connection (get people to where they want to be faster, make it easier to get jobs)
• Allow competent people to exercise agency and leadership over local areas (have a stake in it, but entrenched interests of low quality will likely not allow it)

Factors working against us:

• Youth unemployment due to automation (nobody will reproduce without income or surplus)
• Increasing concentration toward developed areas (young people feel there is no community or opportunities in small areas), further driving up the price of rent

Higher degrees of transportation such as robotaxis or rail may alleviate the increased concentration in cities if enough production is made for them to be easily affordable. Instead, people could live quite far out while still being able to do work in the car as it drives itself.

Solutions to youth unemployment and unrest include increasing group feeling, so that certain companies or organizations may support a large amount of people that meet a minimum bar of quality so that they have some network and place to exist (this does not mean that technological competitiveness should be sacrificed, and college itself sort of serves this role already) rather than the idea that companies should automate to have the least amount of workers.

I’m not in the position to make company decisions, but I question why they couldn’t be re-allocated using the surplus from automation to construct more things.

Group Feeling, Money, and Society

If more goods are produced with fewer workers, less money is available for consumption of these same goods, hence the suggestion of a Basic Income.

Frequently in the past a retirement was made in the next generation. A small town of a thousand people who care for each other (in places of high trust and group feeling, many things become free) and have existing capital stock, land, and knowledge may be as good as a retirement of millions of dollars, claims on the goods and labour of other people.

If group feeling and trust do not exist in the society, then members will at worst sabotage and at best be indifferent to maintaining a standard of quality.

Now to live in a country where even the most basic convenience store is clean because the people have the group feeling of the country, in that they think: “this is my country, I must take care of it” versus one where “I live here, but the CEOs want to exploit me” gives remarkable difference in behavior.

This long-term antagonism will cause a security issue for the owners and producers of goods, hence increased selfishness is not in their self interest. The violence may not be very organized, but it will be random and happen with increasing frequency. Minnesota, Pennsylvania, United Healthcare CEO.

Given that it is not easy to de-escalate, it is conceivable that wealthy people who are networked with other wealthy people will increase repression instead: more surveillance, ID checks, locks on merchandise, gated communities, tank-like Chevy Tahoes, and checks on highways.

Predictions for the future

Should this continue, an idealistic perspective is creating their own community (e.g. Edge Esmeralda) in the distant future.

However, that may only be possible for those more capable than the current system in the United States, so they choose to opt out. You need a certain amount of assets already as well. Many Midwestern towns just slowly dwindled into decrepitude given de-industrialization.

Conceivably, it may be a slow collapse according to Carroll Quigley that looks like this:

Civilizations die as (1) decreasing political security and the ending of law and order make property precarious and make personal violence an increasingly significant element in life; accordingly (2) long-distance trade decreases; as a result (3) town life becomes precarious and there is a general exodus from the towns as people try to find a place in which they can be attached in some stable social and economic relationship to the food-producing earth; obviously (4) there is a decline and even a disappearance of the middle classes (the property-owning, commercial, literate, city-dwelling group); and (5) illiteracy rises rapidly.

We don’t know exactly what will happen as a whole: to read about large-scale wars and social events is different from experiencing it yourself. Think about what you can personally do based on your own perception and skills.

If you are older: you may re-consider the balance between wealth accumulation and community accumulation if you are in a position to do so.