Ludicrous pax. How is that you always come to the exactly wrong conclusion? (e.g. the one that supports your completely incorrect economic theories) No one studying population growth seriously thinks it is FEAR OF POVERTY that causes low population growth. It is wealth and education.
Did you ever stop to think that since
a) the shift from agrarian/developing society no longer requires a large family workforce (e.g. child labor in agrarian farm societies)
b) modern medicine allows people to delay childbirth much longer
c) educated people delay marriage and childbirth until late 20s and 30s because
d) people want to spend more time on THEMSELVES, in the career, traveling around, having fun and finally
e) that many people no long feel the need to "pass on" their genes and live on vicariously
f) the rights of liberated women not to be simply life long incubation chambers
is responsible for the reduction of pop growth below replacement rate?
Even having 2 children per family leads to a shrinking population. You need to have atleast 3 children per family (or "2.1") to cause an increase. Who wants to have such a big family nowadays? It's certainly not loss of income that's driving it.
I could afford to take care of like 10 kids personally, but my wife and I want no more than 1 or 2. Why? Because I think it is irresponsible to have so many, not just to the planet, but because it divides your time amongst the children, and I personally want to maximize the time I spend guiding my child.
It is in fact, poverty that drives childbirth. Even in the non-agrarian US, the lower classes have a much higher birth rate, and that is because of less opportunities for women to be anything but baby machines.
On automation, I love it. I love self-checking myself out at Home Depot and Walmart. I hate dealing with customer service reps. I love online technical support, I hate phone support. I love self-service gas, I hate full service. Only place I desire personal human service is health care, restaurant, hotel, etc
At McDonalds, why should someone be paid $5-6hr to press buttons on the cash register and swipe my card, when I could just swipe my credit card and press "#3 meal" on the thing myself.
This is no difference than "automated teller machines" which replaced the need to physically go to a human bank teller to withdraw cash. Now those tellers handle more sophisicated queries, like opening accounts, selling loans, etc.
Anytime efficiency is increased, it is a net win for everyone. There are two ways you can get wealth: one, invest in scarcity. (e.g. buy real estate, as population grows, demand rises, but supply is fixed. This makes everyone who is a home buyer poorer) Second, invest in efficiency.
Being able to produce more with less lowers scarcity, preserves the environment, conserves resources, makes things cheaper and more plentiful. It lives all boats. If I invent a new technology that can produce any product with half the amount of resources, it would be like doubling the amount of resources in the earth, or halving the amount of wilderness that has to be disturbed.
Automation causes disruptions. Some McDonalds employees with have to be let go, but the remaining employees could get more benefit, since they are handling more customers per person, as well as people who hold McDonalds stock getting a greater ROI.
I am in the tech industry. Alot of crappy low level programming (like web page authoring and VB apps) are being outsourced to India now. If one day my job gets outsourced, then I have not succeeded in raising my skill levels high enough to justify my salary level. I have personally prepared for this by getting into BioInformatics which I believe will be the next big tech boom (biology + computation) If I'm wrong, I will have to go do something else.
But my personal opinion is, if your job can be automated, or some other person comes along and offers to do your job at the same skill level for a lower price, you have no RIGHT to block it.
You have no fundamental right to make me pay you $5/hr to get a hamburger when I could pay 50cents to an automated machine. My goal is to get a hamburger, not subsidize a dead end career.
