I believe you've missed the point almost completely. The parent comment's point is that the USA is as rich as it is because they've effectively taken out an enormous loan from the markets. The markets trust the USA to pay back this loan because they trust the USA to keep producing children, some subset of whom will collectively generate enough wealth to cover the loan. If everyone in the USA agreed not to have children any more, the country would immediately collapse (not collapse in the future when the workforce ran out, but immediately) as the market rushed to salvage what it could from the country's walking corpse.
There is no contract. Are we putting a contract on reproductive promise for markets? Is this a contract out on women’s uteri?
This isn’t about macro economics at all. This is all about religion forcing women to breed and the tyranny of scrotums to see who can pee farther most into the gene pool.
However a contract does exist between the parents of the child. With the male..due to the lack of anatomical bits to carry a fetus to term within his body or capable of feeding said offspring through mammary excretions is responsible for the well being of the offspring. Financially or otherwise. Because. Biology.
In the jungle, when the alpha male is unable to provide for the litter, he gets displaced. Insect brains seem to be far superior with reasoning. Clearly mammalian instincts are not up to scratch when it comes to collecting on contracts. The female praying mantis being more sensible simply devours the male after mating. The male drone bee breaks off its penile appendage and free falls from above while in the throes of a kamikaze orgasm. Homo sapiens get to go to a job and support a child. Do it. If you can’t, don’t do it. There is no societal contract to nourish the fruit of strangers’ loins.
Dear men, please curb your ejaculation. And if you can’t, make enough to support your mutated chromosome financially and when a pandemic comes around the corner, man up.
> Are we putting a contract on reproductive promise for markets?
There are no contracts stating the the companies in the S&P 500 must perform enough in the future to support the current market cap of the index, but still the index is where it is.
The market is forward looking, and children are implicit in that valuation.
The rest of your post, again, seem to sidestep that argument.
If children are commodities, why should all of society subsidize the breeding population? Why not practice eugenics while we are at it? Because that would be the logical conclusion. This is uncomfortably close to Nazi ideology.
Assumptions about future children make them no more commodities than expecting rain next year to water your crops for your farm business making weather a commodity.
Assumptions and math make market valuations, including bonds.
But I'm not even sure you are attempting to argue in good faith, so I will check out now.
I am not arguing at all. I am just pointing out that your statement makes zero sense. The only way it makes sense is if you are suggesting that we adopt nazi ideology of eugenics.
The accusation reg lack of ‘good faith’ also makes no sense. Good faith is only relevant if both of us are in agreement according to contract law.
I am pretty sure that I disagree with you. No need to beckon ‘good faith’.
I think the parent's argument makes perfect sense, and reducing it to adopting eugenics does sound pretty close to a bad-faith response.
Markets don't care about any particular specific implementation of children; the market just cares that there will be children, of some average productivity level to maintain economic growth. Sure, if we went full eugenics, markets would likely shift to expect a much higher productivity level in future generations, but... that seems like a pretty obvious outcome.
> Good faith is only relevant if both of us are in agreement according to contract law.
I think maybe you're talking about the legal definition of "good faith", wherein the rest of us are talking about the "don't be a dick" definition. Not saying you're being a dick, but it does feel like you're willfully misunderstanding the parent's argument.
User croon has ‘checked out’. I think we can shelf the dick and good faith discussion.
To you, kelnos:
1. Sub replacement fertility rates in countries like Italy has already led to Natalist policies.*
2. The world will do better economically with a lower fertility/sub replacement rate. Why? Because the notions of money and currency is changing. Automation will reduce jobs and wages.
3. When technology will replace human labour faster than ever before in our history, we can no longer relate to replacement rate of population as an indicator of economic growth.
4. With eventual UBI adoption and possibly crypto that will change how we see ‘money’ as a financial construct, the old rules NO LONGER APPLY.
5. Being in the middle of the sixth extinction event and being a super apex predator, a higher population is guaranteed to accelerate our extinction as a species sooner than a sub replacement fertility rate.
6. In the event of a catastrophe or unforeseen disaster, we should have our genetic material preserved in a gene vault. Like a seed vault.
6. If the climate crisis becomes worse before it becomes better(which it is guaranteed to be..), then we need a robust, healthy population that will likely have to deal with a nomadic lifestyle.
7. We are no longer at the mercy of good old fashioned boinking and breeding to perpetuate the human species. We need to protect our environment instead of looking to perpetuate our own gene pool.
7. HALF a surviving child per person or a replacement fertility rate of 1.00/woman should bring us back to carrying capacity of our planet.
8. It is also likely that we will discover anti ageing technologies and perhaps even become hybrid carbon-silicon based life forms.
We can’t breed ourselves to extinction. At the current rate of consumption due to exponential population increase, if we don’t control population before the inevitable depopulation occurs in terrible and devastating ways, we won’t have any resources left in the only planet that sustains life as we know it.
*[..]Some governments, fearful of a future pensions crisis, have developed natalist policies to attempt to encourage more women to have children. Measures include increasing tax allowances for working parents, improving child-care provision, reducing working hours/weekend working in female-dominated professions such as healthcare and a stricter enforcement of anti-discrimination measures to prevent professional women's promotion prospects being hindered when they take time off work to care for children. Over recent years, the fertility rate has increased to around 2.0 in France and 1.9 in Britain and some other northern European countries, [..]
[..] In Italy, for example, natalist policies may have actually discouraged the Italian population from having more children. This "widespread resistance" was the result of the Italian government, at one point,[when?] taxing single persons and criminalizing abortion and even contraception.[..]
European analysts hope, with the help of government incentives and large-scale change towards family-friendly policies, to stall the population decline and reverse it by around 2030, expecting that most of Europe will have a slight natural increase by then.[..] <—- if this isn’t eugenics, I don’t know what is...whatever economic benefit increased population has, immigration and automation tech will compensate.
