Enki wrote:There is also the process of globalization. If you live in New York, London is as close as every other major city that is not Philadelphia, Boston or DC. Culturally speaking, Iowa is on another planet for peers who are familiar with backroads in Tuscany. This is an important part of urbanization in the Internet age. The very shape of the world has been remade. Just as it was remade for the second half of the millenium from 1492 onward as Capitalism arose as a necessary outgrowth of the sudden burst of global trade brought on by the competition between the European powers worldwide.Juggernaut Nihilism wrote:Fertility declines as urbanization, which turns children from assets to liabilities, increases. Because urbanization tends to coincide with the late phase of a civilization's development, we tend to project causality where it probably doesn't exist. The world, as a whole, is in the process of a long-term move from the country to the city, and I'm skeptical that we'll ever see the population numbers modern-day Malthusians fear.
The thing about the lack of children is that there are destitute immigrants all over the world, hungry to be the underclass in a wealthy developed nation. They will come and fulfill the roles the economy requires, so they can send a remittance.
Cellular phones more than anything are spreading the global communications network into more and more neighborhoods throughout the world. This allows for people who were previously isolated by geography to trade in global and regional markets.
Dunno, Enki. With the old computers from back when we were growing up, there was still a lot of room for tinkering alongside playing. I learned my first programming language (q-basic) in an effort to hack the "Gorillas" game that I was playing at the time. I modded CIV2 to death, and learned scripting in the process. Today's tablets are closed environments, more an interactive tv than a computer. People who use them consume entertainment, do not produce anything. Its closed nature is one of the reasons I've avoided all Apple products all these years, despite their obvious aesthetic advantage and even ease of use.What I am really waiting for is when a generation of scientists starts making serious breakthroughs after autodidact study on iTunes U, MIT OpenCourseWare, Code Academy and the Kahn Academy. That's going to open up the market in a whole other way that people are not anticipating yet. We have yet to have a post Information Revolution generation. That's my kids, Halo 3 and Angry Birds for them, inhabit the place that Asteroids, Pac-Man and MIssile Command inhabited for my generation that grew up alongside the development of the video game as well as the information revolution. My kids do not know what it is like to not have internet in their home. They have an iPad and know how to use it at 2 and 5. I am only 34 and the world I grew up in is already an anachronism. From, "Car phones, what a waste of time and money, why would I want to talk on the phone while I'm driving?", to the same people who said that having a cell phone; every single one of them. My grandparents lived in horse and buggy days in New Mexico, my kids have been flying in airplanes since they were infants. I know people my age who order materials from China to cover their geodesic dome at Burning Man. The global economy is at our fingertips, literally.
This sort of interconnectivity at this scale is unprecedented. As Facebook and other 'network effect' products demonstrate that there are different orders of functionality in population groups when you have a large network effect.
In market terms, billions of people who couldn't get widget X, can now, and billions of people who couldn't sell widget X, can now. With 3D printers, more people will be able to manufacture complex machinery than could before.
Fertility collapse will drive miscegenation as people will look outside of their culture group more. If big cities are any indication, people are not making their love life choices based on notions of ethnicity nearly as much as they once did. We are all Mutts here in the Americas anyway.
In otherwords, if I can't find any blond blue-eyed corn-fed American girl, I'll find myself a brunette brown-eyed maize-fed Mexican girl.
I keep having these images of a bunch of young people taking electricity, internet and food for granted, without any idea how to maintain all the infrastructure their forefathers and foremothers built up for them. Eloi bereft of morloks.
I know, I know. I'm getting cynical and misanthropic in my old age.