<story><title>Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009)</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687779/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>This being a biology journal, I was kinda expecting an even larger perspective. If you look at how biological ecosystems work, just about every creature reproduces way more than what is sustainable. Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there&amp;#x27;d be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that.&lt;p&gt;The reason it doesn&amp;#x27;t happen of course is that you run into resource crises. Any species that keeps doubling at their natural rate will run out of food, or it becomes food for others.&lt;p&gt;Coming back to society, it&amp;#x27;s as if we just aren&amp;#x27;t prepared for a shrinking population. It&amp;#x27;s hard to make preditions against a variable that&amp;#x27;s always gone one way, but is showing sign of turning. How much of the economy is really just size? What&amp;#x27;s gonna happen when that reverses?&lt;p&gt;This will probably be a major political theme that lingers in many advanced nations. Fewer young people to work, but also fewer votes than the people who benefit. Immigration as a potential cure, but for how long, and at what cost? I tend to think it&amp;#x27;s already a kind of underlying dynamic, just not the one that appears in the headlines so often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barrkel</author><text>As long as the pie is increasing in size, people can tolerate getting a proportionally smaller slice. If the pie stops growing, that becomes untenable.&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is somewhere in wealth taxes, which are much harder to implement effectively than income taxes, but will be necessary for redistribution in a world with static or declining incomes.&lt;p&gt;To put that into context with population pyramids, to support the old people, young people will need to get a bigger slice of the pie. That means less wealth being locked into untaxed distribution schemes that pass down generationally, whether it&amp;#x27;s trusts or corporations.</text></comment>
<story><title>Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009)</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687779/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>This being a biology journal, I was kinda expecting an even larger perspective. If you look at how biological ecosystems work, just about every creature reproduces way more than what is sustainable. Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there&amp;#x27;d be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that.&lt;p&gt;The reason it doesn&amp;#x27;t happen of course is that you run into resource crises. Any species that keeps doubling at their natural rate will run out of food, or it becomes food for others.&lt;p&gt;Coming back to society, it&amp;#x27;s as if we just aren&amp;#x27;t prepared for a shrinking population. It&amp;#x27;s hard to make preditions against a variable that&amp;#x27;s always gone one way, but is showing sign of turning. How much of the economy is really just size? What&amp;#x27;s gonna happen when that reverses?&lt;p&gt;This will probably be a major political theme that lingers in many advanced nations. Fewer young people to work, but also fewer votes than the people who benefit. Immigration as a potential cure, but for how long, and at what cost? I tend to think it&amp;#x27;s already a kind of underlying dynamic, just not the one that appears in the headlines so often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Felz</author><text>&amp;gt; Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there&amp;#x27;d be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that.&lt;p&gt;What? That makes no sense as an exponential process. It&amp;#x27;d be at least unfathomably larger than the universe by now, not just solar system sized.
Or were they assuming it&amp;#x27;d expand constantly only from the surface in all directions?</text></comment>