The New York Times generated some controversy this week by publishing an article on the previous remarks of a Yale economics professor named Yusuke Narita.
Very curious on how Japan can solve this issue while retaining their culture in the long run. I've not looked in to the primary causes on their low birthrates, though I remember reading there's a large discrepancy between the male/female population. I'd assume their strong emphasis on work life may also contribute.
In the UK, using immigration to support the aged population only works if the immigrants actually work.
Too many just claim the enormous benefits that our dear leaders throw at them, contributing nothing to the economy, but at the expense of all the people who have to work to survive.
Still, it is frustrating to read the incisive critiques of this technocratic death cult without so much as a glimmer of an idea of how these very real fiscal problems facing medicine (not to speak of other social entitlements) might be tackled from the right.
I actually have some good ideas but more or less all of them boil down to tapping the well of spiritual revival to buttress a voluntary accommodation to a lower standard of living.
It’s hard to visualize because on the one hand, one feels that there exists a sort of morality to the idea that everyone always receive medical care at the “state of the art”. Otoh, when the state of the art becomes utterly unaffordable, is it immoral to fail to provide it or pursue it? Or is it just practical?
Maybe we don’t have to DO anything other than to prepare ourselves for the fact that we (who are currently below 60) are increasingly likely to die very much like our great grandparents did because there just won’t be anything fancy left for us when we get to needing it. Hopefully by then most of us will have made our peace with the reaper.
I agree that the looming insolvency of the developed world's health and pensions systems is probably an ulterior motive for cost-reductions here, but I feel like the reactionary critique of the medical-industrial complex is not very coherent on this point. "The system doesn't like healthy and it doesn't like dead, but it does like sick" should logically lead doctors to artificially prolong the lives of the elderly in a state of moribund misery, because that results in maximum expansion of the bureaucracy.
Scott Alexander wrote a pretty good piece on the topic of euthenasia called Who By Very Slow Decay, and speaking as someone who doesn't particularly want to go out the same way that some of my grandparents did, I'm broadly supportive of having a legal option for assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
It's also a little naive to think that any amount of right-wing pro-natalism is actually going to rescue our health and pensions system at this point. I'm supportive of moderate pro-natalism and broadly agree that traditional social values need to make a comeback, but even if birthrates were to double tomorrow it takes 20 years to grow a 20-year-old, so this isn't going to translate to a useful impact on the workforce fast enough to avoid these systems going bankrupt. So... what more charitable alternative are tradcons and reactionaries proposing here, exactly?
Jesus is the author of life. The devil comes to kill, steal and destroy... guess which spirit we are living under?
Very curious on how Japan can solve this issue while retaining their culture in the long run. I've not looked in to the primary causes on their low birthrates, though I remember reading there's a large discrepancy between the male/female population. I'd assume their strong emphasis on work life may also contribute.
In the UK, using immigration to support the aged population only works if the immigrants actually work.
Too many just claim the enormous benefits that our dear leaders throw at them, contributing nothing to the economy, but at the expense of all the people who have to work to survive.
Banger
Great points.
Still, it is frustrating to read the incisive critiques of this technocratic death cult without so much as a glimmer of an idea of how these very real fiscal problems facing medicine (not to speak of other social entitlements) might be tackled from the right.
I actually have some good ideas but more or less all of them boil down to tapping the well of spiritual revival to buttress a voluntary accommodation to a lower standard of living.
It’s hard to visualize because on the one hand, one feels that there exists a sort of morality to the idea that everyone always receive medical care at the “state of the art”. Otoh, when the state of the art becomes utterly unaffordable, is it immoral to fail to provide it or pursue it? Or is it just practical?
Maybe we don’t have to DO anything other than to prepare ourselves for the fact that we (who are currently below 60) are increasingly likely to die very much like our great grandparents did because there just won’t be anything fancy left for us when we get to needing it. Hopefully by then most of us will have made our peace with the reaper.
I agree that the looming insolvency of the developed world's health and pensions systems is probably an ulterior motive for cost-reductions here, but I feel like the reactionary critique of the medical-industrial complex is not very coherent on this point. "The system doesn't like healthy and it doesn't like dead, but it does like sick" should logically lead doctors to artificially prolong the lives of the elderly in a state of moribund misery, because that results in maximum expansion of the bureaucracy.
Scott Alexander wrote a pretty good piece on the topic of euthenasia called Who By Very Slow Decay, and speaking as someone who doesn't particularly want to go out the same way that some of my grandparents did, I'm broadly supportive of having a legal option for assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
It's also a little naive to think that any amount of right-wing pro-natalism is actually going to rescue our health and pensions system at this point. I'm supportive of moderate pro-natalism and broadly agree that traditional social values need to make a comeback, but even if birthrates were to double tomorrow it takes 20 years to grow a 20-year-old, so this isn't going to translate to a useful impact on the workforce fast enough to avoid these systems going bankrupt. So... what more charitable alternative are tradcons and reactionaries proposing here, exactly?