You need to get AIM, so I can yammer at you directly.
Hrm, Japan's situation...very low birthrate, high # of dependents, but pretty advanced in terms of industrialization - except that it exports ideas, and those ideas are mostly manufactured in other countries, right? I know a number of massive Japanese corporations have factories outside Japan; how does that affect their GNP - does it count as theirs, or someone else's? Uh, never mind (unless it has impact on what would happen if natural disaster struck).
Boy, I guess the numbers would have to be MASSIVE for the US to either a) cap immigration for reasons other than political/ornery, and b) cap birthrate by immigrants. It does seem that lower-income women and first-generation immigrants do have higher child-rate numbers than higher-class, long-term women in US, generally speaking. Hrm. Fewer taxpayers, more dependents.
Well, getting back to world-building: if taxpayers = people who cannot have children, and dependents = people who can have children + children + few elderly, and the taxpayers outrank the dependents, then economically things would be balanced in that sense, producing a stable economy? Assuming all other things being as they are now, what would it do to our economy to suddenly have biological damage that renders, say, 75% of the population unable to have children? Would the effects be more drastic short-term, or long-term?
Gyah. Woo! Pumping the economist for in-fo-ma-shun. ;D
no subject
Date: 23 Nov 2004 12:39 am (UTC)You need to get AIM, so I can yammer at you directly.
Hrm, Japan's situation...very low birthrate, high # of dependents, but pretty advanced in terms of industrialization - except that it exports ideas, and those ideas are mostly manufactured in other countries, right? I know a number of massive Japanese corporations have factories outside Japan; how does that affect their GNP - does it count as theirs, or someone else's? Uh, never mind (unless it has impact on what would happen if natural disaster struck).
Boy, I guess the numbers would have to be MASSIVE for the US to either a) cap immigration for reasons other than political/ornery, and b) cap birthrate by immigrants. It does seem that lower-income women and first-generation immigrants do have higher child-rate numbers than higher-class, long-term women in US, generally speaking. Hrm. Fewer taxpayers, more dependents.
Well, getting back to world-building: if taxpayers = people who cannot have children, and dependents = people who can have children + children + few elderly, and the taxpayers outrank the dependents, then economically things would be balanced in that sense, producing a stable economy? Assuming all other things being as they are now, what would it do to our economy to suddenly have biological damage that renders, say, 75% of the population unable to have children? Would the effects be more drastic short-term, or long-term?
Gyah. Woo! Pumping the economist for in-fo-ma-shun. ;D