A hoarders mentality builds up on this in an extreme way with worry that discarding any item may end up with them needing it the next day…. The minimalist would say, so what, i’ll just borrow it!

I do have no idea why hoarders seem to always hoard cats too!

Neighborly Borrowing, Over the Online Fence
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/business/29ping.html

1) Then the question is, why do people have money? They have money because they work hard to produce stuff. However, since stuff is so easy to produce these days, why do people work so hard? I say because they are not used to being easily able to satisfy their needs – the rest is translated into wants because people can no longer identify their needs (I *NEED* HVAC).

2) I mean mature as in complex/advanced. Not as a value/personality development judgment. Europe’s social security is more complex(mature/developed) system and it can fully take care of their elders compared to the US system where SS was never meant to be fully supportive of everybody and people still have to set up their own retirement plans to avoid eating cat food. The European SS is about 60 years older which might be one of the reasons.

3) I think that is what I’m saying with a few modifications. A more complex society requires more education, in particular of the women, which leads to delay of child birth which leads to fewer children. Higher income also leads to needing fewer children to support old age (maybe the blender is a metaphor – if you can buy your own blender when your 75, you don’t need children to do it for you). There is typically a delay of a couple of generations between the two stages in which people continue to have many children about two generations after they don’t need to anymore. Of course there are religious conservatives who see many children as a status symbol and who can afford it. This is not the majority drive of fewer children though.

4) This paragraph does not make so much sense to me. You say there’s a middle layer where people can’t afford children. Only the very poor and the very rich can afford children? In socialized countries most of the cost of children is paid for by the state: free day care, free health care, free education (to university level), and a generous tax credit from the state. If you have five children, you can practically live off of state money. If nothing else socialists should have tons of children – it’s only that they don’t need them, so they don’t. Instead they have as many children as they want. This mostly comes down to education and personal goals. Also note that the US leads the number of teenage pregnancies in the western world. This comes down to lack of sex education.

5) Wasn’t that my point? I think you completely misunderstood my use of the word “mature”. By mature I for instance means that they are part of a complex economical system that can take care of their needs. If you are not part of such a system, you need children .. or good friends.

6) The carrying capacity depends on the standard of living. Google/study the concept of ecological footprint and you will see lots of research in this field including carrying capacities, etc. US life expectancy is actually declining but that is more a problem of obesity. Some poor countries have declining expectancies due to external constraints (lack of food, health care). There is more food than before but that has nothing to do with sustainable carrying capacity. Find out how the food is produced and you’ll see it depends on finite resources mined phosphor and methane for fertilizer. Yes, this is a result of many people. You can not ecologically/sustainably feed the planet’s current population. Whether there are “too many” is a value judgment. If you want/think everybody should enjoy a US lifestyle, then there are too many people. In this case, resources will run out and people will starve. Before that there will be wars. Presently oil, next water, then possibly land.
If you think 6 billion is about right, we will fight for resources until everybody’s lifestyle is like Mexico on average. If you lean towards 9 billion, then Bangladesh it is. Or more accurately, probably 500 million rich people with the rest being chronically malnourished. Indeed a negative effect. One value judgment is whether this is equitable. I will not answer that, only remark that 15% of the world’s population uses 50% of its resources. I note that follows the Pareto principle.

Point by point, very articulate.

I can’t help but think you might be missing some things here. First, there is a simple principle that spending keeps up with income. People “hoard” because they have money and need something to do with it. So, they buy stuff. Sure, they could give it away to charity (see Singer Solution to World Poverty), but most people really don’t care all that much about others.

Second, I have to take issue with your arrogant use of “mature” to describe civilizations that have fewer children. Since modern Western culture is clearly far, far younger than many traditional cultures that encourage large families, I feel safe assuming you mean mature as a value judgement. Have you ever heard of “chronological snobery”?

Could it be that the move toward fewer children in many cultures is a product of the selfish consumerism that you decry? If people lived frugally, they could afford larger families. But, as you pointed out, children cost money and are no longer needed. The principle of opportunity cost tells us people spend money on what they value. Obviously, many people value their blender more than children. This seems to be a good reason why people not only have fewer children, but they choose to buy new blenders rather than save the lives of children (again, see Singer Solution). How mature.

You also seem to miss the role of government is the decline of fertility. Look at a map of global fertility rates and you can see a clear correlation between government management of the economy and fertility. Communist and former communist countries are an extreme example, with low fertility, and America is more toward the middle. America is wealthy enough that people can afford heavy taxation and two or three kids. In more socialized countries, people don’t have the luxury. They have little money and high taxes. So, perhaps your mature countries are simply filled with people who cannot afford their taxes and families, while less socialized countries allow their people to choose whether to save more in a 401k, or invest in children. This is also why Europeans live in smaller homes and drive smaller cars. It’s not because they are so much greener; it’s because they lack the green.

And what about the evidence that hundreds of years ago, wealthy people had fewer children? It wasn’t because they were more mature, but wealth brings luxuries, such as birth control and the ability to be entertained by the theatre rather than the free at-home option. More babies are born in fall than in other seasons, and a common explanation is that the cold kept people indoors 9 months earlier.

And I’ll limit myself to one more point. You wrote, “There is clearly an overabundance of people now which is why more people are seen as a liability.” Clearly? Can you identify the carrying capacity of Earth for humans? Life expectancy is longer than ever before. There is more food than ever before. I can’t help but wonder, is that the result of too many people? Sure, the lifestyles of a minority of humans are having a negative affect, but it seems like pure nonsense to say there are clearly too many people. Maybe you just see too much of the wrong kind of people.

What you say makes absolute sense: people hoard because they don’t know any other options. They don’t understand how arbitrary it is to buy and keep for perpetuity (not when there are outlets like amazon, ebay and craigslist). Buying a high-quality item and having it recycled throughout the larger human community just makes sense (everyone saves money and gets maximum utility out of that good), as opposed to everyone individually buying a second-rate item for the novelty of it being “new” i.e. useless trinkets with, as you say, planned obsolescence. The latter style is also bad news for the environment!

As per your recommendation, I am currently reading RDPD, and the liabilities vs. assets chapters really are nothing less of an epiphany for me. What my culture (an amalgamation of advertising and archaic myths held by middle and working classes) has been telling me all along has been a big hoax. We are taught to equate consumer goods with power and wealth, but the exact opposite is true. This has been both an empowering and disturbing revelation: empowering because I have now completely re-worked my understanding of how money works in a capitalist society, and disturbing because our culture still perpetuates this myth of consumerism=wealth to the masses everyday.

I kind of feel like I’ve just left Plato’s cave!

having kids: it’s all one great big pyramid scheme to prop up our economy and government programs like social security (only half joking)

But, consider that having no children is a liability for the state, and thus ultimately an indirect liability shared by all of us (US taxpayers). Does having no children further grow and empower the state? If you have the funds to hire services (doctors, nursing home, etc.) then it all works out. But if you run out of money, presumably your children take over and fund your decline. With no children or other extended family, that task falls to the state, unfortunately. This is an enormous topic, so I’ll just cease and desist there…. ;-\