From: Aaron McBride (themcbrides@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Mar 04 2004 - 01:25:37 MST
Tomaz Kristan wrote:
<clip>
>Nobody seems to bother, not on this list, not anywhere
>else as far as I know, if in fact we have, the first
>time in history, a situation, where the economic
>recovery (in the US), does not make new jobs, and even
>much more, that the number of job seekers goes down as
>well! As the number of those who need jobs -- has in
>fact decreased.
>
>
Could any of this have to do with the leading edge of the baby boomers
generation hitting retirement age? The size of the working age
population could actually be dropping. Unfortunately, I don't know of
any good way to check. I do know that you can't rely on government
unemployment figures that are based on how many people are on welfare of
one form or another, especially when welfare benefits run out and those
people are no longer counted.
What's this have to do with SL4? Well, it would be good to know on a
whole how we can expect the economy to behave over the next 20 years.
There is going to be a huge shift in the ratio of workers to retired
persons over the coming decades unless we change our retirement system.
Here's a site that's worth looking at for more information on this:
http://www.agewave.com/ .
Until I'm convinced that 1) we need a very strong economy to bring about
a Friendly Singularity, and 2) that we have the Friendliness Theory and
AGI theories hammered out (so we know we're ready to make the jump at
all), I'm not sure that a strong economy is the most important thing,
especially a strong growing economy that might even quicken an
unFriendly Singularity by bring nanotech to the masses and other likely
bad things. On the other hand, people die and suffer every day, so the
sooner we get prepared, the better.
-Aaron
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