Alright, let’s cover this again, with a bit more explication, since the idiots are really doubling down on “oh no, decreasing population.”
Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization.
• Japan had it's largest total drop in population since 1968.
• U.S. population flatlining as birth rate stagnates.
• China's fertility rate hits record low.
• Singapore's birth rate falls to record low.
• UK… pic.twitter.com/OwloSfysBi
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) August 21, 2023
If you want to see it on a map, here goes:
Even India has dropped to about replacement rate.
Now, let’s deal with this.
First, to the extent the plummet in birth rates is because of decreased biological fertility, like reduced sperm counts, it’s bad.
Second, despite this, we are well over the world’s carrying capacity and you are seeing it in the collapse of other life forms (ecological collapse) and climate change.
Third: the world’s carrying capacity is variable in a sense: what matters is number of people times the average per capita carrying cost of each person.
Fourth: the more population we want to have, the lower our per capita carrying costs have to be.
Fifth: a lot of people whine about this and to a certain extent rightly so. It is associated with austerity.
Sixth: imagine a world in which you bought a phone and used it for 20 years with modular upgrades; a car and used it for 50 (with modular upgrades); a washer and dryer and used it for 75 years, and where all of those things, when they finally ended their lives, were carefully recycled as much as possible.
Imagine a world in which almost nothing was made out of plastic. (In the 70s almost all bottles were glass and we used paper bags and grocery items were not individually wrapped in plastic and fuck “germs!” Covid has proven we don’t really care about that.)
Imagine a world in which we work half as much, create stuff that lasts for decades or even half a century or more.
Seventh: “but how can we afford this?” We can afford anything we can actually physically do. Each individual item would be more expensive, but last far longer and be cheaper overall. Yes, we would have to change how we distribute permission to have things, but we need to do that already.
Eighth: even in capitalist terms the “oh, without population gain how can we have economic growth” stuff is incoherent. Capitalism is supposed to increase productivity massively, so you should still be able to have growth, certainly per-capita growth. If you can’t, you’re a bad capitalist.
Ninth: that particular issue is related to oligarchs wanting to funnel all the money upwards and instead of relying on customers, rely on government, including central bank, subsidies. (Neither Tesla nor SpaceX would have made it without massive government subsidies.) In actual capitalism capitalists want high wages, because “everyone else’s employees are my customers.” The cost of high wages is more than made up for by people being able to afford their goods. This is why the economy of the post-war era was so good: high wages and lots of consumptiong.
Tenth: of course this sort of capitalism has to go away, we can’t afford a planned obsolesence economy in a world over carrying capacity and with limited stocks of key resources (the way we’re burning thru lithium should be literally criminal). But even in capitalist terms “oh no, population decrease” is an admission of failure.
Eleven: the dependency ratio is how many working people are supporting non-working (old, young, disabled and not allowed to work) people. Yes, a lower ratio makes things harder, but again, productivity is what matters and capitalism keeps claiming it’s good at raising productivity. Plus the actual percentage of people working for wages in high prosperity periods has often actually been lower than in high prosperity periods.
Twelve: oh, and worker compensation is likely to go up as population decreases and as the carry ratio decreases (or at least, be higher than it would have been otherwise, civilization collapse is also in the mix.) After the black death, welfare increased massively. We’re already seeing some of this effect due to the pandemic (one of the only good things to come out of it.)
***
We need less population. The world’s population has over doubled just in my lifetime (I’m 55). That’s ridiculous. And minus the internet and a few good medical improvements, I’ll tell you that life wasn’t worse then. (Even Africa had higher growth rates in the 50s and 60s and the dire poverty numbers are bullshit, because subsistence farming was far more common, but that’s another article.)
We have no problems we can’t adapt to, minus a few scenarios like the Venus runaway, a full ecological collapse which eliminates the apex species (that’s us) or polluting the world so much we can’t survive (which includes nuclear war.) We can, in theory and even in practice, if our politics wasn’t so screwed up, even make most people better off at the same time. But it will take time, and the most important problems are made simpler by population reductions.
What is going to make everything harder, actually, is our refusal to deal with Covid and our “New Emperor’s Clothes” insistence on pretending it’s over, while it continues as a mass disabling event. Yeah, we can handle a lower dependency ratio, but crippling hundreds of millions of people and making hundreds of millions more sicker is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound.
As before, as so far always in this crisis, the most important thing we have to do is replace our leadership class: political and private, en-masse, so that the correct decisions can be made. And yes, capitalism as we understand it is going to have to go away.
But this weird idea that population reduction right now is bad is breathtakingly stupid, and people who believe it have been fooled, or are fools
Folks, it’s your donations and subscriptions which make it possible for me to keep writing (since I need to eat and pay rent and the cost of both have skyrocked) so please (if you aren’t struggling) DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
bruce wilder
Something that really needs to be said frequently and with conviction — thank you.
I really wonder at the inability of supposedly smart people to figure out even roughly the overwhelming effects of congestion costs on productivity in high-population regions.
GrimJim
I foresee the elites seeking, as usual, to take advantage of this “crisis” to restrict career movement of the members of the useful upper and middle class. I expect they will use the student loan debt “crisis” to essentially reduce that segment of the population ~12%) to professional serfdom, along with the higher skilled manufacturing positions required to maintain robotic factories. These are the equivalent of the professionals of ancient Rome whose professions essentially became hereditary, eventually to develop into the medieval guilds.
The remaining 87% will be left to become cannon fodder, day laborers, or die in a ditch. In ancient Rome these people became the coloni, or servi, later known as serfs. During the Migration and Merovingian era many of these were traded back and forth among factions via raiding as outright slaves. I expect such to develop when international oil trade breaks down completely, requiring an attempt, however unfruitful and brief in the face of climate change, to return to labor intensive farming.
The upper and middle class apparatchiks will decline as their professions become obsolete, their children reduced to day laborers or neo-coloni as the time frame warrants.
Certainly, the Commons and the Poors will never be allowed to benefit from any crisis. Today’s elite will see to that, as will their fellow travelers and true believers, the class traitor MAGAts, who, as their ancestors did after Bacon’s Rebellion, will receive a simple mark of distinction above that lower class, though they may wallow in the same filth and lick the same boots.
Until even that all becomes unsustainable and dies, either in a fire or drowned in boiling waters…
Sub-Boreal
Thanks Ian for your refeshing clarity on this. I get so weary of the Left’s population-blindness which quickly degenerates into hair-setting-on-fire (eugenics!! ecofascism!!) whenever the topic comes up.
StewartM
One, population decline whining is but a cover to cut the ‘entitlements’.
Two, wanting to increase the native-born population (more births) is based upon fear of the sensible alternative, of just getting your young people from overseas who may not have the same skin hue, or speak your language, or follow your religion, or whatnot. Trump supporters in particular are afraid of the ‘Great Replacement’. Gotta have them thar’ white Anglo-Saxon babies!
And abortion is all about killing those white babies! (That’s probably not literally true, but at a nearby church they had set up mock infant graveyard under a photo of a white baby, so the symbolism says it all).
Tallifer
Thank you, Ian, for so cogently expressing through these facts and rational propositions a persuasive argument against unlimited growth of economies and population.
Willy
Hopefully it won’t be only the stupid people who’re breeding, to then bitch about being replaced by the people they’re hiring. Maybe greed, for lack of a better word, is not good. Or maybe the problem is that we lack a better word. Nobody sweats “ambition” much. Until it steps on them. Then we need a better word for whatever the hell that was.
If the Eskimos can have at least 40 words for snow, maybe we can come up with a word for a smiling Elon Musk terrified about a declining population hurting his Martian business opportunities.
And why the hell does anybody go to his Ted talks, when bringing in sacks of rotten vegetables is forbidden? Or who isn’t a social scientist or criminal psychologist or a James Randi or something? All I see is a bumbling silver spoon Aspergers with a completely stunted sense of humor.
NR
This is 100% correct. And as Ian has pointed out, the population is going to decrease one way or another. Declining birth rates is certainly better than the alternative (though it’s unfortunately too late to prevent that I think).
anon y'mouse
i have never understood the “dependency ratio” arguments except to give cover to the ponzi scheme mentality of capitalist groaf and “who will pay my pension scheme” (also ponzi).
one adult human should be prepared to collect enough resources to support one non-adult human and one elderly person, at minimum (not in isolation but i will use the solo person for demonstration purposes) before any higher tech/higher productivity concerns even come to bring this ability to support more and more into play.
why? honestly, the cycle of life period. the infant up to functional adulthood (varied by societal complexity–in most tribes this was about 12 yo and you were supposed to be as functional as the adults) is by necessity supported by a parent (hopefully two, but not always and that is not always Mom’s fault–plenty of men abscond on their responsibilities) and unless we really want to foment a world where the minute a person becomes too old or physically unable to gather the adult portion themselves, then they off to the soylent green chamber, then the elderly bit can be thought of as you paying your parent back for supporting you during the childhood.
and then add technology and productivity and so forth on top. as it is, we are in a society that actually tells people if they can’t afford to both fund their own education to become a fully functional adult AND simultaneously during their working years, store enough “surplus value” to afford to live after their working years (or merely when no one else wants to hire them. ageism is a thing), then they should probably off themselves.
i would suggest this about the idea of “replacement theory”—-what if it’s not “not true”, but the idiots who have taken it up as a racial thing are misunderstanding what is going on and who this maybe-policy is directed at?
because our country (USA) certainly does not want American workers, of any race. they would much rather the desperate and striving from our colonial/imperalist victims show up here and work their butts off with no expectation of rights, benefits or a living wage.
i see some of my last comments about relegitimization of capitalism with idpol (i didn’t call it that) were stricken from the record. if that was due to language used or if i am now permabanned from here as well as NC (and shadowbanned elsewhere), i do wonder if people are assuming i am some weird racial supremacist.
it is not unknown to use “black propaganda” like Qanon to make certain ideas seem laughable to “sensible people” by purveying an abominable version of the story to “deplorable” sorts. one must ask though, why places as varied as the post office to your local elder care prefer to bring in foreigners and then claim that “americans won’t do the work” when americans have applied and can’t get the work.
i do mean Americans of every race. it used to be heatedly discussed among more libertarian, capitalistic and/or right wing types the social theory that “striving for better only takes place until the third generation”. or when the immigrants become “americanized” (by their third generation in this country) the ability to reap the full capitalistic profit on their endeavors goes down because then they become adapted to our society and stop “striving” (i read this as they are fully aware that now they have rights, including the right to a living wage which is less and less on-offer, and aren’t willing to take as much crap as their parents and grandparents endured just to be here).
ohwell, if i am out of bounds here as well as the entire rest of the intertubes, then c’est la vie and well wishes to all. even those with whom i have disagreed in the past. disagreement does not imply “hatred”. i have only a few people i reserve hatred for in my life. it takes too much energy.
Joan
I think it’s definitely a good thing to have global population decrease and hopefully fewer kids rich enough to own twenty houses and fly around on private jets, haha!
I am happily childless, but one thing I’m witnessing among my friends in my age group (mid-late thirties) is they cannot economically do it all. A lot of them work full-time because quitting work is too much of a risk and they worry what a blip in their work record will do to their future chances of getting hired.
If they have a child, a lot of cities don’t have enough affordable daycare for working parents. It’s like you’re pulled in five directions at once and I’m not surprised if a lot of women realize they can’t make it happen.
mago
“. . . a bumbling silver spoon Aspergers with a completely stunted sense of humor.”
Ya gotta laugh.
StewartM
Imagine a world in which almost nothing was made out of plastic. (In the 70s almost all bottles were glass and we used paper bags and grocery items were not individually wrapped in plastic and fuck “germs!”
Sorry, but the answer is not that simple. Paper, glass, aluminum, and metal all have their environmental downsides, worse than plastic, when total environmental impact is determined. In fact, one of the original arguments for using plastics was its environmental upside–in not chopping down forests for paper, in not using animal products, for not increased mining. Plastics are lighter than glass or metals and thus require less energy (and thus generate fewer greenhouse emissions) to transport. They require less energy (again, greenhouse emissions) both to produce and to recycle–even compared to paper.
And though I understand your ‘fuck germs’ because of the mishandling of Covid, would you really prefer to oust single-use plastics from medical applications? The dangers of cross-infection in medical applications is very real.
What I believe where the problem lies is—once again–in our faith in capitalism to provide ‘solutions’ when its primary operating mode is ‘privatize profit, socialize costs’. The biggest reason why plastics are an environmental issue is that we didn’t set up recovery and recycle streams from the very start, with the government organizing the effort and the costs borne by the producers. And not just for plastics, for all waste–paper, metal, aluminum, glass, and organic.
Thus the producers would be strongly motivated to either set up with production a recycling stream, and/or minimize the incorporation of materials that would be difficult to recover and/or recycle. With plastics, both polymer blends (a physical dispersion of one insoluble polymer into another) or polymer compositions (layered structures of different polymers) have become popular, and often utilized in packaging too (A SlimJim beef jerky package contained 7 different layers of various incompatible polymers; I know because I’ve analyzed it). Obviously entire films or compositions which are such mixtures may pose challenges for recycling.
But it’s not just something as trivial as SlimJim packages—your computer screen, phone screen, or tablet screen contains multiple films, each possibly containing structured layers of many different polymers (plastics)
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-85d6ac167a17eea7ab7fdaf1cae1be39-lq
https://admetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/a-d-metro-resistive-stack-4wire.jpg
Which bring me to this:
Sixth: imagine a world in which you bought a phone and used it for 20 years with modular upgrades; a car and used it for 50 (with modular upgrades); a washer and dryer and used it for 75 years, and where all of those things, when they finally ended their lives, were carefully recycled as much as possible.
Which brings me to my pet peeve and worry. Yes, I too get frustrated when I see single-use *anything*. But even more disturbing are ‘durables’ for which there are easy ways to recycle or reuse. Examples of these include—all electronics (and the deliberate push by manufacturers to drive consumers away from relatively long-lasting desktop computers and laptops to short-lived phones and tablets is, well, evil from a variety of perspectives). But also shoes, clothes, tires, and almost everything. I have a pile of worn-out shoes I want to recycle, but the nearest shoe recycling facility I’m aware of is in another state.
To echo Tony Wikret, this all came about when you ditch any notion of ‘common good’ and (horrors!) fail to incorporate any larger economic planning into an economy. The inevitable result is, well, waste. But old tires and worn-out shoes and old clothes and empty glass containers aren’t properly seen for what they are, wasted resources.
Ian Welsh
Given the rise of microplastics, to the point where it’s no longer safe to drink rainwater, and the fact that there are other ways to sterilize, even in hospitals plastics have to be used carefully.
As for durables, that’s what I was talking about when I discussed making things not planned obsolete, but recycling them when the time came.
Shoes shouldn’t be disposable, as an aside.
KT Chong
Collapse of the global ECONOMY vs ECOLOGY.
When villainaires talk about a global collapse due to declining populations, they are talking about the collapse of the world ECONOMY that has made them very rich and very powerful. The bigger the world population, the richer and more powerful they are gonna get. They are not talking about the collapse of the world ECOLOGY, which cannot sustain our current world populations.
StewartM
Ian
Given the rise of microplastics, to the point where it’s no longer safe to drink rainwater, and the fact that there are other ways to sterilize, even in hospitals plastics have to be used carefully.
When I worked for a living (ha!) I actually set up a proof-of-concept test to analyze for microplastics in drinking water (fighting managerial types who were both pushing me get busy doing the test but also wanted me to not do the test as indicated by a consortium’s protocol, in order to save time and money (huh??)). This consortium had proposed a sleuth of similar tests–for microplastics in sea water, fresh aquatic waters, soils, etc., and other groups/labs worked on those. The notion was to compare both different methodologies and different lab results on identical, known, sample sets (these samples had known amounts of a variety of common different plastics added to them) to get an idea of the accuracy, precision, and robustness of each of the proposed methodologies on different sample types.
The final goal would be methods that would say “to determine the amount of type of microplastics in matrix A use this method Z”. The test method would characterize the micoroplastic content by total amount, by the size fractions, and by the proportion of the different plastic types.
I think we our mental image of the microplastic problem is flawed. It’s not the stuff you see in photo–the plastic straws, or PET water bottles, or polyethylene milk containers and grocery bags or other highly visible trash. The primary source is fibers from clothing. The former are unsightly and yes, can be a problem for larger species at times, but it’s the fibers that get shed from synthetic fiber clothing every time they are washed, fibers so small that they bypass the filters in sewage treatment systems to end up in natural waters. And, being small, also in wildlife and in us.
Shoes shouldn’t be disposable, as an aside.
I have a small anatomical abnormality, which results in uneven shoe wear (you can visibly see after several months that the right and left shoe are wearing out differently). Continually wearings these worn shoes could make the abnormality worse, resulting in problems with my back, hip, or knee on the affected side. Ergo, I have to keep an eye on the wear patterns and ditch the shoes at an appropriate time.
I don’t know of anyone who re-soles shoes. Moreover, eventually the upper parts begins to fail too, so eventually it gets to be like a bicycle that can’t be fixed or can’t be fixed for less cost than a new bike (I have one of those, hanging up, in the storage shed, though I did manage to replace everything on that except the fork and frame before the fork bent and the bike shop said they couldn’t get another). But I’d be happy just being able to send the worn-out shoes to be made into new shoes or something else.
Like I said, I look at what gets put out on the curb for garbage pickup, and the waste is appalling.
StewartM
Oh, and I should also mention in addition to fibers, beauty products are also a problem, as these include small (c. 10 micron) polymer beads are deliberately added to formulations. In 2015, the US banned use of microbeads in such formulations (Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015). Though I know that other kinds of (biodegradable polymer) microbeads, are being substituted instead.
That’s another possible solution, some plastics will degrade in a few years in natural environments rather than persist for 10s or 100s of thousands. Cellulose esters, particularly cellulose acetate, is one.
different clue
I have zero children, and at age 66, children seem unlikely at this point.
So I’ve done my part for population non-growth.
mago
When I was young (a long time ago) you could still get shoes re-soled and repaired.
I loved the smell of the shop where a short bent Slavic man toiled over his lathes and metal shoe horns repairing worn leather shoes for the working stiffs.
He also had second hand shoes for sale arranged by category such as boots or loafers or whatever, probably left behind by deadbeat customers or the deceased.
Stewart M’s comments unlocked these memories along with others such as collecting bottles from trash cans to trade in for the deposits, which money was used for Saturday afternoon pinball playing at the local pool hall. That money also paid for an hour’s rent on a pool table.
There were no plastic water bottles then, nor plastic anything as I recall aside from plastic people as Frank Zappa so accurately called them.
But memories are fallible.
One more thing, about microfibers in the water? Might want to ditch your fleece garments or refrain from washing them. Better to refrain from buying them in the first place.
But what are we to do?
Alas and alack as Jack Kerouac would say.
different clue
We still have a shoe repair shop here in College Townville. Shoes that are even made with soles and uppers and etc. anymore could still be re-soled, I should think. Many sneaker-type shoes are made with a foot-containing upper glued onto a lower ( “sole”).
After a time, the glue dissolves or wears away and the upper separates from the lower.
It is still possible to have the two components glued back together, sometimes two or three times. It costs a lot but the money spent fixing the shoes you have is money with-held from the masters of planned obsolescence at Big Shoe.
Since we all live under the Class Enemy Occupation Regime and its government, the only thing we can do about “alas and alack” is to function as passive obstructionists in the consumption-space and buy natural fiber if we can find it, either new or second-hand.
We can all be happy shoptivists, Shop! Shop! Shopping! for a better world. Well, its either that or nothing at all. And every dollar spent on Fair Trade coffee helps keep an artisanal coffee grower on the land as well as withholding that dollar from Big Coffee.
We work in the dark. We do what we can.
StewartM
DC,
I have tried to take not just shoes, but torn garments to get repaired (say, a broken zipper). Usually the tailor just shrugs at me. Of course, I live in a backwater of Appalachia.
Mago,
I’m mostly in agreement with all you guys. It’s just that you have to make choices on what materials to use, and from a global environmental and human health perspective. Getting rid of plastics per se is a bad idea if it both increases greenhouse emissions and leads to more deforestation.
Even some of the ‘alternatives’ still could generate microplastics—your metal and aluminum cans now come with thin (micron-thick) plastic coatings (surveying what types of plastics were used to line food and beverage cans was actually one of the projects I was involved with in my last years working).
Why did they do this? Well, one of the more interesting charts I encountered in school was an engineering text with corrosion rates. What was surprising to neophyte me was discovering that, given time, that “everything dissolves everything. At least to a minute extent”. And simply put, the metals in the can will end up dissolved in the food or beverage. The plastic will be affected too, but the moieties that come out of it are judged to be less a health hazard than the metals (which is pretty obvious looking at data from ancient Rome to Flint, Michigan on metals poisoning).
This is also true because you choose the kind of plastic to form the liner and it too has to get FDA and EU approval for food and beverage contact. This is done by taking the polymer (plastic) and stressing it under harsher conditions (longer exposure times, higher temperatures, etc) than it would see in actual use, to solvents chosen to mimic food and beverages. Then one has to both measure the total quantity of moieties that extracted out of the plastic and also identify the species that extracted out. If the total concentration of moieties is above a certain threshold (‘de minimus’, low ppb range) AND there are no ‘bad actor’ chemicals (or analogues) present, then generally the plastic will be approved.
If not on either case, then the toxicologists step in an feeding studies are done using rats. However, I’ve only seen this happen once in my career; generally if either the concentration is above the ‘de minimus’ threshold or ‘bad actor’ molecules or molecules similar to ‘bad actors’ are present, and thus animal feed studies become necessary, then the effort dies. For one thing, animal toxicty studies are both lengthy and costly.
The other source of microplastics that is often overlooked? Tires. Oh, I knew that we mis-manage bulk tires as much as we do every other waste materials stream. But what I didn’t know was that much of the microplastic pollution comes from wheeled transit of any sort that uses rubber. The elastomers in tires abrade with use, and tiny pieces (“tire dust”) wear off the tire as one travels down the road. This “tire dust” then gets washed off the road, into waterways, and eventually into the oceans.
I don’t think it’s an issue of getting rid of plastic or any one material per se. I do believe that we should manage our waste, big items and small, and make less and repair more. Just today, I helped a neighbor’s family–she’s in the hospital due to a car wreck–set a broken washing machine out on the curb. Why can’t we just fix these things? At the very most, give a discount if the buyer can turn in an old unit to be recycled to get a new.
We should indeed try to either avoid single-use plastics or require that it be biodegradable and its degradation products not environmentally harmful. Right now, I’m saving, washing, and re-using my non-biodegradable straws. Most of my other plastic containerware gets saved and re-used, but at a point I just have to ditch it because it’s mostly ‘3, 4, 5, and 6’ code plastics (1 and 2 I can and do collect and recycle).
different clue
@StewartM,
It would be a tiny gesture I know, but . . . I wonder if certain hollow plant stems could serve as straws for several uses. And when no good anymore, they could be composted because they are, after all, made of ‘plant’.
Some of the very thinnest and narrowest bamboos might be strawworthy if the node at each end of the hollow internode stem-segment were cut off. I read somewhere that elderberry stems are either hollow inside or else have a very soft pith which could be burned out with the red-hot tip of a length of coat-hanger wire.
But I haven’t tried it, so all I can do is wonder at this point.
anon y'mouse
on shoes, i was told by the next-last shoe repairman i used that most shoes are totally unrepairable, and the rest not worth repairing (crap materials, even in expensive ones).
i was also told that the skill of shoe repairing within this country used to be taught in prisons as a viable work path for those exiting, and that learning the skill as an apprentice and also as an american was nigh impossible. most existing shoe repairmen now come from places where the skill was not allowed to die out.
he told me this while claiming he couldn’t afford to hire an apprentice, and our transaction was interrupted about five separate times by him needing to answer the phone, retrieve items, make change and so forth. he had no concept that the “apprentice” would do most of these things while he could get back to shoe repairing (waiting times were looooong in his shop), and that he could train them in the quieter moments gradually on the “grunt work” tasks.
training of almost all things has gone out the window. small businesses claim they cannot afford to do it AND earn enough off the customer’s job to keep the shop going (prices have to stay competitive with the big guys, if the big guys offer an alternative, the rest is sacrificed to the real estate and local tax/fee gods). my guess is that they also don’t want to do it, because then their employee will be able to ensure a more equitable disposition of pay/benefits lest they go elsewhere with their mad-skillz acquired by pain and suffering of the employer.
it’s all downhill from here, folks. when you can’t get a plumber because no one wants to train a plumber, well…i guess you will be hiring a foreigner from where everyone does their own plumbing and has at least rudimentary skills. then you can pat yourself on the back because you are paying a valuable immigrant for something we have all been told “americans won’t do”. see, altruism only works if it isn’t given to your own fellow countrymen. same reason we had to ship all the jobs oversees for the last 50 years–to raise living standards abroad.