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1Introduction
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3Our society is seriously out of scale.  This fact has produced a range of dysfunctional behaviors that we have incorporated into our behavioral framework, creating further imbalance.  The end result will be atomization, depopulation, and social chaos.  The only remedy for this problem, long term, is reduction in scale, achieved by reorganizing nations into manageable and relatively homogenous populations, population and immigration control, and restraint of technological, economic, and social policies which give rise to problems of scale.
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5This remedy is not, I must stress, a devolution--it is not a reversion to the past, much less an idealized past free from worry.  In any composition of society, there will be tension between traditional and progressive outlooks, there will be complacency and conflict and all the usual human evils.  Nor is the primary concern Malthusian, that is to say an unsustainable growth in resource consumption (while this is a problem we face as a result of scale, it is not my focus here).
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7By scale I mean more than mere population growth; I refer also to the scale of complexity created by the West's conversion to a multicultural, globalized social model.  In this model, all distinctions including race (meaning ethnicity), nationality, culture, and religion are viewed as subordinate to the division between the managerial class and the managed class.  Thus effective democracy is blunted and masses of people are shifted and reorganized in accordance with the decisions of a managerial class.  Aside from the negative consequences brought about by heedless change, a second order of effects is seen in the dramatic increase in social complexity and the need for citizens to accomodate radically different (and in some cases incompatible) outlooks. 
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9Population Density and Social Pathology
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11Although there is a long history of sociological research into the problems of post-industrial society (for example Durkheim's work on suicide), the seminal work on overcrowding is John B. Calhoun's "Population Density and Social Pathology".  As the title suggests, Calhoun's work centered on experiments in population density separate from a concern for resource availability.  Density here is best defined as the proximity of other competing organisms, and the experiments suggest that at a certain level of density, well below that required by physical needs, there is a complete breakdown in social behavior.  Thus this research explored a problem that Malthusians ignored.
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13Calhoun's experiments consisted of creating enclosed rat habitats which provided unlimited food and water, safety from predators, and disease control, and enough space (about a quarter acre) to accomodate a maximum of 5000 rats.  Originally intended to study the effects of social structure on access to communal resources, Calhoun found that the result of his experiment was profound social pathology.  While the rat population stabilized far below capacity, once rat density crossed a threshold Calhoun observed a nonlinear increase in dominant male aggression and deviant sexual behavior, including exclusive homosexuality and hypersexuality, and on the part of many rats passivity and withdrawal.  Some males became completely solitary and focused on eating, sleeping, and self-grooming.  Cannibalization and maternal neglect also rose dramatically (not entirely unexpected for a rat population).  Most unusual was the development of what Calhoun termed a "behavioral sink", whereby the mass of subordinate rats stayed huddled together in the center of the rat pens.
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15In one of Calhoun's papers his conclusion is particularly affecting:
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17John B. Calhoun:
18The results obtained in this study should be obtained when customary causes of mortality become markedly reduced in any species of mammal whose members form social groups. Reduction of bodily death (i.e. 'the second death') culminates in survival of an excessive number of individuals that have developed the potentiality for occupying the social roles characteristic of the species. Within a few  generations all such roles in all physical space available to the species are filled. At this time, the continuing high survival of many individuals to sexual and behavioural maturity culminates in the presence of many young adults capable of involvement in appropriate species-specific activities. However, there are few opportunities for fulfilling these potentialities. In seeking such fulfilment they  compete for social role occupancy with the older established members of the community. This competition is so severe that it simultaneously leads to the nearly total breakdown of all normal behaviour by both the contestors and the established adults of both sexes. Normal social organization (i.e. 'the establishment') breaks down, it 'dies'.
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20Young born during such social dissolution are rejected by their mothers and other adult associates. This early failure of social bonding becomes compounded by interruption of action cycles due to the mechanical interference resulting from the high contact rate among individuals living in a high density population. High contact rate further fragments behaviour as a result of the stochastics of social interactions which demand that, in order to maximize gratification from social interaction, intensity and duration of social interaction must be reduced in proportion to the degree that the group size exceeds the optimum. Autistic-like creatures, capable only of the most simple behaviours compatible with physiological survival, emerge out of this process. Their spirit has died ('the first death'). They are no longer capable of executing the more complex behaviours compatible with species survival. The species in such settings die.
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22Conceptual space
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24In the same paper there is this exchange regarding overcrowding, which I quote in full because it makes an important distinction:
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26Quote
27Professor Mellanby said Dr Calhoun had suggested that by 1984 man was going to be as crowded as his mice and that this would have disastrous effects. Experiments had been going on for a long time with man. Man was not uniformly distributed. He lived in some communities just as crowded as Dr Calhoun's mice. Professor Mellanby had been very familiar with populations in parts of London forty years ago which were restricted communities. People seldom moved out of them. Until the children were taken to camps for holidays they had seldom been more than a quarter of a mile from their homes. They were living amidst extreme crowding and bred very successfully. Therefore, was it not possible to get an answer to this for human beings by examining such communities? Did crowded, enclosed communities behave like the mice? Or did this occur most obviously in those communities which had about the lowest population density in Sweden or the United States?
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29Dr Calhoun replied that 1984 was not the year in which ultimate density would be attained, but a date beyond which the opportunity for decision making and designing to avoid population catastrophe might be quickly lost. He stated, in any case, that density per se was not the major factor, that rate and quality of social interaction were paramount issues. Basic to his thesis was that despite the thousandfold increase in human numbers since the beginning of culture, some forty to fifty thousand years ago, there had been no change in effective density. The reason for this, alluded to by Professor Young, was that man had discovered a new kind of space, conceptual space, which enabled man to utilize ideas in order to mine resources and guide social relations. However, there was a breaking point for this process, at which time physical density might overwhelm man's ability to utilize conceptual space in order to cope with increasing numbers and it was that breaking point which we might be rapidly approaching. The fact that reproduction could be affected by density had been dealt with by Dr Thompson in Indianapolis (Thompson 1969). An older study for Scotland (Kincaid 1965) had shown that stillbirths and other parameters were density related. However, in terms of conceptual space, it might be the necessity for limitations to growth which might be the more difficult conceptual area for man to deal with. In that case a further increase in birth rate might be expected past the breaking point (Galle et al. 1972).
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31Here in Calhoun's "conceptual space" we find room for the psychological tax placed on mankind by increased complexity in the cultural, technological, and social spheres.  This issue of conceptual space may implicate modern geopolitics, in which we see conflict develop among nations which  were in the past removed from each other's concerns by both physical distance and conceptual distance, a lack of awareness based on lack of interaction (even where there is knowledge and limited trade).  Post-industrial globalization has changed this, and for the first time in human history it has put cultures which have developed more or less in isolation from one another (i.e. geographic non-neighbors) into direct resource conflict.  That human culture as it has evolved for 50,000 years has been rooted to a limited geography with an ethnically homogenous identity may be a necessary condition for stable development, and an awareness of and economic linkage to alien cultures may lead inevitably to a "clash of civilizations".
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33This exchange (developed further in the original paper) also shows concern for crossing a line past which population control becomes effectively impossible--this concern is shaped by Calhoun's experimental findings that even when the rat population fell the rats retained dysfunctional social behaviors and depopulation continued until extinction.  While extinction is an unlikely fate for mankind (even Western man), it suggests that there may be very long term effects--and that pathology in one generation may lead to subsequent dysfunctional generations even when the main driver of the original pathology is removed.  This can be viewed as either a conservative tendency of social behavior or as the destructiveness of pathology to social behavior (the latter could explain the development among advanced civilizations of high standards of ethical and moral conduct, rooted in religion, as a crucial safeguard against just such destabilizing pathology--and the evident erosion of these standards during periods of decline).
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35Therefore it is wrong and misleading to view the implications of Calhoun's experiment as bearing only on physical overcrowding.  Care must of course be taken when drawing connections between Calhoun's rats and human populations.  For example, the common existence of large, thriving population centers does not in itself refute the notion that population density leads to social pathology, because other factors can influence the sense of conceptual overcrowding, including population diversity, advances in communication, and a smaller percentage of the population originating from non-urban settings (i.e. the relative inescapability and importance of the city to cultural life).  Experiments conducted on human subjects measuring performance in crowded vs. non-crowded settings cannot hope to capture long-term psychological effects of overcrowding. 
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37Modern social pathology and secondary effects
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39The sociological implications of Calhoun's experiment are profound.  One can see in contemporary politics both greater aggression and greater subordination and passivity, a presage perhaps of Spengler's "age of Caesars".  The profusion of modern sexual deviancy, not limited to the homosexual population (which is now accorded status as an approved lifestyle in much of the West), is accompanied by predictable decline in fecundity.  Similarly, sex roles have blurred, men becoming more solitary and self-preoccupied while women exhibit more aggressive behavior, as with the rats in Calhoun's experiments.  Crime is only kept in check by record levels of incarceration (hence the misleading nature of crime statistics that view only the rate of reported crime).  Other research has shown that increasing ethnic diversity has had exactly the predicted effect of making people more suspicious and dissociative, and it is highly likely that increased integration of technology has had a similar effect.
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41There are other effects of this increase of scale beyond the social dysfunctions seen in Calhoun's experiments.  The scale of modern society has necessitated a professional managerial class to govern it, which has had serious implications for democracy and social equality as well as the bourgeois class upon which democracies and markets rely.  This managerial class, made up of society's cognitive elite, has become isolated and inbred in addition to the problem of its compulsive novelty-seeking (as discussed elsewhere).  As the mass of society grows more unstable the managerial class acts mainly in a self-serving manner, developing short-term strategems (wage stagnation, mass immigration, massive debt, culture wars) that will likely produce greater long-term instability.
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43In this context, the drive to over-maximize and over-optimize systems can be seen as a kind of frenetic resource-hoarding, perhaps the natural result of further atomization and aggression.  This has in turn produced dehumanized environments as optimization and efficiency reduce the amenities and dignity of daily life to the absolute minimum that can be sustained in the short term (to increase profits disbursed in a winner-take-all manner).  The modern cubicle office seems more fitting for rat experiments than for human beings, and the lowest designation of office work, the call center, is provided the further indignity of constant anxiety over the prospect of outsourcing and further automation--at least for those few who can tolerate such a job for very long.
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45The stresses and anxieties of modern life drive an unsustainable, insatiable consumerism, most visibly evident as gluttony but also present in our greater indebtedness and our obsession with immediate amusement.  This consumerism, I argue, is the result of and attempt to escape from the anxiety of daily life.
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47It is also my theory that anxiety and complexity drive us into a psychological state from which spiritual fulfillment becomes impossible--just as the sufferer of acute depression finds common enjoyments unsatisfying, so do we in our present state find solitude, peace, and religious communion to be empty and meaningless experiences.  Instead we are driven to momentary and increasingly isolating pleasures, and our spiritual pursuits regress to infantile pacification.
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49How can the problem of scale be addressed?
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51I reject the sociological positivism that marked the work of Durkheim and also Calhoun's generation of social scientists.  Due to the complexity of human behavior and human environments, researchers have been unable to adequately model social surroundings and their experiments are largely useless, except insofar as they confirm a negative hypothesis.  That is to say, such research may confirm the conditions for dysfunctional social behaviors, but it cannot confirm the conditions necessary for healthy social behaviors because if a single factor is overlooked the entire social ecosystem may be put in jeopardy--healthy social behaviors are fragile.  (More likely they will overlook not one but several factors due to bias and cultural influence.)
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53A general problem with social transformation is that its ill effects can remain latent for one or two generations because of the lingering influence of older (superintending) generations.  Thus the most significant impact may not arrive before the second or third generation.  The implication is that significant social transformations always carry with them a grave risk of compounding error.  That error can be compounded still further when society reaches the scale where transformation quickly becomes global; in effect, the replication rate of error increases due to large scale society's reliance on mass communication and mass culture and the cognitive elite's infatuation with novelty.
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55For all the risks associated with such things as genetic modification or carcinogens, comparatively little attention is given to the risks of social transformation, as evidenced by the last century of transformation and upheaval.  (It now seems that each successive transformation is a cure for the last one.)
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57Scale may be the inevitable result of our evolutionary imperative to reproduce or perish.  Natural selection only produces advantageous adaptations in the relative short term; as environments change, species face constant challenge to adapt or perish.  The problem of scale is the unintended result of extremely successful adaptation in conflict with the practical limits of the human mind.  As with Calhoun's rats, once we reach the limits of our conceptual space, we begin to degenerate--though in some respects we have chosen to define our degeneracy as normal or even superior.
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59Many of those influenced by positivistic thinking have attempted to formulate strategies to ameliorate the effects of scale on ordinary life, but I think a much more comprehensive and indeed radical solution must be sought.  Scale must be diminished directly, not merely managed through the development of new coping strategies.  There are four vectors of attack on scale:
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611.  Smaller nations comprised of homogenous populations
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63For countries such as the United States, this means division into regional states preferably with independent governments.  Current regional divisions are too great to foster healthy politics, and in places such as the southwest they have become ethnic divisions as well.  Cultural and ethnic homogenity may begin to repair the community bonds weakened by excessive diversity.  Government can become more responsive to the needs of a unified citizenry with a shared sense of identity and purpose, and greater possibilities awakened by less obsessive competition.
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652.  Population and immigration control
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67To insure the maintenance of a stable and homogenous society, immigration should be tightly controlled and population should be maintained at no greater than replacement levels.  A severe reduction in population is not desirable for the instability it would bring about, but a small rate of decline could be manageable even for modern liberal democracies whose current economies are addicted to growth.  How this can be achieved is an open question, but acceptance of the necessity of restraining population for the health of all would allow for a considerable range of options.
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693.  Management of systems vulnerable to problems of scale
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71Here we have the greatest challenge, as the most vulnerable systems show the greatest short term benefits from scale, namely economic and technological.  We must rid ourselves of the delusion of efficiency--the belief that any increase in productivity is justified regardless of its effect on human beings.  This will be a painful process, as it has been a driver for many of the superficial pleasures we have turned to as our society has become more complex and threatening.
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73Efficiency has come to mean cheapness in all things, and we refuse to see the ill effects of this cheapness--on the dehumanization of daily life, on the mechanization of work (the loss of physical labor which we require as animals), on the psychological upheaval that comes with the loss of careers and employment meaningful to us as individuals.
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75Implicated in this last vector is the entire managerial class, which has utilized the delusion of efficiency for its own gain and at the expense of the managed class.  How the cognitive elite can be restrained, given its well-established tendencies in this direction, is another question.
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774. Political reform
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79In order to preserve what social stability remains, political participation should be reformed to reduce the influence of atomized citizens on political discourse and to restore a balance between the rural and urban outlooks.  To this end, I favor restricting the franchise to property-owning households (that is, one vote per family).  This may well be regarded as the most fanciful suggestion in a series of fanciful suggestions, for the franchise has become in modern society a sacred touchstone, never mind that it is increasingly used only to select the emptiest and most inane politicians from a highly competitive series.  I would argue the opposite, that the franchise has been degraded by being awarded to everyone everywhere while requiring less sense than is needed to pass a driving test or obtain a credit card; it is granted as well to those who are still in a mode of living more closely resembling adolescence than adulthood.
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81This political reform is not flippant; it targets precisely that voter who has become most menacing to society, the rootless, self-infatuated, novelty-seeking intellectual.  I admit it will be difficult if not impossible to get this one past him, for he reads and often pretends to understand what he reads, and has arrogance to spare besides.  However it is clear he will undo everything in an instant, for any reason or simply because he is bored with life (this more or less describes his entire involvement in politics). 
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83Conclusion
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85We can see that scale is intimately tied to many of the social and political dysfunctions of modern life.  We are dealing here with the limits not of human ideology or imagination but of human psychology--limits which there is no convincing evidence we can or should wish to change.  The sort of human being who would prefer our over-crowded, over-complicated, and atomized society is properly understood as autistic or else sociopathically aggressive.  Apart from the anxieties which drive consumerism, aggression, and infantile pleasure-seeking, we are left with impoverished spiritual lives which dull our taste for everything in life.
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87There is no reason in the world to believe that the density and complexity of the present scale of human civilization is sustainable past the short term.  One way or another we will face crisis and diminished existences.  Our choice is whether to restore the conditions necessary for truly human lives, with all the richness of the human spirit, or continue as pathetic, huddled rats. 
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89I would like to add as a postscript to this the observation that scale's corrupting influence on business and politics extends beyond the elevation of an amoral managerial class.  Where rewards are asymmetrical (e.g. winner-take-all situations), scale produces a fever pitch of competitiveness, supposedly its major benefit.  However this competitiveness reaches such a level that only the most relentless and personally malleable individuals succeed--everyone lacking this single-mindedness fails.
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91Thus everything becomes shaped by a new form of person whose drives push him to a narrowly defined standard of success--appeal to the masses--and thus is lost the variety and vitality of the culture.  One sees it in film, literature, politics, and especially business, as the gradual erosion of verisimilitude, and the loss of innovation and wide range of perspective which are ironically a hallmark of systems operating in suboptimal fashion.*
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93Perhaps this is most readily visible to the average person in the quality of movies he sees at the cinema.  Hollywood is the embodiment of scale, a cultural and industrial colossus which by virtue of its scale attracts nearly everyone of every level of talent.  As a result of this intense competition, it is inevitably degraded:  standards of personal behavior and ethics plummet, creativity weakens both from inbreeding and from the demands of a heavily optimized financing system, and the gradual darkening of its reputation provides a selection pressure on its population by pulling in those well-suited to it.  In effect a dysgenic shift in the population occurs, all due to the inevitable forces of scale.
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95This process then happens everywhere--again the result is a diminishment of life against which one can do nothing so long as scale is allowed to reach its fullness.  To limit scale becomes the one goal that a man who cares for his culture, his art, his people must have.
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97* Note that resilient nature is pervasively suboptimal. 
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100HERE HERE HERE HERE HEREHEREHERE HERE HERE HERE HERE HERE
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102This is a rebuttal 
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104The fervor with which people today defend their participation in the electoral process is entirely out of parity with the significance, symbolic or otherwise, of that participation. Your suggestion is eminently reasonable and is clearly the best arrangement if we want to preserve whatever dignity remains attached to the democratic process, but as you yourself admit it will be inevitably be met with caterwauling over MY RIGHTS, HOW DARE YOU TAKE AWAY MY RIGHTS YOU MONSTER...and for this reason, I question the wisdom of even retaining the franchise, as you call it, at all. Anarchy or autocracy seem equally feasible, given the excessive attachment of individuals today to their fractional involvement in what basically amounts to a nationwide platitude-spouting competition. 
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106Your proposed encroachment on that involvement, minor as it is, will encounter as much opposition as if you had suggested that we elect David Duke as president-for-life and change our nation's name to THE UNITED STATES OF HITLER. So what advantage does limited suffrage offer over...well, no suffrage at all? Why do you think that the franchise hasn't already been degraded to the point that even its restriction to property-owning households cannot save it? 
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108reply
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110I basically agree with your assessment.  Part of the purpose of my conclusions is to reinforce how serious and how large the problem of scale is--it cannot be remedied by half-measures.  I believe that once the problem is accepted in its entirety, it will become evident that some dramatic action is necessary.  Whatever form this action takes, it is important for people to understand that scale must be addressed head-on--we are already mired in its effects, so slowing its rate of growth or working around it are not sensible options.
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112Perhaps though this is more in the mode of propopents of anthropogenic global warming--so large a problem that no one can take it seriously, much less accept the need for dramatic change.  The very suggestion that America be split up into regional powers (although I find this wholly feasible and sensible) will probably come across as a weird hallucination--it strikes at the heart of our multiculturalist, melting pot fantasy.  How can he not see that diversity is our strength!
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114What would be an acceptable outcome to me would be to jolt conservatism back into some form of life--particularly intellectually.  There are a wealth of conservative ideas out there (you yourself have pointed to writers such as Ellul who I think have an inherently conservative message), which could be grappled with in preference to the absurd economic and geopolitical fixations that form the center of conservative "thought". 
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116anther rebuttal
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118As Niall Ferguson wrote, "There is no solution to the problem of declining empire."  I don't believe the US is an empire in the sense Britain was, but its home territory has already become an empire of disinterested ethnicities.  
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120I think solutions need to be explored along those lines.  Forget about repairing the Western nation-state.  What low-RCS local solutions can be devised?  Is there a way to minimize one's dependence on the utilities grids? Are there ways of de-coupling our incomes from soulless corporations run by the managerial class we despise?  Can we live more frugally?
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122I know from talking to some of my old friends who now have kids that there is a nucleus of family-forming people who still hold to the old ways of viewing things because of the cognitive dissonance they experienced living in the extant multicultural utopias of the US.  They look to the future and don't see much for their children in the United States.  The question is, "How do we get such people to all live around one another and form an architecture parallel to that of fedgov and the state governments?  I think it can be done.  I think it must be done.  We need to start thinking more solidly "Post-American."
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124Edit: When you read through the comments on this article, you know that no one else believes any of this is going to end well:
125http://news.yahoo.co..._white_minority
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127Everyone instinctually knows we're headed for a Brazilian future at best, a South African one at worst. 
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129Sorry if this was a bit poorly thought-out or incoherent.  I've been awake for quite awhile. 
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131reply 
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133I think solutions need to be explored along those lines.  Forget about repairing the Western nation-state.  What low-RCS local solutions can be devised?  Is there a way to minimize one's dependence on the utilities grids? Are there ways of de-coupling our incomes from soulless corporations run by the managerial class we despise?  Can we live more frugally?
134I think these are interesting questions.  I definitely think de-coupling from institutions of scale is necessary, and it's not insanely difficult to do.  There are smaller companies, if you are willing to accept the lower pay and ups and downs of small business life (not all roses).  I think especially with a return to traditional sex roles "smaller living" is possible.
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136View PostPRCalDude, on 12 March 2010 - 04:13 PM, said:
137I know from talking to some of my old friends who now have kids that there is a nucleus of family-forming people who still hold to the old ways of viewing things because of the cognitive dissonance they experienced living in the extant multicultural utopias of the US.  They look to the future and don't see much for their children in the United States.  The question is, "How do we get such people to all live around one another and form an architecture parallel to that of fedgov and the state governments?  I think it can be done.  I think it must be done.  We need to start thinking more solidly "Post-American."
138This part I am skeptical about.  Forget about any kind of parallel society.  Just trying to find like-minded people will tend to suck in extreme types.  Most people, even those willing to take the steps to disconnect, will find themselves pulled away from uprooting--by other social connections, the need to find work, and so on.
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140Maybe what needs to happen at first is to reshape conservatism.  I think people need a way to live within the framework offered by modern life while rejecting the poisonous excesses of scale.  Really it gets back to traditionalism in everything.  I've been thinking about sex roles lately.  It's a core building block of society because it's such a fundamental part of who we are as animals.  I want to write something touching on this soon.  And of course this is a part of us that has become extremely distorted by the pathologies produced by scale/complexity/overcrowding.
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142Just look at the way sexuality and sexual identity are completely deformed in the media.  Homosexuality as healthy, promiscuous sex as self-assertive, even something as extreme as transsexualism is looked at as "oh my goodness this poor man/woman/thing".
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144Of course there are cases--rare--of ambiguous physical sexuality, but these have no relation with any of our current sexual obsessions.  Hardly any homosexuals or transsexuals fit this category, any more than nerd culture is the result of naturally occurring autism.  We are creating this madness--creating then excusing it. 
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146anther rebuttal
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148This part I am skeptical about. Forget about any kind of parallel society. Just trying to find like-minded people will tend to suck in extreme types. Most people, even those willing to take the steps to disconnect, will find themselves pulled away from uprooting--by other social connections, the need to find work, and so on.
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150Perhaps.  I lean towards this view, but that doesn't mean we should give up.  Quite the opposite. 
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152For starters, we're rapidly moving towards roboticizing most work and having software do ever more of the engineering work.  There might not be much work to even do.  Right now, a good chunk of the population does essentially no useful work, as Bushrod has frequently stated and much data supports.  The amount of manufacturing this country does has actually been increasing as manufacturing employment has fallen off a cliff.  Sooner or later, more and more of the left hand side of the bell curve (and even much above the mean) will be unemployable.  So your point may be moot as there may not be much work to do.  What this does mean, however, is that tech will be extremely cheap.  
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154Secondly, if crime spikes and we continue this economic malaise (as we almost surely will), people will be looking for cheap property regardless of where family is located.  Right now, the cheap property is in the rust belt and the midwest.  I am in favor of everyone white moving north of the 48th parallel on this continent where lack of pigment is your friend.  If you superimposed Germany onto North America at its original latitude, it would basically stretch from mid Montana to just south of Calgary.  Happily, these areas of the continent are pretty empty.  For instance, Montana is the size of California with a population of only 1 million.  The sun belt is what's filling up with all of the "excitement" right now, though the northern and midwestern big cities have plenty also.  My prediction is that the welfare state isn't too far from collapsing thanks to our skyrocketing debt-to-GDP ratio.  Once it collapses, it will be awfully uncomfortable to live where its cold.  Recall that South Africa is warm, so you won't freeze living in your shanty made of corrugated siding.
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156Quote
157This part I am skeptical about. Forget about any kind of parallel society. Just trying to find like-minded people will tend to suck in extreme types. Most people, even those willing to take the steps to disconnect, will find themselves pulled away from uprooting--by other social connections, the need to find work, and so on.
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159One reading - certainly not the only reading - of Western history suggests that the church filled in where the Roman empire receded.  I'm not trying to offend anyone's sensibilities by saying this as the Dawkins set finds this idea extremely contentious.  However, the church did play a role where the state failed.  Protestant churches (and, it appears, Orthodox churches) are rather decentralized and facilitate loose structure and networking with authority everyone participating agrees to.  Something secular along these lines would be necessary for non-Christians, but could be worked out.  I actually have no problem with secular government, I'm just throwing out the church as an example.  The "extreme types," in a church setting, would always be weeded out.  In a secular setting, they could simply be cut-off from local economic activity or just generally be made to feel unwelcome.  This is the advantage of downscaling.  I also think that our current government, over the next 20 years, is likely to depopulate this country to quite a degree by trying to tax everything that moves while "fighting" unemployment through by creating more public sector jobs at the expense of the private sector.  Also, as you said, with increasing scale comes increasing complexity and thus chaos.  Also, the tax base is collapsing in more ways than one:
160http://news.yahoo.co..._white_minority 
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162The more I read, the more I think we're on the brink of having the ability to decentralize our power, manufacturing, and food production.  Your original post mentioned the effects of excess population density.  Perhaps I didn't read carefully enough, but I believe these effects are only to be seen below certain latitudes and under certain conditions.  Russia, for instance, only has 150 million people over an enormous territory.  Canada and much of the US are largely empty.  Eastern Europe has a shrinking population.  It's only in the warmer slums of the world where population is a problem (India, for instance).  I think there is a lot of land that can be put to good use with small-scale decentralized methods of living that simply shrug at what goes on in Washington DC. 
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164Copying this from the thread on genital decoration because it equally applies here:
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167Dysfunctional sexual dynamics (female aggression, hypersexuality) are predicted by Calhoun's rat experiments.  That's what I believe we are seeing here:  pathological behavior that is the result of human psychology being overwhelmed by overly complex social interactions (the conceptual space is exhausted).  I believe that "transgressing the boundaries" happens due to anxiety over social roles and a perceived lack of order.
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169The anxiety isn't necessarily conscious.  It's often difficult to determine one's own long-term emotional state (such as depression), so the anxiety can persist for a long time and work its influence before its effect on behavior is identified.  I think the anxiety comes across as a sense of meaninglessness or disconnectedness, and that the ordinary coping behavior consists of thrill-seeking and self-pacification (aggression or passivity).  Obviously this will include increased focus on transient pleasures at the expense of forming stable, long-term attacmhments--remember, the anxiety seems to foreclose refuge in stability because it is produced by instability.
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171Durkheim identified economic success as a destabilizing condition, however I think he needed to go back farther and look at the motives for pursuing lavish wealth.  It is a form of resource over-hoarding which is in itself pathological.
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173Today's sexual mores don't surprise me.  They are a dramatic change from my adolescence in the 80s but they perfectly fit the conditions we are now in.  I believe that the bombardment of diversity messages in the media has heightened to a pitch some of this anxiety and the feeling of crowded conceptual space.  Before the 60s-70s, human civilization has never developed under such a gigantic communications umbrella--I call it "umbrella" because it blocks out everything beyond oneself.
174
175Of course its effect could not be immediate, it took a couple of generations to finally result in this extreme state of pathology and sexual confusion.  Something like genital grooming makes no sense unless you are so overexposed to stimulating images that you begin to fixate on them.  During this fixation the person becomes drained of emotional content and becomes an object, hence subject of stylized representations.  This is not even normal in men, let alone women.
176
177anther post
178
179I'm actually reading a book right now on somatics that talks about the effects of urban modern life on our stress levels and well-being (and what to do about it).  It was written back in the late 80s.  
180
181I think populations are ultimately caught in some huge feedback loop.  For instance, the Romans didn't really have to so much invade Greek territory as show up and occupy a depopulated Greek territory.  Later, Rome itself depopulated over a very short period of time due to starvation.  Look at Detroit now.  New York would already be a ruin if it weren't for Giulianni throwing all of the dangerous negroes in jail and throwing away the key along with it.  Los Angeles, despite the influx of Mexicans, is actually shrinking in size.  School enrollment has been declining along with the city itself, which has the worst roads in the nation (and the worst schools) - a microcosm of el futuro de Norte California.  Actually, Baja looks better than Los Angeles in many ways. 
182
183another post PLEASUREMAN
184
185Technology became a double-edged sword.  I think it increased our conceptual space in a sense, but then crowded it tenfold so that while we've been able to manage our out-of-scale problems better (we won't starve to death for lack of food) the complexity increased dramatically and has led to more fast-spreading pathology.
186
187In Haidt's TED talk about conservatives and liberals, he refers to Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights as a depiction of social entropy (an intriguing modern interpretation), arising from too little concern for order.  Our sexual mores seem to be playing out the abandon and hedonism of the central panel.
188
189Out of curiosity, PRCalDude, what is the book you are reading? 
190
191reply
192
193Basically, the idea is that stress and anxiety go into the various postural muscles and screw up movement patterns and cause pain.  Over time, the build up of stress causes "sensory motor amnesia" in the brain and motor and sensory nerves and muscle dysfunction accumulates.  
194
195The book is a bit too polemical and self-congratulatory, but the core idea is sound because pain and motor dysfunction is ultimately controlled by the brain.  Oh, the idea that it can arrest aging is obviously hyperbole too.  But you can stay relatively supple throughout life if you learn how to keep motor control of your muscles.  Most people in the US nowadays, through obesity and disuse, can barely walk.  But if you go to Germany, you can see old ladies walking around and riding their bikes like they're teenagers in the freezing cold.  It was a real eye-opener for me.  
196
197Anyways, as you've probably figured out, I'M A PRETTY UPTIGHT GUY.  I developed back and neck pain and needed to learn how to mellow out.  :draper:  But my muscles haven't totally loosened back up yet.  
198
199Interestingly, though, there are societies with basically no back and neck pain despite the fact that heavy manual labor is common.  Western societies are typically the ones with the highest incidence of these illnesses even though we don't do much physical work anymore. 
200
201I don't think public housing on the scale of things like Pruitt Igoe works well with anyone, but it definitely works least well with groups prone to deviant and criminal behavior.  Rez housing has much the same problem.
202
203Inner city neighborhoods were mostly screwed by the flight of higher IQ blacks once segregationist barriers got torn down.  This led to a collapse of norms in many of these neighborhoods and ultimately required a massive criminal justice response in order to get things under control.  (Katrina was just a dramatization of this.  It happened right before our eyes and we still didn't get it.)
204
205Speaking of troublesome populations, it's ironic now that open borders advocates point sneeringly to anti-Italian and anti-Irish sentiment during the early 20th century.  In fact the large waves of Irish and Italian immigration brought plenty of problems and were only (problematically) assimilated after moratoriums.  It's typical of our arrogance to assume that what we have forgotten didn't matter.  Of course liberals think the answer to urban sprawl is densely populated cities.  There's no way around it:  we enjoy being dumb. 
206
207more reply
208
209So a friend of mine just got a job at a company that sells some kind of software analytics package that helps other companies track how efficiently they're using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to gin up new business (or as the ad copy has it, "Social Media Monitoring and Engagement"). Apparently business is booming and their services are in great demand. It got me thinking about how, in our sophisticated modern economies, so much of what we do is just producing more useless frivolous bullshit to satisfy people's status anxiety, and then we start companies to manage and monitor and promote and optimize said bullshit (you mention the drive to optimize everything a couple times in this thread, well don't you worry, they're going to optimize the f**k out of Twitter http://www.myposting...tyle_emoticons/default/flathead.png ). To paraphrase Snow Crash, it seems all we're good at making anymore is "social media", high-frequency trading, and reality shows. I'm guessing the increased departure of so many large and prestigious fields of work from anything remotely resembling value creation is probably another symptom of the kinds of problems discussed in this thread. 
210
211PLEASERMAN reply
212
213That's an excellent point.  "Social networking" has become an intense focus of Internet life even though social hyper-interaction (and interaction lacking depth or realness) appears to be one of the main issues.  It reminds me of the kind of manic, compulsive behavior you see in people overwhelmed by anxiety.  It is the flip side to the extreme regression that can also serve as a response to overstimulation.
214
215There seem to be overlapping motives or goals to this form of interaction.  Something that could warrant another post is the way the workplace has changed, particularly as women entered the workforce and brought gynocentric pathology to its social organization.  (Women interact with very different motives from men of course.)  Today workplace socialization is very shallow and this tends to heighten anxiety.  Beneath the veneer of HR-enforced fake comity there is nothing but aggression.  Certainly many opportunities for rich interaction have disappeared from daily life, and escapist social networking might be the reaction.
216
217Of course by "anxiety" I mean not only or mainly the sort of desperate awkwardness of nerds; I think most of the anxiety we experience is subconscious and tends to go unnoticed even as it interferes with normal social interaction.  It's probably the reason many marriages fall apart--the subconscious hostility leaves people too worn out to fulfill the needs of a spouse--in fact to participate in any deep relationship, which must draw on a reserve of emotional energy.
218
219Another part perhaps is the busywork quality of this artificial social networking--getting more friends (even people you barely know or care about), participating in social networking games, and generally hoarding resources in the form of "points" (this is why nerds care so much about their gamer scores--it is classic hoarding activity, only directed at a completely useless resource).
220
221I also like that you bring up reality shows, a form of vicarious socialization (and almost the entire point to them is to release hostility).
222
223So when we talk of "scale" and "complexity" we are mainly talking about the problem of being overwhelmed by threatening or challenging social interactions within an atomized, heterogenous environment.  Resource hoarding is one symptom, as is of course regression and escapism. 
224
225ANOTHER THING
226
227How can the problem of scale be addressed?
228
2294. Political reform
230
231In order to preserve what social stability remains, political participation should be reformed to reduce the influence of atomized citizens on political discourse and to restore a balance between the rural and urban outlooks.  To this end, I favor restricting the franchise to property-owning households (that is, one vote per family).  This may well be regarded as the most fanciful suggestion in a series of fanciful suggestions, for the franchise has become in modern society a sacred touchstone, never mind that it is increasingly used only to select the emptiest and most inane politicians from a highly competitive series.  I would argue the opposite, that the franchise has been degraded by being awarded to everyone everywhere while requiring less sense than is needed to pass a driving test or obtain a credit card; it is granted as well to those who are still in a mode of living more closely resembling adolescence than adulthood.
232
233This political reform is not flippant; it targets precisely that voter who has become most menacing to society, the rootless, self-infatuated, novelty-seeking intellectual.  I admit it will be difficult if not impossible to get this one past him, for he reads and often pretends to understand what he reads, and has arrogance to spare besides.  However it is clear he will undo everything in an instant, for any reason or simply because he is bored with life (this more or less describes his entire involvement in politics).
234
235
236
237Thomas Carlyle, on 15 April 1850, said:
238...there is in all Colonies a fluctuating migratory mass, not destitute of money, but very much so of loyalty, permanency, or civic availability; whom it is extremely advantageous not to consult on what you are about attempting for the Colony or Mother Country... And if by any means you could (which you cannot) exclude the Fourth Estate, and indicate decisively what Wise Advice was the thing wanted here, and Parliamentary Eloquence was not the thing wanted anywhere just now,--there might really some light of experience and human foresight, and a truly valuable benefit, be found for you in such assemblies.
239
240Quote
241Steve wrote, "it's better for your career to assert that everything's very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?"
242
243This is an excellent point. In the U.S. we are paying a very heavy "elite tax" for overcomplicated legal, medical, government, and education systems. But people are starting to drop out.
244
245People are dropping out by "ghettoizing" themselves. They get a bill from a lawyer, they don't pay it. Medical bills? Don't pay them. They work in jobs that pay mainly in cash, don't own real estate, and make themselves judgment-proof.
246
247I also note that the elite, expert media is dying. In ghetto world, people get their news through Facebook.
248
249This ghettoization trend will continue and it will put a serious dent in the revenues of expert-run institutions.
250
251another PLEASERMAN
252
253Sailer's latest article on iSteve touches on the subject of stress and population density.  He quotes from Nature News:
254
255Nature News:
256Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg's Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and 498). Stress is a major factor in precipitating psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
257
258...Meyer-Lindenberg works on risk mechanisms in schizophrenia, and previously focused on the role of genes. But although a dozen or so genes have been linked to the disorder, "even the most powerful of these genes conveys only a 20% increased risk", he says. Yet schizophrenia is twice as common in those who are city-born and raised as in those from the countryside, and the bigger the city, the higher the risk (see 'Dose response?').
259http://isteve.blogsp...izophrenia.html
260
261Sailer seems to pooh-pooh the idea that a generalized cause like "stress" can account for different rates of mental illness (i.e. he must not be reading MPC).  He remarks:
262
263Steve Sailer:
264Fourth, if city life correlates with schizophrenia, why stress instead of infection as a potential cause? Disease burden was such a problem for city dwellers until quite recently that, for example, sub-Saharan Africa had very few cities. People in Africa had to live spread out in small villages or they'd get sick and die.
265Of course population density could very well increase infection rates since infection loves company.  One could even come up with a Greg Cochran-esque explanaton that some form of communicable brain illness is responsible for the elevated stress.  But the simpler, Occamian explanation is that being crushed in with a few other million people who all compete for an increasingly select position at the trough makes people more anxious and more vulnerable to stress-related illness.
266
267Plus I think the inability of Africans to summon up the level of civilization required to combat diseases (among other things) might be the case in his example. 
268
269Here is another one
270
271I think Sailer's missing an obvious point, one that he himself has made in other contexts. e.g., when talking about Social Security privatization, he argued that most people don't want it because they don't want to deal with a bunch of confusing investment options in their old age. It takes considerable brainpower to think through those options thoroughly, and most people just don't have it.
272
273From there, it seems to be an easy leap to PM's theories. We have dozens of those types of decisions hanging over our head at any given time. We're also at the mercy of other people who make those types of decisions for us every day--bureaucrats and managers, in our own country and abroad. And then we have to walk out onto the street every day and realize that our neighbors have nothing in common with us--not blood or history or even language--and look at us as marks to be picked clean.
274
275Taken together, that's a tremendous amount of strain, and it can't help but show up in how we live our lives. 
276 
277
278PLEASERMAN post 
279
280Sailer also makes this curious error:
281
282Steve Sailer:
283Third, it's not at all clear to me that we stress out more over stuff that wasn't around during the evolutionary past. Lots of people stress out over snakes and spiders, but people seem to get fairly used to, say, driving 75 mph on the Ventura Freeway.
284Sailer evidently doesn't keep in touch with any older relatives.  A few of mine completely stress out over traffic in Dallas, which has nothing on California freeways.  Then there is having to drive in inclement weather, which shaves the margin of error even further; the end result is a traffic system that tends to work well only when nothing goes wrong.  As soon as someone makes a mistake, you've got a backup for several miles.  Sitting in traffic on your way to work isn't stressful?  I can't count how many mornings I used to arrive at the office with my thoughts completely thrown off track by how much longer it took me to get to work that day (in one case a 45 minute commute stretched out to two and a half hours--again, that's nothing compared to LA's fragile traffic network).
285
286Do people really spend a lot of time stressing out over snakes and spiders, vs. what kind of computer to buy, how soon the HVAC company will get out to replace the air conditioner, what is going on with the cable reception, how much are they going to jack up my property taxes this year, is the department getting outsourced, etc?  Compared to just 30 years ago (when there were a whole lot more capable white people running things) I would say the level of stress we're subjected to has skyrocketed.
287
288Consider this sadly common experience:
289
290> Please tell me which area you need assistance with. If you're having trouble with your Internet, say "Technical Support". If you're--
291
292"Technical Support"
293
294> I'm sorry, I couldn't understand that. If you're having trouble with your Internet, say "Technical--"
295
296"TECHNICAL SUPPORT"
297
298> It sounds like you have a question about your bill. Is that correct?
299
300"No!"
301
302> I'm sorry, I'm having trouble understanding. Please choose one of the following--
303
304"Representative!"
305
306> I'm sorry, I couldn't understand that.
307
308reply
309
310Sailer's usually very perceptive when it comes to what makes people tick, but in some cases he over-generalizes from his own experience. Most people aren't as smart, and clear about their own motivations, as he is. (Or as his friends and family are, for that matter. Greg Cochran knew there were no nukes in Iraq in 2001, why didn't everybody else?) 
311
312another 
313
314PLEASUREMAN, on 29 June 2011 - 07:43 AM, said:
315Sailer also makes this curious error:
316
317Steve Sailer:
318Third, it's not at all clear to me that we stress out more over stuff that wasn't around during the evolutionary past. Lots of people stress out over snakes and spiders, but people seem to get fairly used to, say, driving 75 mph on the Ventura Freeway.
319Sailer evidently doesn't keep in touch with any older relatives....
320
321Do people really spend a lot of time stressing out over snakes and spiders, vs. what kind of computer to buy, how soon the HVAC company will get out to replace the air conditioner, what is going on with the cable reception, how much are they going to jack up my property taxes this year, is the department getting outsourced, etc?  Compared to just 30 years ago (when there were a whole lot more capable white people running things) I would say the level of stress we're subjected to has skyrocketed.
322
323My parents are shocked by and terrified of driving in America. I don't think their old Dacia could even get to 90 km/h on a flat with a tailwind. (For that matter, I'm terrified of driving on two-lane switchbacks climbing the meridianal Carpathians, or of Roman/Athenian-style Bucharest kamikaze traffic where you just casually park on the sidewalk. But my fears are rational.)
324
325As it happens, I know a lot of well-to-do elderly people. In classical music, there are lots of old people who are reliable donors for arts events because they inherited money and they "want to give back," etc. They constantly talk about how overwhelmed they are by modern life. It's clearly not a money issue.
326
327It's downright weird for me to meet people with bulging bank accounts who are frightened of modern life nonetheless. But their society has vanished out from under them. In the old days, you'd call customer service and talk to a live white person. Now you get a machine or a bindi. You'd go and do your errands in person. Now, corporations would prefer that you interact with them purely through the web. And then there's the fear.
328
329I suppose many people here recall this famous section from Saul Bellow (linking to summary to avoid 888) -
330
331Quote
332In Poland, France, England, students, young gentlemen of his time, had been unacquainted with kitchens. Now he did things that cooks and maids had once done. He did them with a certain priestly stiffness. Acknowledgment of social descent...
333
334[Sammler reports a black pickpocket operating openly on a city bus. The New York police insolently inform him they that they haven't got a man to watch the bus.]
335
336[Later, the pickpocket, having graduated to robbery, is openly going through an old man's wallet. He looks up and sees that Sammler has been watching. Sammler quietly gets off the bus and leaves. The thief accosts him in the lobby of his building, silently presses him against the wall from behind, and eloquently warns him off thus:]
337
338He was directed, silently, to look downward. The black man had opened his fly and taken out his penis. It was displayed to Sammler with great oval testicles, a large tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing -- a tube, a snake; metallic hairs bristled at the thick base and the tip curled beyond the supporting, demonstrating hand, suggesting the fleshly mobility of an elephant's trunk, though the skin was somewhat iridescent rather than thick or rough.
339
340One feels a kind of distant, Olympian pity for wealthy old crocks who voted D all their lives and whose hearts earnestly, honestly bled for the suffering of the vibrantly diverse. Now their society has gone to pieces and they hear the wolves at night. Every so often, a granddaughter is raped in Haiti or robbed in Baltimore; a grandson moves far away for his corporate job and never calls; the streets get a little narrower, a little meaner; there start to be neighborhoods where one doesn't go. It was a nice country they had, once. 
341
342reply 
343
344View PostPLEASUREMAN, on 05 July 2011 - 11:39 AM, said:
345Tainter is on my wish list, I've got the gist of his argument but I want to read the details
346
347I'm in the same situation, but based on my limited understanding, it strikes me that Tainter's concept of social complexity may be the human scale you refer to which must be limited to prevent collapse.
348
349The problem is thus: A society increases social complexity to solve problems, and gains some benefit thereby.  But at some point, the marginal return on investment declines to the point of going negative.  Then, as noted in the Charles Hugh Smith review, the institutions which generate this complexity transition from problem solving to self-preservation (this phenomenon is studied in the dismal science under the name "Public Choice Theory" and makes a great deal of intuitive sense, at the very least).  We thus find ourselves in a society with excess social complexity - that is, wildly out of scale - but the institutions which provide this excess have no interest in rolling themselves back.
350
351This would also explain the paradox of capitalism, to wit, that free markets are such powerful engines for economic growth, and yet, capitalism seems to inevitably result in large corporations doing significant societal damage.  If one accepts that - to corrupt Clarke's third law - any sufficiently advanced business is indistinguishable from government, then clearly large companies become part of the network of corrosive complexity, working right alongside governmental organizations to raise the standard of misery (Exhibit A: The Economic Crisis, the bailouts, and the aftermath).
352
353The primacy of social complexity is also compelling, because it seems to hold intuitive explanatory power beyond simpler metrics such as population density.  Surely we can envision two demographically and geographically identical societies, and yet imagine that the latter has ten times the social complexity of the former and likely suffers for it.
354
355If all this is true, then three questions present: How do we measure social complexity?  How do we know how much is best?  And how do we ensure that optimal level?  The answers are, to my mind at least, not obvious.  I agree with the four points of reform you previously proposed; surely smaller, homogenous societies that actively throttle complexity would be better, and if the franchise was restricted to upstanding societal stakeholders, we might well expect a better result.  But isn't that exactly what the first 1.5 centuries of America were?  Lamentably, it appears not to have been much of a safeguard.
356
357(I have a poorly-formulated idea that the subjugation of women may turn out to be astoundingly important to the human richness of civilization.  Necessary, but not sufficient, as the Muslim example indicates - but necessary nonetheless.) 
358
359reply pleaserman
360
361Good points.  I have not finished Tainter's book yet, but in the beginning he talks about a lot of different societal collapses, including societies that were not particularly large scale--however "scale" is relative to technology and social structure (a tribal society exceeds its scale--and thus needs to either change, divide, or collapse--at a relatively low population density and geographic expanse). 
362
363reply 
364
365View Postniggerfaggot, on 23 November 2011 - 09:28 AM, said:
366If all this is true, then three questions present: How do we measure social complexity?  How do we know how much is best?  And how do we ensure that optimal level?  The answers are, to my mind at least, not obvious.  I agree with the four points of reform you previously proposed; surely smaller, homogenous societies that actively throttle complexity would be better, and if the franchise was restricted to upstanding societal stakeholders, we might well expect a better result.  But isn't that exactly what the first 1.5 centuries of America were?  Lamentably, it appears not to have been much of a safeguard.
367We can only hope that a better understanding of social collapse (through the work of Calhoun, Tainter, et al) informs decision-making.  We do have an advantage over past societies in that our understanding of history (while imperfect) is far more advanced, with the caveat that ideology can erase the insights of the most meticulously gathered historical record.
368
369It may be an inherent human limitation for man's reach to "always exceed his grasp"--it may be impossible for societies to limit themselves because the language of growth and prosperity is so intoxicating.  Knowing what we know now, we can only hope that some development of these ideas occurs in sociology and politics, and that awareness of the problems of complexity find a communicator who can stir the public.  Otherwise, as you say, no matter how we structure society, all those efforts will inevitably be undone. 
370
371reply 
372
373View Postniggerfaggot, on 23 November 2011 - 09:28 AM, said:
374The problem is thus: A society increases social complexity to solve problems, and gains some benefit thereby.  But at some point, the marginal return on investment declines to the point of going negative.  Then, as noted in the Charles Hugh Smith review, the institutions which generate this complexity transition from problem solving to self-preservation (this phenomenon is studied in the dismal science under the name "Public Choice Theory" and makes a great deal of intuitive sense, at the very least).  We thus find ourselves in a society with excess social complexity - that is, wildly out of scale - but the institutions which provide this excess have no interest in rolling themselves back.
375
376This would also explain the paradox of capitalism, to wit, that free markets are such powerful engines for economic growth, and yet, capitalism seems to inevitably result in large corporations doing significant societal damage.  If one accepts that - to corrupt Clarke's third law - any sufficiently advanced business is indistinguishable from government, then clearly large companies become part of the network of corrosive complexity, working right alongside governmental organizations to raise the standard of misery (Exhibit A: The Economic Crisis, the bailouts, and the aftermath).
377
378Capitalism has no such paradox, large companies whose marginal returns on complexity (barring a monopoly environment, one of the reasons we have antitrust laws) inhibit their balance sheet go out of business and make the way for companies who can make better use of their resources.  The only way this is inhibited is by government support, usually through collaborations, uncompetitive contracts, and/or bribes, giving them favorable terms which foster their inefficiencies and make them subject to the same problems as ensconced government agencies.  One may argue that capitalism inevitably harbors the scale necessary to foster uncompetitive public/private sector hybrid goals that are ultimately parasitic to the people, but it would seem any Constitution that's prepared enough to put safeguards in place to prevent such an action would completely bypass the problems you're talking about.  But then it becomes less of a criticism of capitalism itself and more of a necessary guideline to build a society around to foster it.
379
380To be fair, even government was not designed to be static forever, the founders understood that revolution was a necessary part of any civilized society.  The Constitutional framework was simply set up to make it a more peaceful revolution than a civil war every 50 years or so, by means of making government heads subject to popular vote.  If you'll notice, the systemic problems in government built up over the last 30 years are a direct result of gentlemens' agreements between competing parties:  NAFTA, credit easement, lax immigration, formation of huge federal agencies, etc.  A little conflict now is necessary to prevent a big one later. 
381
382PLEASERMAN
383
384George Hannibal Peppard, on 23 November 2011 - 09:07 PM, said:
385Capitalism has no such paradox, large companies whose marginal returns on complexity (barring a monopoly environment, one of the reasons we have antitrust laws) inhibit their balance sheet go out of business and make the way for companies who can make better use of their resources.  The only way this is inhibited is by government support, usually through collaborations, uncompetitive contracts, and/or bribes, giving them favorable terms which foster their inefficiencies and make them subject to the same problems as ensconced government agencies.
386Their complexity can be offset by driving wages down and they can negotiate prices more effectively, as in the case of Wal-mart.  But that's beside the point, the paradox that he stated wasn't that capitalism results in inefficient bureaucracies (although this may be true), but that the motives of capitalist businesses ultimately and inevitably pit them against the social good.  Really it's axiomatic, if your primary motive is the creation of wealth, other values will eventually come into conflict.  Moreover very large corporations are difficult to counteract in a liberal democracy.
387
388reply
389
390View PostPLEASUREMAN, on 23 November 2011 - 10:20 PM, said:
391View PostGeorge Hannibal Peppard, on 23 November 2011 - 09:07 PM, said:
392Capitalism has no such paradox, large companies whose marginal returns on complexity (barring a monopoly environment, one of the reasons we have antitrust laws) inhibit their balance sheet go out of business and make the way for companies who can make better use of their resources.  The only way this is inhibited is by government support, usually through collaborations, uncompetitive contracts, and/or bribes, giving them favorable terms which foster their inefficiencies and make them subject to the same problems as ensconced government agencies.
393Their complexity can be offset by driving wages down and they can negotiate prices more effectively, as in the case of Wal-mart.  But that's beside the point, the paradox that he stated wasn't that capitalism results in inefficient bureaucracies (although this may be true), but that the motives of capitalist businesses ultimately and inevitably pit them against the social good.  Really it's axiomatic, if your primary motive is the creation of wealth, other values will eventually come into conflict.  Moreover very large corporations are difficult to counteract in a liberal democracy.
394
395Almost any business that you can say is doing active social harm has already done this because it's a monolithic entity long since taken over by bean counters and sniveling bureaucrats who are only looking towards their internal power struggles.  Lots of moderately sized businesses in my area at least are actively involved in such community activities as sponsoring school sports teams, sponsoring local activities etc. because, first it's good for business, but second because they realize its their community they're making money off of, and that it's worth it in good will to give back to them.  Profit by its nature being against social good?  That's already 90% of the way to Karl Marx, and untrue to boot. 
396
397reply 
398
399Tim Hannibal Tebow, on 23 November 2011 - 09:07 PM, said:
400Capitalism has no such paradox [...] One may argue that capitalism inevitably harbors the scale necessary to foster uncompetitive public/private sector hybrid goals that are ultimately parasitic to the people
401
402Paradox highlighted.  As PLEASUREMAN points out, the trouble is not so much bureaucracy, but a myopic emphasis on ever greater profits - an emphasis that confers a great deal of power upon successful corporations, since they wind up with the biggest profits.  (Hence the difficulty with regulating big business, since they have the big bucks needed to take-over regulators and reconfigure them to serve corporate interests.  The Civil Aeronautics Board is one such example: while it was supposedly regulating flight for the benefit of the citizenry, the airlines were enjoying levels of profitability never since revisited after dismantling the CAB.)  This is what I meant by "any sufficiently advanced business is indistinguishable from government" - that is, when a corporation reaches a certain scale, its power becomes such that you, as an individual citizen, are as much at its mercy as at the government's, since the two are are almost without a doubt in collusion.
403
404A great example is the H1B visa scam, an issue solely championed by large corporations (and some number of useful idiots) for the purpose of driving down the cost of labor.  As the CEO a large, profit-focused company, you'd be stupid not to support the H1B, and you have the billions to get your way in Congress.  As an individual engineer, there is little you can do.  Government may enact the H1B, but it is only to satisfy the demands of large corporations.
405
406You go on to say:
407
408Quote
409it would seem any Constitution that's prepared enough to put safeguards in place to prevent such an action would completely bypass the problems you're talking about.  But then it becomes less of a criticism of capitalism itself and more of a necessary guideline to build a society around to foster it.
410
411This is the Silver Bullet theory of government: "If we just create the thing with the right set of rules, then all this rot can be prevented."  And that may well be the case, but humanity has yet to crack that code, and we have no way of knowing if we ever will.  America got a good 150 years out of our Constitution but now, well, here we are.
412
413Later you praise the virtues of small business:
414
415Quote
416Lots of moderately sized businesses in my area at least are actively involved in such community activities as sponsoring school sports teams, sponsoring local activities etc. because, first it's good for business, but second because they realize its their community they're making money off of, and that it's worth it in good will to give back to them.
417
418In this we are in total accord.  At the moment, I work for just such a business, Christian and virtuous.  And while it isn't perfect, it is obviously far less pathological than the standard issue big corporation.  And how could it be otherwise?  Really, I don't see how the CEO of Glaxo Smith Kline would be able to steer his multi-national ship in a virtuous direction even if he wanted to.
419
420Which leads us to:
421
422Quote
423Profit by its nature being against social good?
424
425Not at all.  Clearly, capitalism has done more for human economic/material prosperity than any other economic system in the history of humanity.  But recognizing the usefulness of the profit motive is not the same as decreeing profits uber alles, and it is that attitude which tends to emerge victorious in modern capitalist societies, with concomitantly deleterious effects.  The theoretical and empirical truth is that, in unrestricted capitalism, the most efficient and profitable companies will win - and thus, pure capitalism selects for the most ruthlessly profit-focused companies.  And in a utilitarian theory of ethics, the world could hardly be better structured.  For an example of a leading proponent of such a theory of human society, I present you with the hero of my youthful idiocy, David D. Friedman:
426
427reply 
428
429niggerfaggot, on 28 November 2011 - 01:51 AM, said:
430View PostTim Hannibal Tebow, on 23 November 2011 - 09:07 PM, said:
431Capitalism has no such paradox [...] One may argue that capitalism inevitably harbors the scale necessary to foster uncompetitive public/private sector hybrid goals that are ultimately parasitic to the people
432
433Paradox highlighted. 
434
435That's not a paradox. There's nothing contradictory (a defining trait of a paradox) about capitalism eventually harbouring the scale necessary to stifle competition. Essentially this is just a special case of the more general phenomenon where if you feed a beast long enough, it will someday be big enough to turn on you.
436
437View Postniggerfaggot, on 28 November 2011 - 01:51 AM, said:
438
439This is the Silver Bullet theory of government: "If we just create the thing with the right set of rules, then all this rot can be prevented."  And that may well be the case, but humanity has yet to crack that code, and we have no way of knowing if we ever will.  America got a good 150 years out of our Constitution but now, well, here we are.
440
441
442I think the role of constitutions is overrated. One of the founding fathers (I think Jefferson) said something along the lines of "our constitution is designed for a virtuous people; irreligious and amoral people are unfit for self government". Basically, I understood it as saying the strong constitution of the US was caused by having in place a homogenous, industrious and altruistic society, and not the other way around. After all, Britain has never had a constitution (in terms of something like the bill of rights, which is what was so unique about America's) and it seems both were equally impotent in the face of the POZ onslaught.
443
444
445View Postniggerfaggot, on 28 November 2011 - 01:51 AM, said:
446
447Not at all.  Clearly, capitalism has done more for human economic/material prosperity than any other economic system in the history of humanity.  But recognizing the usefulness of the profit motive is not the same as decreeing profits uber alles, and it is that attitude which tends to emerge victorious in modern capitalist societies, with concomitantly deleterious effects.  The theoretical and empirical truth is that, in unrestricted capitalism, the most efficient and profitable companies will win - and thus, pure capitalism selects for the most ruthlessly profit-focused companies.  And in a utilitarian theory of ethics, the world could hardly be better structured.
448
449
450I doubt any society has ever had, or will ever have, what you'd describe as "unrestricted" or "pure" capitalism, so while what you say might be true in some theoretical ideal, it's clearly not the case that our present system, whatever you want to call it, winds up rewarding the most efficient companies (or in any system outside of a goon's mind). Inevitably, many industries will remain heavily regulated and inevitably the regulation will be twisted to suit the insiders in each particular industry (e.g., look at healthcare, education, aerospace or defence).
451
452I think you're missing the point that ultimately a lot of these maladies affecting American capitalism are not problems inherent in (or we're claiming are inherent in) capitalism specifically; they are related to scale and would appear in any economic system increasing in scale indefinitely. 
453
454reply
455
456niggerfaggot, on 28 November 2011 - 01:51 AM, said:
457View PostTim Hannibal Tebow, on 23 November 2011 - 09:07 PM, said:
458Capitalism has no such paradox [...] One may argue that capitalism inevitably harbors the scale necessary to foster uncompetitive public/private sector hybrid goals that are ultimately parasitic to the people
459
460Paradox highlighted.  As PLEASUREMAN points out, the trouble is not so much bureaucracy, but a myopic emphasis on ever greater profits - an emphasis that confers a great deal of power upon successful corporations, since they wind up with the biggest profits.  (Hence the difficulty with regulating big business, since they have the big bucks needed to take-over regulators and reconfigure them to serve corporate interests.  The Civil Aeronautics Board is one such example: while it was supposedly regulating flight for the benefit of the citizenry, the airlines were enjoying levels of profitability never since revisited after dismantling the CAB.)  This is what I meant by "any sufficiently advanced business is indistinguishable from government" - that is, when a corporation reaches a certain scale, its power becomes such that you, as an individual citizen, are as much at its mercy as at the government's, since the two are are almost without a doubt in collusion.
461A great example is the H1B visa scam, an issue solely championed by large corporations (and some number of useful idiots) for the purpose of driving down the cost of labor.  As the CEO a large, profit-focused company, you'd be stupid not to support the H1B, and you have the billions to get your way in Congress.  As an individual engineer, there is little you can do.  Government may enact the H1B, but it is only to satisfy the demands of large corporations.
462
463This is the Silver Bullet theory of government: "If we just create the thing with the right set of rules, then all this rot can be prevented."  And that may well be the case, but humanity has yet to crack that code, and we have no way of knowing if we ever will.  America got a good 150 years out of our Constitution but now, well, here we are.
464
465It would require one amendment to the Constitution to fix this, all federal elections are to take place with public funds, and make it a class one felony and immediate expulsion from any federal post to accept gifts or contributions from any party known to be affiliated with a corporation.  This should probably apply to state positions too, but I'm not sure if their budgets would be quite as friendly.
466
467Without the backing of anti-competitive legislation, it would be much easier for any startup companies to challenge big business, and it would help to alleviate the scale problem.  There are so many insane fixed costs to a business as soon as you hire the first employee that are nearly insignificant once you reach mega-corporation status that anyone challenging them is already kneecapped to a significant degree, and the debt that most folks have to get into just to open a business, along with the risk that some f****t is going to sue you at any time, a disgruntled employee wants to make your life hell, your landlord coming down on you for whatever reason, let's just say small business is always at risk for going under.  You have to not only be good, but also incredibly lucky to make it.  Evening the playing field would be the first step to resume actual capitalism, and removing the fuckbuddy relationship between legislature and corporations would be the beginning.
468
469Quote
470Not at all.  Clearly, capitalism has done more for human economic/material prosperity than any other economic system in the history of humanity.  But recognizing the usefulness of the profit motive is not the same as decreeing profits uber alles, and it is that attitude which tends to emerge victorious in modern capitalist societies, with concomitantly deleterious effects.  The theoretical and empirical truth is that, in unrestricted capitalism, the most efficient and profitable companies will win - and thus, pure capitalism selects for the most ruthlessly profit-focused companies.  And in a utilitarian theory of ethics, the world could hardly be better structured.  
471
472No, unrestricted capitalism favors whoever happens to be rich at the moment and makes it nearly impossible for labor to fight on an equal footing with capital, as once you can simply buy your way out of having to follow legislation, be it through bribes or unrealistically small penalties, you reach the end game pretty quickly.  Unrestricted capitalism should never be a goal, you obviously need a set of laws that recognize basic human rights, remove competition crushing practices in terms of monopolies, allow labor to organize in certain specialized niche industries and particularly hazardous occupations, and a few other guidelines to keep the market healthy.
473
474I really believe in a utilitarian sense this regulated, well structured capitalism is what provides the most motive to improve.  Monopolies and guaranteed profit chains generally seek to keep the status quo in place at all times, why risk upsetting the boat when you have a guaranteed killing on your hands?  Hell, look at the drug companies, which in the land of insane insurance rates are practically printing money - their most profitable ventures are mass marketing, wining and dining doctors to promote their products, then buying legislation that makes it illegal to reimport drugs from places where they sell them cheaply (Canada and Mexico) to where they can charge full price (the USA).  Since when has capitalism in America been about blatantly anti-competitive practices like this? 
475
476reply
477
478Whilst devouring copyright-free ebooks, I
479
480G.K. Chesterton offers a great perspective on scale and modern pathologies. He was there as the 20th century got into full swing and saw with startling clarity where any number of trends were heading (or, in the case of eugenics, may still end up). He's particularly rewarding to read these days because he doesn't fit easily into any of the modern political boxes; he built his philosophy on an older and broader rock (call it Petrus) than liberalism or conservatism. Keeping one eye on eternity kept him away from the easy answers of editorialists, and gave him a broad and cheerful perspective on controversies: His books are full of "laughter and war"--roaring denunciations, large-hearted sympathy and impatience with equivocation--but never pettiness or bitterness. To him, we were all fallen, and we were all fools. The sooner we realized that common quality, the better.
481
482I don't pretend to understand his political program, distributism, in depth. It seems to amount to breaking up large estates and granting small ones to the whole population. Everybody owns and tends his own parcel, a kind of miniature kingdom and line of defense against the forces of cosmopolitan finance and the rapacious state. Small and local trump big and sprawling--both in everyday practice and in broader consequences.
483
484Chesterton offers a nice illustration of it in his collection of essays on Ireland; long but worth it.
485
486Quote
487I was moving in a hired motor down a road in the North-West, towards the middle of that rainy autumn. I was not moving very fast; because the progress was slowed down to a solemn procession by crowds of families with their cattle and live stock going to the market beyond; which things also are an allegory. But what struck my mind and stuck in it was this: that all down one side of the road, as far as we went, the harvest was gathered in neatly and safely; and all down the other side of the road it was rotting in the rain.
488
489Now the side where it was safe was a string of small plots worked by peasant proprietors, as petty by our standards as a row of the cheapest villas. The land on which all the harvest was wasted was the land of a large modern estate. I asked why the landlord was later with his harvesting than the peasants; and I was told rather vaguely that there had been strikes and similar labour troubles. I did not go into the rights of the matter; but the point here is that, whatever they were, the moral is the same. You may curse the cruel Capitalist landlord or you may rave at the ruffianly Bolshevist strikers; but you must admit that between them they had produced a stoppage, which the peasant proprietorship a few yards off did not produce. You might support either where they conflicted, but you could not deny the sense in which they had combined, and combined to prevent what a few rustics across the road could combine to produce. 
490
491For all that we in England agree about and disagree about, all for which we fight and all from which we differ, our darkness and our light, our heaven and hell, were there on the left side of the road. On the right side of the road lay something so different that we do not even differ from it. It may be that Trusts are rising like towers of gold and iron, overshadowing the earth and shutting out the sun; but they are only rising on the left side of the road. It may be that Trades Unions are laying labyrinths of international insurrection, cellars stored with the dynamite of a merely destructive democracy; but all that international maze lies to the left side of the road. Employment and unemployment are there; Marx and the Manchester School are there. The left side of the road may even go through amazing transformations of its own; its story may stride across abysses of anarchy; but it will never step across the road. The landlord's estate may become a sort of Morris Utopia, organised communally by Socialists, or more probably by Guild Socialists. It may (as I fear is much more likely) pass through the stage of an employer's model village to the condition of an old pagan slave-state. But the peasants across the road would not only refuse the Servile State, but would quite as resolutely refuse the Utopia. Europe may seem to be rent from end to end by the blast of a Bolshevist trumpet, sundering the bourgeois from the proletarian; but the peasant across the road is neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian. England may seem to be rent by an irreconcilable rivalry between Capital and Labour; but the peasant across the road is both a capitalist and a labourer. He is several other curious things; including the man who got his crops in first; who was literally first in the field.
492
493To an Englishman, especially a Londoner, this was like walking to the corner of a London street and finding the policeman in rags, with a patch on his trousers and a smudge on his face; but the crossing-sweeper wearing, a single eyeglass and a suit fresh from a West End tailor. In fact, it was nearly as surprising as a walking haystack or a talking cow. What was generally dingy, dilatory, and down-at-heels was here comparatively tidy and timely; what was orderly and organised was belated and broken down. For it must be sharply realised that the peasant proprietors succeeded here, not only because they were really proprietors, but because they were only peasants. It was _because_ they were on a small scale that they were a great success. It was because they were too poor to have servants that they grew rich in spite of strikers. It was, so far as it went, the flattest possible contradiction to all that is said in England, both by Collectivists and Capitalists, about the efficiency of the great organisation. For in so far as it had failed, it had actually failed, not only through being great, but through being organised. On the left side of the road the big machine had stopped working, _because_ it was a big machine. The small men were still working, because they were not machines.
494
495reply 
496
497Great find!
498
499As hunter-gatherers all of our motivations and goals ran together for the most part.  There was little difference between helping yourself, your family, or your community.  Work, family, and communal life weren't so compartmentalized and for all but the most nomadic, there was commitment to location.
500
501With increasing scale, especially in the last couple centuries, all motivations and interests have increasingly come into conflict with one another and all the ideologies that have sprung up are just weak attempts at treating the symptoms of what is really ailing us.  
502
503Unfortunately, the current system has no inherent interest in developing either institutions or technologies that would permit a serious descaling. 
504
505
506reply 
507PLEASUREMAN, on 23 November 2011 - 10:20 PM, said:
508...the motives of capitalist businesses ultimately and inevitably pit them against the social good.  Really it's axiomatic, if your primary motive is the creation of wealth, other values will eventually come into conflict.
509
510Your saying this reminds me of why the contemporary right is such a joke. Because progressivism is all-pervasive in the West, today's so-called conservatives are bereft of any principles or arguments that either don't originate from the left (yesterday's communists being today's conservatives and tomorrow's reactionaries) or are not utterly dependent on the existence of progressivism to exist. Like the proverbial fish, would-be rightists don't realize that they're swimming in progressivism. 
511
512So the right venerates corporate predation not because they've put any disinterested thought into whether it's actually beneficial, but because the left claims to be against it ("claims" being the key word here). They advocate pointless military adventurism because the left appears to want peace. They argue for low taxes on millionaires because the left argues for high taxes. No critical thought involved whatsoever. 
513
514(Of course, the left favors progressive taxation not out of humanistic principle, but as a way of shutting out the upper-middle class, the high income earners, from the upper class, whose accumulated wealth is unaffected by high income taxes.)
515
516Lacking any stable metaphysical ground from which to derive their beliefs, the right, the beta males of Western discourse, look to the alpha left for leadership. Long resigned to this subservient fate, the right pursues one of two options: either it adopts progressive notions wholesale--e.g., racial and sexual egalitarianism masquerading as "liberty" and "self-determination"--or it exists merely as a foil for the left, reflexively contradicting anything the latter says, for the same reason a 5 year old contradicts his parents, namely, to enact the illusion that he has autonomy of thought, let alone any say in the final decision.
517
518What's so vexing about all this is that even when the right is correct policy-wise, it's only by accident. They don't argue for low taxes on millionaires because it's economically prudent, they argue for low taxes to spite those commie redistributionists, blithely unaware that they themselves, these bastions of conservative principles, would be considered communists if they got in a time machine to 50 years ago. Because the leftward march of the West is both inexorable and invisible, we are faced with the current farce: the Godless denouncing the Godless for their Godlessness... forever.
519
520But there's something heartening in all this: the infinite possibility enumerated by Dostoevsky in Brothers Karamazov, the elusive yet everlasting possibility:
521
522Quote
523Have faith to the end, even if it should happen that all on earth are corrupted and you alone remain faithful: make your offering even so, and praise God, you who are the only one left. And if there are two of you who come together thus, there is already a whole world, a world of living love; embrace each other in tenderness and give praise to the Lord: for his truth has been made full, if only in the two of you.
524
525If you yourself have sinned [ :hardship: ], and are sorrowful unto death for your sins, or for your sudden sin, rejoice for the other, rejoice for the righteous one, rejoice that though you have sinned, he is still righteous and has not sinned
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528
529Dunno if this has been said already, but I see 2 very big reasons for the increase in scale: cheap energy and nuclear weapons.
530
531Cheap and abundant energy, especially oil, has increased farm yields considerably, which enabled the many-fold increase in population since then. Many millions of people live now today because food is cheap. Peak oil is fat approaching, and when it does, there will be war. The wars itself, combined with the increasing scarcity of oil (and cheap food), will lead to famines and death--a two way decrease in scale.
532
533Ever since nuclear weapons were invented, nations have been a little more cautious to engage in conflict. This leads to high population growth. See this comic for an explanation. 
534
535reply
536
537
538I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on an unusual early contributor to a critique of the SCALE of modern materialist culture. 
539
540Ralph Adams Cram, an architect of the early 20th century, is deservedly well known for his work in the United States as a sort of American Pugin. He drew from the English medievalist revival of the 19th century and developed, in various books on his craft, an intelligible explanation of what he was doing in architecture, and the duty he felt to contribute a positive English and Christian civilizing influence to the protean American culture of his time: a culture which, as the rest of the century would show, was vulnerable to drastic shifts of direction and the disintegration of its racial, cultural, and spiritual self-understanding. Bits of this are strewn across his works on architecture; I ran across some of them at the end of his book, Church Building. (All his books are free at Google). 
541
542One aspect of his work has mostly been forgotten; a curious little book called Walled Towns, in which he criticized the rapid disintegration of the physical and tribal matrix of the rural village and the small town in favor of the industrial and commercial  megalopolis. 
543
544Much of it is unpractical and romantic, tendencies to which the more famous Distributists were also prone. I don't agree with some of his prognosis, which is lacking much background in economics or political philosophy. And yet he makes many trenchant criticisms of technology, the ideal of efficiency, and the impossible conservatism which simply rewinds to a past political regime in the face of a new mass society — a criticism PMAN has made. However, I have had some interesting thoughts while reading some of his stuff. 
545
546A quote describing several problems already emerging as mass capitalism and socialism matured before the Second World War — partisanship, globalism, consumerism, materialism — from Walled Towns: 
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548Quote
549"We can neither return nor remain but — would we go on, at least along the lines that are at present indicated? Are we tempted by the savage and stone-age ravings and rantings of Bolshevism? Have we any inclination towards that super-imperialism of the pacifist-internationalist-Israelitish "League of Free Nations" that comes in such questionable shape? Does State Socialism with all its materialistic mechanisms appeal to us? Other alleviation is not offered and in these we can see no encouragement. It is the eternal dilemma of the Two Alternatives, which is nevertheless no more than a vicious sophism: "Either you will take this or you must have that," the starling-cry of partizan politics by which "democracies" have lived. In all human affairs there are never only two alternatives, there is always a third and sometimes more; but this unrecognized alternative never commands that popular leadership which "carries the election"...Reactionism or Bolshevism: "Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!" We are told that the old world of before-the-war must be restored in its integrity or we must fall a victim to the insane anarchy of a proletariat in revolt, and for many of us there is little to choose between the two. We have seen how fragile, artificial, and insecure is civilization, how instantly and hopelessly it can crumble into a sort of putrid dissolution the moment its conventions are challenged and the ultimate principles of democracy are put in practice, and we do not like it....On the other hand, we saw the triumph of "Modern Civilization" in the twenty-five years preceding the Great War, and as we realize now what it was...an impossible farrago of false values, of loud-mouthed sentimentality and crude, cold-blooded practices; of gross, all-pervading injustice sicklied o'er with the pale cast of smug humanitarianism; a democracy of form that was without ideal or reality in practice; imperialism, materialism, and the quantitative standard."
550
551His answer is leisurely elaborated in the rest of the book. In short, it is a drastic reduction of social life away from the mass society addicted to expansion and specialization, towards purposely less efficient, more intimate and social, less financialized, less multicultural communities.
552
553They are more dream and vision than definite political tracts or manifestos. But Crams's thoughts suggest to me that the discomfiture in 20th c. Western minds at the changing economic and social scale of their civilization was much broader than a few isolated political and economic thinkers. And that suggests a new dimension to politics separate from the tug-of-war over which policies the managerial superstate chooses to deploy.
554
555reply
556
557Quote
558For some of the poorest, like Leung Cho-yin, home is a metal cage. 
559The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars (£105) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood. 
560Home to tens of thousands, such cages - stacked on top of each other - measure 6ft by 2.5ft.
561
562...Legislator Frederick Fung warns there will be more if the problem can't be solved. He compared the effect on the poor to a lab experiment.
563'When we were in secondary school, we had some sort of experiment where we put many rats in a small box. They would bite each other,' said Fung.
564'When living spaces are so congested, they would make people feel uneasy, desperate,' and angry at the government, he said. 
565Leung, the cage dweller, had little faith that the government could do anything to change the situation of people like him. 
566
567'It's not whether I believe him or not, but they always talk this way. What hope is there?' said Leung, who has been living in cage homes since he stopped working at a market stall after losing part of a finger 20 years ago.
568
569reply
570
571Population density and fertility is a fascinating example of the trade-off of societal complexity and growith - one I hadn't thought of before coming to MPC. It seems that all advanced societies (which are just complex organisms) seem to have a self-limiting capacity that triggers once immediate population density increases (correlated in our evolutionary past with increased competition for resources and thus less chance for the survival of offspring) Historically, this notion has been well-supported - Polybius decried the childlessness of the Hellenistic Greece of his age, despite the world-city expanse and hubristic greatness of their cities (particularly Alexandria); the urban centres of central and northern Italy had significantly lower fertility and family size than the surrounding countryside; and the Australian state of Tasmania is the only Australian state or territory with an above replacement total fertility rate. Tasmania is sparsely populated, with extremely rugged wooded terrain and the significant population centres feel more like country towns than the mainland megapoleis - the absence of high-rise buildings, the rural feel and closeness of the city to the river and the bush are probable psychological factors in fertility. 
572
573Population density and fertility have long been understood to be negatively correlated (Singapore's single digit fertility comes to mind), although this never seems to be addressed by any public policies. My state government is busily formulating a plan for urban development that will either create more urban sprawl and infrastructure pressures OR will mean the building of dozens of hideous high-rise apartment buildings in the inner and outer suburbs, all in response to the unchecked immigration that has been occurring over several decades. The consequences of this will mean more sprawl or building, more demolition of our architectural as well as historical heritage, as well as the myraid social problems associated with increasing population density - social alienation, declining fertility, declining altruism, increased mental illness etc. There is of course a problem with measuring population density and fertility and that is - that the population density of the country is irrelevant. Australia is an enormous country, but the vast majority of the population are cramped along the east coast. The density of urban centres needs to be taken into account. 
574
575The study Population Density is a Key Factor in Declining Human Fertility looked at the correlation between human fertility and population density - Australia was a outlier, with low fertility and low population density, but as I discussed that's not taking into account the high density of population centres, which are a tiny fraction of total land area. The study found that the deciding factor in fertility was not infant mortality, female education or per-capita GDP, though those were factors, but was population density (the correlation itself, when other variables - immigration, education levels etc. were controlled, was .73). The study is itself behind paywalls, but from what I can gather that, the actual preferences of people changed with population density not just their behaviour - Americans and Australians express the desire for more children whereas Singaporeans and Dutch express a desire for less children than Americans and Australians.  
576
577Singapore's population density 
578
579PLEASERMAN reply
580
581It all looks very much like Calhoun's rat experiment, where the organisms spontaneously cease reproductive behavior but in addition they take on other behaviors that complement the cessation of reproduction--including, most dramatically, the pathetic "behavioral sink" of rats huddling together (see http://en.wikipedia....Behavioral_sink).
582
583This suggests that space--and for humans this includes a number of conceptual definitions of "space" such as room for advancement--is an incredibly important variable in the lives of social organisms.  The realization of its importance is what makes the suggestions by economists like Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen that Western countries dramatically increase their populations seem so starkly insane (and it's ironic that borderline autistic intellectuals would make such a suggestion).
584
585This was all much-discussed at the time of Calhoun's research because it fit in with a foreboding of Malthusian disaster.  Overpopulation was a major concern in the 70s, but this concern became derailed in the 80s when economic prosperity and the failed predictions of dramatic shortages relieved this anxiety.  I think generational shift also contributed, as people more accustomed to increased crowdedness assumed power, and concerns of older generations were muted.  In addition, the economic populism (or quasi-populism) of the 80s renewed a sense of conceptual expansiveness even as population density was increasing.
586
587However, this adaptation to increased crowdedness seems to have been temporary.  I think the culture today presents a fairly stark picture of increasingly dysfunctional behavior led by a desire to compensate for crowdedness, complexity, and diversity.  Increasing hedonism should be expected as people turn to repetitive pleasure-seeking behaviors to numb themselves to the low level anxiety that modern society generates.  More autism, more neoteny, more bizarre behaviors.  Once mass societies become entrenched in a dysfunctional cycle of behavior, I think the risk of a lot of bad outcomes increases greatly--another world war, severe resource shortage, widespread poverty and disease throught the "first world", etc.  If history is any guide, one can't underestimate the irrationality that can seize entire nations in such circumstances. 
588
589REBUTAL reply 
590
591PLEASUREMAN, on 19 May 2013 - 01:02 PM, said:
592However, this adaptation to increased crowdedness seems to have been temporary.  I think the culture today presents a fairly stark picture of increasingly dysfunctional behavior led by a desire to compensate for crowdedness, complexity, and diversity.  Increasing hedonism should be expected as people turn to repetitive pleasure-seeking behaviors to numb themselves to the low level anxiety that modern society generates.  More autism, more neoteny, more bizarre behaviors.  Once mass societies become entrenched in a dysfunctional cycle of behavior, I think the risk of a lot of bad outcomes increases greatly--another world war, severe resource shortage, widespread poverty and disease throught the "first world", etc.  If history is any guide, one can't underestimate the irrationality that can seize entire nations in such circumstances.
593
594Well, the main difference between Calhoun's rat experiment and everyday life is that aside from areas where there is no physical space to branch out into, like Hong Kong or Europe to a degree, a vast amount of people are choosing to stay in a higher population density area when at least in America there are numerous small towns that are being depopulated rapidly as the populace concentrates to larger cities even as total fertility declines.  I know we've both jawed ad infinitum about the reasons why - no job opportunities, limited potential for socialization, etc, but the fact remains that there's no reason why most couples couldn't build a small house out in the boonies and live fairly comfortably even on the smaller paychecks.  This is oddly in stark contrast to the moves of the 60's and 70's, where the push was to go "back to nature" and form communes, small, tight knit communities etc (even if the sentiment was halfhearted and most people moved back).  Less oddly, the few couples that I've known who have done just that seem to be doing fairly well - the question is why don't more people do it?  Clearly the push is there from the media angle to live in bizarre urban situations, considering the tripe pushed on the Boob Tube, rather than in semi-rural life, but I can't imagine everyone who leaves small town America does it because of some f****t on TV.  Any ideas? 
595
596PLEASERMAN reply
597
598When you present the hypothetical couple you skip several places ahead.  How did they meet?  Certainly not in a small town with a median age somewhere in the late 40s.  How do they afford a house on Walmart wages?  The transformation of the economy from the 50s through the 90s completely removed many types of work from towns under a specific density.  If we are really talking about small towns, and not satellites of large cities, there are few opportunities, which is why you've seen massive flight from rural to urban environments throughout the 20th century.
599
600Moreover, the couple isn't self-sufficient.  They will want to live somewhere they can form social and work relationships with others, and a low density rural town hardly fits the bill for the majority of people.  The nature of work and social habits will draw young people into the orbit of cities, and keep them there once their careers are established.
601
602By the mid-20th century, towns were faced with the imperative:  grow or die.  Without growth, the lack of hierarchy slots to move into would drive most of the youth to leave whether they wanted to or not, and this left towns in a state of gradual decline and death, unless they were favorably situated to draw population from the surrouding rural area.  The people most likely to stay would be those in service jobs and those lucky enough to get into one of the small number of slots in the upper hierarchy (a few lawyers, doctors, teachers and similar professionals needed).
603
604Even in cities you have a problem, because we can't actually have infinite growth--for example, not all or even many of the lawyers minted every year can find jobs in that profession, much less jobs which have any hope of paying off the debt accrued.  Since there is nowhere else to go, people face decline in living standards instead, but it is less of a decline than they would face in low density areas that offer even less opportunity for them.
605
606Of course the people at the very top of the economic food chain do have the prerogative, and they exercise it--they gravitate toward sparsely populated suburbs and exurbs that afford them more space, or extremely expensive urban districts with low density residential areas--although even these people do not entirely escape the pressures of high population density if they must commute to more crowded spaces to work (assuming they are not independently wealthy or retired).  Assuming that everyone else decides not to make this choice is like assuming that women enter the workplace because they want careers--for most women it's not a choice, it's an economic necessity that they feel from an early age.
607
608Finally, most people now come from urban rather than rural settings, so by the time they are adults prepared to assume full control of their lives they are already tied to urban centers in numerous ways, and have already begun to develop some of the dysfunctional behaviors that make urban centers more appealing (gratification of hedonistic impulses, for example). 
609
610REBUTAL reply
611
612PLEASUREMAN, on 19 May 2013 - 02:39 PM, said:
613Even in cities you have a problem, because we can't actually have infinite growth--for example, not all or even many of the lawyers minted every year can find jobs in that profession, much less jobs which have any hope of paying off the debt accrued.  Since there is nowhere else to go, people face decline in living standards instead, but it is less of a decline than they would face in low density areas that offer even less opportunity for them.
614
615That's what I'm talking about.  Professionals are not going to be working for a Wal-Mart salary even in rural areas.  If you're a general practitioner doctor, or even a business manager, you're going to be earning 40k+, and if you add two of those salaries together even in Redneckville it will keep you in a decent sized home, pay for a couple of kids, etc.  The commute may be rough as you might be traveling to the nearest town of size, at least on average for say one of the two earners, but a few years of that will let you get a nest egg that should pay for at least one kid as long as you don't spend lavishly.  Like I said, I've known a couple of couples that have done that, and unsurprisingly they're the ones that have the least marital troubles, the only ones actually that seem to have a totally healthy marriage. 
616
617Quote
618Of course the people at the very top of the economic food chain do have the prerogative, and they exercise it--they gravitate toward sparsely populated suburbs and exurbs that afford them more space, or extremely expensive urban districts with low density residential areas--although even these people do not entirely escape the pressures of high population density if they must commute to more crowded spaces to work (assuming they are not independently wealthy or retired).  Assuming that everyone else decides not to make this choice is like assuming that women enter the workplace because they want careers--for most women it's not a choice, it's an economic necessity that they feel from an early age.
619
620Finally, most people now come from urban rather than rural settings, so by the time they are adults prepared to assume full control of their lives they are already tied to urban centers in numerous ways, and have already begun to develop some of the dysfunctional behaviors that make urban centers more appealing (gratification of hedonistic impulses, for example).
621
622Like I said before, it's understood the fact that job security and socialization are going to be less fulfilling, so let's get that out of the way.  Is it not worthwhile to be a bit of an island socially if you don't have to deal with the stresses of city living and the marriage stress that comes with it, culminating in putting off or not having a child?  Even if it means you can't have an iPhone, cable television, and you have to eat out only a couple times a week?
623
624As for: 
625Quote
626When you present the hypothetical couple you skip several places ahead.  How did they meet?  Certainly not in a small town with a median age somewhere in the late 40s.  How do they afford a house on Walmart wages?  The transformation of the economy from the 50s through the 90s completely removed many types of work from towns under a specific density.
627
628Median age or not, there are men and women in their primes of life who grow up in small towns, even if they're a relative minority.  The question is why they then choose to join the majority in urban living.  And it's certainly not "out of habit", as barring family moves or whatever, they grew up in small town America, since most kids don't leave their families until minimum age 18, especially out in God's country.  All my high school friends who moved to urban areas did so solely out of money, but then I'm an old fart and the job markets were better then (and not a lot of them moved lol).  Why are kids today still doing it is the $64,000 question. 
629
630reply
631
632Even if you come from a small town, you are still part of a massive-scale society. Billy-Bob from the boonies watches TV, goes to movies, reads magazines, watches porn, etc. He still knows the names and faces of hundreds, even thousands, of celebrities. He buys products that come from anonymous corporations and has no idea who made them (or how they work). His job requires him to obey decisions made by anonymous strangers who may be thousands of miles away.
633
634Even if the number of people he sees in person on a daily basis is small, it doesn't save him because his interactions with them are only one part of his life. We are surrounded by strangers even when we totally alone. 
635
636reply
637
638Figurative Caucasian, on 19 May 2013 - 09:09 PM, said:
639Even if you come from a small town, you are still part of a massive-scale society. Billy-Bob from the boonies watches TV, goes to movies, reads magazines, watches porn, etc. He still knows the names and faces of hundreds, even thousands, of celebrities. He buys products that come from anonymous corporations and has no idea who made them (or how they work). His job requires him to obey decisions made by anonymous strangers who may be thousands of miles away.
640
641Even if the number of people he sees in person on a daily basis is small, it doesn't save him because his interactions with them are only one part of his life. We are surrounded by strangers even when we totally alone.
642
643Totally agreed.  But I don't think it explains the constant exodus, even a little bit.  We have Netflix or the internet or Facebook or whatever to get our daily fix of Jersey Shore and the Kardashians, etc.  Hell we don't even have to pay for movies or drive to see them if we're dedicated enough for that mental candy.
644
645Bear in mind I'm not looking for a definite, X leads to Y leads to Z answer, and I don't know that a single one is possible.  I'm just wondering the trends that explain the trends about why we're still concentrating as a society into smaller areas that cause these stresses, even as we get more neurotic as a society.  Are we expecting big pharma to give us happy pills to countact them?  Does the media play an even bigger role than we thought in societal breakdown?  Is it peer pressure?  Is the poz in the schools the biggest factor?  Clearly the path of the future, due to energy prices, more minorities in urban areas, and a failing and tyrannical government, is smaller and more local.  Why is the temporary trend still going in the opposite direction? 
646
647reply
648
649There isn't an "exodus", George.  82% of the population lives in cities and suburbs (this exceeds the global rate of about 50%).  And the rural population that is left is disproportionately dying old people.  There's no one to migrate. 
650
651reply
652
653I have to agree with Pleasureman.  The scale of our society is now global, and that pulls people into cities where global scale commerce can occur.  It's almost like a disparate group of animals being fused into one living entity: the redundant organs atrophy as the individual beings are subsumed into the body of the larger whole.  The relentless pressure to achieve efficiency and profit forces countries to abandon their unprofitable industries and small towns.  The big cities are the nodes where the transformation is occurring.  The concentration of resources make it more efficient, the large markets there make dispersal of products and services more profitable, the transportation networks efficiently connect it to other global centers.  This is happening everywhere.  The global system is becoming a pyramid, a hierarchy arranged on a global scale.
654
655That means that our society is going to be torn apart as it becomes part of this global pyramid.  The people are being drawn into the cities where they hope to offer tradeable services.  The flood of Mexicans and third worlders into the country is part of our global integration.  The massive spending on welfare is just a vestige of our egalitarian past, when white men could not stand to see their fellow white man wallow in poverty.  It is heavily used by blacks and Mexicans here in order for them to achieve some parity with whites, but their free ride will soon come to an end.  Our new global elites will pare that back as much as they can in order to keep the peace or find some equilibrium where they can profit and some middle class proles can foot the bill. 
656
657reply 
658
659Sailer had a post this week which offers some interesting insight into this topic. Context for the quotations below: the Yanomami tribe are remote South American rain forest pepo. Many years back an anthropologist married one of the tribeswomen and brought her back to Jersey with him. They had three kids, but the tribal just couldn't get into urban living:
660
661Quote
662I live in a place where I do not gather wood and no-one hunts. The women do not call me to go kill fish. Sometimes I get tired of being in the house, so I get angry with my husband. I go to the stores and look at clothing.
663
664Quote
665It isn't like in the jungle. People are separate and alone. It must be that they do not like their mothers.
666
667In this person we see someone who grew up in a culture and context about as far removed from modern scaled-up society as you can find on Earth (the Yanomami are removed from society scaled up even as far as the early medieval period). This is just one individual, sure, but her reaction is telling. No sense of community, no sense of purposeful effort, negative emotions arising from boredom/frustration, empty consumerism as an unsatisfying substitute (the woman eventually returned to the jungle), and, again, with emphasis: no sense of community. Make of her sense of a lack of motherly affection what you will (the mothers in the Jersey suburbs were most likely women who combined child rearing with a career outside the home).
668
669A key difference between this Yanomami woman and us is that we have generations of gradual acclimation to civilized life, and yet her reactions to the modern city sound a lot like what we've seen in spades from people since the beginning of the industrial era. And increasingly in the past century.
670
671Also, it's interesting to note in light of her comments that references to the "urban jungle" seem to be quite inaccurate: the jungle is in a way more human than the warrens of the great cities, despite showing less imprint of human will. The possibility occurs that there is a point in human control over an environment where it is too extreme to produce a viable habitat for human beings (or real heroes). 
672
673reply
674
675Marxist Hunter, on 01 July 2012 - 02:19 PM, said:
676Dunno if this has been said already, but I see 2 very big reasons for the increase in scale: cheap energy and nuclear weapons.
677
678Cheap and abundant energy, especially oil, has increased farm yields considerably, which enabled the many-fold increase in population since then. Many millions of people live now today because food is cheap. Peak oil is fat approaching, and when it does, there will be war. The wars itself, combined with the increasing scarcity of oil (and cheap food), will lead to famines and death--a two way decrease in scale.
679These are the two main drivers of scale (together with transport/food production tech and the managerial revolution).  Past societies either collapsed in war-often after expanding their borders beyond manageable limits, like the Romans-or tapped most of their easily available resources (soil, timber, iron) and settled into comfortable stagnation.  Nukes and cheap energy rule out both options.  Looking at Russia and Eastern Europe a peaceful population decline to a sustainable level seems possible in some regions, if not in others.  Whether continued immigration is allowed to swell populations beyond sustainable levels will be a major factor. 
680
681PLEASERMAN reply 
682
683Populations are already exceeding sustainable levels.  We are relying on increasingly fragile networks of resource shipment in order to maintain standards of living, which at any rate rest on an imbalanced economic equation (basically a ponzi scheme).  The West is undergoing a sharp population drop and aging out of social welfare systems.  The population drop makes migration of other groups more destabilizing in a shorter period of time.  As recently cited, European whites are going from 28% of the world's population to under 10% by mid-century, while less feedback-sensitive Arabs and Africans explode in numbers and pour into Western nations in a steady stream, abetted by growth-addicted elites.
684
685Beyond birthrates, European whites seem to be assuming dysfunctional behaviors due to the turbulence of mass society, with declining levels of trust, loss of cohesion, and compensatory materialism and self-isolation.  Even if their numbers weren't falling quickly it would be reasonable to predict collapse owing to the rapidly escalating complexity costs and the palpable psychic exhaustion of the race.  Complex societies aren't very good at adjusting to sharp demographic reversals.  By the time changing conditions reach mass awareness, the society has reached a point where it is collapsing in on itself.
686
687Of course shitlibertarians who are no good at math assure us that Africa is about to become an economic powerhouse (they feel the number of coups is now down to a manageable level).  More likely they'll be rapidly stripped of resources by a world population that is indulging in its last orgiastic feast before nature rebalances the equation.
688
689That's the pessimistic view anyway.  The optimistic view is that, despite or because of the record of previous collapses, our society is resilient and will find a way to devolve in an orderly manner (or parts of it will).  The current situation is unprecedented--we don't know what collapse looks like in a crowded, interconnected world.  Notwithstanding the late Western zeal for universalism, kin preference may reassert itself and migrations could speed up the process of decentralization and re-nationalization.  Instead of leading to extinction, the declining European white population might allow retrenchment and regrowth at a reduced scale while Africa and other parts of the world, no longer sustained by massive Western consumption, are forced into a brutal reckoning (but that's not our problem).
690
691It's both an upside and a downside that mass societies can undergo rapid change.  Certainly people at the beginning of the 20th century expected a very different future from what emerged, as did people in the mid-20th century, and perhaps as do we.  It gets tricky to predict the future when you can anticipate it and alter your direction. 
692
693reply
694
695A 2007 article connects IQ and dysgenic population growth to the effects of density: http://www.humanbiol...s 32 (2007).pdf
696
697Since the author is German, it seems he can't help suggesting that nature is having her revenge against mankind for scale:
698Quote
699If nature is reacting to dramatically reduce the present bloated size of the human population, which is upsetting the normal balance of species and resources, and in this way protect the earth against further exploitation, human capital deterioration would be one way to bring about this end because this large human population has become dependent on high IQ for its survival. Because in a democratic society population pollution is politically non-existent and even impossible by definition, the success of the counter-strike of nature against a species that is intelligent enough to propagate and fill the earth, but not sufficiently intelligent to understand that it must conserve its ultimate resource, the human mind and thus the quality of its population, seems to be guaranteed.
700
701PLEASERMAN reply
702
703Dynatest, on 27 December 2013 - 03:01 AM, said:
704If you reduce population, you would still have the same sort of complexity, just maybe on a smaller scale.
705
706A lot of the complexity we have is there to address the problems that increased population creates.  There are other factors, such as homogenity and technology, but if you look closely these also tend to be connected to population size (homogenity can break down due to the fluidity of human capital that a mass society creates; technology advances at a rapid pace due to high investment made possible by mass economics).  Plus you can identify stages of sociopolitical organization that are locked to population size.
707
708You want less movement, stronger connections between people, reduced traffic of information.  These are all of course the opposite of what we think is a net good (fluidity, individualism, data volume). 
709
710reply
711
712Complexity arises from increased population, but it also comes from other sources as well. One of the biggest of those is time accretion. Many solutions to social problems have a one-way implementation path: a kind of "trapdoor logic" to them. Once implemented, they can't be easily reversed because of cascading dependencies and feedback consequences. Each new solution changes the fundamental scope, nature, and understanding of the problem itself. After even a few decades of that non-linear problem/solution feedback interaction, you get an accumulation of interrelated and interdependent complexities that cannot be unwound or simplified. This becomes much more rapid when lots of people are involved, but it occurs in all social milieus at all scales.
713
714PLEASERMAN reply
715
716This is exactly right.  Once we have greater complexity it is difficult to let go of it.
717
718Some of it may be psychological dependency--for example, airport security after 9/11.  There are layers of complexity that we could sacrifice if we had the resolve to live with the risk.  After all, we live with the risk of spree shootings because we're not willing to give up the freedom to defend ourselves.  Both spree shootings and terrorist attacks are rare events with a real risk that is neglible (you're far more likely to get killed by a drunk driver, or if you live in the southwest, a Mexican).  (N.B. There is an opportunistic aspect here as well--9/11 presented elites with a chance to increase their control by an order of magnitude, so they were eager to hype the risk.)
719
720One of the benefits of reducing population is that rare events are experienced as even rarer because of course the repetitions needed to get to the rare event take place over a longer time span.  The perception of risk, not actual risk, seems to be more important to escalating complexity (there's little we can do about human perception, which is founded on linear rather than exponential probability).  Other sociological changes happen due to exponential changes in scale--crime for example becomes more of a problem as mass cities create anonymity while also presenting people with criminal tendencies more unrelated and unsympathetic people to target, as well as giving them the awareness that crime fighting must employ triage and hence exploitable opportunities.  You see a similar thing with democratic efforts by specific groups to secure greater government benefits, a form of theft from the commons.
721
722Increased population also increases complexity by pushing resource consumption to limits that require greater technology (or else limited technology limits the population naturally).  We have cities in the desert that can only exist because of large scale management of water resources.  Reduce the population and the level of effort needed to sustain communities drops greatly.
723
724The problem with controlled population reduction is that it means pain now for a happier life later, a choice that becomes more difficult due to scale itself (i.e. we feel less group cohesion and thus less responsibility for future generations, who will reap many of the benefits of our sacrifice).  This is of course even more of a problem as ethnic diversity creates more conflict and an acute awareness of which groups are getting the spoils.
725
726We were discussing in chat last night the idea that the net effect of the Internet has been largely negative.  This is counter-intuitive to mainstream discourse because the benefits to information fluidity and efficiency of operations is so great.  It also provides us with pellet consumption activities that fire off reward signals in the brain.  But on the other side of the scale it reduces depth of social interaction (which requires physical presence), introduces possibly harmful levels of noise to our daily environment, and subordinates local relationships to self-interested transactions.
727
728From a certain point of view, the Internet starts to look like food aid to Africa.  The benefits of greater complexity end up creating need for even more complexity as they allow us to outgrow previous constraints on population and consumption, while exacerbating poorly understood sociopolitical changes.  Even 30 years ago, Joseph Tainter was observing diminishing returns on investment in production and research.  Today we seem to be accelerating complexity simply to sustain current political fantasies, without any benefits being realized.
729
730To change people's minds I think you have to get them to understand the population density problem (which is somewhat easy to understand) and you have to present to them the incentive of richer social relationships that reduce their reliance on continual stimulation.  But it's never easy changing addict behavior. 
731
732reply
733
734I finally got around to reading "The Collapse of Complex Societies," and I would urge anyone with even a passing interest in Political Asylum topics to pick it up. The book lays out a simple but sturdy formula to explain why cultures get complicated and why that can't last: Civilizations arise to solve problems, and inevitably you run out of low-hanging solutions. Keeping problems at bay involves investing more and more resources and getting less and less back for your trouble. Eventually, the society (or some component of the society) decides that facing the problems is less trouble than continuing to pay for the solutions--as, for instance, many Romans welcomed a barbarian invasion to free themselves from the burdens of confiscatory taxation and constant debasing of the currency. Along the way, he makes a lot of points that resonate with our current situation. All troubled governments ramp up spending on bread and circuses and other public displays because they need to enforce their legitimacy and mollify client groups that stop seeing welfare as largesse and expect it as a right. Meanwhile, as societies go into free fall, the population sees that the old civilizational pillars aren't keeping the sky from falling in, so they turn to alternatives that seem to have better answers (Eastern cults for the Romans, Internet ideological warfare for us?).
735
736The book has some blind spots. For one, it was written in the mid-80s, and Tainter assumes that the U.S./Russia standoff will continue and neither side will allow itself too collapse. The consequences would be so terrible both sides will pay any price, bear any burden to subsidize complexity, no matter how small the marginal returns become. Tainter also missed the ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia and separatist movements around the globe, and those kinds of blood-and-soil questions don't enter into his calculations much, if at all.
737
738Still, for all Tainter misses, the roadmap he lays out makes it obvious that the U.S. entered collapse mode a long time ago, and there isn't much we can do to avoid it--we are committed to too many obligations and we simply can't carry all of them out anymore. When we decide paying for all of them isn't worth it--and we will decide that eventually--life will get a lot worse for a lot of people who rely on those handouts in one form or another. On the other hand, as Tainter makes clear, collapse doesn't mean Mad Max. Collapse means descaling; collapse means regions or individual municipalities learning to fend for themselves without a safety net. A lot of those smaller societal units may end up a lot more robust than they are now, while others will end up Detroits. A sobering, unsettling but ultimately hopeful book. The end is coming, but the end is when the real work begins. 
739
740reply
741
742JBS Haldane touched upon scale in a political context at the end of his 1926 essay on biological scale (ie how the square/cube law affects the structure and capability of animals and insects), and to quote Wiki: "The conceptual metaphor to animal body complexity has been of use in energy economics and secession ideas."
743
744The eccentric Haldane's grasp of mathematics and his work and ideas in mathematical genetics were nothing short of brilliant. At the time of the essay Haldane was an ardent socialist who would later become an ardent communist who was still praising Stalin at the end of his life in the 60s. Nevertheless, he felt at the time that 'extreme socialism' was impractical in GB and US because of these country's sizes.
745
746On Being the Right Size:
747And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human
748institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators
749and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city
750was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government
751made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States,
752and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible
753for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may
754perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the
755referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.
756
757To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme
758socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry
759Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He
760has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate
761of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But
762while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I
763find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an
764elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.
765
766Henry Ford running a socialist state as a business concern comes across as rather bizarre, more of a Moldbuggian corporate utopia than a socialist one. But increased communication technology seems to be a contributor to larger (and ultimately more dysfunctional) democracies. Haldane, intuitively brilliant as he could often be, in no way foresaw the multiculturalism and diversity worship that would ultimately turn first-world democracies into the rent-seeking failures that we see today. 
767
768reply
769
770Bruce Charlton discusses Calhoun's mouse experiment.  
771
772http://iqpersonality...use-utopia.html
773
774Quote
775The demise of 'Mouse Utopia' reinterpreted as mutation accumulation by Michael A Woodley
776*
777
778The so-called Mouse Utopia experiment was conducted from 1968 by John B Calhoun
779
780http://en.wikipedia....John_B._Calhoun
781
782The idea was that four breeding pairs of mice were allowed to reproduce freely in a 'utopian' environment with ample food and water; no predators; no disease; comfortable temperature, conditions and space. What happened is described by the author: 
783
784http://www.ncbi.nlm....d00338-0007.pdf
785
786
787Phase A - 104 days - establishment of the mice in their new environment, then the first litters were born.
788
789Phase B - up to day 620 - exponential population growth doubling every 55 days.
790
791Phase C - from day 620 population growth abruptly slowed to a doubling time of 145 days.
792
793Phase D - days 560-920; population stagnant with births just matching deaths. Emergence of many pathological behaviours. 
794
795Terminal Phase - the last conception was about day 920, after which there were no more births, all females were menopausal, the colony aged and all of them died.
796
797*
798
799The Mouse Utopia experiment is usually interpreted in terms of social stresses related to 'over-population' crowding - generating pathological behaviours and a loss of the will to live. 
800
801But Michael A Woodley suggests that what might be going on is mutation accumulation, and deleterious genes generating a wide range of maladaptive pathologies, incrementally accumulating with each generation; and rapidly overwhelming and destroying the population before any beneficial mutations could emerge to 'save; the colony from extinction.  
802
803So the bizarre behaviours seen especially in Phase D - such as the male 'beautiful ones' who appeared to be healthy and spent all their time self grooming, but were actually inert, unresponsive, unintelligent, uninterested in reproduction - are not adaptations to crowing, but maladaptive outcomes of a population sinking under the weight of mutations.
804
805*
806
807The reason why mouse utopia might produce so rapid and extreme a mutation accumulation is that wild mice naturally suffer very high mortality rates from predation.
808
809Therefore, because wild mice are so short-lived, mice are not 'built to last' and have the reputation of being unusually-prone to produce new deleterious mutations (and are therefore extremely prone to cancer, and susceptible to carcinogens - which is why mice are used to test for carcinogens).
810
811Thus mutation selection balance is in operation among wild mice, with very high mortality rates continually weeding-out the new mutations (especially among males) - with typically only a small and relatively mutation-free proportion of the (large numbers of) offspring surviving to reproduce; and a minority of the most active and healthy (mutation free) males siring the bulk of each generation. 
812
813However, in Mouse Utopia, there is no predation and all the other causes of mortality are reduced to a minimum - so the frequent mutations just accumulate, generation upon generation - randomly producing all sorts of pathological (maladaptive) behaviours. 
814
815*
816
817To test whether mutation accumulation is the real explanation for the demise of Mouse Utopia, the original experiment should be repeated but with genetic controls. Woodley is hoping to do this himself. 
818
819Also, a variant experiment could perhaps be conducted, which maintained utopian conditions but without allowing overcrowding (e.g. by continually splitting-up the growing community, and creating more and more small colonies).
820
821In other words, the social conditions of Utopian mice would be held constant, while mortality rates would be kept low for multiple generations.  
822
823My prediction would be that the Mouse Utopians would go through phases A, B, C, D and terminal to become extinct even without increased population density/ overcrowding, and due purely to cumulative genetic damage. 
824
825Charlton says the mice were done in by the fact that deficient mice were not culled the way they would be in the wild.  
826
827I think he's saying that overcrowding doesn't matter.  It's the quality of the population which matters.  
828
829That sounds counter-intuitive to me.  
830
831reply
832
833Blythe, on 19 July 2014 - 11:12 AM, said:
834
835Charlton says the mice were done in by the fact that deficient mice were not culled the way they would be in the wild.  
836
837I think he's saying that overcrowding doesn't matter.  It's the quality of the population which matters.  
838
839That sounds counter-intuitive to me.  
840
841It's an interesting theory...there could be something to it. But one thing the blog post doesn't mention is that the Calhoun experiment was about social space as well as physical space. There were excess males who could not compete (presumably for females) and withdrew from the mating and reproduction game, instead engaging in abnormal, bizarre and sometimes violent behavior.
842
843Human societies are more complex than reproduction and mating. In the human world, social space can be eliminated through technological advances that make huge swaths of the population obsolete, e.g. automation eliminating many types of jobs that were viable for people of modest intelligence.
844
845What made Calhoun's experiment so chilling was that many of the pathological behaviors by mice seem to parallel modern human pathology -- senseless violence, social withdrawal, hypersexual behavior in some specimens, asexual behavior in others. These behaviors seem too common in humans to be the result of a few mutations that have emerged and spread in a relatively short time. It doesn't add up. 
846
847That said, Woodley's hypothesis is worth testing because it could tell us what kind of influence dysgenics might have on group behavior. I don't think it's completely one thing or the other. 
848
849reply
850
851f****t STRIVER POOR, on 19 July 2014 - 12:13 PM, said:
852What made Calhoun's experiment so chilling was that many of the pathological behaviors by mice seem to parallel modern human pathology -- senseless violence, social withdrawal, hypersexual behavior in some specimens, asexual behavior in others. These behaviors seem too common in humans to be the result of a few mutations that have emerged and spread in a relatively short time. It doesn't add up. 
853
854This is the key takeaway for me.  The parallels with human society are far more evident now than in Calhoun's time--hypersexuality, consumerism, isolation/shrinking social spaces, autism and ADD disorders, violence and increased competition for resources--everything points to human society falling to the same pathologies as afflicted the mouse/rat habitats.  I'm unsure why Charlton is reaching for a mutation theory in light of this. 
855
856plreaserman reply
857
858Charlton also seems to dismiss the idea that social input can overload, i.e. that there is a numerical limit to the number and quality of social interactions we can process without things going haywire.  This seems completely intuitive in light of what we are seeing now. 
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863The Rat Park experiments were among the first to show the error in the once dominant myth that certain drugs, particularly the opiates, convert all or most users into drug addicts. In the 1970s, this myth was said to be demonstrated by the high consumption of opiates and stimulants of rats isolated in specially modified Skinner Boxes that allowed drug self-administration. Alexander and his colleagues demonstrated experimentally that rats isolated in cages of about the same size as Skinner Boxes consume far more morphine than rats that are socially housed in Rat Park.[6] Subsequent research has confirmed that social housing reduces drug intake in rats[7] and that the dominant myth was wrong both for rats and for human beings.[8]
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866Addiction as a social problem
867
868Alexander then explored the broader implications of Rat Park experiments for human beings. The main conclusions of his experimental and historical research since 1985 can be summarized as follows:
869
870Drug addiction is only a small corner of the addiction problem. Most serious addictions do not involve either drugs or alcohol[9]
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872Addiction is more a social problem than an individual problem. When socially integrated societies are fragmented by internal or external forces, addiction of all sorts increases dramatically, becoming almost universal in extremely fragmented societies.[10]
873
874Addiction arises in fragmented societies because people use it as a way of adapting to extreme social dislocation. As a form of adaptation, addiction is neither a disease that can be cured nor a moral error that can be corrected by punishment and education.[11]
875
876Therefore, the current NIDA Model of addiction, which Alexander refers to as the official view, is untenable.[12] Contemporary world society can only overcome mass dislocation (and addiction) by restoring psychosocial integration on a political and social level. This requires major social change.[4]
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879More on Rat Park:
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882Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]
883
884To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
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888Looking up Al Bartlett's name (see Documentaries Thread) leads to a treasure trove of SCALE-related articles and quotes. This essay, where he argues that technological development and growing population are the driving forces eroding political freedom, could have been posted in the Political Asylum.
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891Many new technologies carry with them the ability to be used to annoy others, and hence are the legitimate proposals for regulation. ... The rapidly expanding universe of communications has spawned calls for regulations from those designed to keep violence and pornography out of the reach of minors, to regulations that limit the activities of those who create and launch computer viruses.
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893:kagan: OR THOSE WHO USE MEAN WORDS ON TWITTER. 
894
895Keep in mind that this was written before social media. Now that our ability to annoy each other is at an all time high, European governments are actually trying to regulate internet speech.
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898If air pollution became a problem in a small town, the town would have to deal with it, and each citizen of the town could participate in discussions about ways to solve the problem. But when the population of the region around the town grows to become a gigantic urban metroplex with, say, ten times the population of the town, ten the voice of one citizen in the town in solving the regional problem is diluted by a factor of ten. With regional population growth, all manner of problems from pollution to transportation become regional problems, and this expansion of the problems greatly diminishes the voice of individual citizens
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901The actions of local public bodies to establish zoning and land-use regulations such as urban growth boundaries, are driven by population growth, yet these actions ... are clear infringements of individual freedoms. ... Ironically, the persons who complain most loudly about these losses of freedom are often those who advocate continued population growth for the self-serving reason that they profit personally from it.
902
903That essay quotes another one, written by former Reagan administration member Fred C. Ikle, who tried (in vain) to warn that economic growth is not a cure-all.
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906... like the little boy who angrily kicks the table after banging his knee against it, (conservatives) invariably blame bad government for all the evil consequences that growth may entail.
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908A rising tide, yes, lifts all boats. It lifts the tax collector's boat. It enables every Congressional committee to spend more of the people's money. It "forces" every bureau chief within the Federal bureaucracy to expand his staff and offices "just to keep up with growth". The rising tide also helps governments to cover up gross malfeasance; the citizenry may have to wait for the ebb tide of a recession to see it exposed. At that point, when the body politic is deprived of the spoils that can flow so generously from continuing growth, it may at last be goaded into starting a clean-up.
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910I'd strongly recommend reading the whole thing. There are too many good passages to quote, including pleas to conservative policymakers not to ignore environmental conservation and not to abandon their base on immigration. He talks about how growth can bring about cultural rot, and how increased density combined with diversity makes people angrier and more isolated. The only thing he doesn't do is name the Jew (also a brief reference to blacks :pussy: "whose forefathers helped build this country.")
911
912This paragraph could have come from a Pleasureman effortpoast:
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915Population growth is the paramount, the most elemental anti-conservative force. It unleashes a flood of social change that will cascade onto every level of society. It creates irresistible pressures for farflung, and usually irreversible government interventions, allegedly to cope with all the social changes that rapid population growth has unleashed. It thus helps the radical left to garner political support for its social engineering schemes. It dilutes the reach of religious institutions that seek to preserve society's moral fiber. It empowers the unprincipled and the rootless to tear down vastly more civilizing traditions and riches of culture than they will ever create.
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920Population growth is the paramount, the most elemental anti-conservative force. It unleashes a flood of social change that will cascade onto every level of society. It creates irresistible pressures for farflung, and usually irreversible government interventions, allegedly to cope with all the social changes that rapid population growth has unleashed. It thus helps the radical left to garner political support for its social engineering schemes. It dilutes the reach of religious institutions that seek to preserve society's moral fiber. It empowers the unprincipled and the rootless to tear down vastly more civilizing traditions and riches of culture than they will ever create.
921
922Good quote.
923
924I've said before that nothing I am writing about vis-a-vis scale is new.  Except maybe for more recent stuff on diversity like Putnam's study, it's all well-trod ground, part of a big discussion in the 60s and 70s over the future of our society.  People were dealing with the prospect of entire generations raised in a mass society, and this brought many concerns to the forefront of public discussion, from resource usage to the effect of modern urban environments on human behavior.  Another way to think about it is that people who were shaped in pre-mass society environments were getting a good look at how aggressively the pace of change was annihilating their own pasts.  This included a fair number of political and academic leaders.
925
926But as the percentage of the population that was shaped by pre-mass society environments got smaller, due to generational die-off and the retreat of those environments into largely rural America, this discussion trailed off without its concerns ever being resolved.  Problems were also masked by a period of economic and cultural flourishing during the middle part of the century.
927
928But that flourishing period is long over and I think (or hope) that this discussion re-emerges because it is badly needed. 
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930pleaserman reply
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932John Chrysostom, on 23 October 2015 - 04:58 AM, said:
933Population density's really only a problem when all your neighbours are strangers and your social interactions are with strangers too. Population density in a university dorm are high, but doesn't have the same pathologies Cabrini Green did.
934
935I disagree.  Population density is a proxy measure of several factors that can be expected to have a negative effect on social health:  fluidity, percentage of transactional interactions, total number of interactions, competition for resources.  Low social health in turn increases need for self-isolation and hedonistic activity to relieve stress.
936
937Violence and antisocial behavior aren't the only metrics for poor social health.  One of the downsides of the university is that decoupling from the family environment tends to make students anti-tradition, more involved in hedonistic pursuits, more drawn to radical ideologies and extreme behaviors.  Most conservatives who went through a "phase" of being liberal or libertarian did so at this point in their lives, and the non-traditional, high-density university environment is a contributing factor.  A lot of them never fully recover from it because the social impact is so large. 
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941I would argue universities exemplify many of the pathologies caused by scale. Hypersexuality, hedonistic pleasure seeking contrasted by single minded careerist intentions, faggotry and trans acceptance are centered in urban university culture. At the age where people are most likely to create their political identities, these people go to institutions run by the vanguard of managerialism, and are immersed in poz ideology. The university system is responsible for more social decay than any other single sociopolitical system in the world. 
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945Population density on a Hutterite colony is high (at least if you only count living quarters), yet their level of social dysfunction is still very low. The difference is that they aren't forced to be in close proximity to strangers, everyone has work / a purpose, and there is no subsidy from the outside without they cannot live.
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947You could argue it's low density if you include square footage of gardens, fields, the dining hall, etc., but by the same token one could count restaurant square footage for a typical suburban American.
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951Every generation is going to see change annihilate their past now. Note that baby boomers, having been completely unmoored from the past by the countercultural atmosphere of universities in the 1960s and 70s, have grasped onto the pop culture of the 1950s as "tradition" and lament the erosion of the values and institutions *they* knew---Hollywood, rock and roll, Christmas, sanctimoniously saying 'Judeo-Christian values,' colorblindness, etc. Millennials will be no different. Remember, *they* were the original counterculture revolutionaries, and they're being thrown under the bus as fuddy-duddy old reactionaries now. You're done being shaped as a person by age 30, and unless universities suddenly become reactionary and codify 2015 as Holy Tradition Yea And Forever Amen, the values, habits, and institutions millennials have hold dear will be under full assault by 2055. One can only speculate what the revolution will be then; the only constant is the constant need for the (((people))) who run the university to launch revolutions, and that human nature never appreciates having the rug pulled out from under it. 
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955Population density probably matters in the sense that exceeding either upper or lower bounds (racially determined) breeds dysfunction, but it's not the end all be all.
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957Imagine you have 10 small towns with 100k inhabitants each. Stipulate that people mostly live and die in the town of their birth. Whatever level of complexity is currently present, I believe I can demonstrate how to markedly increase that complexity without changing population density one whit.
958
959It's easy: for each town, randomly distribute half of its inhabitants among the other towns. When all is said and done, your 10 towns should still be around 100k each in population, but now you'll have many more families and friendships split up among multiple towns. Repeat this exercise each generation and, assuming replacement-level fertility, social complexity will still go through the roof compared to where it started, yet population density will remain the same.
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961Bearing this thought experiment in mind, one can see how the somewhat mundane transportation revolution (trains, planes, and automobiles) could radically increase our social complexity. We can become overscaled without changing our population density, and in fact technological progress has probably had some significant effect to that end, making poor immigration policy even more disastrous than it innately is.
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963To me, scale is a tricky subject, not just because of how multi-faceted it is, but also because it's not all bad -- there are benefits along with the drawbacks. What matters is that, first of all, the topic is considered "respectable" so that we don't rush headlong into overscaled tragedy, and second, that we identify and address all the low hanging fruit post haste (here immigration is the obvious example).
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965For a given ethnicity, in a given geography, with a given level of technological development, there is probably a "sweet spot" of scale. Change any one of those given variables (and there are probably more) and that sweet spot could shift. Because of this, I doubt we will figure out a universal prescription for scale anytime soon; but if we are thinking and governing in these terms -- searching for the sweet spot, as opposed to the cult of infinite growth -- I expect we would fair far better than we presently do. 
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969Some Amish leaders figured out the connection between telecommunications and transportation to SCALE and just flat out banned it in the 1920s (banning cars) and 1940s (banning telephones and radios). They subsequently missed most of the social atomisation of SCALE, despite living 120 miles from NYC and the DC area.
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971The groups that didn't embrace such bans mostly integrated into the host society and lost their distinctive language and ethnicity.
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973I'm of the opinion that religion is really the only effective counterbalance to SCALE, since it can keep the gateways to SCALE out. (When I say "religion", I am including ethno-religious groupings, not the modern day situation where people change their religion frequently.) 
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975PLEAREMAN reply
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977Density correlates with many aspects of SCALE that we've touched on in other threads, but relevant to this discussion is the inference of a limit on human capacity for social connections.  Limits differ from person to person, but it's evident that the larger a group of strangers someone finds himself in, the more prone he is to disorientation and asocial withdrawal (sticking with a group or isolating).  This disorientation is partially relieved by relative relatedness--cultural and racial homogenity, similarity in background and interests, generational closeness, etc.--but also exacerbated by opposite qualities.
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979Anecdotally, we find that density + largeness tends to breed lots of problems.  In education, large schools have shown enormous drawbacks from increased violence and truancy, lower teacher satisfaction, and student alienation.  Large workplaces feature a ruthless form of ladder climbing, departmental conflicts, and a sense of passivity among employees.  In large organizations there seems to spontaneously develop increased hostility unless the organization is decentralized and/or is directed against an antagonist organization (into which the hostility created by largeness is poured).
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981What you don't see much in mature urban populations (i.e. non-immigrant) are large families and particularly large extended family networks.  This indicates the effect of density on procreative behavior.  Transactional interactions that result from high density lead to increased need for rules and enforcement of rules to replace cooperation and trust.  These changes in the social environment have downstream effects, namely insecurity and a reduced buffer against negative emotional experiences, which in turn lead to compensating behavior that is asocial or antisocial.  While people can remain functional in these settings (except at the margins), we generally don't see social life improved for them in the long term, compared to at a smaller scale with enduring relationships.
982
983What we've done on this forum in the last few years is really flesh out what happens due to density, which started as a crude proxy measure but has evolved into a more sophisticated theory of social interaction. 
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988John Chrysostom, on 28 October 2015 - 12:50 AM, said:
989Some Amish leaders figured out the connection between telecommunications and transportation to SCALE and just flat out banned it in the 1920s (banning cars) and 1940s (banning telephones and radios). They subsequently missed most of the social atomisation of SCALE, despite living 120 miles from NYC and the DC area.
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991The groups that didn't embrace such bans mostly integrated into the host society and lost their distinctive language and ethnicity.
992
993I'm of the opinion that religion is really the only effective counterbalance to SCALE, since it can keep the gateways to SCALE out. (When I say "religion", I am including ethno-religious groupings, not the modern day situation where people change their religion frequently.)
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995Social capital and population density are two different things. I think Haidt discussed communes in The Righteous Mind, showing that the religious ones tended to last substantially longer. He argued that was because the religious communes' social capital was bolstered by religion. 
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997I think you're conflating density and social capital. Though, there is likely a lot of interaction between the two e.g. extremely high population density probably lowers social capital. 
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1001I've lived in high-density city that didn't have nearly the social atomization I've experienced in much less dense American cities. But that was because most people owned their homes and walked to the area stores, the park, and the churches. Of course, people's kids still left when they grew up, so it wasn't the same as small town life, but permanence does a lot to counteract SCALE. Apartments and zoning away the corner stores aren't an outright necessary part of urban life. Neither are diversity initiatives to uproot established neighborhoods. I'm not saying urban life is perfect or ideal, but there's a lot we do in America seemingly with the intent of making it worse. 
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1005I suppose one of you has done a calculation... How big can a city actually be at this point in time without gross input distortions, IE corrosive redistribution and financial value transfers? How much farmable land would need to surround the city? What's the ratio of highly specialized workers and workers who would need a basket of skills in order to hold it all together?
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1008I'm old enough to remember the power outage of 2003. I find it hard to believe many coasters could handle 2 weeks without inputs. Point is, a lot of the east coast is way out of scale and the 2003 outage was evidence of that. 
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1013jack cracker, on 13 November 2015 - 08:49 PM, said:
1014I suppose one of you has done a calculation... How big can a city actually be at this point in time without gross input distortions, IE corrosive redistribution and financial value transfers? How much farmable land would need to surround the city? What's the ratio of highly specialized workers and workers who would need a basket of skills in order to hold it all together?
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1016It's a complex equation having to do with ethnic (inherited-cultural) traits that touch on intelligence, capacity for altruism, and strength of kin preference, among others.  And these traits are not necessarily constant over time, even with a relatively stable population, much less our own constantly churning demographics.  Also in this equation is the social environment, which is never constant, and which incorporates complexity, technology, geographic size, and density.
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1018It's not just the size of the city that matters but the urbanization level, i.e. the balance between rural and urban environments in the nation as a whole.  You see the importance of this when you contrast urban vs. rural attitudes and behaviors.  Paris is not a microcosm of France.
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1020You can't design the ideal balance on paper, any more than you can say there is one ideal height for human beings.  What I think we learn from studying SCALE is the importance of limiting it, of establishing controls much like genetic controls on height.  This requires a conservative approach, but it is a conservative approach unlike the historical conservatism of mindlessly defending authoritarian hierarchy.  It must not be afraid to learn from the social and physical sciences; it can be partial to tradition without being rigid, and it can be flexible without being careless.
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1022Change can be an element of conservatism, with the goal of conserving a balanced society.  This is admittedly very tough to do--how do we conserve established social boundaries without becoming schlerotic?  How do we react to changes in communications and technology?  We can see that there is no "invisible hand" to establish the limits for us.
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1024Possibly, given man's nature, failure is inevitable, but we shouldn't let fear of failing keep us from rebuilding something better than it was before.  That is the spectre of defeatism that haunts many conservatives.