I call it memetic whole-life r/K theory. Civilizations pursue one of 2 strategies: r-civilizations treat life as cheap and are robust to a lot of death at all life stages and sustain it with high birth rate K-civilizations great life as expensive and fight hard for every life
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But there’s also high K roles under high risk, like specialized doctors. Sol this hypothesis has a lot of details to be worked out. It’s not a simple, elegant theory. It’s a messy heuristic for mapping system survivability in terms of soecuslization/redundancy/r/backfill
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Note that severe labor shortage was one of the effects of the Black Death. Already by them society was specialized enough it couldn’t tolerate the death rate. Society collapsed quite deeply.
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Humans can make such distinctions but the system may not have the ability to discriminate like that. So it reacts sharply to any death rate spike.https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1282202538868125698?s=21 …
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Plus system has evolved to work with the constraints that people tend to care about family elders and their own old age. A society that treated life past 60 as worth sharply less for eg would not have a stable incentive structure. Makes for fun sci-fi like Pebble in the Sky tho
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One last thought on this. The inverse of this bottleneck problem is then a boon for society. Huh? If small clusters can catalyse widespread prosperity then from a developmental perspective, it means a small corps in key positions can raise level of development of a society.
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Many countries are already running negative population growth as it is. So long as they can attract immigrants, they can buy their way out of trouble, instant backfill. 1/3
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UK pop 66m, 9% foreigners UK NHS 1.28m staff, 13.8% foreigners UK NHS *doctors* 28% foreigners https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7783/ … https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-an-overview/ … 2/3
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I was thinking of this especially in Italy when it was rampant. The knowledge loss
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