I read Instapundit because it allows me to skip reading news. If anything important happens in the world, I feel that I would find out about it at least as fast by scanning Instapundit as I would if I read the various news sites.
Left2Right was an interesting blog for awhile. The bloggers there were attempting to reach out to the Right in order to increase the ratio of dialogue to diatribe, or something like that. Unfortunately, after just a few months of not making much progress convincing anyone on the Right of anything, and being subjected to malicious comment spam, they "temporarily" shut down comments last summer. In order to provide a forum for continued comments during the "temporary" shut down, I created a comments blog called Left2RightComments with supporting scripts that automatically scanned Left2Right for new posts and created a parallel post with comments enabled. Unfortunately, the frequency of posts at Left2Right has become extremely limited and they've never reintroduced support for their own comments. I would stop supporting the Left2RightComments blog as well, since there is very little activity anymore, but it would take more effort to disable the scripts than to just do nothing, so that site is still operational. Since there is technically a forum for comments for each post, I guess reading Left2Right posts doesn't really violate my rule. I was considering creating comments blogs for sites like Instapundit and Powerline, but I'm afraid I would end up having to moderate the comments for those blogs and I don't have time (if anybody is interested in giving it a shot, let me know).
Brothers Judd is my latest disappointment. While there supposedly are comments at Brothers Judd, they are very carefully controlled, so that it's not a real comment forum at all. Orrin Judd allows comments that either support his general viewpoints, or that have a contradictory viewpoint but are silly or stupid (so that they make liberals seems silly and stupid). In my experience, comments that don't fit into one of those two categories are often deleted. For example, the last two comments of mine in the following sequence were intentionally deleted (confirmed by email with Orrin) (oj is Orrin Judd):
The deleted comments are pretty tame, I think, and well supported with actual numbers. And they took me some time to put together. Since I don't have time to waste, no more commenting for me at Brothers Judd.Bret:
Name a people who's ever benefitted from population decline?
Posted by: oj at February 13, 2006 04:01 PM---
Well, for example, I believe the black death which hit Western Europe in the mid 1300s and greatly reduced the population (especially in the cities) accelerated and extended the renaissance which, of course, led to modern times. It did so, I believe, by increasing the productive capital (farm land, infrastructure in the cities, etc.) per person, with that wealth enabling a portion of the populace to pursue science and technology.
Posted by: Bret at February 13, 2006 04:22 PM
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Bret:
That's not population decline but a natural disaster. Wars too have little long term effect. The conscious decision to decline demographically is never reversed.Posted by: oj at February 13, 2006 04:52 PM---
Oh, I see, we're playing the oj definitional game again. If we asked 100 people on the street what "population decline" meant, I'd bet at least 90 of them would say any reduction in population would qualify.
But, ok, I'm curious. Which examples of "population decline" did you have in mind? Any with an actual reduction in population? Or all they all declining in some other sense?
Posted by: Bret at February 13, 2006 05:01 PM---
Bret:
Yes, not many folks, particularly you, grasp demographics.
Posted by: oj at February 13, 2006 05:22 PM---
What's hard to understand about "population decline". If the replacement rate is greater than 2.1 and there's a disaster that kills 50% of the people---then the population takes a drop down but continues upward at the same slope, just from a new lower base. Kinda like the stock market.
If the replacement rate is 1.5 or any number significantly less than 2, then the population size is on a downward slope and shrinks exponentially with each generation.
To paraphrase Jim Cramer, "it's where the number is going that counts".
Posted by: ray at February 13, 2006 07:17 PM---
Bret, Europe may indeed live longer than OJ, but it won't live longer than his great-grandchildren. I don't think you have a good intuitive grasp for what happens when you are on the righthand side of an exponential curve. It drifts slowly, gently, but gradually steeper and steeper----and then suddenly it goes vertical.
Posted by: ray at February 13, 2006 07:22 PM---
ray:
Secularists measure things by their own life spans.
Posted by: oj at February 13, 2006 07:53 PM---
Ray,
Nope. First, the 2.1 number you cite is not constant. It's based on life expectancy, which during my renaissance example was much, much shorter. Second, the "disaster that kills 50% of the people" in that case, took decades. In other words, it wasn't like a tsunami. The reduction in population (which most english speaking people would consider a "population decline") was pretty slow - a few percent a year. It was rough, but when it ended, it spawned the modern age.As far as "where the number is going" for the western european population, the long term trend is up. There will be at most a relatively short (a century or two max) downward blip before it stabilizes or heads back up.
Posted by: Bret at February 14, 2006 12:08 AM---
Ray,
Regarding your 2nd post at 7:22 PM. You've (sort of) described what an exponential curve with a POSITIVE exponent looks like. A growing population has a positive exponent, a shrinking population (I would usually say a "population decline", but I don't want to be misunderstood by oj), has a NEGATIVE exponent, and such curves DO NOT go "vertical" on the right hand side. They are "vertical" on the left side and then flatten out asymptotically on the right.
As an example, consider a birthrate of 1.5 children per woman with the replacement rate of 2.1 that you seem to like and a generational timespan of 30 years (since they don't have children until they're fairly old in Europe). Then, every 30 years, after reaching steady state, the population will shrink to 1.5/2.1 times as large as it was. 1.5/2.1 = 0.71.
The population of France is currently about 60 million. The following would be the future population of France predicted by the above numbers:
2005 60 million
2035 43 million
2065 31 million
2095 16 million
2125 11 million
2155 8 million
2185 5.7 million
2215 4.1 million
2245 2.9 million
2275 2.1 million
2305 1.5 millionSo after 300 years, they'll still have more than 1.5 million people. That's probably more people than there were in France in biblical times. Keep in mind that the 8 million in the 2155 is roughly the same population France had in the year 1500, when the renaissance swept Europe, and at that point, they'll have a population density more similar to that of what the United States has now.
So this exponential trend won't get really worrisome for hundreds of years. By which time the trend will reverse.
Posted by: Bret at February 14, 2006 01:12 AM
However, Orrin does a great job at excerpting the money grafs from a few dozen headline articles from numerous papers around the world - so I'll still be reading Brothers Judd and heartily recommend that portion of it, at least for now.
