Happy new year, Dick.
And happy new decade, although the decade is going to begin january 1st 2011.

I have the feeling that this generation (mine) is going to be in a transitory situation, while the next one will really have to deal with the disaster that your generation created and mine looked like blindly accepted for convenience.
And it's not gonna be like the Great Depression that you mentioned, because i have the feeling that this one will be without any hope for the future.

Mmmh... i believe your computer is wrong. Third millennium started on year 2001 (as the first one started on year 1). So that second decade will start at 2011. Eheh... I don't want to be boring, but in italy we say that celebrating a recurrence before its exact date brings unluck, that's why one is allowed to celebrate a belated birthday party but not an anticipated one - I think this comes from the thought that if the birthday is celebrated before there is the risk that the guest of honor dies before the right date and the celebration is vain.

Nowadays i consider myself very lucky with respect to the poor populations in the third world. And i believe the things will remain pretty much the same for several years. But the tendence is that the global wealth is not capable to keep growing, and being that the most powerful people will try to grow their personal wealth, that means that they will steal it from the less powerful ones. Which means that the number of rich people will reduce, although they will be always more and more rich. Being that i am not one of those lucky (=selfish?!?) ones, i will become more and more poor. I have the feeling (=hope?!?) that this process will be very slow, so it won't be much different for myself. I wonder for the next generation...

I have no idea about the interpretation of those economic stuff (Hey, remember you are chatting with a stupid! ). I guess that the most the Euro goes up compared to the USD, the most european economy goes better than US one. Which thing, of course, doesn't mean that european average people live better than american ones.

Dick, i was not thinking to any astronomic relationship with the count of the years. Simply, if somebody supports the statement that the third millennium starts at year 2000, for a simply algebric reason, he has to support also that the second millennium starts at year 1000 (being accepted by everybody that a millennium contains one thousand years). So that the first millennium should start at year 0. Being that year 0 does not exist, one of the two should be accepted: that the first millennium AD starts at year 1 BC, or that the third millennium starts at year 2001.

Well... although i know the existence of the Limits to Growth report, i don't know a big lot about its content. My observation was just that the capitalism, which is the strongest (so the winner, in a free competition) system is based on the continuous growth of the enterprise. Being that the wealth in the world is not infinite, if a company grows there must be another that falls. Applying the free market to any single human being, if one gets a bit more rich, somebody else becomes a tad more poor. Or vice-versa.
The logic should suggest that the poor ones become a bit more rich while the rich ones become more poor. But usually who is rich is also powerful, and he won't agree to loose his wealth. On the opposite, being that he is powerful, he would like to increase his wealth not to loose his supremacy of power against other rich furts.
Which makes very easy to conclude that rich people will be more rich, while poor ones will be more poor.

I believe that nowadays the situation is not harder than what happened in the past. All ages had economical crises and it happened that in the past they were harder and longer in time than the recent ones, probably because our economical system is much more flexible and agile.
The real difference that should create a big warning, is that this crisis is global, it covers all the world, being that the economy is now global. Moreover also the human cosciences are globalized. If in the roman empire they could accept that who is outside didn't even belong to the world, so that they could accept that others die for the advantage of Romans, nowadays we, people in the rich part of the world, cannot agree with the idea to have everything while other even people die of hunger because of us, just for the unfortunate incident to be born in the other side of the world. Or, atleast, i hope we cannot.

That makes also the identification with the rich guys that are having all with the bad guys that do not care about humanity.

This, i believe, is the real fall of the world.
Kioto and any further Copenagen will always fail, because they need as a precondition the tendency of powerful and rich people to give up some wealth and power for the common Good. One could say "if i loose power/money, there will be somebody else that will have that power/money", which doesn't change the situation.

I believe the real problem is that the human have the bad (and unusual in the animal world) tendency to predilige the personal good to the group/species good. In our case the good of the individue is right the opposite of the good of humanity.

As you can imagine i politically appreciate better Keynes position about economy

The thing is that i believe it is not enough anyway. Already, with some kind of control, capitalism is not properly "capitalism" (political control on economy is not compatible with free market and liberism).
I believe that capitalism is based on differences. Somebody different (more rich, or more clever, or smarter...) must be prized with privileges (more power or more money), that makes him even more "different". Otherwise there's no reason for that "different" to devote himself. That's the idea capitalism is based on.
In a population that can enjoy one chicken each, if there is one that has two chickens (because he wants or deserve it), there must be another that has zero chickens and dies of hunger (or proportionally some people have only a portion of chicken, name it malnutrition). If some "deus ex machina" (like politics, for example) stop the growth of wealth in chickens (say the limit is 1.5 chicken each maximum) there will be a number of people that will obtain to be close to that limit. Which reduces that privilege to the normality and will anyway create malnutrition to who is not in that number of rich. That, in a just government would reduce the limit so that everybody will continue to have one chicken each but... duh... that's called communism, isn't it?

Which in my opinion doesn't solve the problem yet. Because:
1) the population grows. If everybody has its chicken ensured, nobody dies of starvation. If one doesn't die of starvation first increases the number of living people of one, and second he reproduces himself (comfortable for that his children will anyway have the ensured chicken each)
2) the population average age grows, because in a rich environment people tend not to die. Which makes labor much less efficient.

The real problem is that we base our lives on the fact that resource are potentially infinite. Which is not. The only way to have more is to steal from somebody else.

The obvious solution is that there is a demographic control so that population doesn't grow for new births. And a limit on the expected maximum age (i don't know.... like killing old people?), in order not to age the average.

Which solution obviously i don't like at all.

Dick,

Population control cannot be other than brutal, if "brutal" has an evil meaning in our conscious.
About the control of births i think we are living in a phase in which it is already naturally controled by common sense. Infact i noticed that in the XXth century the number of children per family was big in the poor agricultura societies and small in the rich industrial ones. I think (careful, it's just my personal thoughts) there are two reasons that explain this. The first is practical: in agriculture, to have a good production, one family needs a lot of young and strong people to make hard works, while the work in the industry is more "individualistic", so that children in a family are only a cost. The second reason is that there is a natural (genetical or cultural?) tendence of any human being to try to ensure the expectation of a better (or atleast not worse) condition for the children. So that one couple will plan to have a child when they can ensure to give him/her a bigger wealth. Since part of the wealth passes from one generation to the next one, that means that for a very poor man it is easy to forecast a better condition for his child, while for a rich one it's more difficult.
That's why in the rich countries (where agriculture is only a "side business") the rate of birth is much lower.
But, on the other side, there is the opposite problem, that is rich societies have wider access to medicines, hygiene, better quality of life. Which grows the expectation of life for human beings.
And the conclusion is that population grows a lot in poor countries where, by the way, the expectation of life is low. At the other end, in the rich countries the rate of growth of population is lower (in Italy, for example, it is negative), but the expectation of life is high. In italy, for example, there is no problem of growth of population, while population gets older and older, and that is a big problem. Fortunately (although it's not generally considered a luck) there is a lot of immigrants that lower a lot the average age of people.

Dick, you speak about renewable sources (i guess you refer to energy sources - which, despite our imagination, is not a primary need of humans as it is food and water).
I was speaking about wealth as it is considered in a capitalistic society. I make an easy example:
Suppose you have an economically close and independent society of 100 people. Suppose there is one single company that produce one type of good, say cellphones. All the people in that society work for that company. Say they produce 100 phones a year, and suppose their salary is 100$ a year. Being that the society is closed, everybody has to consume 1 phone a year. And being that the total salary is 100 times 100$ = 10,000$, the company, with the sale of the 100 phones a year has to collect atleast 10,000$ a year. So that the cost of one phone is 100$. So, each person gets 100$ a year, and he has to buy one phone a year at the price of 100$. Which means that he has one new phone a year, but also that he cannot grow richer or become more poor.
If now i suppose that there is a renewable variable in the cellphones, that means that with the same energy spended by that labor, the company can produce one cellphone for less than 100$, say 90$. Which means that the total money the company makes in one year is no more 10,000$ but only 9,000$. That means that the company can pay less value in salary. Exactly 90$ each, which means that it's a fortune that the cost of the phones is 90$, otherwise there would have been some phones that couldn't be paid by the buyers. On an extreme situation, one cellphone would cost only 1 cent, but in that way the salary would be reduced to only 1 cent a year, and in that way everybody would have had to spend that penny for buying a damn cellphone.
As you see, the cost is variable, the amount of energy and availability of raw materials doesn't produce any new wealth and doesn't change the distribution of wealth.

I am not in favor of capitalism. Actually i don't like it at all. What i pointed out is that while capitalism tend (atleast in theory) to redistribute evenly the wealth, so that giving everybody an even access to their needs, in capitalism the distribution of wealth is not even. Being that the amount of wine in the bottle, in a closed economy, is always the same (as i showed above), if somebody drinks more than his share, there won't be enough for the others. Being that capitalism is based on inequalities, that follows that most of people is getting more poor.

The solution to this problem, in the last century, was exportation. The problem of the stupid example i made is that the economy is closed. But if we allow exportation, the excess of products can be sold outside the borders of the country, making so that some wealth goes into the country, enriching, in average, the whole citizens. This had the side effect to impoverish somebody else, but that was far from our eyes. It happened to be in Africa, South America, Asia.
Nowadays we demand to consider economy globalized, which means that our society is not the set of citizens of a nation, but the whole human race in the world. It's obvious to me that this global economy is a closed economy, and so we cannot solve the problem i pointed out by selling excess of products outside, because there is not any "outside" of this world. Which means that or we change the economical system to a more even, or we have to accept that while few people grow richer and richer, the main majority will die of hunger.

Dick, i will answer your comment later. Now i want only to correct sinething in my previous one. There is in particular one paragraph that is unreadable for some dumb typos. This is the correction:

I am not in favor of communism. Actually i don't like it at all. What i pointed out is that while communism tends (atleast in theory) to redistribute evenly the wealth, so that giving everybody an even access to their needs, in capitalism the distribution of wealth is not even. Being that the amount of wine in the bottle, in a closed economy, is always the same (as i showed above), if somebody drinks more than his share, there won't be enough for the others. Being that capitalism is based on inequalities, that follows that most of people is getting more poor.

Dick, i am not sure i understood everything you are saying.
Because you showed where is the problem. But you didn't say which is the solution.

Yes, i guess there are fluctuation on the number of births in different periods, so that the gravity of the problem will fluctuate... say... fifty years later. But anyway, at the end, the thing is that in rich population the average expected age grows.

As far as i know the average expected age is computed taking a large number of samples, summing all the ages each one dies, and then divide it by that large number. In other words, if the average age will be seventy in 25 year, that will be the year in which i expect the probability i die is higher, being that in 25 year i will be 70. So that it will happen for everybody that was born in 1965, independently on how many they are. If they are a lot, there will be a lot of people that die, if they are only few there will be only a few.
As i said, is that wealth tends to enlarge the expected average age. I belive it is pretty obvious that, although this discussion of mine don't consider the fluctuation of number of births, as more the expected average age grows, if any death is replaced with one birth, as more the average age of the population grows.
(With "average age" here i mean the age you compute summing in a particular moment the age of everybody and divide by the number of people you measure).
In other words, where the number of people remains constant, if the expected age grows, the age of people grows in average. Or, in other words again, if a nation becomes richer, the population grow older.
Unless there are more births than deaths. But that cause a growth of population, which means that the total wealth available for that nation must grow.
Otherwise, if the wealth does not grow, it happens that the available wealth for the citizens decrease.

I don't know what is the solution for this problem. The only one that i can think of (although i hope it won't ever be applied, being that i am slowly growing older) is to artificially control people deaths when they reach some age-limit.

Another solution is that naturally we arrive to the natural limit of age. But it seems that some scientist say that that natural limit is actually over 120 years.
In an utopistic world where everybody reaches 120 years and any death will be replace with a birth, with the time we will have an even number for any age cohort, so that, for any person from 1 to 20, there will be a person over 100. If we consider "an old grandpa" somebody that is over 80, and "a kid" every child 0 to 10, well, anyone of them will have, on average, 4 old grandpas over 80.
Every couple will give birth to exactly 2 children in their life (being that some day when the couple dies they will be 2 of them). Those children will have 8 people over 80 to tell them stories.

The thing that does not work in this scenary, is that old people won't be productive as youung ones are, although they will consume even more (for medicine and other stuffs they need for their life).

Anyway if you take the world population, i believe that the average expected age is no more than 40. If you grow it to the limit of 120, it means that the number of people in the world triplicate. There simply won't be enough food for everybody, even if you will convince every human being to have only two children each couple.

Uhm. I think that it is not true. In poor nations in Africa food is not enough for sure, but they still give birth to a lot of children.

I agree that when the rate fluctuates it is a big problem.
But also you would agree with the fact that if the average age of population grows (because there is more wealth, there are no wars or better medicines), to keep the rate of younger cohorts high, the population has to produce more births. Those babies will eventually grow adult and old, and since we want to keep the younger cohorts bigger than the old ones, when those guys will be old, the population would have to produce even more and more kids.

I try with an example. Suppose that a half of population dies before 40. Since the death rate is so high for some kind of illness, there will be a lot of kids. Say that people 0 to 20 are 75% of population and 20 to 40 only 25%.
At a certain point they discover a new medicine that allow people not to die before 40 with the same rate. So that the population 20 to 40 will increase a lot. If nobody dies, after 20 years those "old" guys will be 50% (and 50% the young ones). If that nation, for some reason, wants to keep young people 75% of population, they have to find a way to convince people to have more kids.
So, if before the discovery of that medicine the population was 100, 75 were young and 25 were old. After that discovery, if we want young people to be 75%, being that old people become 75 (being that young people don't die before growing old), young people would be 75*3=225. The population, grew from 100 people to 225+75=300. It triplicated.
That calculation looks really surprising. But the things are much worse. Because i didn't take care of the fact that when the medicine is discovered, the old generations don't become 50% all of the sudden, but it will take 20 years for the young one to grow old. In those 20 years, to balance and make so that the rate of young one keeps the 75 percent, they have to have more and more children. Which eventually grow old too, and when they are old they sum to the 75. So that, after 20 years from the discovery of that medicine, the number of births must be much bigger than 225.
Moreover we didn't consider the fact that, being that the illness would kill before 40, after the discovery of the medicine people won't die also after 40 (the expected age limit grows). So that, if we consider "old" everybody over 20, people over 40 will be belonging to that cohort.

Now, one would ask why in the heaven we want to keep young cohort 75%.
In my simplified example i considered "old" everybody over 20, which, i admit, is ridiculous. I did so to make it more easy. But it is obvious that after a certain age people consume a lot and don't produce nothing. In italy, for example, we have a retirement system controled by the state that works pretty much like this:
During the work age people pay a tax (called INPS) that is a share of the salary that the state is supposed to keep and invest, and give back to the citizen when he is retired, as a "retirement monthly check" (in italy we call it "pensione"). I could say it works pretty much like an insurance ("retirement insurance" they call it?).
The problem of italian system is that the truth is that the State does not invest those money directly, but it uses them to pay the "pensione" to the old ones. The system is more complicated, for obvious reasons, but we could say, simplifying it a lot, that a share of my salary is used to pay the INPS tax that is used to pay the pensione of my father. In other words, with my work i support myself and my father.
It is obvious that when the number of old people grows the young people will have in charge a bigger number of old people to support.

There are some solutions about this, and they are kind of following all of them, without a big success, in italy.

First solution: if the expected age grows, the age in which somebody is allowed to stop working and receive his pensione should proportionally grow. In other words, in my stupid example, when the medicine is discovered, the expected age grows, so that we should consider "young" everybody 0 to 30 and "old" 30 to 60. Being that it keeps growing the limit will be eventually moved from 30 to 40, to 50 and so on. This way works but there is a couple of obvious problems in this: Firstly there is to say that if the expected age doubles, that doesn't mean that the age in which people is in shape enough to be considered "productive" doubles too. In the middle age, expected age was about 40. Now it is about 80, in Italy. But in the middle age they were productive from 10 to 40, now they are productive from 20 to 60. There is a bigger share of unproductive people. Second problem is that if 10 years ago the state "stole" me that INPS tax with the promise that at 60 i could get my pensione, now it cannot say that they will "steal" that tax for another 10 years in order to make me have my deserved pensione at 70, ten years laters.

Second solution: if the expected age grows, the rate of birth grows. That, as we said, will increase a lot the population, making so that the problem will be worse in the next generations. In italy they are giving incentives (as reduction of taxes) for families that have births, which thing doesn't make a big difference. The big difference instead, is given naturally by the immigrations (mostly from Africa). A lot of young people is coming in with their families, and they are making a lot of kids. And this makes a grow of younger cohorts. In other words the immigrants are paying for our old generations pensione, and their kids will pay for us, through their INPS tax.

Third solution: If the number of old people grow, and the amount of money available for their pensione do not grow at the same level, the amount of pensione for each decrease. And that makes so that we have to integrate the pensione with other kind of previdence insurance. Still it is perceived as an injustice that i paid a lot of money for years and years with my INPS tax and then i will have only some crumbs back.

That explain the problem as the way i see it. But the worse thing, at this point, is that none of those solution can work. Because any way you see, to support everybody the production must increase a lot.
Infact upon the first solution, if people go to retirement at older age, it is obvious that in their life they produce much more than years before.
The second solution say that there is more and more people, and obviously more people produce more.
In the third solution there is the need to put money in insurance because the pensione is not enough. And those money come from the salary, so that the salary itself should grow. And the salary can grow only if the production grows.

The conclusion is that if the expected age grows, the production must grow, Both because there is a lot of new people to feed, both because they have to feed also old people. Being that wealth is not infinite, the growth of expected age cause the global impoverishment. If somebody still wants to make money in all of this, he has to accept the conscience inconvenience that somebody else is dying of hunger.

Dick.
I think i didn't explain very well in my previous comment.
I am mixing up two things, actually: the increasing pupulation and the growing of expected age (still i am not sure in English you call it in that way, but i am sure you can understand: i mean the average age when one expects to die).
I actually wanted to say two things:
1) when expected age grows, also population increase a lot. Or, otherwise, the average age increase a lot (and here i mean "average age" the average among the ages of everybody in the population). And that thing seems very obvious to me.
2) In both cases (population or average age growth) or in a combination of them, wealth available for each person in the population decrease.

The thing of the pensione/social security was just an example. I am ready to give up with my social security and move my expectation of life during my retirement on other types of investiment. That is not a problem.
The problem, instead, is that social security is a mirror of what happens naturally on a society. When somebody grow old he cannot work as he did when he was young. You would admit that a 80 years old guy doesnt' have fresh muscles for low-level labor, he doesn't have good sight for looking in a microscope as he did when he was a young biologist. He doesn't have the sense of equilibrium to work as a carpenter as he did when he was 20 years old. He doesn't even have the fresh brains to find smart solutions in problems (i see this on myself - i had better ready brains 20 years ago, and i am "only" 45, nowadays!). In other words 80yo people are less productive than 20yo people. I wish you could agree on this point.
So, one of the two: let 80yo people die of hunger or let 20yo people support them.
Now, if there is 1 80yo person every 10 20yo people, these last have to produce 11 apples each in order to eat 10 and leave the 11th to the old guy, so that the guy has 10 apples too. If instead there is one old guy every young person, the young one has to produce 20 apples to feed his own grandpa. The difference, for the 20yo guy is that in the first case he produces 11, in the second case he has to produce 20 apples, for the joy to be able to eat the same amount of 10 apples.

If people want to have their 10 apples paying the INPS (or supporting some way the society imposes) of one apple although there are more and more 80 yo, the number of 20yo people must increase more and more. Being that the 20 years old people will be the 80 years old ones after 60 years, that means that in this way in 60 years there will be even more and more 80 years old people.
So, also on a static expected age, population grows.
And if population grows, individual wealth decrease.

That is what i wanted to say. The pensione system is only a simplification of this fact of life. I wanted to point out that since the pensione system doesn't work for the reasons we pointed out enough, that follows that also the social system itself cannot work. In other words, we cannot allow that expected life grows. Although i don't know how to solve the problem, i can admit that this is a big problem.

Tell me about the birth rate of .33.
You made wrong calculations or it's an indicator different from my empirical view?

Uhm... i guess the birth rate computed the way you suggest, in my example, is so low because the life expectancy is very high. People live 100 years, so that a big part of the population is made of old people.
I don't know how much is the birth rate in Italy in this formula. What i know is that in average one woman gives birth, during her life, to less than 2 babies (i think it is 1.6 or something, although i am not sure). That means that if the life expectancy remains constant, the percentage of old people grows, because there is more people that grow old than the much that enters the young cohorts (1.6 per woman means 1.6 per couple, which means that there are 2 parents growing old and only 1.6 new young for each couple).
Also, as you pointed out, the population growth is negative in Italy, which means that the rate of birth is less than the rate of death. In other words, while the life expectancy grows, the birth rate decrease. Which makes the situation even worse.
Why? I don't really know, but i can guess.

There is a lot of couple in Italy that don't have children or they have only one, because we are accustomed, over here, to give birth only if we are sure to support them. "Support" means ensuring their life style atleast as rich as ours. Nowadays the wealth in Italy is felt as decreasing, so that there won't be a lot of possibilities in the future that our children will live a better (or atleast eaven) life than ours.
Moreover Italy is actually overpopulated. I think that the human beings self-regulate on this point. If you divide the 300 million people by the surface of the US, you will see that the density is much lower than Italian.
Moreover i would think that the population won't decrease at all. I believe that those 58 million is the amount of Italian citizens, counting the ones that have Italian passport. In Italy there actually are a lot of immigrants from Africa and Eastern europe, which have regular visa but they don't have Italian citizenship. I hope those immigrants in the future will eventually be considered citizens for that statistic purpose. And they will find a way to make it regular also the irregular immigrants. For two reasons. First that i would like that people living in Italy have the same rights of other people still living in Italy, independently upon the ownership of a stupid paper as a passport is. And second, the average age of immigrants is much lower than Italians. Unfortunately it looks like that Italian people in Italy is slowly disappearing. I would like that it will be replaced by a new people of integration.