I’m no longer sure what you mean by the word ‘civilization’. Do you define it as ‘anything that happens after we start planting our food instead of foraging’?
Civilization is cities. Civ can’t exist w/o agriculture.
From wiktionary on civilization:
Civilization is not limited to cities. There have been nomadic civilizations. Nomadic civilizations exist without agriculture. So, you are against people creating stationary shelter? Do you even believe in shelter? I suppose a home that isn’t a natural cave would be too much technology for you.
This is actually because people choose to have less children as a function of wealth, not any sinister reason. When you can afford condoms, you control when you have children and also how many. When children cost more to raise because each child needs to have a ton of education to survive in a civilized society, people also cut back. Children used to be a boon because families needed the labor, when 90% of families ran farms. Now children are more a burden.
I know this is the conventional wisdom but I think there are a lot of good reasons to doubt it. First of all, I think that “net reproductive success” is one of the most important factors driving high childbirths. When your children have a low probability of surviving young childhood, a reproductive strategy is to simply have more children. Then there are cultural/political factors.
I think the idea that people have children because “they can’t help it from happening” is basically false. You’ve never heard of non-vaginal sex? It doesn’t lead to pregnancy and I’ve heard reports that it can be quite satisfying. Even cavemen (and cavewomen) could manage that form of birth-control. If the only thing holding back the floodgates of childbirths is contraception, ask yourself why every woman before about AD 1960 didn’t have at least 12 to 16 children.
I think that the supposedly negative correlation between wealth and fertility is also false - the more wealthy a family, the more children they have at least within the US. Look it up, US fertility statistics are positively correlated with household size all the way up the socioeconomic ladder. Rich people have more children. That people in richer countries have less children than people in poorer countries shouldn’t be a mystery given the reproductive strategy for low childhood survival rates - have more kids! In addition, cultural factors need to be taken into account. People in the US today have fewer children than people in the US circa 1950, yet the US is roughly the richest nation in the world as it was in 1950.
I’ve written on the economics of reproduction here. I don’t agree now with everything I wrote then but I think that the general gist still holds: reproduction is a market and reasoning about it in other terms - as all popular discussion on the topic invariably does - leads to confused and useless conclusions.
Clayton -
Read this blog to know why/how your being poisoned by your food.
Do you have another website to tell me how I’m being poisoned by using the Internet??
From wiktionary on civilization:
Civilization is not limited to cities. There have been nomadic civilizations. Nomadic civilizations exist without agriculture. So, you are against people creating stationary shelter? Do you even believe in shelter? I suppose a home that isn’t a natural cave would be too much technology for you.
How are nomads a “civilization?”
Because they fit the definition of a civilization given in the quote directly above your question. The Bedouin, for example, were (and still are though dying out) a great civilization that has had a major impact on modern civilization.
Clayton -
So now we’re playing semantics?
No, we’re playing “words have a definite meaning.”
No, we’re playing “words have a definite meaning.”
I wouldn’t mind doing a topic on this. The minute someone says “words don’t mean anything” they are as a rule speaking nonsense and can no longer enter conversation.
No primitivist would call non-ag societies “civilizations.” How can you have a civ if your only hunting and gathering?
Not that it matters mr “Anarcho Capitalist”, but here is Rothbard:
Seriously, switch names you’re an anarcho-primitisvist; you’ve nothing to do with capitalism
You can if it is “[a]n organized culture encompassing many communities, often on the scale of a nation or a people; a stage or system of social, political or technical development.”
Not that it matters mr “Anarcho Capitalist”, but here is Rothbard:
Seriously, switch names you’re an anarcho-primitisvist; you’ve nothing to do with capitalism
So being an anarcho-capitalist means agreeing with everything Rothbard said?
Vive has a good point. You have nothing to do with capitalism, anarchist or otherwise. Nevermind the division of labor and markets, you need CAPITAL for there to be capitalism.
Vive has a good point. You have nothing to do with capitalism, anarchist or otherwise. Nevermind the division of labor and markets, you need_CAPITAL_ for there to be capitalism.
Capitalism is free markets. Markets exist inherently. Property rights exist inherently. What makes you think capitalism wouldn’t reemerge after civ’s collapse?