Statistics?
WTF?
I disagree with your premise.
I’m fairly surprised that we’ve gotten this many posts in before someone did. The whole thing is made on anecdotes. I didn’t even post any research or surveys.
Should I presume that you want some?
If you’ve got studies showing that people in one age group or another are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, or in extraterrestial activity on Earth, or that the person they’re talking to online really loves them, or that it’s a great idea to start a race war, I’d be interested to see them, sure.
And I’m also surprised that this thread got as far as it did before somebody objected to that premise. Especially since this board full of people pointing out that internet scams, alien invasions, etc. are ridiculous also is full of older folk.
There is nothing safe about the collapse in birth rates in developed countries. Civilization cannot survive if the rest of the world follows the lead of Spain and South Korea, where each generation is half the size of the last.
The planet will not be better off with a billion people. That’s not enough people to develop the technology for a post-carbon economy. They’ll have to keep burning coal and oil until the end. And so many resources will go toward supporting the enormous elderly population that they’ll have nothing left over for technological development or really anything.
In contrast, with the current population we can keep the level of progress we have and (hopefully) make it through the upcoming crisis. It will still be a close call but not a guaranteed civilizational suicide like massive degrowth would be.
There is easily enough energy and resources for 100 billion people on Earth as long as we aren’t maximally stupid about it. For instance, if all the US did was replace the farms we use for worse-than-useless corn ethanol production with solar panels, we’d have roughly 10x the total energy production of the US. Total–not just electric. And that’s just fixing the stupid thing we’re currently doing. If we were actually smart we could do a lot better than that. But we need people to build these things.
Research into the mechanisms of batshit belief systems is disappointingly thin, but I was able to locate 2 citations. Uscinski, Enders, Klofstad, Seelig, Drochon, Premaratne, and Murthi (2002) inquire, “Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time?”. After noting that 73% of Americans believe that conspiracy theories are currently, “Out of control”, they find no systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism over the past few decades, however operationalized.
Tyler Nelson’s 2022 BA thesis at Georgia Southern University utilized an Amazon mechanical turk sample of 512 to explore the relationship between individual factors and beliefs in various conspiracies. Twenty questions elucidating the latter include the following:
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The American government uses chemical trails in the sky to manipulate or alter the weather.
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Area 51 contains evidence that extraterrestrials or “aliens” exist
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There was a child sex ring led by Hillary Clinton in the basement of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in the event commonly known as “Pizzagate”
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Bigfoot is alive and well within the United States.
Education and the caucasian variable had significant relationships with conspiracy beliefs. The author measured age, but reported no relationship. The author also asked a number of psychological questions and found that machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (the so-called dark triad) all had strong relationships with conspiracy beliefs. Huh. All reported relationships were univariate (eg correlations): the author didn’t run any regressions. I sort of wish that a data appendix was included.
Yeah, that’s why all the old folks blindly follow youtube influencers and take part in TikTok challenges.
SellingTide Pods should be restricted to young folks. Like alcohol and cigarettes…if you’re over 21, you’re too crazy to be allowed to buy them.
And if you’re going to let children vote, why not let them drive, too?
I thought it was not needed, as you yourself did not provide one either, but if you insist: would you accept one in Spanish? See the graph with the black bars more than half way down the article; that is the age distribution of the sympathisers and prospective voters of a nazi for next week. Or would you prefer German? From the article:
Bei der Landtagswahl in Sachsen-Anhalt landet die AfD auf dem zweiten Platz. Bei den Unter-30-Jährigen ist sie sogar die beliebteste Partei. Wieso wählen ausgerechnet die Jüngsten im Osten rechts?
The AfD comes second in the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. It is even the most popular party among the under-30s. Why do the youngest people in the East of all places vote for the right?
Belief in Bigfoot, 2007 survey
Respondents answering Bigfoot probably or absolutely exists.
By Age
18-29 14.8%
30-39 17.4
40-49 16.3
50-59 16.9
60-69 16.9
70+ 12.5
Comment: For a sample size of 1571, differences between age groups are insignificant according to my eyeball test.
By Education
No High School 27
High School 20.5
Some College 14.2
Tech training 14.1
College 10.1
Postgrad 10.7
By Gender
Male 14.6
Female 17.5
Ridiculous, given the historical record of similar-scale technological development (e.g. the creation of the carbon economy in the first place) with global populations of a billion or less. (That’s leaving aside the question of why we would need to “develop” technology that already exists.)
For instance, if all the US did was replace the farms we use for worse-than-useless corn ethanol production with solar panels, we’d have roughly 10x the total energy production of the US.
I’m going to need figures on that one (including figures for manufacture of that many solar panels). And, of course, it’s yet another example of the aforementioned head-scratcher, given that the question concedes that, yes, solar panels are already a developed technology.
I agree with the premise, but for different reasons. Remember back towards the end of the Bush Jr. years, when the idea that the Republicans were doomed due to demographics was popular? Then Obama won with a fairly comfortable margin in '08, and the whole idea gained more credit. I think what happened is that the Republicans realized it was correct, but rather than move to the left a little to attract moderate younger voters that were / are voting D, they decided to move far to the right to pick up MAGA types that were previously not voting.
To use a sports analogy, it’s like a team with a core of aging players, some about to retire. Rather than saying “let’s rebuild over the next few years in the draft, even if that means we concede a couple of down years”, they decided “let’s play dirty to cover up our underlying disadvantage”.
I cannot possibly disagree more. An enormous amount of the damage humankind is inflicting upon the planet is simply a matter of numbers. When ten thousand people do something destructive, the planet barely notices. When ten million do it, the planet can heal. When ten fucking billion do it, permanent destruction of mega-ecosystems is inevitable.
Relying upon technology to save us is almost as vain as relying on people waking up and being long-term rational. Neither is going to happen, and even they, impossibly, did, it still wouldn’t save us. If you step outside the technobox you dwell in and see the reality of the physical living world, you’d know.
Eliminate the Electoral College, redistrict voting precincts in every state using non-partisan committees who have binding power of decision, regulate online media to eliminate propaganda and lies, and then talk.
I don’t think any age group is more gullible now than in the past. People have always been pathetically gullible and hopelessly stupid.
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Trump proposes the same thing. Losing free speech will make things worse. Or maybe not, it is tempting to see what would happen if the there were honest people who could do the regulation. I don’t think that will be the result of any such system.
There other regulations that wouldn’t be limiting in that way, for instance eliminating anonymity is what is clearly commercial speech and holding media outlets responsible for the content they publish, not mention exposing the dark money.
I’m down with that.
A couple of other posters have given good counter arguments to the technological aspect of this but I think there is another issue. The current economic order relies on ever-increasing growth. Economies that do not grow fail.
I am not knowledgeable enough about this to have an opinion on whether this is a natural law or just a consequence of how modern economies are structured but either way it’s an unavoidable feature of the current economic regime.
I would like to think that it’s that later and sustainable economics are possible but I’m not sure how hopeful I should be.
More babies just means more intellectually competent voters but also more idiot voters. An age cap to voting is bigoted stereotyping because I know a number of seniors who are very intelligent and still razor sharp.
Let children vote? Sounds absurd to me.
If that were necessary then the all-crushing commonality of the calls for “Cite?” that we all throw out and request insistently wouldn’t be necessary, would it?
Or…we’ve all stopped doing that with age, even though we should?
Economic growth does not necessarily imply population growth or even growth in natural resource consumption, any more than it necessarily implies turning ever higher shares of the planet to farmland.[1] Growth in value added or rearranging molecules in new ways is sufficient for economic growth. (Whether AI will upend this is grist for another thread.)
[1] Just as an example, US farm acreage has declined since 2000.
And during the same period (at least through 2017), output has increased. If the population declines, who will consume it?