...if we can get through the next 20-30 years. Peak danger for societies isn't when there's a bulge in birth rates, or when the population starts to fall. It's when there's a bulge in the rates of young, unmarried men who don't have the wherewithal to marry and pass on their genes. That's when you tend to get an increase in crime, violence, warlike behavior, and other things that tend to rip a society apart.
Particularly when those young men feel disempowered, usually through unemployment or under-employment. Consequently, their well-being and the well-being of society in general are no longer neatly aligned, and their rational self-interest does not allow them to support the status quo.
It’s worth noting that “driver” is the most common job for white American males, and the United States can’t be too many years from full automation of vehicles. If the benefits accruing to the broader society from this automation are not redistributed in such a way to alleviate the strain placed on the workers displaced from their roles, I fear it will be the moment this pot boils over.
I’d assume even those with a generous definition are too conservative by far. We rapidly approach a future where no human will operate any heavy machine that accomplishes a discrete task. That task might be to transport goods or people across the country, to lift a steel beam into place, or to assemble ingredients into finished products. Once the cost curve flips over to the other side, the whole thing accelerates.
Even worse if the harmed group is a smaller concentrated minority; they have no legitimate recourse through democratic expression.
"Peak danger for societies ... [is] when there's a bulge in the rates of young, unmarried men"
Could you provide a source for that? There are more unmarried men per capita now than almost any time over the last 100 years [1], yet violent crime has been declining steadily - most people can't seem to agree why, though. [2]
I should also point out that the sort of violence I'm talking about is things like wars, civil disorder, gangs, terrorism, failed states, anarchy, and other group forms of violence, not individual crimes like premeditated murder. The latter has a lot of conflating factors (a sibling comment mentions lead, and there's also abortion, better policing tactics, economic growth, etc), but to get a critical mass of people who are so disaffected by their current situation in life that they want to burn the whole society down, you usually need some form of major demographic or environmental change.
And does focus on political violence in particular (terrorism, rioting, and one more I couldn't pick out of the abstract). Would be interestig to read the whole thing, but thanks for following up! I wonder if the amount of young men in the US that were swayed by Russian influence operations over the last several years would be in-step with this logic.
Video games and movies and internet and junk food obesity have had a powerful impact on "defanging" people who might otherwise be bored and angry out in the streets. Now the aggression is channelled into shitposting online and only occasionally shooting up an office/mall/school
The prevailing theory seemed to be lead but I also remember reading it doesn't explain every drop. I assume like often, it's a mixture of factors and many are quite subtle.
The theory sounds convincing, but if you actually look at countries with the highest rates of young males to females, few, if any, support it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio). China, Portugal, South Korea, Kuwait... these are all countries with far more young men than women, and all are stable.
I know that a country with a high male/female ratio is not necessarily the same thing as a country experiencing a "bulge in the rates of young, unmarried men", but I still couldn't find evidence to backup the claim that it would lead to crime and war. Here is a study which looked at 20 other studies of the number of males and violence and could not find a conclusive trend: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953471...
Only the abstract is available from your link so I couldn't look at the paper's data, but the critique's point is that the relationship between violence and sex ratio is U-shaped, with higher violence noted with both too few men and too many. Furthermore, many of the studies cited in your link were studies of inner-city black neighborhoods in the U.S, which feature both high violence and a large overpopulation of females because all the males are dead and incarcerated. Thrown into a linear relationship that's not actually linear, and they'll conflate the data significantly.
The data on current sex ratios could be read one of two ways: either the theory is wrong, or the theory is predictive, and those countries with an overabundance of young males that are currently stable & at peace will not be at peace for long. There's some recent evidence for the latter hypothesis: of the 5 countries with the highest 15-24 sex ratio, Qatar is in the midst of a diplomatic crisis with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE that may be a prelude to war, and the Maldives just had a coup. I've got friends either living in or with family in China & India that say it's nowhere near as socially stable as is commonly perceived in the West, and that there are a number of social problems that could easily become a powder keg if economic growth dries up.
Reading through what's freely availble I get a sense of causation v. correlation misattribution.
I think it's more likely that the political climate for increased violence also leads to increased imbalance of sexes, particularly because violence against women is more common and violence against men comes in waves in times of war or social strife.
Something that occurred to me (but I don't have data or time to follow up):
I wonder if the U-shaped curve for sex ratio imbalances vs. societal violence reflects both causation and correlation. The dynamics would work like this:
An oversupply of young, unmarried males in a population leads to intense competition for mates and for the resources that attract mates (jobs, money, territory, social status, etc). This triggers instincts in our brains that make us more competitive, and more willing to band together with others to remove potential competition. At some point this reaches a critical mass, populations go to war, and most of the excess males are killed off. This leads to an oversupply of females, but because of social inertia (people don't immediately adjust their behavior after massive depopulation, it takes time to adjust to the new reality), the society remains violent for some time afterwards, even though the sex ratio is now very skewed in favor of women. The data would show a U-shaped curve, but the oversupply of males would be the cause of violence while the oversupply of females would be a consequence of violence.
To verify this hypothesis, there'd need to be a time and historical context attached to each data point, so that in addition to looking at the sex ratio, we'd look at the sex ratio trend before and after the outbreak of violence and on what timeframe violence rates go down. I'm unaware of studies that have done this.
Nuh-uh, the youngin pose no threat.
Enter the internet, video-games, social-media, on tap 24/7 porn and endless escapism. (now with more opiates!)
As long as youngins have food and internet, there is no war to be had. Porn is very key in reducing street-level agression. Moreover discourse on the internet is very easy - aand affordable - to control.
Nukes ensure that there are no wars between the big players. Nukes are also probably the best - least scary - way to go as long as it's done right.
We live in a very dystopian world truly. I would not have imagined that things would have turned out this way even as recently as 100 years ago.
