Sublime

American fears of continued government expansion and the relative prosperity of the nation have kept the initiation of long-term, large-scale social programs at bay. America has no national family financial allowance and allows more children to remain in poverty than does any other industrialized nation. It offers unmarried mothers less help with d

Previous legislation had given first preference to relatives of Americans, with small occupation-based quotas. But the 1952 law had turned that practice on its head. First preference was now going to those with skills "urgently needed in the United States." Fifty percent of each nation's quota was set aside for these professionals. Doctor

floodlit Bojangles’ up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and

Or even setting abortion aside, you’d think longtermists might express concern about the decline in fertility in industrialized countries, a question that some rationalists like Hanson have explored but EAs—80 percent of whom are childless, according to Alexander’s survey[*23]—rarely do, perhaps because it codes as conservative. At other times, tho

Project Genome

I also worry that members of this same class of liberal parents will convince themselves, in a few years’ time, that doing just a little bit of embryonic gene editing to enhance their future child’s IQ or athletic prowess or height is not just their prerogative, but their duty. The world is spiraling out of control, they will tell themselves.

For most of the 2020s, the driving economic force will be low growth in productivity, decreased opportunities for investment of accumulated capital, and low interest rates. It will also be a period of increasing unemployment, driven by continued decline in industry and stagnation in high tech as the result of the maturation of the core technology.

When fluctuations in mortality are high due to epidemic disease, famine, or other causes, the relative risk of mortality in warfare falls. The declining frequency of eruptions in death rates from the sixteenth century onward helps explain smaller family size and, ultimately, the far lower tolerance of sudden death in war today as compared to the pa