Agent23
Ни шагу назад!
Add the entitled attitude and snobbishness of the millennial generation to the mix and you get a situation that is even worse.I generally think were living in the calm before the storm.
To many cycles economic, political and other are all linking up this decade to make things utterly miserable I mean honestly as shitty as the economy's doing we really should be doing a lot worse. And this isn't just america by the way, China, Russia, europe the baby boomers are retiring in mass. Their taking their skills, their labor, their money out of the economy and sooner or later the delay form all that hits.
But, it is the boomers that basically told all of them that they must get university degrees in stuff that is often bullshit to get ahead, and the Boomers voted themselves huge entitlements.
However, such downturns and population declines are not really an anomaly, if you look at European history, the increase of population was not a straight line but there were declines and upward bounces, this is just the down part of a cycle and it is IMHO normal.
Once reconstituted, however, the results are like listening through a stethoscope to a breathing organism, in which living is the systole and dying the diastole. The latter was dominated by numbing rates of perinatal and post-natal mortality. In most places, a quarter of the children born did not survive until their first birthday, and only a half lived to celebrate their tenth. The diary of Jean Le Coullon from the countryside around Metz tells an all too familiar story. He was from a family of thirteen children, ten of whom died before they were married. He himself married in January 1545, and his wife bore him his first son, Collignon, the following year, his second son two years later, his third son, Jean, in 1549, and his fourth in 1552. In 1553 his wife died of plague, by which time two children had already died. Jean remarried eleven months later and went on to have other children by his second marriage, but of all the nineteen children of his and his surrounding family mentioned in the diary, only six lived to be twenty years old. He recounts these deaths in his diary alongside details of the weather and the state of the crops. One might imagine that he did not care very much, were it not for the moment when his first namesake son, Jean, died in 1549. Then he writes: ‘It was of such great displeasure to me that I became inconsolable.’
Large surviving families were not common. Life expectancy at birth was low (say, twenty-five years) and, although it improved if you survived to adulthood, you would be lucky to see the age of fifty-five. Those surviving that long tended not to know how old they were. In 1566, Wiriot Guérin, local provost from the village of Gondreville on the river Moselle, declared that he was forty-four years of age. A decade later, he equally solemnly told the officials of the duke of Lorraine that he was ‘sixty years old or more’. Epidemics of killer disease – bubonic plague, but also typhus, scarlet fever and influenza – could wipe away whole families and have a serious impact on local communities. Our demographic stethoscope registers the spasm of the demographic organism as it tries to cope with death rates that suddenly spiral to 6–10 per cent and, on occasion, 30–40 per cent. An important part of the spasm was the primal, or rather social, urge to replenish. Baptismal rates stutter, then recover fast as the organism worked to restore equilibrium; mini baby-booms were a familiar response to demographic catastrophe. Marriage registers reflect the widows and widowers reconstituting their families and consolidating their inheritances.
How, then, was Europe’s population replenishment sustained? The longer series of surviving parish registers pick out cycles of local and regional growth, periodically arrested by a major mortality crisis, each crisis creating its own peaks and troughs in the family and age cohorts of the future. Most of all this lay outside people’s power to control.
From Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648 by Mark Greengrass