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Behavorial Sink or what happens in a mouse utopia...
An interesting study:
On day 560, a little more than eighteen months into the experiment, the population peaked at 2,200 mice and its growth ceased. A few mice survived past weaning until day six hundred, after which there were few pregnancies and no surviving young. As the population had ceased to regenerate itself, its path to extinction was clear. There would be no recovery, not even after numbers had dwindled back to those of the heady early days of the Universe. The mice had lost the capacity to rebuild their numbers—many of the mice that could still conceive, such as the “beautiful ones” and their secluded singleton female counterparts, had lost the social ability to do so. In a way, the creatures had ceased to be mice long before their death—a “first death,” as Calhoun put it, ruining their spirit and their society as thoroughly as the later “second death” of the physical body.
And do you see any parallels with modern society? The United States has never been richer or easier yet so many people are miserable and birth rates are plummeting. The population collapse is even worse in Europe and Asia.
Instapundit: Less than a quarter of students today have a positive view of capitalism
The argument makes sense, even though we is a society are working hard to achieve things in a different way than in the 1950s. A family could do well on a single salary, wives and mothers could be homemakers caring for their children. Work, careers could be for the entire working life of an employee. The cost of living did not advance as fast, stock markets were largely a growing successful place to put money, interest rates were kept low by government Fiat essentially. The electronics boom was only a glimmer in people's eyes. College was much more affordable. And yet the central thesis is pretty observably correct. Birth rates have crashed. People are living largely self-centered lives, The institution of marriage is in a very bad way societally speaking. I think you can argue it's more of a spiritual problem than an economic one though. Maybe that's something for people to think about on a Sunday afternoon.
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