if we tolerated disease - as man did from time immemorial, we would allow diseases to reach a steady state. We would soon die out as a race due to population decline as we are well below the required rate of replacement in a diseased population. We would have to outlaw birth control as the current rate of replacement would not be enough if half our children died by the age of 5 - as they did in the 1700-1800's.
Survivors might be more resistant, but I and many others do not feel this is a good strategy.
Nature 'saw' the need for an immune system - it was that or die.
About 90% of the native populations of North, South and Central America died from the diseases brought from Europe by Columbus and those that followed. This huge wave of deaths spread from the points of contact by tribal passage and preceded the later growth of hybrid populations of europeans/natives. It was only by later LIDAR surveys of large land areas that these ancient agricultural zones were revealed - some of which are now being explored - large structures - over grown by vegetation. Some were killed by older disease spreads prior to Columbus - it is not a new/unique phenomenon.
So the article's premise is false - we can not back to the old ways.
That said, a better understanding might allow the linked pathogen/prey relationship between diseases and their host populations to be broken - as we have done with smallpox?
>We would have to outlaw birth control as the current rate of replacement would not be enough if half our children died by the age of 5
We could also make rising children less of an obstacle. If you build the infrastructure around rising children so that rising 2 children is not a full-time job, then parents would get more children.
There is little evidence of that. Countries with more support do not necessarily retain higher fertility rates. Look at e.g. the legal right to nursery places with capped costs, long parental leave, and subsequent financial aid in Norway. It might be it'd happen if you exceed a certain level of support, but we've not cracked that nut yet.
I think coat housing still bites even in norway. I am relatively cobfident that cheap housing would allow improved birthrates.
If population declines, maybe housing will get cheaper, but our current system directs unhealthy amount of cash into houaing market and inflates it beyong it's natural state.
While I think addressing prices are important, consider that the high housing costs reflects drastic increases in income. The living standard in Norway has increased massively from when I was a child there, and the benefits given to families with children as well. Yet birth rates have declined in parallel with the increasing wealth.
> high housing costs reflects drastic increases in income.
But it doesn't, housing prices have. roughly doubled in UK for example since 2008, and wages have fallen.c
If you measure housing cost is multiples of income, they have grown massively in the past 70 years. If the price of chicken went up as much as price of housing over the same period, a chicken would cost like $55 or smth
What matters is the long term trends and the multiple is less relevant than the affordability of the monthly cost of housing, or there wouldn't be sufficient buyers able to afford driving the costs up.
The multiple of my mortgage to income is higher than for my parents, but I'm still left with more spending power left over, because my lending is cheaper, the LTV higher, and not all the other costs have increased at a similar rate.
Overall, despite a higher proportion of my income going to housing, I'm far better off than my parents were at my age.
I am not sure about your personal situation, but my parents paid off their property faster because it was cheaper, despite higher interest rates. After 15 Years all theie property is fully paid. They are much better off now.
And low interest rates didn't last, now they are back up in Europe, so people with large mortgages are not having to make huge repayments and will be making them for the next 30 years.
generally speaking we have more capital tied up in housing than we do in productive economy. This is inefficient deployment of capital and is not economically healthy.
I think this is a distraction. It's very simple: House prices reflects peoples ability and willingness to pay. The demand doesn't come from nothing. If people couldn't pay,there wouldn't be demand no matter how much people would like to.
Meanwhile, in the UK where I am now, there is plenty of empty housing at lower cost.
What there is a lack of is housing people want to pay for where they want to pay for it, because many - not all - can afford to be picky.
That's not to say it wouldn't be a tremendous benefit to society to drive down house prices, because it would, but the housing market is elastic:
People can, and have (and many still do), lived in far more cramped conditions, and do when they can't afford to pay more.E.g. house shares and the like.
The actual problem of high prices is a level of inequality that means a subset struggle more. But that is insufficient to explain e.g. fertility rates across the board when the overall wealth is at it is.
Considering my original example, if you look at indications of disposable income in Norway, you'll see people e.g. taking far more holidays abroad, far more have holiday homes, etc. despite spending more on housing.
Overall wealth is through the roof and you see it everywhere. And yet fertility rates are not.
This is also consistent with the development we see everywhere in the world. It's played out in country after country, and is an effect that plays out over many decades.
Once women gained control of their own fertility - they voted with their bodies. Many of the old large families were, in essence, forced on women, to the detriment of many as death was common in childbirth until late in the 19th century.
I'm not familiar with Norway's culture. Personally, if I had access to these benefits, I would have more children and faster. But I do see people who have the financial means and time to raise children who view children as a restriction of their life experience.
This seems to be the challenge. Some people will have more kids if they can, but a lot of others will see more money as an opportunity to do all kinds of things that are hard to combine with having more kids. There may well be a balancing point where beyond a certain level of wealth people will start having more kids again, but so far we haven't found it.
We do sacrifice a lot of our time to raise children. But it's the cost of childcare that makes it really difficult imo. Unless you have a high paying job, you are quite literally going to work so you can afford to pay other people to watch your children while you're at work.
If that were the main factor you’d expect to see much higher fertility rates in French families for example, which isn’t really the case (especially if you exclude families of foreign descent)
True, many women/couples delay children, but look at Japan where the population has been in decline for many years to the point that there are thousands of empty houses - the converses of many places where zoning rules designed to block new homes for the express reason of forcing scarcity = upwards $$.
There is huge inertia in the trades to build it the old way = codes the old way.
We even have laws that mandate windows in all rooms from the days when coal/wood fireplaces were in every room. We got central heat, but we still build no inner rooms with no windows these days. Want a window = wall screen with a video of a scene you like - not brick walls 6 feet away.
The article is about research into non-immune system based adaptive systems of the body that reduce disease susceptibility - i.e why some animals and people can tolerate higher bacterial or viral loads without dying then others, and can we develop drugs which enhance these effects or augment them (i.e. giving glucose support to malaria infected rats which arr experiencing an overactive drop in glucose production due to natural responses to effects of malaria).
It's about therapeutic agents to boost survivability without looking directly at pathogen kill paths - it is admittedly weirdly titled.
Please edit out swipes like the first sentence here. The rest of your comment would be just fine without that.
If you'd please review https://qht.co/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. One of them is "Edit out swipes", and there's even another about this specific case:
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
> We would soon die out as a race due to population decline as we are well below the required rate of replacement in a diseased population
Isn't there a strong correlation between birth rate & child mortality? Most rich societies have slowed down their birth rate in large part because you don't need 5 kids in order to ensure 1 makes it to adulthood.
If we tolerated disease, we would probably increase birth rates to compensate for the spike in child mortality.
Conversely, increasing child mortality necessarily increases child care effort per adult child: a bad deal that can only be compensated by having children at a significantly younger age.
That said, a better understanding might allow the linked pathogen/prey relationship between diseases and their host populations to be broken - as we have done with smallpox?