on fri NUMBER sep NUMBER russell turpin wrote don t swallow too quickly what you have read about more traditional cultures today or in the past do i don t swallow i was just offering anecdotal first hand experiences from a number of cultures indicating NUMBER we apparently have a problem NUMBER which requires more than ad hoc hand waving approach it s trivial it s obvious all we have to do is xy we have any statistics on the poor man s divorce from centuries past are you so sure that the kids in NUMBERth that s easy divorce didn t happen the church and the society looked after that only relatively recently that privilege was granted to kings and only very recently to commoners century england were any more functional than those today what about NUMBERth century saudi arabia is saudi arabia a meaningful emigration source at least from the viewpoint of demographics sustainability and counterpressure to gerontocracy and resulting innovatiophobia we re doing something wrong granting your first two points i m skeptical about the last do you see any signs that america specifically i wasn t talking about the us specifically though the demographics problem exists there as well albeit not in that extent we eurotrash are facing right now or the west generally are suffering from lack of innovation vis a vis youth nations such as iran the NUMBER i m seeing lack of innovation and more disturbing trend towards even less innovation by an autocatalytic process gerontocracy favors gerontocracy last i read the third generation of the revolution all a want to move to america and b failing that are importing everything they can american my point was that the west us first and foremost importing innovation carriers and working against bad trend in the demographics by large scale import while this kinda sorta works on the short run this is not something sustainable 