The Perfect World Thought Experiment

I can’t help thinking that if we gave a hypothetical quantum machine to many people and asked them to play with parameters to try to create a perfect world, the result would be far worse than the current world.

The Demographic Collapse of Developed Countries

One of the problems facing most developed countries today is demographic collapse. All countries are affected: Japan, the United States, Europe. And I notice that this affects the richest countries, where women are the freest.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s a cause-and-effect relationship, but at least we can observe a fairly consistent correlation between these two phenomena.

From there, I arrive at a rather brutal conclusion about the so-called gender inequalities.

Societies of the Past

There have certainly been societies in the past where women were freer and had more power. It was probably more complicated than today, but the hypothesis that this happened a few rare times in human history doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. In that case, we can also assume that, like today, these societies had fewer children.

I repeat that I still haven’t established a cause-and-effect link between these two phenomena, but they remain nonetheless connected.

Moreover, when we also know that infant mortality exceeded 40% until the late 19th century and medical progress… An English queen from the 12th or 13th century (I don’t remember exactly, it’s an example from Harari’s bestseller) had 16 children, and only 4 reached the age of 40.

The Viability of Societies

We arrive at this conclusion: women in history have been free and have had power, but these societies were not viable over several generations. Because these societies didn’t have enough children and were always demographically replaced by patriarchal societies where women are less free.

Today, fortunately, it’s less of a problem. Even the over-educated careerist can still have a child at 39 and that single child will survive and be healthy. But in the 13th century…

So when you have that famous quantum machine, be careful what you wish for.