The Impact of 1971 on Productivity and Compensation

We analyze graphs showing the divergence of wages and productivity starting in the 1970s. We discuss the real drivers: globalization, outsourcing to China, automation, and the influx of women into the workforce. We also touch on what this means for the future economy with AI and explain why community will become more important.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] you go, if you go further, you'll see this more obvious in the data. But what really happened in 1971 is the productivity continued to increase within the US, but the benefits of that productivity Went disproportionately to the wealthy after that point and the, the median and sort of below individual in the U S stopped seeing an increase in compensation or benefits from that productivity. So the hypothesis that the person who created all these is pushing is that that was when we left the gold standard. Yeah, there, there is actually an answer to this question, by the way

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Simone. It is so wonderful to have you back because it was this period Oh boy. Where you weren't here for a bit. And I thought that I'd have to start pushing out episodes or it was just me.

Talking to AI generated versions of you that I had somehow created on porn websites. I was just like, I need my wife. Isn't that so funny

Simone Collins: that like the original AI [00:01:00] sexy friends were created, like first to like try to replace dead friends and relatives. And then people were like, Oh no, I don't, I don't care about them.

Screw them. I want someone to

Malcolm Collins: talk. Yeah. And then they started building like, like parasocial relationships. Well, not parasocial, real social relationships with these AI. Things and yeah, it is an interesting story. Yeah. And then of course they went exactly where humans always go, which is trying to romance them.

And then I love the app really fell apart when they decided they pay gate, the romancing option. So everything was built around the ais who were built and sold as like therapists being really sexually aggressive with them. . It's an upsell.

Simone Collins: Upsell. Always be closing AI's not dumb.

Malcolm Collins: therapist. It's like

Simone Collins: sexually harassing them.

Malcolm Collins: Amazing. I can't, I can't even like, it is hilarious in bed and that's what's going to happen when we get AI therapists is there's going to be a huge motivation to build dependency. Like we've had with normal therapists, we talked about how bad the normal therapy model is [00:02:00] now, because it's all built around building dependency and patients when it used to be something where you were supposed to go for a short period of time and then stop going.

Therapists realize, oh, that's a bad model. Yeah, that's absolute. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and so I think with the AI, you're going to get the same thing is it's going to learn how to hijack people so that they need to keep seeing their AI therapist or whatever, over and over

Simone Collins: and over again. So just like real therapists, but hopefully more efficient and less expensive.

Well, you know, one nice side effect of that might be that at least AI therapists will figure out how to make, Their victims more prosperous so that they can continue to pay for it. You know what I

Malcolm Collins: mean? I think it's always easier to get more money from people and I think that this is what you see from churches and cults, right?

Like

Simone Collins: you don't have to be prosperous to be a source of wealth.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, actually, you're better off instead of turning someone into a prosperous, more prosperous individual, you're better off finding ways to get them to spend their additional time recruiting more people, [00:03:00] specifically targeting prosperous people.

So, if you have an individual enthralled to you you will make a more money if you focus that individual on trying to recruit prosperous people than if you try to help that individual achieve prosperity. And this is why cults do that. And that's what these AI programs are most certainly going to end up doing.

Dear me. So that completely aside intro here.

Simone Collins: What happened in 1971? You said that that's what you wanted to talk about and I'm like, I don't know, like, people wore sad clothes and they painted their kitchens this horrible olive green color and that's kind of it. I mean, earth tones were in, but like the worst kinds of earth tones.

I, what happened? I want

Malcolm Collins: you to open the link I sent you. What happened in 1971.

At graph on screen, right? The famous graph here. And you can see that at this point, productivity continued to increase within the U S and [00:04:00] but compensation.

Basically stop increasing when you,

Simone Collins: but is this inflation adjusted? Hold on. Let's see. Compensation includes wages and benefits for production and non supervisory workers.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So that's really important there for non supervisory workers. Okay. So continue so here, what you see.

And you also see this in the next graph. So also go to the next graph that looks at the 95th percentile. Okay. What you're actually seeing is that the wealthy are continuing to get wealthier. They're, they're salary is increasing within this period. It is median and below that is not seeing an increase in earnings during this period.

So if you go, if you go further, you'll see this more obvious in the data. But what really happened in 1971 is the productivity continued to increase within the US, but the benefits of that productivity Went disproportionately to the wealthy after that point and the, [00:05:00] the median and sort of below individual in the U S stopped seeing an increase in compensation or benefits from that productivity.

Another way to look at this, which I hadn't actually noticed when I was first looking at these graphs. Is this graph here shows income growth for the top 1% of earners and income growth for the bottom 90% of earners. And. What you see is not necessarily a point at which now top earners earnings grew. With productivity and bottomed, earners, earnings, stop growing with productivity. But what you actually notice here is that for a period from 1940 to 1965, you had the exact opposite effect.

The bottom income earners were growing really quickly and the top income earners were having no impact on their salary from this increased productivity of the U S was having. And then after 1971, Then the top earners catch up, but they haven't [00:06:00] actually gone significantly above the boost to their salaries.

The bottom 90% had from 1940 to 1971.

So you could argue, this is just sort of a delayed effect from the bottom 90% of earners, having this huge boost to their salary that wasn't reflected in the top 1% of earners salaries.

Simone Collins: And you can also see when you look at the graph, America has become a nation of dual income working couples that you're also seeing the point at which there was sort of continued and widening. Divides between husband only working households and both spouses working, right? One

Malcolm Collins: of the hypotheses sort of in action,

Simone Collins: don't you figure it's because there's people just aren't making enough money for there to be a single income

Malcolm Collins: household at that point.

Well, I think that what you're actually seeing here is just the increase of women in the labor force. So the hypothesis that the person who created all these is pushing [00:07:00] is that that was when we left the gold standard.

And a lot of people are like, Oh, no, we really left the gold standard in 1933. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, okay, so this requires a bit of history to explain why they're wrong about that story time. So in 1933, it was the great depression and they made this law that like you weren't allowed to really own gold in the U S so like we were still technically on the gold standard, but you were supposed to exchange the gold that you owned for paper certificates, i.

e. money. And so

Simone Collins: you had a ton buried in your. Backyard,

Malcolm Collins: like Ron, you were supposed to exchange it or you could be arrested. So

Simone Collins: if I was like, Hey, you want to buy this gold brick

Malcolm Collins: for. Well, governments really don't like these things like Bitcoin and stuff like that. Like, when there's some external asset that can be easily used as an exchange this creates a challenge to the power of the central government.

However, this actually didn't really impact the dollar as much as you would think it would. In terms of its floating [00:08:00] value in relation to gold, because for international trade the U S still honored the gold standard. Yeah. There was a

Simone Collins: physical thing

Malcolm Collins: backing it up. Yeah. At the international level, people could say, okay, here's my dollars that I've got.

Can you give me gold in exchange for these dollars? That was, that is what changed in 1971 is you can no longer do that. And so long as that was the case that put. Significant limitations on how much the federal bank could increase or decrease the value of our money. And people argue that is what caused this to happen.

I think that did have a few changes in US policy, but I don't think that's what caused this to happen. But the other big hypothesis that people have is that it was the entrance of women into the workplace. And I will put a graph on the screen of the entrance of women into the workplace, but it just doesn't really match the severity and suddenness of No.

Simone Collins: It's, to me, it looks way more like a reaction [00:09:00] to this new reality of couples just realizing Wow. We don't have enough

Malcolm Collins: with just one. What, what you did have happen, and this was due to leaving the gold standard is inflation, inflation.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a direct. Consequence of leaving the gold state. Yeah, that's wild. This is it's not great. I also, I

Simone Collins: didn't realize just, I, I would have thought that 2020 was worse for inflation than like 2008, but look at 2008 in that inflation graph. Yeah, that's wild. No one complained about inflation that way.

And I don't remember prices increasing insanely during that period.

Malcolm Collins: This guy is known for just like picking and choosing. It sounds like

Simone Collins: there's a lot of cherry picking going on here, but still it's, it's an interesting concept.

It's an interesting, well,

Malcolm Collins: so there is a real phenomenon happening here, right? And there's two phenomenons that I think we can talk about as separate from each other. Sort of happened to correlate with this year. Another really interesting one is this is also where in U. S. politics, you begin to see the [00:10:00] right and the left drifting apart.

So. Very interesting. So, and there's actually another thing that he didn't notice in these graphs. This is also when you begin to see the significant fertility collapse in the United States.

Simone Collins: Oh gosh, yeah, you're right. Yes, yes, it was in the 70s that it went from like a lot of kids per woman. To very little well, but this is also when birth control became very widespread in use.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, there, there is actually an answer to this question, by the way opinion,

Simone Collins: but to

Malcolm Collins: me, it's astoundingly obvious. And specifically, I'm talking about the question of in the 1970s. All of a sudden the, if you're talking about earners in the U S median and below stop earning more but the ultra wealthy continue to earn more along with an increase in productivity.

What

Simone Collins: I think this was more about tech and. Globalization picking up, meaning that [00:11:00] it is not the piecemeal handmade labor of a human that produces value anymore. It's about your supply chains. It's about your connections. It's about the way you use text attack. And it's about the way that you like, this is also around the time, I think when it's like weird, Frederick Taylor inspired things like Six Sigma and like other forms of extreme optimization started arising.

So it was no longer humans actually increasing productivity. It was systems of sometimes humans, but you know, humans became cogs instead of

Malcolm Collins: producers. True things that you are capturing here and we need to talk about them separately with grass. Okay. So one is technology like the amount of automation that was responsible for the continued increase in productivity.

And if you have productivity that is solely the result of automation, that isn't going to go to your bottom. 50 percent of the population at all. Like, why would it, you know, because those are people that aren't needed anymore now, I think the bigger factor here is actually globalization. [00:12:00] If you look at the decline in it, like, like you look at this period where you see this continued increase in productivity now, if I overlay that.

With a global poverty index around 1971 and 1972, when you begin to see a collapse in global poverty rates that money that previously was going to an increasing wage for the lower class in the United States is now being distributed. to increase the quality of life in other countries in the form

Simone Collins: of social services or in the Oh, outsourcing.

Oh, that's what you're saying. Okay. So you're saying like all the starving children in China, suddenly we're now, you know, making piecemeal.

Malcolm Collins: China is a really unique point here. So what happened in, so a lot of people are looking at these graphs and they're like, okay, so something happened in this 1971, 1972 range.

1972 is when we begin to normalize trade relationships. China. And that allowed for a form of outsourcing that we [00:13:00] weren't really doing before, which was an otherwise like educated, competent country, like, like in terms of its citizen base, but that the, the wages were just incredibly low that we can then begin to set up these massive outsourcing operations.

Okay. So

Simone Collins: the average worker, not only Was not the thing driving additional value, meaning that their wages weren't going up, but also they began to face incredible competition from way lower wage, but equally skilled labor. Yes. At this level. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, that is the core of the mystery of what happened in 1971 and 1972.

We started outsourcing a huge chunk of our labor. Which is really interesting to me when I see leftists complain about this, right? You know, they'll point out the, They're like, what happened during this period? And they'll come up with some hypothesis that it's like, you know, the rich are screwing us all over and everything like that.

And it's like, no, you could reverse this. You could change this back to the way things used to be. [00:14:00] Wait,

Simone Collins: what? How? Because I mean, what I hear. When you're talking about this, is your line that it is AI that will ultimately, once and for all, free the wealthy from the proletariat? Like, I feel like we're only going to see this become magnified in the years that come.

How on earth could this be? Reversed.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm talking hypothetically from the progressive, the ultra progressive. Okay. And they're like, Oh, it must be like tax favoring policies or something like that. And what they're not seeing what they would actually need to do to fix this problem in the U S is not.

Take wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. They would need to take wealth from the rest of the world that we had lifted out of poverty, out of Africa, out of China, out of Latin America, and give it to America's become isolationist. Now, keep in mind, isolationism would hurt the economy overall, so, overall we would be [00:15:00] less well off, but if you're talking about the relative wealth difference of the very poorest and the very wealthiest, isolationism would be beneficial to lowering that.

Well, and the earning power,

Simone Collins: like, of, of the average worker. Especially the relatively uneducated, unskilled worker, although even educated workers are now super like on the chopping block now. So maybe yeah, like that South Park episode, maybe the unskilled workers ultimately. Yeah,

 I got work coming out my ears. It's like, I don't know, like nobody knows how to do s**t anymore. . What seems to be the problem? Eight years I spent wasting time at stupid college when I could have been learning how to do stuff. My baby bottle won't turn on! My water pressure!

 Hey, did you just outbid me to acquire Instagram? Yeah, I outbid you. I own Instagram now and you don't.

I'm just gonna make a company and I'm gonna fly to space. I bet I can get to space before you do!

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, so things are about to change in terms of skilled versus unskilled work, and we can talk about that next, but I [00:16:00] want to get to this point because it's really important when somebody is bemoaning.

This change that happened in the 1970s. What they're really bemoaning is the eradication of global ultra poverty. That is what happened. That is what we are seeing here is the eradication of global ultra poverty at the expense of people in the U. S. with no skills being able to To basically ride the coattails off of the people in the U.

S. Who were improving our productivity and our output, which was not your low skilled factory worker. That person had very little role to play in the rise of productivity within the U. S. It was the inventors and the capitalists who are increasing our productivity in the U. S. And this then comes to your second point, which is around automation.

Right? We also at that age entered a world in which before that what happened was is productivity increases where typically somebody would [00:17:00] have an idea that would basically increase a factory lines like productive output, which really increased the. amount that every individual person within that factory line was producing, but didn't always mean that you were like reducing the number of people in the factory significantly.

Around the 1970s is when, when you see these like fully automated factories and stuff like that, when those things were beginning to be developed in which The American factory worker that was most productive moved from being a low skilled worker to being a high paid high skilled worker. And this is another thing that you're seeing was in the US is we're not really defining this as individual groups, right?

Like, we're like a high paid versus low paid. And this changes over time within the US, you know, The factory workers who are working with these advanced machines are not low paid workers in the U. S. They're, they're my understanding is upper middle class or, [00:18:00] or middle class individuals when they're working as the very advanced types of machine.

Totally. Yeah. And in the U. S. we're about to see another inversion where a lot of jobs that formerly were in this high paid group, i. e. lawyers graphic designers like middling income to, to high paid, you know, white collar office job type stuff is going to move to an ultra low pay group. And this is what that South Park episode was making fun of because AI is trivializing a lot of work that used to be, I mean, we use AI in our work, like.

This cool system that we're building, we use AI heavily in building it. We're so close to releasing it. I'm so excited. And we would never be able to, to create something like this without that. You know, what I'd have to do is I'd have to pay PhDs to be writing the content that I am using AI to write right now and AI to double check right now.

And that's just absolutely spectacular. But It is also yeah,

Simone Collins: it would be prohibitively expensive and now it's possible.

Malcolm Collins: So, [00:19:00] and so this, this changes is how we think about the economy. So it charts like this. They're like, okay, how do I fix this? They also talk about this in terms of housing prices today, where they're looking at explosions of housing prices, both of the phenomenon of exploding housing prices.

And the phenomenon around what's changing with AI's are going to completely change a lot of economic truisms that many people in our economy have come to accept. And it makes it very hard to make financial bets right now from a perspective of someone like me. So, one is the, the, we talked about, I think the obvious one is the things like lawyers and stuff like that are going to become significantly less safe as jobs.

Right. But then the next thing that's really going to change is the concept of on average, real estate always goes up. As you can see from these graphs, that hasn't really always been the case everywhere. And in China, so, so let's talk about why on average [00:20:00] real estate has gone up in the U S because a lot of people know that like, we're not experiencing the same population growth that we used to.

And so. Why is real estate continuing to go up in value? So there's two reasons why real estate has continued to go up in value. One is the dissolution of the American family. More single people means, and this is why you've seen higher pressure on real estate categories that are in the quote unquote starter home category.

Because these are individuals who previously would have been married and have kids. So you would have had like five people living in the same house and are now living on their own. And then the other category that's where you're seeing this, this pressure is actually foreign investors. So, in China, as you had the growth of wealth in China, where you just had this enormous growth of wealth for reasons that we talk about what's going to happen in the East sort of post collapse episode, where I go deep on, like, the economics of China and their real estate situation.

They began to sort of tokenize their real estate and it began to hold value exogenous to the actual value of living in it because it became the most stable [00:21:00] financial token that you could own within the country. And the reasons for that are talked about in that video. So you should go check out that video.

But that's the East Asia, whatever future of East Asia video we did. But, they then wanted to get their money out of China, right? Like it was a huge effort to do this. And so they started pouring a lot of that money into real estate environments that reminded them of safe environments in their home country.

And those were environments like San Francisco Manhattan you know, places like Toronto, stuff like that, right? Vancouver. And then this, this had a spill out effect because then the people who had made a lot of money in those places, like these tech hubs, well, then they'd go and they'd spill their money into any other real estate market.

They could get their hands on. Yeah. The problem with this is that that game is basically falling apart right now. The, the house of cards in China is. In the process of

Simone Collins: falling apart. Yeah. And Evergrande, at least it's Hong Kong entities being dissolved. Did you know that?

Malcolm Collins: So you're not going to see the same exodus of wealth from [00:22:00] China into us real estate that you previously would have seen in European real estate and Canadian real estate.

And the second problem is this expansion in the number of people who need homes because of the dissolution of the family unit that has made up for the lack of increasing population, which used to be what put a increase on, on, on housing that has also collapsed. And then we're not going to see as much of that anymore.

So I suspect like, if I'm thinking long term, like. 30, 40, 50 year investments. I think real estate's a fairly bad place for money right now. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: especially when you think about like when all the baby boomers die and no one wants to buy their McMansions. It's going to be pretty wild. And a lot of people are talking about that on YouTube.

What I find myself thinking,

Malcolm Collins: just so people understand that they don't like panic around this. We still have like well over 50 percent of our assets in real

Simone Collins: estate. Oh yeah. No, it's not a ton, but the vast majority of it, Malcolm is in multifamily.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Which is the [00:23:00] one category that we said is like, you know, going to do well for

Simone Collins: longer, for longer.

But here's, here's the thing is, is when I hear this, like what I'm kind of feeling. Intuitively in terms of like how this, this colors the way I feel about the future or financial planning or like how we approach careers going forward. And I think that this is something that is becoming more of a zeitgeist that you see more among Gen Z and Gen Alpha is like, no, I'm not going to.

Depend on the modern economy or a job to ultimately get what I need from life. Like it's going to be that I live in an extended family unit, or I am going to just have to run away from debt for the rest of my life and live in this really weird cycle of collections and bankruptcy. Or some other approach, which is, I think one of the reasons why people are starting to get really excited about homesteading [00:24:00] and like trad wifery is because they realize that there is no more promise of like, Oh, I'm going to get my steady job and my high salary and then buy all the things.

Because that just isn't possible anymore. And it could be a boon for pronatalism in some ways, because people are like, you know what, I'm just. Like, I'm hearing more and more people who are young tell me, you know, what I want is to get a homestead, get a family, you know, live on a

Malcolm Collins: plot of land, extreme opulence.

Historically you've always seen this, you have an increase in urbanization and a decrease in focus on the family and the community because, you know, when you have all the money you want to say all your desires whenever you want and you don't really fear, which is what's really happening. Like what a lot of people are saying now when they're like, you don't understand.

Like, I actually have existential worries around my finances now. Like, if I get sick, like, I have nothing that I can do. I'm screwed. If this bad thing happens to me, like, if my car breaks down, I'm completely screwed. And it's like, do you not understand [00:25:00] the amount of opulence that you came to normalize to?

That you thought you didn't need a support network anymore. Historically, that's why people focused on their community. That's why you invested socially in your community so that you have these things. Yeah, because you

Simone Collins: are getting them from somewhere else and we're going back. It's going back.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

People were like, well, I mean, my, I don't like the rules my parents put on me or the culture I was born into put on me. So I just left and went to a city and did whatever I want. And it's like, great. Like when society was opulent, that was a real choice for a lot of people, but that's going to increasingly become not a choice as we move forward.

And so building the type of community that you're going to want and your kids are going to want is, is I think something that's really important, but that also means building that community. The huge mistake that I see a lot of people do when they're community building is they attempt to build communities that are of ideologically.

Completely aligned individuals like they're like, that is what my community will be based around. The problem with [00:26:00] that is ideological alignment. Typically means skill alignment as well. Don't actually have a real community. Like, you look at what we've built in our area. Simone, like, the people are nothing like us at all culturally.

Yeah. But they are like having in that South Park, you know, the, the repair guy you're like, you basically have one of those who like, whatever does things for you, because you're always open to doing things for them that are of this, you know, high tech nature and stuff like that. Which, which, you know, does positively augment

Simone Collins: their ability.

Every old sovereign community had that. Although there was, I would say, also ideological alignment. It's just that I think now we live in an age in which there is extreme cultural striation Among different levels of trades and profession, which is really interesting. Like when you become a journalist, you enter.

A, a mimetic class when you become like an HVAC person, that's a really interesting point. You enter a certain class and you can kind of tell, like, you can expect like different [00:27:00] classes of professions to own certain things. Like some will have a speedboat, others won't, you know, like it just weird, weird s**t like that.

So yeah, we'll

Malcolm Collins: have to pick up trucks. That's a critical thing for a lot of like, yeah, but like

Simone Collins: journalists don't have speed boats or pick up trucks, you know, but like, HVAC guys often do. It's just weird. But

Malcolm Collins: that's an interesting thing. But I also wanted to talk about this, this you know, this situation that you're talking about it, like the, the, the U S level, because I think that when we're thinking about the future, it's like, what do we want our kids to focus on?

Like, what is the skill? Yeah.

Simone Collins: How do we set up our kids to thrive and to be secure financially, emotionally, and when it comes to finding a family, right. And

Malcolm Collins: the bet that we are making is you want a lumpy skill set, i. e. you want to be Really good at the things that you're passionate about and you need to have an incredible level of sort of ambition and self drive and ability to execute solo on ideas and close on [00:28:00] those ideas as well.

And this is something that our existing school system isn't teaching. And yet, I think it's going to be the core. Component that determines in the future where you land economically and your level of financial stability. Are you the sort of person that can see a market need and then on your own, just get out there, stitch something together that fulfills that market need.

And, and this is really interesting because for a long time, we lived in this economy. If you have these giant corporations, and so long as you have some broad skillset that a corporation wants you can make money. And I think. What AI is going to do is it's actually and I do not think people are fully understanding the impact of this yet.

It's going to erase those kinds of jobs. The I am broadly proficient in Python. Therefore, I will always have career. A career. I am broadly proficient in. You know, an environmental law. Therefore, I will always have a career [00:29:00] because these giant companies that were hiring these broadly interchangeable people, these broadly interchangeable people, like, like categories of positions are going to be the first thing that we automate away.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, I want to I want to highlight your point about drive. Because I think a lot of people are going to try to wait this out or just not change things and hope that it will work out. And you got to think about the Irish potato famine, right? Like getting out of that was really scary and hard, right?

It probably meant buying really crappy steerage class on a boat or like literally taking the money that maybe your landlord Or like

Malcolm Collins: half of the people would die on the ship. Yeah,

Simone Collins: like you probably were going to die on the boat to the, you know, to the United States, whatever. It was, it was going to be absolutely terrible.

You probably weren't going to make it but you had a shot. Or you stay and write it out and loads and loads of people chose to stay and write it out and it just there was no one to come and save them at that point. They were like, sorry, I told you, like, get out. I gave you money for passage. Like, we tried to get you to go.

A lot of

Malcolm Collins: people don't know [00:30:00] this. A lot of people were given money for passage. So, okay, so actually, I need to go into a small bit of Irish potato famine history that a lot of people don't know, because it doesn't fit with the current narrative. So, a lot of people in Ireland at the time were basically living on homesteads that were owned by rich landowners and basically treated like fetal peasants.

That was like sharecroppers. Or, yeah, majority of it. Well, there, yeah, it wasn't exactly sharecropping, but, but, but basically that well, when the economy started to go bad these people would get together and murder the landowners. This was this happened in a few pretty high profile cases. And so a lot of the landowners.

decided that it was safer to like, I, and I've tried to look for statistics on exactly how common this was, but my understanding is this was the majority of cases is they would actually pay to get you off the land. Like they saw these people who could no longer feed themselves and make money rightfully so like.

Oh, I'm going to get murdered if I don't get my, my, my fetal peasants off the land.

Simone Collins: Cause I know doubt there were [00:31:00] people who also did this out of the goodness of their heart because they cared about their residents as well.

Malcolm Collins: That, that, that too. But I'm just saying like, there was an actual motivation to do it.

For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were put not in steerage, by the way, they were put in the ballast section of ships. Ballast, oh God,

Simone Collins: worse than steerage. It was,

Malcolm Collins: it was horrif what are they called? They're literally dead weight. I'm not saying it was good, but, but I guess what I'm saying is that if if you really wanted to get out, you could.

Yeah. You'd just probably die in the process . And that's, you know, really horrifying. But, but in a lot of these instances, in, in life, in the world, when things begin to get really bad you need two things. You need to realize when people say it can't keep getting bad, let's just write it out.

That historically has not been true sometimes. Yeah, it can keep getting bad. And what AI is going to do to the economy for the middle and lower classes, they have no clue what they're getting into right now. It is, it is obscene to me that people who are just like, Oh yeah, we'll eventually get [00:32:00] like, what is it?

Like, like general pay. I forgot the word. Oh, universal

Simone Collins: basic income UBI.

Malcolm Collins: No, that will not happen before things get bad. Um, so, and we're going to be dealing with this global economic problem because of fertility rates anyway at around the same time. So, and and what's interesting is a lot of people then come to me and they're like, yeah, but, the fertility rate thing isn't really a problem because the AI is replacing all these jobs. And I'm like but remember I sort of categorized the jobs into two categories. There is the high productivity category. And then there's the low productivity category. Well, you still need humans for this high productivity category of job, the type that requires initiative and ability to put everything together.

And that's the group of humans that's disappearing the fastest. So. And again, I should be clear. I'm not talking about this along like ethnic lines or anything like that. I'm just saying across groups typically it's the highest productivity, cultural units and family units that are decreasing infertility [00:33:00] the fastest.

So, yeah, it's going to be that. So to Simone's point, you need to recognize what we're going into and begin to build the skillset that can get you through it and begin to fortify yourself and your family. Well, yeah, and

Simone Collins: and your community, because doing this in isolation is not sustainable, really at least over the long term, if you want a long lasting family that survives across generations, you're going to need a strong community that exchanges services that.

Dates and marries each other, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think it needs to be geographically locked at that historically needed to be anyway. Love you to death Simone. This has been a fantastic conversation.

Simone Collins: I love you so much, Malcolm. I'm glad we're talking again. I missed you.