GT, I go with most of your excellent observations too, but with several differences of emphasis.

For instance, if we're thinking of the same beast, that social structure that developed somewhere in the 19th century is no longer current as anything more than a vestigial fancy in some sections of popular culture.

At the beginning of the 20th century, roughly a third of the workforce in Europe and North America was engaged in agriculture; another third formed the classic urban proletariat of factory and manufacturing workers; and about a fifth were in service, the "downstairs" people of Downton Abbey etc. The remaining 20 percent in the professional and political classes were almost exclusively male.

By the end of the 20th century, the servant class had disappeared completely as had most agricultural workers, and the traditional factory working class was a shadow of its former self. The advent of more easily doable divorce, along with pharmaceutical contraception and the economic necessity created when US/European capitalism hit a ceiling of productivity in the 1960s, drew most adult women in this region into the general professional workforce.

These are only the most gross indicators of the many huge changes in social structure that have taken place in the last 120 years or so. The result is a vastly differently weighting in our social structure. In this century, the most important sector in the labor pool will be the "knowledge" worker. This is why, despite the obvious value of recognizing cultural relativity, it is vital to have an educational system that cherishes and shares the importance of a "central" culture, such as a "standard" language, that other variants can be relative to.

As to the continuing population explosion, this I believe is a response to the productivity challenge. Our species is reproducing faster because it senses a need for more hands on deck. And I believe the reason all those hands are coming on deck is because we're in the midst of a set of fast-moving scientific and technological advances. Humans are essentially quite a lazy species, and the sooner it can figure out how to get robots to do the heavy lifting around this planet the quicker we can go back to slathering sunscreen on one another at the beach.

I'd better stop!

Wow, with Asomughua getting the heave-ho from Phillie there sure are a lot of aging secondary players out on the market today.

Last Edited By: Win80 03/12/13 04:24 PM. Edited 1 times.