The Population Explosion

The population explosion. One used to hear it a lot in the seventies. The schools taught children that oil would run out by 1990. That the seas would be empty of most fish and that rationing of various goods would be going on all over the world. Not only that, but we would be experiencing and entering another ice age.

The graph displaying population trends, pictured above, comes from 1959. They largely got the figures right. The schools and their apocalyptic predictions, based on the assessments of many professors and social scientists, got it wrong.




The image is typical mid-century and is charming as it attempts to lighten the diminishing significance of the United States and the USSR. They got this right too. The dominance of China over the rest of the world is only now starting to be recognized. They hold more and more debt of the United States and now have the lion's share of factories and labor. In 1959 no one imagined one of the problems would be that the USA would voluntarily move production of most goods to China and other 3rd world nations with huge populations and cheap slave or slave-like labor conditions.

Predicting the future has always been risky. And even the best projections seem to miss out on something or misinterpret the significance of some aspect. While the cold war raged, population was mainly a threat because of the armies. During the Korean conflict, the US experienced this ability of communist nations to send hordes of men to their deaths and still have a seemingly endless supply of bodies to keep fighting. So the concern was quite valid in 1959. The way the world has evolved, and to a large degree peace has reigned, military ramifications are no longer the largest concern. Contaminated food supplies, millions of cheap products made with toxic materials and the consumption of energy and water far faster than the will and money has been spent on the construction of power plants and water desalinization facilities are now what we must contend with.

The birth rates have been increasing the most in the less civilized areas. Wealth and productivity have always diminished birthrates. Industrialization limited the need of available bodies for labor. West European native birthrates have been in freefall since after fifties. The western European nations find themselves about to be outnumbered by immigrants from nations with vastly different cultures, threatening to completely destroy the thousands of years of cultural history and development of these western nations. Birth control has done its job too well in the west and this has magnified the disparity of educated and uneducated masses. The world gets dumber and, by default, more violent with each passing decade as the birthrates of various nations and peoples determine the future of the world.

History illustrates that everything happens in cycles and that nature simply abhors imbalance. When things become too imbalanced, nature steps in and balances them. Technology, which had been the western crown, is spreading all over the world to places that have for centuries been in a state of stagnation and intellectual amber. Hopefully, as a result, wealth and population control will come with this technological assimilation.

The population patterns and growth will subside as wealth spreads. Predicting what the population will look like in 2050 is difficult. It could easily be 9 billion, 10 billion or more. What sort of shortages or difficulties this number would bring about into the world is also hard to predict. Food, energy or perhaps most importantly - a lowering of the cultural and moral development because of billions more uneducated humans living in nations experiencing retrogressive movement in terms of IQ, medical care, sanitation and cultural expression.

These things may be overcome. Energy may become plentiful as new technologies are invented. Education may become compulsory all over the world and be facilitated by new technologies that link even the poorest inhabitants of the world. For all those with a positive and optimistic outlook, coupled with a real understanding of what threatens mankind, can be those who find the solutions and make the future brighter and more bountiful than any 'expert' would have ever guessed.

Dressing in Suburbia

Suburbia. The area surrounding the cities for residential usage. A place where kids can be raised in safety, a larger home could be purchased for the same money and where things were newer. Suburbia grew in the late forties after WWII closed and soldiers came home. Mass production which had been used for automobiles and tanks now made its way to the biggest consumer purchase of all - the home. And suburbia was where these new tract homes were.

This was progress. The cities had decayed and crime was higher. The soot from the factories made some cities nightmarish, like Pittsburgh. So it was healthy and viewed as a step up when some family moved to suburbia.

Looking at the advertisement above, from 1959 when the media noticed suburbia was just starting to become a popular destination, we see that suburban dressing was pretty fancy by today's standards. Sure it's an ad and ads are often exaggerated, but no one felt dressing like this was out of line. Image was important. It's still important today, but you would hardly know it based on the clothes of the average suburbanite. Something happened.

Suburbia has grown old. The dilapidated cities that were fled back in 1950 because they were around fifty years old and had turned into slums, now find their mirror in suburbia - where fifty year old homes now fall apart and become suburban slums. That's why people dress down in suburbia today - the general socioeconomic status of the residents is markedly down.

So now the suburbias keep expanding and like tree rings around the numerous cities downtown core, can be dated to the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties and two-thousands. In the last two outer rings, where income and socioeconomic status are generally higher, a little more care in dressing can be found. But you will likely not see girls dressed like the ad below, even on Sundays.





And where will you see kids dressed to go to school like the ad above, also from 1959? Perhaps a school with uniforms. But the typical fashion for grade-schoolers is now dictated by Walmart and the department stores have drastically altered their selections as well, tailored to the dressed down generations that have inhabited the schools for the past ten years now.

The past is the road map for the future. Soon enough the dressed down look will be unfashionable and the 80s or some other decades fashions will be revised and made fashionable once again. Follow the socioeconomic movement patterns and there you will still find places where dressing and dressing well is not a lost art.

Welcome to FUTURAMIC!

Futuramic is one of those made up words. It was originally used in the postwar years of the late 1940s to describe a new Oldsmobile. An Oldsmobile was a make of car by General Motors, much like Chevrolet or Cadillac. Futuramic meant futuristic or something that was on the cutting edge of technological and design development. Something could be made out of ceramic. So future + "amic" sounds like something made out of the future. That was what the marketing boys wanted to sell anyways. That it also triggered associations with the word dynamic was also taken into account. GM later would have MOTORAMAs which were Motor + Drama and were shows put on to entertain and sell the latest automobiles. Industrial America loved made up words and starting in the 1930s and 1940s when mass production really took off and Americans had many more choices in goods, these coining of words became very important in the sales and marketing approach of the time. Futuramic was not the best of these and the Oldsmobile sold well, but not incredibly so. However, Futuramic was perhaps one of the most blatant and blatantly optimistic of these newly minted words. After all if you thought the future was going to be dismal, you wouldn't want to associate your product with it now would you?

So that is why this blog is called FUTURAMIC. It symbolizes the future, but not just any future - a future that is going to be wonderful and something worth looking forward to!

Again...WELCOME.