It's not all of humanity. Just people in industrialized nations, for the most part. The third world has babies as much as they can as often as they can.
So many of our "first world" problems wouldn't happen if we'd just help out the third world with education, opportunity, and other basics. Too bad living in the industrialized world doesn't mean one can't be foolish or racist.
Other than in general terms, there's no comparison.
The birth rate declining is normal in terms of industrialized countries... people educated enough to use birth control and who have availability tend to have fewer kids. The rest of the world hasn't caught up yet, and probably won't in time to avoid problems.
The birth rate isn't declining because "America is in decline"... it's declining because people are choosing not to have children. The wisdom of that choice is open to discussion, of course.
There's a strong argument to be made that the Romans existed as a political entity for 2000 years and that the final end wasn't until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The last thousand years are mainly a story of slow decay which is why they get lopped off in all the simple narratives about the fall of Rome. If there's anything to be learned from Rome, it's that an advanced civilization can survive almost anything.
This is an interesting topic for a number of reasons. It's tied up in political questions like immigration, taxes, healthcare and education. And there are unresolved economic questions like, "how will capitalism survive the end of endless growth?" Sociological questions like, "why did everyone stop having babies?" And then there's the environmental perspective, "Are we already hopelessly past this planet's carrying capacity?"
The article doesn’t do a good job of highlighting that the decrease in pregnancy is mostly (maybe entirely?) among teenage girls. Maybe kids today are having less sex or maybe they’re better at using birth control. Either way, this is a good thing.
Teenager pregnancy isn't the same thing as teenage sex.
Sex is pretty wonderful for your health and metal well-being, if you minimize the threat of STIs and pregnancy.
Education and programs that allow the under-aged access to healthcare facilities that specialize in sexual health and family planning seems to be the more healthy (and more sustainable and achievable) alternative to abstinence advocacy.
I think that anyone that believes that teenage abstinence is at all achievable is probably delusional, or at the very least heavily sheltered, on the topic.
Looking at the downvoted but not commented-upon comments in this thread, and specifically the content of those comments, I'd speculate that certain people find the assertions therein either too challenging to their own beliefs, or somehow offensive, but not enough to actually challenge them with a comment.
Seems like if you say the wrong thing about theocracy, or have sane and body-positive sex advice, you're bound to get some silent judgement from people who aren't brave enough to actually call you out, lest they have to actually defend their beliefs that cause them some degree of cognitive dissonance. It's likely easier for them to not question why they think the way they do, and if it's the right way for them to think/react/etc. at all, so those beliefs and assumptions go unchallenged.
Obviously this is all speculation and assumption, but if someone won't engage with you to explain themselves, that's all one can really do, for better or worse.
Normally there isn't much point arguing about it. We all know. Why argue?
I'll make an exception for you though, since you may have a misunderstanding. You mention "theocracy". Atheists can believe that sex should wait for marriage. No religion is required to hold that belief. It's the same with "body-positive". Abstinence until marriage doesn't mean hating bodies or sex, and it doesn't mean being ashamed of either.
All it takes is a preference for low-risk orderly lives without all the tragedy that sex-related mistakes can bring. Since behavior affects others, including sex partners and offspring, there is a duty to avoid giving them an increased risk of tragedy. Breaking hearts isn't nice at all, and that gets far worse when sex is involved. People usually consider the first time to be special, and it would be best to share that memory with a spouse. It's awful to think that a person would be longing for a previous partner; having a comparison could weaken the current relationship. Moving from one partner to another, repeatedly breaking the emotional bond, weakens the bond that can form.
> I think that anyone that believes that teenage abstinence is at all achievable is probably delusional, or at the very least heavily sheltered, on the topic.
If presented with a nation (comparable in HDI to the US) with average age of first sexual encounter for women being 21+ would your posterior probability of teenage abstinence being achievable be different from your prior?
Singapore, the nation where you can't even walk aroud your own house naked (along with other ridiculous laws) and where breach of laws incurs incredibly draconian punishment? We Americans made the security/liberty decision long ago, and picked the right side. Singapore's methods aren't constitutionally applicable to America.
The age of consent in Singapore is 16. That's 3 whole years of teenagery with 3 whole years for a teenager to have legal teenage sex. But I guess if you will set your posterior to exactly equal to your prior faced with this evidence, then we don't really operate with a similar framework for knowledge, so there's very little point in discussing.
Less unwanted pregnancies which result in less abortions, single mothers relying on taxpayer social safety nets, or extra state money spent on kids falling through the cracks of the foster care system.
The problem here seems more unwanted pregnancies than with teenagers having sex.
I se how less sex is an easy solution to the problem, but it is also the wrong one. Your teenage years are when you have the more energy and hormones, you are basically built to have sex. Not to mention it's healthy for the mind and body.
It would be like not allowing teens ride bikes because of possible crash with cars since stats show teens are more likely to have accidents than adults.
Better find a way to limit the accidents themself: you get healthy kids, having fun, and they grow into better adults.
A big part of the stigma around teen sex is rooted in thousands of years of religious taboo associated with it among the world’s major religions. This is likely because those belief systems were the original dominant form of birth control.
This is likely a case where the evolution of human culture hasn’t caught up with the available medical technology.
Teenage pregnancy has lots of outcomes--almost all negative.
The female body really often isn't ready for pregnancy that early (women used to have menarche much later than currently)--this causes long-term health problems with both mother and child. Teenage mothers rarely have the resources to care for children well--this traps the mother and the child in a poor socioeconomic situation and affects their long-term health and development. etc.
Yes, there are women who tolerate pregnancy just fine as teenagers. Yes, there are teenagers with resources who can take care of children and not have it affect their life. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.
The presumption is that teenagers are unmarried, unable to support an independent household, and of a mindset that lacks self-control. It's just a lot of correlations with various kinds of chaos.
We certainly don't make it easy with our law. We enforce a minimum age to marry, work, and purchase a home.
Population change is going to have wide-ranging effects on society and the economy. Already, the shrinking size of generations is putting smaller colleges out of business and is expected to hit the housing market hard in the near future [1].
Immigration will have somewhat of a mitigating effect, but sentiment has been pretty anti-immigration for a while. Worse, the rest of the world is experiencing the same decline in birth rates [2], and is developing so fast that the economic argument for a resident of another country to emigrate to the West is shrinking. (Why learn another language to live in Denver, when Shanghai is faster-growing and more modern? [3])
To be sure, there are lots of confounding factors, like the universities and social freedoms available in the West, but on a 50-year span we should expect to see some dramatic shifts due to these demographic evolutions.
Ironically (given our current Zeitgeist) by the time we start to feel the effects of the these demographic trends, we'll need more automation to keep up productivity (and therefore long-term GDP growth)... especially when one considers the entitlement spending that will be needed to care for the elderly).
I'd imagine that by then, there will be more individuals advocating for increased automation and (hopefully) society will become increasingly 'techno-optimist' as a result
Having a kid is hard and usually looks unrewarding from the outside in the US. I get that having a kid isn't for everyone but for a lot of working class people the optics look like a choice between having a belligerent room mate that takes all your money vs. being able to poonhound around on Tinder and blow my money on fun. Some people might choose the former if the outcomes weren't so starkly contrasting. The government needs to be doing more to support families or else we're going to end up in a situation like Germany where we have to import people from abroad just to prevent shrinkage.
Earth's resources are strained, yes. However, taxing billionaires as you propose wouldn't necessarily pay for all the entitlement spending that the elderly require.
A solution to both of these problems is increasing total factor productivity (aka doing more with less). The big rise in living standards during the post-war boom was largely a result of a huge increase in total factor productivity.
This has petered out since the 1970s and a lot of the 'zero-sum' mentality/nostalgia for a 'Great America'/fighting over a fixed economic pie in the US today is because we haven't been increasing productivity (i.e. there hasn't been enough technological innovation and disruption) at a fast enough rate.
I don't think Earth's resources are strained. I think we're approaching capacity, especially in the oil industry, but so much of the food we produce is thrown away.
Paying for retirees is solvable by simply aggressively taxing the billionaires.
You can't eat money. The problem is not financial, it is economic. Ignoring the few durable things that can be stockpiled, the money retirees spend, whether it comes from savings or taxes can only be spent on goods and services produced at the time the money is spent, by the labor force available then. The smaller this labor force, the higher the wages, the less purchasing power money has. Retirement saving becomes a positional good, it's not enough to save enough, you have to save more than the other retirees, because you're all competing for the same scarce resource: labor.
If that doesn't make sense, try thinking about it from a purely physical point of view. Retirees need physical goods and personal services (e.g. nursing). Both of these require humans to produce. The fewer producing people there are (young and middle age adults), compared to consuming people (retirees) the less there is per person, regardless of who you tax or how.
We kind of can eat money. Agriculture is already highly automated, and will become even more so as labor costs increase. For example strawberries are currently picked by hand because the fruit is so fragile, but picking robots are in advanced stages of development and will probably be widely deployed within a few decades.
A reduced supply of younger workers will also tend to increase retirement ages and reduce age discrimination. For example, a healthy 75 year old can still do a lot of nursing tasks. He might no longer be physically capable of lifting a bedridden patient but he can administer medications, record vital signs, change dressings, etc.
I mean, sure, kind of. But indirectly. We can eat improved technology which we might be able to buy some of with money.
increase retirement ages
Yeah, that's one of the negative consequences of the demographic collapse. Not that old people who can still work are owed a vacation funded by the young, but the world isn't exactly fair in handing out pain, and not everyone who can't retire will be deserving of not being able to retire.
reduce age discrimination
Maybe. Old people too broke to retire don't have tremendous leverage in the labor market, and historically market forces don't tend to fix discrimination, see, e.g. Blacks in the US.
> The earth resources are stressed beyond the breaking point with the current population.
Suppose you are right about this. Then it follows, you have to make some cases like below.
1. Largest population growth comes from the third world countries in Africa, Asia and Central and South America. How should we reduce the population growth in these countries?
2. There's a large influx of immigration into the first world countries where the immigrants resources usage will likely increase by a lot. How should we reduce the immigration into the first world countries from the third world?
This doesn't seem sustainable, to me. Just basic evolution. As long as some subpopulation has a birth rate above replacement rate, that subpopulation will grow, until the total birth rate at least returns to replacement.
I feel like human culture has still not reached a steady state after the invention of birth control. I don't know what will happen per se, but it seems like the world of the future will have to be more encouraging of parenthood, in some way, than the world of the present. I hope it is a way that is consistent with the model of a modern free Western democracy.
Relevant article [1] and corresponding HN discussion thread [2]
Daily reminder that in an evolutionary context, the last 200 years are the blink of an eye.
I'll paste a comment I made there: "If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover. If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective."
> If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings.
We don't really know that. There are environmental stressors that lead a species to adapt; there are also stressors that cause a species to go extinct. I think time scales are really important here. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than humans. But the rate of creating new antibiotics and contraceptives are probably in the same ballpark.
The newness of the contraceptives doesn't matter as long as they're still opt-in. No-one's suggesting humans will evolve condom-melting sperm. There's no need: a much easier trait to evolve is the desire to have kids.
But the "desire to have kids" is such and abstract and complex issue; nature already has it figured for us, we have the desire to have sex, to nurture and to like kids is secondary.
It would be impossible for nature to evolve such a complex, conscious yet instinct-like feature as "I want to have kids for the sake of kids... right, where do I start... I need a fit SEXUAL partner(so that I have healthy kids)... but just to have kids... totaly not for the pleasure of sex ... economy be damned, I want kids... kids are extremly hard to raise by modern standards... scratch that... I need to have kids no matter what".
> It would be impossible for nature to evolve such a complex, conscious yet instinct-like feature as "I want to have kids for the sake of kids..
We have such an instinct now. Women (some men too, I guess) in their 30s frequently attest to a feeling that their "biological clock" is ticking and that they feel a yearning to have kids for the sake of having kids. This desire is probably still secondary to the raw sex drive in humanity, but evolution is great at taking secondary drives and turning them up to 11.
Keep in mind also that evolution isn't necessarily genetic. Humanity's unique advantage is culture. We can change our "software" much faster than we can change our genetic "hardware". Some culture groups, e.g., the Mormons and the Amish, already have fertility rates very much above average. As long as fertility is heritable, it doesn't really matter whether the mechanism is genetics or culture: the future belongs to the people who reproduce.
Women have started having children throughout the aeons at a very early age.
It is onĺy in the last 80.000 years that humans have made the conscious connection between sex and having children.
Womens fertilty declines sharply in their 30' and it is through conscious understanding of that fact and imitation that they think "their biological clock is ticking"; they consciously understand that it is now or never, that all their friends have children and that their looks and chances of attracting mates are fading.
Also, I'm willing to bet that people in the "my biological clock was ticking" camp have much, much lower birth rates than average(probably close to 1), which is an indicator rhat they actually felt pressured not to be childless rather than a genuine desire to have childreN.
I absolutely agree with your culture argument, I am just claiming that modern culture will go extinct unless we incorporate higher birthrates into it, not that the human species will go extinct.
Would raising children in Africa fit "modern standards"?
The guys story seems fictitious at best and there is no chance he actually had sex with two women a day and impregnated one woman a day.
The random chanches of conception for unprotectected sex between two young people is 1 in 20.
You mean volutarily stop doing it or banning contraceptives?
If it's the first, there's absolutely no way that would happen, if it's the latter, what's next, we ban abortions, women working, force people to marry, we ban the pull out method, the calendar(I'm not trying to build a straw man here).
A balanced and fair solution to the declining birth rates would be so complex that I'm convinced no human designed system would work; perhaps we could turn ourselves into a AI run perfect human zoo in the future, but as long as humans are in the decision loop I think it is impossible.
I think you address a very salient point vis-a-vis birth control. There are many women who otherwise would be bounded to natural reproductive cycles that have created a never before seen phenomenon in society, and that is the childless self-sufficient woman. This leads to lower future-time orientation in the population since consumption is not compounding as fast as if it were directed towards progeny. Society becomes more self-serving as a necessary effect, with accompanying lower moral standards to boot, eg The Kardashian Effect.
Of course it's rational, and I don't think anybody suggests we ban contraceptives, but the fact is having children was never a rational choice(except for treating children as pension funds), children were just a byproduct of sex being pleasurable.
Sorry I'm going to be contrarian here but if "people can't afford kids", then why is it well established that poorer people have more kids while richer have fewer? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility).
Answering my own question.. I think the reason people are having fewer kids is more to do with urbanisation and all the social and cultural changes that come with that.
Poorer populations have less access to sex education.
The government pays $850 a fortnight to a single mother, on top of a $5000 baby bonus and various other incentive schemes. Poor social classes see this as an easy means of money compared to working a "dead-end" job.
Maybe they have kids to escape their reality. People cope in different ways; drugs, drinking etc. Maybe they desperately want to live through their kids.
> Poorer populations have less access to sex education.
This is likely an accurate thesis based on macro and micro studies.
TLDR Education, empowerment (contraceptives), labor force participation = decline in fertility rate. Provide access to all of the above, fertility rate drops off.
I would sum it up as counterintuitively "Because they can't afford not to have kids." Urbanization is certainly a factor in how affordable kids are as in rural contexts they essentially paid for themselves via farm labor.
In the world wide context of rich vs poor in the third world it is often the case that your children are your social security. This may also be culturally enshrined as a literal legal duty for offspring to care for their parents no matter how alienated they were.
It would be technically accurate yet misleading to say Social Security and pensions are anti-family. Ensuring care in old age regardless of savings or offspring ability to provide undermines the obligatory support network role. Of course modern perception of family has evolved in the same sense that marriage is seen more about love instead of an economic transaction.
And that is before any conscious or subconscious k/R strategy. Essentially "elites" are incentivized to get the "best" heirs and dedicate more resources to them. Those struggling and incentivized to reproduce enough to have some survive and be successful.
It’s very simple. If you are poor, your needs can be met with a small budget. If you are rich, (upper middle class..truly wealthy people don’t have to care)the ‘fixed costs’ are higher.
You are lower middle class and Disney world is fine to take your five kids and you don’t have to break the bank. But if you are upper middle class or even borderline rich, every additional expense due to extra progeny is many times over. Your savings can’t be stretched if there is a dip in earning potential. It’s difficult to ‘step down’.
A very simple example is mortgage/owning house vs renting. Less riskier to be laid off as renting capacity is elastic vs losing mansion and cost of living of a certain lifestyle is inelastic.
There's always the option that we will die off, that we are experiencing a great filter.
Perhaps we have changed our environment in such a great way that it is impossible to avoid it?
We have the(correct) climate change narrative that makes people think declining population is a good thing, instant communication and very rapid dissemination of information and tools which enable a "winner takes all" situation(which means 1% of the population has the means to comfortably raise 100 children, which they won't, while 99% can only raise 1.X children, which they are doing), birth control, anonymous and tolerant societies where it is ok to be childless(and it really is ok), pursuit of happiness(which was never a thing in human history), non-religiousness(all major religions value having children), long working hours, "good parenting"- which is a good thing for the children, but it makes raising children incredibly expensive in money and time, both of which most people don't have, the fall of monogamy, the ridiculous real estate prices, the rise of mental dissorders -- all of which lead to below replacement birth rates.
Don't count on subgroups to save the day, their higher birth rates will plummet as soon as we hook them up to our values and we free them of their oppressive values.
The best book I've read on population is Countdown by Alan Weiss https://www.amazon.com/Countdown-Last-Best-Future-Earth/dp/0.... If you think we need to grow or that leveling off to 10 billion or even 7 billion helps, you'll appreciate reading the book.
Among other points, he recounts several nations that have lowered birthrate without coercion to greater abundance, prosperity, and joy -- Thailand, for example.
Sounds like good darwinistic filter to me. In this case it will filter out people who are so afraid of the future that they want to rather have mankind extinct.
How about this instead. We collectively weren’t smart enough and lacked the skills to organise and solve complex and political issues at scale so we went the way of the Dinosaur.
Sounds also like a Darwinian theory to me.
Never mind people who can actually see the writing on the wall I guess, just keep breading during a totally unmitigated environmental disaster and see how that does for your offspring.
I know for a fact this issue turns people off having children.
I feel like through all the worst times in the world, there was At least a relatively safe guarantee the biosphere would be there to support you.
We’re destroying that like never before so I think that it’s a much worse time for our future prospects personally.
No other thing worries me more right now than climate change.
Having a habitat to live in is important, it might be easy to forget that we’re animals too but I think as we look around at the extinction at other species via our smartphones, we don’t realise this is our future too if the current trajectory doesn’t turn around very, very fast.
It is now, but the threat of climate change's short- and medium-term effects has people scared (quite reasonably) that our record of increasing safety will come to a screaming reversal in the next 50-75 years.
I'd be hesitant because schooling costs more than ever, and nowhere near commensurate with salaries. Not every child can go to med school or graduate out of CS program and start pulling FAANG money at age 22.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadSo many of our "first world" problems wouldn't happen if we'd just help out the third world with education, opportunity, and other basics. Too bad living in the industrialized world doesn't mean one can't be foolish or racist.
Except for some parts of Africa, the birthrate across the world is declining. The worldwide average is 2.4.
Likely the world's population will start decline in actual terms some time in the 2nd half of the 21st century: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
The birth rate declining is normal in terms of industrialized countries... people educated enough to use birth control and who have availability tend to have fewer kids. The rest of the world hasn't caught up yet, and probably won't in time to avoid problems.
The birth rate isn't declining because "America is in decline"... it's declining because people are choosing not to have children. The wisdom of that choice is open to discussion, of course.
There's a strong argument to be made that the Romans existed as a political entity for 2000 years and that the final end wasn't until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The last thousand years are mainly a story of slow decay which is why they get lopped off in all the simple narratives about the fall of Rome. If there's anything to be learned from Rome, it's that an advanced civilization can survive almost anything.
This is an interesting topic for a number of reasons. It's tied up in political questions like immigration, taxes, healthcare and education. And there are unresolved economic questions like, "how will capitalism survive the end of endless growth?" Sociological questions like, "why did everyone stop having babies?" And then there's the environmental perspective, "Are we already hopelessly past this planet's carrying capacity?"
Sex is pretty wonderful for your health and metal well-being, if you minimize the threat of STIs and pregnancy.
Education and programs that allow the under-aged access to healthcare facilities that specialize in sexual health and family planning seems to be the more healthy (and more sustainable and achievable) alternative to abstinence advocacy.
I think that anyone that believes that teenage abstinence is at all achievable is probably delusional, or at the very least heavily sheltered, on the topic.
Seems like if you say the wrong thing about theocracy, or have sane and body-positive sex advice, you're bound to get some silent judgement from people who aren't brave enough to actually call you out, lest they have to actually defend their beliefs that cause them some degree of cognitive dissonance. It's likely easier for them to not question why they think the way they do, and if it's the right way for them to think/react/etc. at all, so those beliefs and assumptions go unchallenged.
Obviously this is all speculation and assumption, but if someone won't engage with you to explain themselves, that's all one can really do, for better or worse.
I'll make an exception for you though, since you may have a misunderstanding. You mention "theocracy". Atheists can believe that sex should wait for marriage. No religion is required to hold that belief. It's the same with "body-positive". Abstinence until marriage doesn't mean hating bodies or sex, and it doesn't mean being ashamed of either.
All it takes is a preference for low-risk orderly lives without all the tragedy that sex-related mistakes can bring. Since behavior affects others, including sex partners and offspring, there is a duty to avoid giving them an increased risk of tragedy. Breaking hearts isn't nice at all, and that gets far worse when sex is involved. People usually consider the first time to be special, and it would be best to share that memory with a spouse. It's awful to think that a person would be longing for a previous partner; having a comparison could weaken the current relationship. Moving from one partner to another, repeatedly breaking the emotional bond, weakens the bond that can form.
If presented with a nation (comparable in HDI to the US) with average age of first sexual encounter for women being 21+ would your posterior probability of teenage abstinence being achievable be different from your prior?
I se how less sex is an easy solution to the problem, but it is also the wrong one. Your teenage years are when you have the more energy and hormones, you are basically built to have sex. Not to mention it's healthy for the mind and body.
It would be like not allowing teens ride bikes because of possible crash with cars since stats show teens are more likely to have accidents than adults.
Better find a way to limit the accidents themself: you get healthy kids, having fun, and they grow into better adults.
This is likely a case where the evolution of human culture hasn’t caught up with the available medical technology.
Teenage pregnancy has lots of outcomes--almost all negative.
The female body really often isn't ready for pregnancy that early (women used to have menarche much later than currently)--this causes long-term health problems with both mother and child. Teenage mothers rarely have the resources to care for children well--this traps the mother and the child in a poor socioeconomic situation and affects their long-term health and development. etc.
Yes, there are women who tolerate pregnancy just fine as teenagers. Yes, there are teenagers with resources who can take care of children and not have it affect their life. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.
We certainly don't make it easy with our law. We enforce a minimum age to marry, work, and purchase a home.
Immigration will have somewhat of a mitigating effect, but sentiment has been pretty anti-immigration for a while. Worse, the rest of the world is experiencing the same decline in birth rates [2], and is developing so fast that the economic argument for a resident of another country to emigrate to the West is shrinking. (Why learn another language to live in Denver, when Shanghai is faster-growing and more modern? [3])
To be sure, there are lots of confounding factors, like the universities and social freedoms available in the West, but on a 50-year span we should expect to see some dramatic shifts due to these demographic evolutions.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-boomer-whos-going-to-buy-you...
[2] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3039064/chin...
[3] https://a16z.com/2019/10/30/the-power-of-qr-codes/
I'd imagine that by then, there will be more individuals advocating for increased automation and (hopefully) society will become increasingly 'techno-optimist' as a result
A declining population is not a problem - except to handwringing economists.
From a human perspective, we need to only have workers to fulfill the production needs of society.
Paying for retirees is solvable by simply aggressively taxing the billionaires.
In the US, having a kid or kids is an unaffordable luxury item for couples trying to survive in today's economy.
I know the only way, I can afford my kids is that I got lucky with the stock market.
A solution to both of these problems is increasing total factor productivity (aka doing more with less). The big rise in living standards during the post-war boom was largely a result of a huge increase in total factor productivity.
This has petered out since the 1970s and a lot of the 'zero-sum' mentality/nostalgia for a 'Great America'/fighting over a fixed economic pie in the US today is because we haven't been increasing productivity (i.e. there hasn't been enough technological innovation and disruption) at a fast enough rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#cite...
For the adventurous/curious:
https://www.bls.gov/dpr/faqs.htm
http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers2/Warr.pdf [PDF]
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/36161/frontmatter/9781... [PDF]
You can't eat money. The problem is not financial, it is economic. Ignoring the few durable things that can be stockpiled, the money retirees spend, whether it comes from savings or taxes can only be spent on goods and services produced at the time the money is spent, by the labor force available then. The smaller this labor force, the higher the wages, the less purchasing power money has. Retirement saving becomes a positional good, it's not enough to save enough, you have to save more than the other retirees, because you're all competing for the same scarce resource: labor.
If that doesn't make sense, try thinking about it from a purely physical point of view. Retirees need physical goods and personal services (e.g. nursing). Both of these require humans to produce. The fewer producing people there are (young and middle age adults), compared to consuming people (retirees) the less there is per person, regardless of who you tax or how.
A reduced supply of younger workers will also tend to increase retirement ages and reduce age discrimination. For example, a healthy 75 year old can still do a lot of nursing tasks. He might no longer be physically capable of lifting a bedridden patient but he can administer medications, record vital signs, change dressings, etc.
increase retirement ages
Yeah, that's one of the negative consequences of the demographic collapse. Not that old people who can still work are owed a vacation funded by the young, but the world isn't exactly fair in handing out pain, and not everyone who can't retire will be deserving of not being able to retire.
reduce age discrimination
Maybe. Old people too broke to retire don't have tremendous leverage in the labor market, and historically market forces don't tend to fix discrimination, see, e.g. Blacks in the US.
Suppose you are right about this. Then it follows, you have to make some cases like below.
1. Largest population growth comes from the third world countries in Africa, Asia and Central and South America. How should we reduce the population growth in these countries?
2. There's a large influx of immigration into the first world countries where the immigrants resources usage will likely increase by a lot. How should we reduce the immigration into the first world countries from the third world?
Edit: Just pointing out that doomsday predictions about population growth have been consistently wrong for the last 100 years.
I feel like human culture has still not reached a steady state after the invention of birth control. I don't know what will happen per se, but it seems like the world of the future will have to be more encouraging of parenthood, in some way, than the world of the present. I hope it is a way that is consistent with the model of a modern free Western democracy.
Daily reminder that in an evolutionary context, the last 200 years are the blink of an eye.
I'll paste a comment I made there: "If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover. If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective."
[1] "The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360626
We don't really know that. There are environmental stressors that lead a species to adapt; there are also stressors that cause a species to go extinct. I think time scales are really important here. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than humans. But the rate of creating new antibiotics and contraceptives are probably in the same ballpark.
It would be impossible for nature to evolve such a complex, conscious yet instinct-like feature as "I want to have kids for the sake of kids... right, where do I start... I need a fit SEXUAL partner(so that I have healthy kids)... but just to have kids... totaly not for the pleasure of sex ... economy be damned, I want kids... kids are extremly hard to raise by modern standards... scratch that... I need to have kids no matter what".
We have such an instinct now. Women (some men too, I guess) in their 30s frequently attest to a feeling that their "biological clock" is ticking and that they feel a yearning to have kids for the sake of having kids. This desire is probably still secondary to the raw sex drive in humanity, but evolution is great at taking secondary drives and turning them up to 11.
Keep in mind also that evolution isn't necessarily genetic. Humanity's unique advantage is culture. We can change our "software" much faster than we can change our genetic "hardware". Some culture groups, e.g., the Mormons and the Amish, already have fertility rates very much above average. As long as fertility is heritable, it doesn't really matter whether the mechanism is genetics or culture: the future belongs to the people who reproduce.
Womens fertilty declines sharply in their 30' and it is through conscious understanding of that fact and imitation that they think "their biological clock is ticking"; they consciously understand that it is now or never, that all their friends have children and that their looks and chances of attracting mates are fading.
Also, I'm willing to bet that people in the "my biological clock was ticking" camp have much, much lower birth rates than average(probably close to 1), which is an indicator rhat they actually felt pressured not to be childless rather than a genuine desire to have childreN.
I absolutely agree with your culture argument, I am just claiming that modern culture will go extinct unless we incorporate higher birthrates into it, not that the human species will go extinct.
Those thoughts don't seem to have been going through this guy's head: https://www.sunnewsonline.com/i-slept-with-1400-girls-impreg...
The random chanches of conception for unprotectected sex between two young people is 1 in 20.
If it's the first, there's absolutely no way that would happen, if it's the latter, what's next, we ban abortions, women working, force people to marry, we ban the pull out method, the calendar(I'm not trying to build a straw man here).
A balanced and fair solution to the declining birth rates would be so complex that I'm convinced no human designed system would work; perhaps we could turn ourselves into a AI run perfect human zoo in the future, but as long as humans are in the decision loop I think it is impossible.
People can't afford kids. Not enough time, not enough income, even hiring help is out of most people's budget.
People are being squeezed and the middle class is shrinking. No wonder they don't want kids whose lives will be worse than their own.
Answering my own question.. I think the reason people are having fewer kids is more to do with urbanisation and all the social and cultural changes that come with that.
Poorer populations have less access to sex education.
The government pays $850 a fortnight to a single mother, on top of a $5000 baby bonus and various other incentive schemes. Poor social classes see this as an easy means of money compared to working a "dead-end" job.
Maybe they have kids to escape their reality. People cope in different ways; drugs, drinking etc. Maybe they desperately want to live through their kids.
This is likely an accurate thesis based on macro and micro studies.
TLDR Education, empowerment (contraceptives), labor force participation = decline in fertility rate. Provide access to all of the above, fertility rate drops off.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... (Fertility Rate: What explains the change in the number of children women have?)
Outside of Africa, there are only a handful of countries where the fertility rate is > replacement rate.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tim...
In the world wide context of rich vs poor in the third world it is often the case that your children are your social security. This may also be culturally enshrined as a literal legal duty for offspring to care for their parents no matter how alienated they were.
It would be technically accurate yet misleading to say Social Security and pensions are anti-family. Ensuring care in old age regardless of savings or offspring ability to provide undermines the obligatory support network role. Of course modern perception of family has evolved in the same sense that marriage is seen more about love instead of an economic transaction.
And that is before any conscious or subconscious k/R strategy. Essentially "elites" are incentivized to get the "best" heirs and dedicate more resources to them. Those struggling and incentivized to reproduce enough to have some survive and be successful.
You are lower middle class and Disney world is fine to take your five kids and you don’t have to break the bank. But if you are upper middle class or even borderline rich, every additional expense due to extra progeny is many times over. Your savings can’t be stretched if there is a dip in earning potential. It’s difficult to ‘step down’.
A very simple example is mortgage/owning house vs renting. Less riskier to be laid off as renting capacity is elastic vs losing mansion and cost of living of a certain lifestyle is inelastic.
And this pattern appears in every aspect of life.
Perhaps we have changed our environment in such a great way that it is impossible to avoid it?
We have the(correct) climate change narrative that makes people think declining population is a good thing, instant communication and very rapid dissemination of information and tools which enable a "winner takes all" situation(which means 1% of the population has the means to comfortably raise 100 children, which they won't, while 99% can only raise 1.X children, which they are doing), birth control, anonymous and tolerant societies where it is ok to be childless(and it really is ok), pursuit of happiness(which was never a thing in human history), non-religiousness(all major religions value having children), long working hours, "good parenting"- which is a good thing for the children, but it makes raising children incredibly expensive in money and time, both of which most people don't have, the fall of monogamy, the ridiculous real estate prices, the rise of mental dissorders -- all of which lead to below replacement birth rates.
Don't count on subgroups to save the day, their higher birth rates will plummet as soon as we hook them up to our values and we free them of their oppressive values.
Among other points, he recounts several nations that have lowered birthrate without coercion to greater abundance, prosperity, and joy -- Thailand, for example.
It inspired me to 3 podcast episodes on lowering birth rate: episodes 248, 250, and 251 http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-and-monologues-vo....
Also Limits to Growth's 30 year update https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/19...
My new thing is telling people I have 10 kids, then saying ‘just kidding, only 5’
You have some catching up to do.
I’d personally be quite hesitant at this point.
Sounds also like a Darwinian theory to me.
Never mind people who can actually see the writing on the wall I guess, just keep breading during a totally unmitigated environmental disaster and see how that does for your offspring.
I know for a fact this issue turns people off having children.
The world is getting progressively safer, by the numbers.
We’re destroying that like never before so I think that it’s a much worse time for our future prospects personally.
No other thing worries me more right now than climate change.
Having a habitat to live in is important, it might be easy to forget that we’re animals too but I think as we look around at the extinction at other species via our smartphones, we don’t realise this is our future too if the current trajectory doesn’t turn around very, very fast.