This may be unpopular, but I already feel the earth is well beyond it’s ideal human population capacity. We are straining resources because of our bad policies and practices and politics.
Yes and no. if you look at the date though the places with the most "abundance" or wealth is where the fertility rate is collapsing. It is largely down to that wealth that people are having less children.
"Good" and "Bad" are down to perspective and is very subjective. Especially when talking about this issue.
There is a strong correlation also with educational levels and birth rates. the more educated the person, means both they are more successful monetarily, and they are less likely to have children, or have only a single child which is less than replacement (every child has 2 parents)
So is large numbers of uneducated people having children that statically will also be uneducated as well a "good" thing for humanity? I dont know have you watched the movie Idiocracy?
Natrually then most people will say "well we just need to educate that generation, get those nations / people educated" , this however does not solve the problem of birth rates because as you educate more and more people, as you bring more and more people to success they will also stop having children. If you reach the utopia where everyone in society has equal levels of education, then it is very likely you will see population crash.
Now technology could solve for that, extended life / extended fertility span for women for example would certainly inverse the population issue.
I don't want people to suffer unnecessarily. But the more people we add to the planet, the more we exacerbate problems with food, water, Co2 emissions, etc.
In the end, something will curtail human population growth. I really hope it's voluntary and painless.
Exactly, let it be our educated decision not starvation, senseless wars and poverty. And the more the human population rose it took into other populations, it led to numerous extinctions, etc
I hope the trend stays like this. It’s not like there are 1000 people left, there are still billions extra
Following this logic (and ignoring the increase of suffering as a raw product of addition) it's totally possible there'd be less suffering if we stayed in loosely connected hunter-gatherer societies.
Following this logic further, we might be best off if we reduced the population to a single person whose ideal, perfectly happy life is that of a hermit.
Philosophers have given this a lot of thought: the "repugnant conclusion" is what to Google for.
The problem is a lot bigger than coal power. One example, agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation and many of our current agricultural practices have questionable long term sustainability. In addition our agricultural processes are introducing new diseases into the human population, including our current pandemic.
The problem of sustainably providing nutritious food people want to eat is just one of a dozen that we are not solving at acceptable levels.
In my view, you are echoing propaganda. Nothing says humans have to live in cities and burn massive amounts of fossil fuels. The way we are living may be stressful to the planet, but humans aren't the problem... it's the way we are forced to live that is.
It's almost like we've all been convinced to join some weird, global suicide cult. Except instead of killing ourselves we're throwing our genetic information away.
Almost everyone I know who is really well-off/rich is having several kids. Heck, Elon Musk, who is basically spending his life trying to solve these environmental problems as his multiple businesses, has six!
Why are their social norms and thoughts on this so different from the rest of us?
It's not rocket science, it's because they don't have to raise the kids - I'd be surprised if elon saw his kids for more than a third as much as the middle class sees theirs. Hell he wasn't even at the birth of his latest.
Yes. Pretty much everyone I talk to would happily go to their small town, or village close to their homes and families but they don't. They say they can't.
This is the popular view, reinforced by lots of different bits of media and pop culture. It's also wrong.
Enough food is already produced right now to feed every person on Earth [1]. Most estimates furthermore put the Earth's carrying capacity at around 2 billion more people than we already have [2].
The problems that people think of when they think of "overpopulation" are the result of insufficient distribution systems, corruption, unconstrained capitalism, faulty human psychology, and poor education. They are problems caused by human beings screwing over their fellow human beings. Some of these problems get easier to solve when you have more people, not fewer, and in any case, nobody's yet figured out how to make things much better in a shrinking economy.
It's obviously very difficult to predict, but there's also some expert speculation that affluence will spread widely enough to slow the birth rate down to be close to the death rate and we'll reach some sort of equilibrium.
I think another factor is traditionalist religious minorities – ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Amish, Latin Mass Catholics, etc – many of these minorities still have big families, and are sustaining those big families generation after generation. (Even though some people who grow up in those kinds of communities defect to mainstream society, something like 80% choose to stay.)
Those religious minorities are quite small right now, but if they manage to sustain their current growth into the coming decades, they may end up being a much more substantial component of the population.
Over 50% of the worlds resources are consumed by the USA. A lot of it goes to waste e.g. restaurant food, "ugly" fruits etc
The problem isn't the quantity of those resources, the problem is in distribution. The world is abundant enough to comfortably support twice as many humans, if human inefficiencies, waste, greed and selfishness are factored out.
Agreed, but no one seems to know how we decouple the economy from growth without hurting or angering a lot of people. Maybe we just tear off that bandaid quickly.
The resources are there but they are misallocated and the few own most of them. When push come to shove it will become more and more obvious this is one of the problems. Until the we fight on stupid things
The number of people who would be adversely 'negatively' affected if we said "alright, we're taking control of this situation and not just going to blindly let you maximize your profits at the expense of the rest of the planet" is pretty small. A few millionaires and billionaires. The majority of us will adapt just fine.
It should be who can produce the most efficient and consume the most efficient. We should go back to building solidly and everlasting. The investment may be initially more expensive but the return will compound quickly and the benefits will make a difference. We’re wasting so many resources to stir this stupid economy and it always crashes.
This just means that the strategy of keeping most of the wealth with a tiny minority and expecting the middle class to bear the cost of supporting the old people in wholly separate existences and households paid for by the young isn't tenable.
Some degree of distribution of wealth and multi generational households would render it tenable again.
I dunno, looking at the fertility rates of rich countries vs. the performance of equities, it seems like increased productivity from computerization and automation is perfectly capable of offsetting much of the economic decline from a lower birthrate.
For the planet? Yes. For people who have priorities other than child rearing? Yes. For economies based on endlessly borrowing from the future, overleveraging, and fractional reserve lending, most definitely not. The economy will have to adapt, as the decline curve is locked in the longer the fertility rate is below replacement rate.
This is, overall, splendid news. Commendable this was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Not when you realize that the economy is largely a huge ponzi scheme which requires a constant stream of new participants to prop up asset prices and generate economic activity.
The care issue is real, not so much because we need people to look after them, which potentially could be automated, but rather the new generations are the ones paying into the system and funding their pensions.
Unfortunately that would require political action that would never be accepted by society until they're hurting enough that it's too late. No politician is going to win an election by promising to make your life worse now for the future generations.
Not all ponzi schemes are dysfunctional, some are sustainable in the long term.
For instance if you have an asset that appreciates over time and represents true value (say because it generates more income over time) then you can't realize that appreciation if there is no-one to buy that asset from you. That is the marginal effect of having less people.
There's a short-term problem of society becoming "top-heavy", where there might not be enough young to pay for the continued care of the old. But in the long run this seems like a win. I wonder what impact it might have on climate projections.
The planet is of finite size, so unlimited growth was clearly never an option. The question is, what is the best population size, and how do we get to that level?
A big part of that problem is that most nations have a pension system where the active work force pays for the pension of the elder instead of each person paying their own pension by saving/investing troughout their lives.
Saving and investing is ineffective if everyone’s investment returns (assuming there’s any returns to be had with productivity slowing and economies stagflating, note the monetary policy in Japan and Europe) are chasing the same limited pool of healthcare and caregiver labor.
The only solutions are technology or rationing care.
The key is who saves/invests the most and they will have access. This is how it works with everything in capitalism and this is the only efficient way we know of distributing resources.
The boomers will be dead long before the system shocks itself. Probably the tail end of Gen Xers or Millenials that will get royally screwed, if I had to guess.
I don't really think so. It's the parents who decided to have fewer children and be against immigration (mostly the US and UK). If they are really getting screwed then they can always open their countries up for immigrants.
Government and private retirement strategies both rely on cash transfers from younger workers. In a government system, the younger workers pay taxes which are transferred to retirees. In a private retirement system, younger workers are the purchasing counterparties as retirees sell off their investments.
Retirement financing in general relies on future economic growth for future cashflow. That said, you don't necessarily need a growing population to make it work. If the population declines 15%, but the average worker's productivity goes up 20% during that time, you still come out ahead.
>Government and private retirement strategies both rely on cash transfers from younger workers. In a government system, the younger workers pay taxes which are transferred to retirees. In a private retirement system, younger workers are the purchasing counterparties as retirees sell off their investments.
The core unit of the economy is not cash, it's value. Saving roughly corresponds to avoiding consumption and preserving value; in a very basic economy, this would take the form of e.g. preserving grain in a granary rather than eating it all. People or government savings systems that save for retirement are then able to consume the value they saved when they retire; they don't require any value transfer from the working population.
You can't store medical workers in a silo for later. That's the big problem. Older people don't need to eat more but they do need more attention from nurses and doctors.
In a society that wishes to support people who are not producing value, the people who are producing value will need to overproduce.
Whether you measure the overage in units of lifetime granaries, or running annual surpluses, is primarily an accounting choice.
As a practical matter, it's impossible for one farmer to save up enough food to span their entire retirement. Storage is an expense, and food goes bad eventually. The concept of a retirement is only possible in a society that transacts value regularly.
Yeah but we have money that can be stored and anyone that is old and have reserves of money will be treated and get food etc.
Society doesn’t reward you based on the value you produce but based on how much fictional currency you have. This could be entirely granted to you for example in a a lottery and you never produced anything of value.
Money spoils (aka inflation) just as much as food does. To maintain the value of your money you have to actively utilize it in the economy by investing it. This is not a flaw. It is necessary to keep the economy running. Otherwise we would see Scrooge McDuck in real life.
You'd still need someone to sell that 20% more product (or service) your worker is producing and with 15% less people your entire market has just shrunk.
The system was obviously designed for a "reasonable" amount of retirement from 5 to 10 years. Nowadays everyone is exceeding that despite a raised retirement age.
That money is worthless if it is not backed by a young labor force that can produce what the pensioners need. There are not many things that you can buy during your 30s and keep using in your 80s.
Think of a reverse Corona virus that only kills the young.
Retirees have lots of money but the shops and factories are closed.
Nobody wants to admit it but the only chance to “win” against climate change is to either drastically reduce the population or invent some magic technology that solves the problem for us.
Advancements in existing technology just aren’t going to be enough at the timeline we’re looking at. Political change is another non-starter because it just won’t happen on a global scale. Then there’s the fact that for the vast majority of people alive today, the Earth’s condition in 50 or 100 years is rightly not even on their radar.
what does it mean to "pay for" the continued care of the old.
Unless we have such a population implosion that we can no longer produce food or run our factories, then we don't need to "pay for" anything. We can simply decide to distribute the resources necessary for the care of the old.
The real cost of everything is the labor required to produce it, not the dollar value it receives in a market place. I don't think anyone is talking about a complete collapse in the labor pool.
Yes, but e.g. Japan faces a big problem where the labor pool will be a small part of the population, with a big noticeable slice involved in elder care. If current plans to automate large amounts of this work (and I worry that automating it could be horribly dystopian) do not succeed it will be a large problem. (Not to mention other types of resources that those not in the labor force consume besides direct care).
Pensions, social security, etc. The point is that the "active economy" will shrink beneath what was expected for those systems to function for the number of elderly they will end up having.
I'd like to see an accounting of the real resources (not money) that elderly require vs children and young to middle aged adults. I'm suspicious because it sounds much like the undue burden tripe you hear about disabled people.
At least in the US, expenses in later life seem not too bad, until the last 3-5 years--at which point healthcare cost absolutely blows everything out of the water. Like, more healthcare cost in one week at 85 than an entire year at 50. Especially once a person is unable to safely walk to the bathroom or prepare a simple meal without falling. Meds, ambulance transport, non-emergency wheelchair transport, rental of various equipment, home health aides, physical therapy, speech therapy, rehab or nursing care, palliative care. The costs are just stupefying.
Edit: I've replied mostly along the lines of the financial costs, but the human service component is by far the largest part of it, that's the main resource consumed.
I was thinking more along retired or semi-retired. But yes end of life is a thing. Even then people 'sounding the alarm' about the ratio of workers to retirees 'plummeting' are way overstating things. Over the next thirty years the percentage of people over 65 is going to double and then level off.
The source of the panic is the 'exponential growth forever' dingbats being confronted by a reality they don't like.
Pretty much every western civilization on Earth is fully capable of providing a minimum standard of living to its entire population today, let alone just a larger chunk of the pie elder group in half a century.
Its an active and intentional decision not to do so. Unless society collapses and the knowledge of how modern mass production works to produce so much plenty evaporates it will continue to take a tiny percentage of the whole population to provide the resources needed to survive to the rest.
We should be expecting a technological singularity before 2100, not some dystopia where all wealth evaporates and the only people with money left are under 30s who get to work 80 hours a week farming rice for grandma.
When pension systems run dry or hyperinflation occurs to prop it up (a mathematical certainty), the result is massive depression and an unprecedented decline in progress. When times are tight, nobody is going to care if their power is green or not because they're focused on survival.
another chicken little article. worthless speculation about the future. who knows what will happen if the population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, infinite growth society must have it’s day of reckoning
Sure. Curing cancer. Imaging black holes. All a giant scheme.
In April, energy prices dropped. People stayed at home and read and just didn't mess up. If terrorists did not orchestrate the coordinated burning and looting of hundreds of USA cities, we might have kept it going. No more people telling everyone what to do from far away.
Can't have that.
So now we have to work our lives away again, just so some drunken mob does not cannibalize us from the inside.
Why is population declining? People are awful today. Horrible and cruel to one another. People work each other to death and destroy families without a second thought just for money they spendthrift away. Sharing in service, grief, passing on wealth and knowledge to the next ones up, that's all gone.
Now it's just a world of ogres. If you're kind, you're weak or weird. Everyone's looking to get one over on another. A pack of dogs cheating at cards paying monkeys to fix cars.
In human population, we should be aiming for quality, not quantity. Quality also means diversity.
If higher quantity unavoidably brings a higher proportion of human suffering, then we have no other choice but to promote quality over quantity. I fear for the future of our species. Our evolutionary instinct to multiply combined with the tech we've created is now bringing this planet to the brink.
Everyone wants to exist. But I would rather exist in a positive way, than exist at all.
People may believe that they fear for the "future of our species," but at a meta level, is it not merely an expression of the same innate human desire that caused us to build up civilization and medicine to the point that we're facing the aforementioned issues?
Without getting into a long spiel, human intelligence appears to actually be extremely limited, compared to a theoretical perfect intelligence, and any explicit actions we may take to enforce "quality over quantity" could end up doing more "harm" than "good" as soon as 1 "move" beyond the furthest move that we're capable of calculating.
IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
> People may believe that they fear for the "future of our species," but at a meta level, is it not merely an expression of the same innate human desire that caused us to build up civilization and medicine to the point that we're facing the aforementioned issues?
Yes, in a way. But with mindfulness, one can choose different thoughts to attach to that innate survival feeling of wanting to exist and multiply. Instead of, 'We need to always multiply / population control is evil', make it, 'We need to create a better world for our species and those around us'.
> IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
Also agreed. I've read the big AI books like Nick Bostrom's and Max Tegmark's. Given their monumental knowledge, the sentiments around population control are not so much about saving so much as managing. More importantly, it's about saving the possibility of AI and superior forms of evolution to arise in the future, which are far more significant than current Homo sapiens.
One way to put this into practice is to choose to adopt a child as your own, instead of producing yet another one. I may do this in my life.
If you believe you're the sort of person who can potentially "save" the world, wouldn't you want to clone your inherited software to counterbalance the cloning of those who cannot or will not?
> who knows what will happen if the population declines.
Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing. Existing homeowners will do their damnedest to prop up prices by any means possible, but it can't last forever. Housing prices will crash sooner or later. It will probably happen in each country long before a its population has halved.
Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility in many countries. Who has time to raise kids when they have to work two jobs just to pay rent? But once it becomes more affordable to raise a family, fertility trends are likely to reverse until it a new balance is reached.
This is just one of the many factors that might come into play over the next 80 years that popular predictions about 2100 tend to glance over.
> Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing.
It won't without policy controls, otherwise, housing units will be redeveloped into other uses (including smaller numbers of larger units designed and managed in a way to foster single-family occupancy per unit.)
> Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility.
In many areas the shortage of housing isn't really one of space, lack of housing, or population, but rather that everyone wants a house in the same urban areas, mostly due to the availability of jobs.
If you want a house in Ireland for example, then the country-side is dirt cheap, but if you want one in Dublin or Cork then be prepared to pay through the nose. The situation seems similar in most countries.
I'm not sure what a solution for this will be, but I'm not sure if population decline will be a major contributor.
Urban areas usually have a younger population than rural areas do, so I think it's safe to assume that a dramatic change in the number of young people will affect housing prices in cities more than in rural areas. For example, that block of crappy houses near the university would be worth a lot less without a steady stream of students to rent them out to.
I think it's a bit more complex than that, houses decay over time and need replacing and upkeep. If we want sufficient housing in 50 years we need to maintain the upkeep as well, which will probably only be done according to "supply and demand", so there may still be a shortage just because many houses won't be maintained sufficiently.
In quite a few cities you already see quite a lot of housing just left derelict even though there's a housing shortage.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a larger part of the then-old people will want to keep living in the city, as that's where they've been living their entire lives (which differs a bit from today's old population).
I don't know ... it's really hard to predict these things. It could very well be the case that you're right, but personally I wouldn't really bet on population decline significantly reducing the pressure on the housing situation. It seems more of an economical/policy issue to me than a population issue.
No really - trends are real, this is science, and we use them to actually estimate the future, in much the same way we try to do so with climate and other things.
"It will be positive for the environment"
Possibly not true. Low-birth Westerners are already the #1 emitters of Co2 by a margin, so it's not so linear.
" population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, "
Most GDP growth does not come from resource utilisation.
So there are definitly some upsides to less people, but it's also a tremendous risk. Never before in history has this happened naturally, and it's happening fast. This is a 'really big, kind of scary' issue that we have to contend with, and as your points illustrate, there are definitely many facets let alone the social one's.
"It doesnt follow they would emit less CO2 if they happened to have children."
Except that it does. Literally from the article, they state "women entering the workforce, education jobs etc" - which increases income, and this is 100% correlated to increased consumption of all forms. It's consistent everywhere.
FYI this is the de-facto neoliberal plan (not being conspiratorial here). It's more directly apparent in China's ambitions i.e. Belt and Road: "The stated objectives are "to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets" [1], but it's not like it's their 'new' idea.
The objective of the wealthier nations is to get the remaining 4 Billion people driving cars, eating Cheetos, wearing H&M (fast fashion, ie 'disposable') and living in IKEA (i.e. trendy, but generally low-quality furniture, that can be replaced every several years).
Calling it a tremendous risk doesn't seem warranted given that it will not produce a significant drop in the earth's total population this century (see my comment above). A top-heavier age spread may strain political and economic systems: these are the social effects you mention. But from an ecological standpoint, not much will change for some time.
There is tremendous risk in covering the planet with ourselves and our waste, though; imho the more relevant risk, especially since we're pretty much locked into the pattern now.
If you look at it from much longer term perspective, it's scary because it's happening extremely fast (1 generation) within nations that have reached a certain level of material prosperity and stability.
It's also 'scary' because it's never happened before.
'100 years' when we will really see the effects more globally, is not a 'long time', it's a 'quite a short time'.
We only ever knew 'one natural direction' and though it's exploded since the industrial revolution, it was at least, in normal times, 'up' to the extent the system could support it.
So yes, it's not 'scary' right now, and as you point out, Mother Earth could use a break from all of us. But thinking about the next 'few hundred' years, it's spooky.
I would agree but for the fact that if we look at habitability prospects from that same longer-term perspective, we see an ocean of scarier things happening just as fast.
Humans have endured and are generally resilient to population fluctuations. We and our industrial societies are not resilient to e.g., significant departure from the Holocene equilibrium[0].
The transition from 2B to 7.8B was also kind of fast: 90 years. The exponential growth we've seen recently is unique in human existence. Before the last several centuries human population growth was much slower. In fact, it seems unlikely that population growth will become that slow again without some sort of disaster scenario.
So this is slightly misleading as well, because it's a geometric curve upwards.
The 'inflection point' you're really looking for is the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
But at least in that capacity - we know what happened: we harnessed energy and could provide for the material wellbeing of huge numbers of people, which can have it's downsides, but it's not all bad. Better 'more' than risking plunging towards nothing.
The 'downward plunge' is happening for somewhat unknown reasons, and it's fast, and we don't know when it's going to stop.
If you put on the afterburners on an airplane, and it goes up faster than expected, that makes sense. But if the airplanes starts falling out of the sky for no reason ... scary.
People who don't want to have a bunch of kids, don't. Does it have to be more complicated than that? Unless everyone makes this decision (which seems unlikely to me although that could just be because I have ten nieces and nephews) it's basically a self-correcting "problem". People who don't reproduce are replaced in the next generation by the offspring of people who do reproduce.
It certainly would improve our chances and reduce the rate at which conditions diverge from the baseline we've experienced for the last ~10,000 years, but it's important to recognize that we would not see meaningful total population reduction until at least 2100 even if the birth rate continued to drop dramatically and disasters claimed several billion lives[0]. There is too much inertia.
Children have become more of a burden than a benefit in many ways. We once had much use for our children. When people were more independent and everyone pretty much had a small business, children were seen as the life blood of that business. Now, we are pretty much expected to fill a role at some large corporation -- which Japan is the greatest example of. Also, the family centered culture has changed to a work centered culture. It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family -- you were seen as a "dead end."
I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
I started to read this waiting for the punchline to a Dad joke. Kids can still mow lawns for sure.
>This stuff is being pushed from the top.
Is this some kind of Sparta thing? Like you all go up to the top of the mountain and someone pushes Dad off? Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
>It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family
When and where was this? As someone who grew up Catholic it feels like that cut both ways.
To be vaguely serious for longer than I want, my wife and I just had a long, unfun conversation about how hard it is to deal with her mom's dementia and I don't know that we could do anywhere near as well with dealing with it if we didn't have a kid of our own. It's a shitty Ponzi schema, but the alternative is being Shakers.
> if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
Access to birth control and abortion, social services and welfare, trends in divorce and family court ... All of these things are top-down forces that create a tapestry heavily influencing human sexuality and the choices men and women make. One only has to look at how different things were 50 or so (or less) years ago before these things were as widespread.
While I don't really believe in a 'conspiracy' - I can easily see "targeted 'top down' forces" in the reverse direction...Limiting women's access birth control, abortion, etc. Hell - just getting your tubes tied can be 10x harder then getting a vasectomy.
If societal forces can be so effective in limiting women's choices/options, is hard to believe they could have had a hand in expanding them as well?
Premodern society where women were effectively property, where religion dictated their role, where marriage and a woman staying at home were the social norm. You're trying to pretend like social policy is a new thing when the Catholic Church has been controlling the rights of individuals for a very long time. To such an extent that Kings were generally subservient to the Pope. And then those Kings and Queens did actions like the Inquisition where they forced individuals to either convert to Catholicism, be exiled, or be murdered.
History goes through many stages of social belief intertwined with social control. In ancient Rome there was a plant that caused abortions and was so popular it went extinct [1]. However also in ancient Rome, Augustus patronized writers like Virgil to help instil "traditional family values" in the Roman population.
Perhaps the "premodern societies" that are emphasized in educational settings had those qualities. Maybe that says more about our educational values than about premodern societies. Many ancient people didn't emphasize property in the first place. Many others were more matriarchal than patriarchal. Sure, Catholicism was fairly irredeemable...
I did my time in the Catholic church. There were some weird moments, but I got a lot luckier than a lot of other kids (and women, indigenous, etc.) Now I get to say my truth. Actually, anyone who reads history can say it too.
“Premodern?” The US fertility rate fell from 3.65 in 1960 to below replacement in 1972. In that time, the labor force participation rate of married women went from 32% to 42%. Then it’s been pretty stable since then between 1.8-2.1, even as the labor force participation rate for married women went from 42% to 67%. We are talking about much more recent social trends at issue.
Some people have extraordinary wealth and they have the ability to set economic incentives, policies, and cultural influences for certain types of behavior to emerge. There's a hierarchy to our societies, there are people with great power and people with little to no power. I guess the greatest magic trick of the modern world is to make people believe such things do not exist.
IMO a greater magic trick is convincing folks like you that these rich people are actually powerful enough to control fundamental behaviors like sex and reproduction.
It's a profoundly dis-empowering and anti-democratic message, which is of course why a lot of those rich people are happy for you to believe it.
The reality is this: in every instance we know of, making education and birth control available to women (not forcing, just giving them the option) has resulted in declining birth rates and increasing standards of living.
It's really quite inconvenient to be pregnant, to parent a newborn, and to be responsible for a child for 2+ decades. It's very rewarding, but it's also really hard. You don't need a global conspiracy to explain why many women limit or opt against it if given the chance.
Are you saying there are no mechanisms that allow wealthy people to influence human behavior on a large scale? Please read "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays.
It's funny how people dismiss things so readily by labeling them "conspiracy theory." I just can't imagine looking at a world with such great wealth inequality and coming to the conclusion that this is an equal playing field where everyone exerts the same influence on the evolution of humanity.
Social progress influences choice, which in turn influences economies, which influence people.
There is no cabal of They. The "shadow government" thesis is straight-up conspiracy batshit.
Unless you mean the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China who certainly authorized the two-child law just a few years back, but they're not really a shadow government. They're a regular one, just not very transparent.
Ultimately both Chinese communism (via Hegel) and Western feminism (via Wollstonecraft) trace their origins back to the French Revolution, so maybe you are being controlled by Robespierre.
What good are books if we can't direct people at them? That book makes my case. The fact that Bernays was a major advisor for the media complex of America makes the book an even more significant piece of evidence for my position.
Ok...the main point is that there is a shadow government that shapes our culture and people's perceptions through mass media and by corrupting influential people for the purpose of endorsing certain ideas/products. In that work, Bernays details these types of "shadow governments."
France has tried. They even give subsidies. But the fertility rate is only 1.85.
The groups that are still growing are those that oppress women. Islamic countries [1] and ultra-orthodox Jews, especially. Evangelical Christians used to be higher but have now dropped down to the below-replacement US rate.
Teen pregnancies are way down in the US. So are abortions; that's not it.
Nobody really understands why. There's lots of speculation. The decline of religion? Better birth control? Video games? Declining testosterone levels? Fewer people in agriculture?
Parenting is hard and expensive, especially these days in the developed world where people have children late and most people don’t live near extended family. My parents moving near me totally changed my wife and my outlook on having a third (from “no way, too sleepy” to “hey remember when the little one was just a baby?”)
Money is just one form of wealth. Having a network of trusted, productive people, such as healthy grandparents who can assist with raising children is another.
I can see in my extended family and friends the monetary and general success of those with supportive families (especially those families with multiple brothers) that worked together versus those families that were split apart and did not have someone to rely on. They are in completely different socioeconomic classes now.
Bill Gates has literally been trying to curb the population of Africa for decades. There's blatant evidence of the rich engaging in population control. This is not to say it's a bad thing...per say...but to say it isn't happening isn't aligned with the facts.
>Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
First, a top dictating human sexuality is hilarious to read out of context. Also somewhat accurate.
Anyway, I don't think they mean there is a concrete system designed to keep people from reproducing. It's more of a feedback loop where the richest people in the world get concerned about things like global warming, overpopulation, and whatever else risks their way of life and so they use their social capital to dictate ideas and ideals that protect them. They can do this with things like think tanks or social media influencers or whatever. It's not some highly organized psyop but it's effective because they have so much economic influence.
I think you're trying to very generously interpret a conspiracy theory that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Access to contraception, and a rise in women's education and employment, are not a message imposed on society by the wealthy, inadvertently or otherwise, nor have they occurred on the timeline of concerns such as climate change and resource exhaustion. They are social consequences of the Enlightenment.
Consider how attitudes towards contraception have changed over time. There was a time, not that long ago, where the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual.
There is a cultural elite, who’s effect has been so profound, they have led you to believe that such a cultural norm as we enjoy today was inevitable and have convinced the world that taking a perfectly healthy reproductive system and making it dysfunctional is “healthcare”.
There is no cultural elite brainwashing me into believe otherwise. I can arrive at this position all on my lonesome, simply by rejecting the appalling prejudices of the Catholic church (and many other religions), misogynists in general, and bigoted authoritarians (but I repeat myself); both on the basis of the crushing harm they have inflicted over the centuries, and the colossal waste of talent due to the systematic oppression of women.
As for this:
> the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual
That depends who you read. If your selectively chosen history of the last 6,000 years consists entirely of texts written by and/or documenting the fun police, I can see how you might arrive at this conclusion. On the other hand, there have always been voices otherwise. Until the Enlightenment they tended to be pilloried and/or executed, but that doesn't exactly highlight the hypocrisy in charge as something to be desired, rather something to be abandoned.
edit: poking around, this seems to be some reference to an American college commencement speech. I'm not an American, so I didn't get the cultural allusion, sorry.
Point of fact, I don't swim in your water at all. Any assumptions you may choose to make about the cultural perspective, skin colour, second language, religious tradition(s), countr(ies) of birth/residence/affiliation/upbringing, nationality of parents and/or in-laws, immigration status, education, newspaper subscriptions, food and musical preferences, or political leanings influencing my worldview are likely flat wrong.
Contraception is not dysfunction, and this is neither a parochial, nor (what-americans-call-"liberal") liberal assertion.
That was people disliking the change and being loud. And they failed to pose their will on those who found contraception useful for their own lives.
And they failed also because non stigmatized contraception lowers teenage pregnancies and make aids spread less. Meaning it actually solves societal problems.
Inability to control pregnancy means less heath, particularly for women and small children.
Old calculus: "I need to have lots of children so they support me in my old age. No matter the cost."
New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."
It's economics, plain and simple. Of course there's a "top" and the "top" does dictate the structure. If you doubt that, ask: what percent of your income do you pay in taxes, and what percent of his income does your CEO pay in taxes (assuming you work at a typical bigcorp)?
I'm not saying that "yolo all the way to carrying capacity -- and beyond!" would be a better policy, but it clearly used to be the policy and isn't anymore. Personally, I think we dodged a big bullet and took a little one. The "little" bullet is still going to hurt quite a bit, though.
This, but also people used to see having a family as being the meaning of their lives. In the modern world, the alternative meaning of life invention is the Career™. This alone, that people have been influenced to believe a career is a replacement for having a family, is highly suspect of "top-down" influence. We don't even have the perspective of how ridiculous career driven culture is.
I think there's definitely something to this, and I'd agree that career driven culture is very toxic.
But I'd also hesitate to call it "top-down" influence. That would drastically downplay the autonomy we have in first-world countries. Nobody is forced to prioritize their career over everything else. In most countries, I'd say it's the complete opposite - tax incentives and benefits are usually structured to encourage child-rearing.
It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
> It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
> The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Aside from tying healthcare to employment in the USA, what systemic issues are there?
> Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
Yet birthrates decrease with income - lower income households have higher birthrates [0]. This suggests that a lower fertility rate is indeed a choice, rather than economic necessity.
top down to me equal some secret cabal of people that push an agenda
systemic to me means the way the system is but how the system got that way would be the random inputs of thousands or even millions of individual and uncoordinated actions.
People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families. In fact the largest families in the modern world come from the people with the least amount of money (not judging, just stating what I've read). So having a paycheck looks like it has the opposite effect of encouraging family. No I'm not arguing that we should therefore get less pay. Just arguing against that idea that if everyone had a paycheck large enough to support a bigger family that they'd start having bigger families.
I would agree that not all systemic problems are top down, but many are, and there are "secret cabals" dedicated to creating and propagating such systems. It doesn't make sense to me to define systemic problems as strictly random, since humans attempt to create top-down, complex systems constantly (especially post-WW2 in more modern society).
> People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families.
Different eras, different issues. In agrarian times a large family was an investment in future labor, and as a retirement/continuity strategy. In modern society, adding children is a significant expense, and with the easy availability of birth control, it's far more of a choice. In both cases, people were following the rational incentives that society has created for them.
We can argue about whether the current economic circumstances are random or top-down, but in either case, if you change the incentives for having kids (universal healthcare, affordable childcare, food/housing security, etc.) then you will get more kids.
This also causes people to move farther away from their families for both school and then work, often meaning that the grandparent support system is not available when you want to have kids.
That, in my opinion, is taken for granted more than anything else.
It also causes people to wait longer and longer to have children. My twins, my first children, came when I was 38 years old. My wife was 35. Most of our friends and family were also well into their 30s before having their first kid. This is not a winning strategy...
Society can only support you in old age if there are enough younger people around. Unfortunately, even though kids are needed for society to function and keep going, not much of the cost of raising kids is socialized, at least in the states. Day care for one kid where I live is $1700/month and rising, you have to be rich to afford it.
"Society can only support you in old age if there are enough younger people around."
I do not agree with that. In my opinion, technology advancements (say, driverless cars) will make reduce the amount of young people needed to support for older people.
I have yet to see any technology that will change a bedpan in the next 30 years. Much less provide the most important component to an older person’s mental (and hence in some ways physical) health - which is the company of other humans, family and friends, and typically grand children and other decendants.
I don't think loneliness will be massive issue. Considering the population of young adults and adults already suffering from it. Nothing will be different for us. And the communications are likely to improve so this is one thing that technology can solve.
In that case, if these technologies become so successful to eliminate the need for young people, they will basically become our successor species and all this is moot anyways.
Obviously that won’t happen overnight, but it could definitely happen gradually.
It's important to note that in Germany, at least, day care is provided by the state at no cost, starting from the age of 3mo or so. You also get 300 euros a month per child. German society has made a concerted effort to encourage that people have children in Germany. It's an idea worth copying, IMHO.
> New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."
My calculus is not at all that society will support me. In fact, it’s the opposite. I anticipate no support from society, but I also don’t want to burden my family or society so I hope to be able to go out on my own terms once I am no longer self sufficient.
If declining birth rate is a matter of what people can afford, we should look for some sort of correlation between wealth and birth rate.
To the best of my knowledge, the correlation is somewhat negative--that is, rich people have lower average birth rates than poor people.
How can it be economics "plain and simple" if even people who can easily afford to raise large families choose not to? Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan could afford more kids than the Duggars. But they have two.
For the same reason that the CEO of the fortune-500 I work at ran around with a broken phone screen for the better part of a year: things cost time and energy, not just money. Children even moreso. Being cash-rich doesn't make you rich in time and energy.
Those are excuses that people make up to soothe their egos. The real reason people do not have children is selfishness. They think that the financial and time cost will deprive them of other material joys. It’s as sad as it is misguided.
I would’t say that is the main reason but that is one of them, sure. Also the society has become a lot more isolated. I sometimes look at a modern societies like Japan or South Korea and am wondering whether the western world will follow suit.
Perhaps there's some truth to what you say if we consider couples who choose not to have kids at all. However, I think the cases that choose to have just one or two children are more common than those who choose not to have kids at all. I think financial situation better explains why people would stop at one kid rather than 3.
Anecdotally: I've had multiple discussions with employed, unburdened men and women (particularly women) in their mid 20s who have decided not to have children for one reason: Climate change.
The planet is collapsing. Our children are likely to die of hunger, disease, or warfare as things become more destabilized over the next 50 years.
We don't believe their lives will be better than ours, and we don't want to further deplete humanity's scant resources.
From this perspective, having children is selfish.
Climate change will either destroy the planet, or some team of scientists and engineers will avert disaster by inventing carbon capture or whatever. It is highly likely those scientists will have been born and raised in a well educated middle class family somewhere in the developed world.
I too have heard this from people. But when I do, I can't tell if it is the root cause or a rationalization. There is still intense social pressure to have children, although I certainly remember it dropping over the last 25 years. Having children is still the assumption for a heterosexual couple, and you are often expected to provide a rationale for why not, and you feel you will be perceived negatively if the rationale is seen as selfish, and people who do choose to have children still sometimes take your choices as a criticism about their life choices. So you come up with some banal reason to deflect the conversation you have had too many times already. Or a reason to justify the decision to yourself, because social pressures are telling you it is a selfish decision and that selfish decisions about your own life are somehow bad.
I am sorry you find my wife and I's decision selfish, sad, and misguided. You needn't think about it, really, as our decision doesn't concern you in the slightest.
It may help you to travel. Some time in other continents made us realize -- we have plenty of people already. The planet will do just fine without one or three more from us.
I personally don't and don't judge you either. As I said earlier, I and my wife didn't want children until one came along; that eventually has changed us.
But we will stop at one and I agree that there are plenty of people already.
It's two statements. 1) childlessness is a selfish choice. 2) this is sad and misguided. That second statement, without evidence or argument, is arrogant and patronizing. Non-inclusive even.
That’s a bizarre and mean-spirited line of thinking. There’s nothing inherently selfish about not having kids. Every life decision involves trade-offs between time, money, effort, and various kinds of joys and sorrows. People have lots of different circumstances that lead them to evaluate these trade-offs differently. Children are a huge, irreversible decision. It’s natural for people to be cautious. Besides, one could easily argue that having kids is selfish - you’re deliberately consuming more resources and tax dollars so you can create clones of yourself and expand your family line. That’s not a nice or realistic way to look at having children though.
You could also have another perspective: The people who bring children into this world, without the future child's consent are being selfish because _they_ want that child. You can never know if that person will grow up to have a miserable life.
I know many would consider it a ridiculous argument but I find your label of selfishness similar.
Pushed from the top? What on earth? Guy, there's no conspiracy required to explain urbanization. It is a simple matter of better agriculture tech. We just don't need much labor on farms anymore.
It's absolutely pushed from the top. Nobody outside of extreme religious communities sees increasing the population as a noble goal.
At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids. If you do have them, the trade is that you will always be financially drained. Somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Very few will ever acquire equity in anything.
The American Dream is now working until you're 70, supporting 2 kids through college, building equity in your house, then reverse-mortgaging your property to hopefully cover your final years.
You could argue that it's an organic evolution of our profit-driven system, but that system only exists because it's what the owner-class is pushing.
Either we should accept that having children is a hobby for the rich and find other meaningful ways to live our lives, or we should have radical changes in society to increase family sizes.
This article is about global birth rates falling, which is true. But your comment is about conditions specific to the US. Yet birth rates are falling in countries which don't have the warped incentives you point out in the states, and where having children is supported (see Europe, much of Asia, etc.). So although you accurately point out that there are downsides, if not disincentives, to having kids in the US, that cannot be the driving cause of falling birth rates in the rest of the world. And therefore there's no indication of any kind of "top-down" force there either.
Here's a top down global conspiracy theory: micro plastics carried by the air and water are ingested and cause hormone disruption leading to less sex and therefore less children.
I politely disagree, the childcare support and social services you have in Europe are not an incentive in anyway, for the large majority of countries here, they are a mitigation at best.
The majority of young europeans in fertile age, continue to struggle with housing costs (high rents high down payments) and salaries not in line with COL until far too late in their careers, if not indefinitely. Those two are the major drivers for 'post-poning' having children in IMHO.
"Europe" is a big and diverse place. But it's my fault for generalizing. Let me rather mention the Scandinavian countries, for example, where support is pretty ample. Certainly, having kids is still expensive and time consuming, but that's how it's been since the beginning of time. The difference is, now people can afford not to have them.
As for the rest of Europe, sure, housing is expensive and all that, but people have more discretionary income now than ever, after housing and daily necessities (at least as far as I can recall from economics classes). But I do think young people's expectations have shifted as well, which makes it feel like we've got less headroom for a bunch of kids. And we certainly don't have the safe, well-paying jobs our boomer parents often lucked into.
Children inherently cost money. Someone has to pay it. You're trying to pretend like the system is designed to screw parents by burdening them with this cost source that is a child when simply put, children cost money.
> How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college?
College costs money. The incentives with government backed student debt has inflated that cost dramatically. This wasn't some scheme to tax parents. It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
> Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
Again, because insuring more people costs more money. Whether you're adding a child or a spouse, more insurance coverage ought to equate to higher premiums. That the economics of how insurance works. Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
> The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids.
The system does disincentive having kids but that doesn't at all imply the system was intentionally designed to do so. (A) kids cost money and that is by definition a disincentive and (B) some policies like college loans were not setup to cause this disincentive. They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
I used to believe your line of reasoning, but I don't anymore.
> It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
Do you really think that's unsolvable? That "bad policy" is corruption. That tuition inflation could be capped.
> Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
You would think we would all want to educate, insure, and support the next generation. Maybe some costs should be shared?
> They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
I know you're saying this unironically, but please consider that a system which allows an 18 year old to sign up to accrue tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of debt over 4+ years with no guarantee that they will be able to pay it back... well, maybe that's just not a system we should have built. You know who would love to build that system? Probably the recipients of the 18 year old's borrowed funds.
I have friends that are engineers in various fields, college educated, career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses and paying down their college debts.
It's no problem though, they just have to keep working and it's all fine. Unless they can't work for some reason, then they've got a big problem.
"career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses"
That just isn't going to work. It can't. By law in most places, the ratio of childcare workers to children is limited. The work simply doesn't scale. Suppose the ratio is 1:4, and there is a 100% markup on the wages to pay for stuff like the building. Sending 4 kids will thus cost the pay of two workers. Dividing down, just 2 kids will cost as much as the typical parent might earn.
Birthrate declines as a society becomes more prosperous and women gain control over their reproductive rights.
In fact, the correlation is the opposite of what you said; wealthier people have fewer kids than poor people in almost every country. Your suggestion that people decide not to have kids because they can't afford them is not supported by the data; those who can most afford the kids have the fewest.
I wish they'd show all the brackets above 200k in income. I would guess that after maybe 500k in income, it probably trends back up.
> Most billionaires have three or more children, the GoCompare analysis found. Among them, 5% had no children, 9% had one child, 23% had two children, 25% had three children, 17% had four children and 21% had five or more. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has four children, and Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of the luxury goods empire LVMH, has five. [1]
So if you're a billionaire, you're having lots of kids, but if you're making 200k/yr you're having fewer kids. It makes sense to me.
Please tell that to Jeffry Epstein, who impregnated a dozen children a day because of pedo and gay blackmail on people we trusted with the nation's leadership. Or the drug smuggling criminals who get multiple families.
Just follow orders, end up burning alive in the WTC or kidnapped in some horrible foreign job site or just being forgotten.
Covid: Young people who should be starting families are sidelined.
China: Amoral lawyers want to be millionaires and take bribes. Your boss at the very top wants to kill Americans.
Immigration: Want to give boss feedback? Great. Hey, train your new H1B replacement.
A complete hostility to anyone else. Nothing except selfishness. Earning just one dollar is a 100% cut throat affair. You really don't know it until you get hit hard, how little people care about you if you die as long as they make a few bucks. Make something, prepare to have every little dirty trick thrown at you until you die in prison.
People became leaders decades ago because they were just willing to do anything and debase themselves. We used to be your neighbors and family. You turned your backs on us. Won with every dirty trick you can think of. Now we're just a waste byproduct or something to churn for money. Not urbanization. You. The hell you made. I hope the mob kills you all through many bumps and bruises and broken bones. True nature will go for your throat. As you die in your sewer, you will see the paradise of my world, your sunset, because I stayed true.
There’s no shortage of media and news out there talking about the joys of being child free in your 40s, how much more fulfilling a good career and vacations are than being burdened with children who’ll impede promotions and take up your free time, how having kids is the worst possible thing for the environment and so on.
It also just costs more to do basic things. Buying a house, finding an apartment, college, finding a job (more competitive), there’s trends of more loneliness and lack of community, you have to learn graphql now, it doesn’t end, and so by the time you find yourself stable in all these things you’re much older, and well, worn out.
Starting a family used to be the first thing you did, but now it’s more of the capstone that one could easily not burden themselves with after all of life’s bullshit.
We are psychologically and financially exhausting a generation.
Because the truth is painful. People don't want to believe things are bad. People will fight tooth and nail to hold onto their perception that we are living in some sort of utopia and that everything is sunshine and rainbows.
I don't blame people that want to look the other way...it's not a pleasant sight.
It's sure ain't easy but if you take a look at the history of mankind it sure is paradise. War and famine have has been the standard, things we complain about are totally different now.
Also not sure why you are downvoted. As a 33 year old working professional who jumped through life's bullshit tip finally start a family, this resonates.
> Children have become more of a burden than a benefit in many ways.
If you view the purpose of your life through a purely hedonist lens, sure. If you view the purpose of your life as being a member of an unbroken chain going back to the very first living cell, with an incredible legacy to uphold and protect, the burden is really just a masked joy.
It isn't just the choices. Young people are having less sex. Japan has noticed this. Declining sales of contraceptives but declines in both STDs and pregnancies, especially amongst the young. Incidents of the "oops we are pregnant" scenario have declined all over the western world. Western culture has for decades complained that young people have too liberal a view of sex. Remember those abstinence pushes in the 80s and 90s? Remember purity rings? They worked.
I attribute this to anti-social tendencies rising due to technology addiction. People are getting worse at social interaction. When you spend so much time in front of a screen, it has to have some effect on your ability to socialize.
I think you've found a confounding variable. The root cause here is that people are entertained by something that pushes their buttons. What you've said makes it sound like people want to socialise but are hampered. I would argue that people are not that hampered but rather choose not to socialise in a way which leads to dating (or community engagement)
The main retort to this is, what about all those people who have a gnawing pain of loneliness. Well, with fewer people that pressed to find a partner, local community engagement is down. This forces dating online which results in people screening, judging and not taking chances, leading to a low success rate. This is not a consequence of a lack of social skills. When people engage in person, there are multiple interactions that occur which are not judgemental (in dating terms), leading to more opportunities for people to see the interesting bits in others.
Yeah... I'm not so sure about that. My bet would be on easy access to porn, entertainment, and social media resulting in less in person social interaction.
Though there's some truthiness here, it's a very cynical take.
Most people aren't thinking about the ROI of their kids, that ironically is a pretty modern twist.
Birth Control is way, overwhelmingly the #1 issue, so far ahead of anything else. Condoms and 'the pill' are a very new phenom. Imagine before them, when every sexual act had a pretty high change of pregnancy. And then it's easy to understand how sex<->marriage<->family are so deeply intertwined in pretty much everywhere. 'Sexually active' basically guarantees children, children need stability, so it's 'nuclear family' or bust for the most part, before the pill. An enormous amount of social conditioning is baked into this.
'Working for corporations' is better than 'working in a factory, mine, or on land you don't own' ie serfdom, which would have been the default for most of our ancestors in one way or another.
Undoubtedly, the 'thing we cannot say in public' is that double-working families has had a double effect on the family 1) less time and 2) more acerbically - the cost of living goes up, particularly for property, forcing everyone else into the same 'two workers or risk being be poor' trap.
Playing with the reproductive system (I mean social system, not so much physicality), is really, really dangerous, as I don't think our individual intentions are all that positive - but the silver lining is that the world does have quite a bit of people, and that in many places, we do need to have less kids.
Remember we're living a lot longer now as well.
So at least for the moment, if India and Nigeria can get a grip on fertility ... it has upsides.
The real challenge, and scary things is what this will mean longer term. Once Japan drops to a certain point, will they level out? Or expire?
The primary issues were first increased probability of survival to adulthood (shift focus to raising fewer kids better) and then higher opportunity cost (especially for women who gained opportunities).
Capitalists want to increase their wealth. They have a well defined role in society. Our government is supposed to be a counterbalance to them...but the two have become intertwined, hence the problem.
In my view, the will of the people is not being reflected in the government due to corruption.
America has had tons of immigrants working 24/7 to run a restaurant, a laundry shop, or a drugstore, while putting their kids through school. Most of them weren't forced to come to America or choose such a job: they did it because even maintaining a 24-hour convenience store is less grueling work than planting rice, and they're rejecting their children's "help" because they want their children to study and have even better, more comfortable jobs.
Pre-modern agricultural societies had huge families because there was so much work that you could always use an extra pair of hands. (Also, many of them died off anyway so you had to factor that in.) You are looking at the past with a seriously rose-tinted lens.
Child mortality was huge, fixing that definitely provided a reason to put a break to the child bearing machine. There are still poor parts of the world where that is still the norm but it’s dwindling fast
I have a 2 year old. It was an accident as both I and my wife didn’t want children or weren’t ready. I’ve got to say that it has become the best part of my life and yes it is not easy when you’re looking in from the outside but becoming a parent changes you, you become more resilient, objevtives in life change, etc So, no, children are not a burden unless you make it to be.
It’s wonderful that it’s worked out for you, but I can show you to Facebook support groups of thousands of parents that abhor and regret having children. Children by their very nature are a burden because they can’t care for themselves.
Are we arguing with the very data from this article? Clearly children are not that in demand if the fertility rate is experiencing a “jaw dropping global crash”.
children have been a cornerstone of human life from the start, but you think the outliers on facebook are the norm?
everything the commenter described are not things one would “demand” before having children, but would only experience after having them. honestly, referring to having children as something that would be “in demand” is disgusting to me
Yes, children "in demand" sounds like they are some kind of marketable product, it does sound a bit misguided.
But I don't blame people who don't want to have children, when we are pressured to produce and be as productive as possible, to be the best versions of ourselves, to be always strive to have more and be ever more end always self improve, the place of parenting in one's life has diminished quite a bit. I am glad I did become a parent and in a way I am out of that rat race as my perspective, my goals, my wants, everything has changed and I think for the better.
If your assumption that people are having less children because of a shift of the sense of responsibility in the modern era--then the counter-narrative could then be built that the birthrate could potentially rebound in a future where automation has replaced workers and people's sense of purpose is no longer a product of career motivations.
I don't want kids because it means I'm legally tied to a woman who can take the majority of my income. The bias against men in the court system is a huge turn off.
Not to mention that there is no shortage of people who want to give you parenting advice, especially in schools. I deal with enough politics at work. The last thing I want is to double my burden.
You're refusing to try because you might lose. This is taking a loss by default. It's like a sports team refusing to go onto the field. It counts as a loss.
I have never felt this world was a place to bring children. And I am not alone. I rarely mention my feelings because it runs contrary to most people's stated views. Yet, any time I bring it up I get a minority sharing strong agreement. I'm 55, and I've asked my entire life the question "how can people bring children into this?" My childhood was no more unusual than the typical American Midwest dysfunction, too.
> Children have become more of a burden than a benefit in many ways.
Especially if you are female. Children turn your very nice life into a completely different one and take up an enormous amount of resource.
I would even go a step further that in certain cultures simply getting married turns your life from a very nice thing into something destined for drudgery. Japan is a primary example as the woman is expected to take care of both sets of parents in their old age.
Do you love some man enough to take that on? Or are you better off having sex occasionally and skipping the marriage thing?
> I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
No need. People aren't stupid and can see the consequences of their actions.
Lack of elder care support is probably becoming more crucial than lack of child care support. Children start with their needs at infinity and get more independent on a strict time schedule--elderly get more dependent on an indefinite schedule and their needs go to infinity right before they pass.
Children have become assets of the socio-economic-intellectual monopolies that run countries today; they are barely entities that have any real familial roles or indeed any parochial roles at all.
To paraphrase that kid from Boyhood: who needs robots when you can program humans ?
What would natural even look like in this context?
It was only in the recent history that it was the expectation that your child would live and go on to have greater than replacement number of children. That is evident by the fact that for most of our species history the total population was fairly static.
Pulling nitrogen out of the air and sprinkling it on domestic crops was real "unnatural" but it got us past ~3B
It is one of the factors for sure, but also contraception, education, women emancipation (eg they are unwillig to make 10 kids unlike 100 years ago even in the western world)
No, but since you mention it, it's interesting to note that one of the litmus tests for what constitutes a species is the ability to reproduce.
A state is a three-way bargain between the living, the state, and the unborn. The state imposes all sorts of inconveniences on us---why do we put up with it?
The constitution lists several reasons---common defense, general welfare, and to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"
Imagine, privileging one's own children over someone else's! How aggressively family-ist.
In other words, one of the primary purposes of a state is to act as a vehicle for inheritance.
That's why immigration is not a solution---the point of a state isn't "people," it's our children, specifically. Without that, no one has skin in the game.
Unless you are talking about interplanetary immigration.
OTOH, the real solution is “this projection of current trends into the future is likely to be just as wrong as when people were projecting the rapid rate of global population growth in the 1960s to continue without bound, or even further accelerate”.
These problems are not wide-spread in most underdeveloped countries, even Muslim-majority ones.
I don't want to "whataboutism" here, but to offer a comparison: the US clearly has a problem with police violence, but we don't judge the entire country's population by it.
I am actually "going over there" as I'm currently living in Indonesia, which has more Muslims than any other country. The problem with your previous comment is that you seem to think that everyone in these countries is the same; the very definition of bigotry is judging people by their attributes (such as country of origin) rather than on individual merit.
The people I meet and hang out with is a biased selection for sure, but the vast majority of them would be an asset for most countries because they're smart, well-educated, and generally "good" people.
Other people ... yeah, maybe not so much. But again: judge the individual.
My point is that many Americans, self included, never heard of FGM until immigrants brought it into to our country.
> you seem to think that everyone in these countries is the same
Your words, not mine. Everyone is an individual. I think many of these individuals should fix their own countries before fleeing to mine. They are not the meek and downtrodden. Every one at the university has blown through at least $125K on immigration attorneys for the student visa alone.
> smart, well-educated, and generally "good" people
There is more to being good than calculus and not murdering people. Given the immense purchasing power they would have in their own countries, why aren't they raising up their own instead of fleeing? So many brahmins blowing through half a mil on a 3rd-rate US compsci degree, while people back home don't even have clean water.
Never mind that the United States specifically also has a tradition of male genital mutilation, so ... you know.
Why should I have the personal responsibility to "fix" my county? Just because I happened to be born there? Seems like a weird take; I don't think location of birth imparts any sort of personal responsibility towards the location.
I was able to leave my own country because I didn't like it, why shouldn't other people have this opportunity? Just because someone else does something bad in their country? Meh. Most people I know aren't "fleeing"; they just want to live somewhere else for a while. Most come back as their family etc. is here and they're usually better off with the experience.
Rich people all over the world spend money on rich person's things. That's a very small minority though, and most people are just regular middle-class people (or worse) with middle-class income and jobs.
My Indonesian girlfriend will have a significantly harder time moving to Europe than I have moving to Indonesia for no other reason than her location of birth, even though she has a university degree and arguably a better job than I do.
You were raised to a healthy adulthood, and educated you to a point where you are internationally employable. Your parents/neighbors/society didn't have to do that. There are a lot of places on this earth where mom and pop would have sold you into the sex trade or worse. After all of that, skipping off to Indonesia to get yours just sounds kind of mercenary to me.
Blue collar vs white collar makes no difference. I'm not really interested in bringing more mercenaries to my country. Instead of building-up the place, they will operate just like the paperclip maximizers that employ them: flee to another country as soon as the market changes.
Most immigrants from developing countries migrate for economic reasons, not to escape genital mutiliation, acid attacks or honor killings which aren't very common in most developing countries. The developing world and immigrants aren't as scary as you seem to imagine them to be.
Just having people in your country doesn't equate to economic productivity. Western nations will want highly educated young people doing hard mechanical labor that often takes two decades of training to get proficient at.
And yes, we will reap the most educated and skilled from less developed nations throughout this century. Which.. just condemns said countries to perpetual destitution. If the best and brightest you invested in leave to go to other countries you both have no incentive to invest in them in the first place or you wasted your economic surplus that is needed to progress your society towards becoming industrialized in itself.
The uneducated poor of the world are not useful to industrialized society. Its why every industrializing nation always adopts universal education to at least make capable laborers out of the poor. Its unlikely to change without world powers deciding to be way more altruistic about their economic exploitation of the poorest regions of the planet.
Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. You've been doing it a lot, it's not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and we eventually ban such accounts.
You have to follow the site guidelines whether others do or not. Any other approach would guarantee a downward spiral.
Please don't miss that the issue here is the pattern of comments by your account, not just what it posted in this thread.
It's true that we don't moderate everything. That's because we don't see everything. Flagging the worst comments is helpful, as is emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.
My wife’s theory is that there will be a lot of babies born in about 6 months (9 months after the quarantine started), but only for first time parents. Being quarantined with a child is the absolute best birth control.
It seems like a lot of unmarried couples live together these days. Anecdotally, I know more unmarried couples that live together than I do unmarried couples that live separately, at least if we're talking about the kind of relationship that is anywhere close to "making babies".
pffft. no way. didn't slow us down at all and I got a 10 and 12 year old.
Wife isn't having any more for medical and conscious decision reasons. We just feel that 2 for 2 is plenty a replacement rate for our middle class efforts.
I thought so too, but birth control is so common, day after pill, etc that I don't think it will matter much, unlike the old days. I'd love to be wrong though.
I initially thought this too, but then someone pointed out that people choose to have kids when they feel their life is stable (and safe).
Sure there will be a load of unplanned pregnancies, but a lot of people actively planning their family might choose to wait to see if they have a job/a place to live/are still alive after the pandemic is over.
Apparently there was a similar drop in birth-rate after the 2008 financial crash - people just held back waiting to see what happened before committing to having kids.
In this regard, human psychology is weird. Ask any first time parent of a ~6 month old if they're going to have a second one and the answer will most likely be a resounding "no!".
Then when that baby is ~2 years old, suddenly the pain of delivery, the sleepless nights and the baseless crying seem to be forgotten, and the cycle starts again.
I remember we learned in elementary school, about three hundred years ago when I was a kid, a correlation (or inverse of) between economic prosperity and demographic picture. It was so obvious it even had named phases for it (that we had to learn, which I forgot).. but from vague memory it was along the lines of expansion (when country is poor), stagnation (when well-fed) and immigration (when rich).
There's a new economic model starting to get popular in Europe called the Donut[0][1] according to which after a country reaches a level of maturity, it should stop focusing on growth and switch to stability so as to avoid overshooting.
I feel like bemoaning sub-replacement rate fertility doesn't take into account the exponential growth of automation in post-industrialized economies and how little labor actually needs to be done to maintain the same productivity, let alone how less labor increases productivity in an organization (no numbers there - just an observation from my own work).
Extrapolated to society I'm not really afraid of an aging population of pensioners like Japan several years ago, because 10 years from now we'll be moving further from human controlled economic activity. But who knows if that is going to be a good thing.
I guess what I'm saying is we're going to hit Star Trek or the Matrix
I worry because society has not given us the benefits of increased productivity. We've already massively increased productivity with computerization, but during that same period instead of more leisure time, society has actually demanded MORE working hours (by putting more women to work)
The question is, are those people actually doing useful work which contributes to an increase of happiness or living standards for people?
I'd argue that many don't, and that many work on stuff that doesn't really matter. This includes many programmers, by the way. I've certainly done more than a fair share of meaningless "bullshit" programming work.
It's kind of hard to make a sweeping statement like that.
We're seeing costs and benefits of increased productivity/efficiency. My diet consists of fruits and vegetables that my parents could only buy a few times a year when I was a kid. My grandmother made dresses from potato and flour sacks during the war, and my great grandmother sold jams from homegrown fruits because sugar was rationed. I'm typing this comment on a machine manufactured and assembled halfway around the world, designed 30 miles from where I'm sitting, and last week took a medical test that was developed, tested, manufactured and shipped across the country in weeks.
To say that we don't benefit from increased productivity is not true - those anecdotes are all examples of how rapid industrialization across the globe and improved communications, design, manufacturing, operations, and strategy have quantifiably improved my life as a human.
I also wouldn't say that the boon in productivity demanded more labor. Particularly because the entry of women into the workforce was driven by the Great Inflation (which didn't improve productivity) and the tail end of second wave feminism which had succeeded in changing our society's attitude towards women in the workforce. The decomposition of that barrier in our society begot such productivity in our economy, it didn't respond to the demand for more.
But I agree, we're not getting all the benefits of such productivity. At least not all of us. But that's why UBI is probably the future, because eventually all our jobs are going to be automated.
Sad the amount of technological progress we may be missing out on by this, I rarely see it discussed but I think fertility is important in order for society to be able to maintain a steady course of improvement in science and technology.
The number of individuals with the potential of Albert Einstein (to pick a stereotype) in a given country is not correlated to the total number of people. Standard of living, a stable childhood environment, quality of schooling, modern medicine, economic opportunity, sanitation, are more important to nurture future innovators. A kid working the fields in Angola will probably never reach his full potential, but little Johnny from suburban America probably will.
Does the article actually say population density "causes" lower birth rates? The title says it is a "factor," which is not necessarily a causal relationship.
>However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.
...
>As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.
...
>The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than three billion people by 2100.
We're still looking at a 2billion increase in population while simultaneously 9/10 billion people from least to less developed countries will be consuming more resources as they develop. Mostly through coal and oil.
The current arrangement, where people with planning skills and self control aren't replacing themselves, is a disaster.
And as expected, the propaganda payload is at the end:
Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option."
So to prop-up our sham economy / pension machine for a while longer, we're going to import people who didn't maintain civil society in their own countries, and figured they'd flee to the west rather than stay put and fight the good fight?
Corporate propaganda for infinite 3rd-world labor.
i think the main question is if people want kids but aren’t having them for economic reasons or if they simply don’t want them.
the latter seems fine to me but we still need to solve the problem of paying for the social security ponzi scheme and will have to deal with increased labor costs (which could be a good thing)
Immigration from the same countries that are rapidly improving their own standard of living, and at the same time experiencing their own demographic crashes?
they can also be solved by cutting back benefits. and higher wages isn't neccesarily a "bad thing" that needs to be solved unless you're a major corporation, which is why they are desperate for immigration.
There is a ludicrous amount of wealth in almost every industrialized nation. Every single one has way in excess of the ability to guarantee minimum income to all citizens without exception let alone just a social security equivalent for the elderly. Its just a question of if they will be interested at all in keeping said people alive in the future.
This article is quite exasperated, but doesn't say much. I'm far from an expert in this area, but here's what I've read elsewhere:
We're quickly moving from the population explosion problem to the population implosion problem. No one planned it or made it happen. But, it looks like we're not actually going to overflow the planet with people standing shoulder to shoulder. Instead, the problem we're facing moving forward is a combination of longer lifespans and less children shifting the elderly support structure from a pyramid to a column.
A big driver of this is people moving up in job prospects around the world. Clearly in rich nations like the US, Japan and UK couples are working more and putting off having kids. But, also in the poorer nations people are moving to the cities because that's where the jobs are. Once there, the combination of high rent and great reductions in child mortality means it doesn't make sense any more to have lots of kids hoping that a few survive long enough to work at a young age. Instead of having babies rapidly, women around the world are going to work to bring in that second income needed to pay the bills in the city.
It's great news, really. It's just really scary really great news because we don't know how to set up a society where there aren't enough young people to support the elderly.
this is fantastic news. Yes, we don’t know how to properly adapt yet, but this planet resources are limited and we aren’t good at sharing them.
What worries me is that long term this can be reversed just like current trend is reversing away from population growth. Current trend seems to be driven by job prospects, education and costs of raising kids. But what if in a future we all had basic income? No need to worry about food, shelter or education for your children. Won’t this lead to population growing again?
Why would it? Do you imagine people enjoy raising four kids or more? Children used to be old-age insurance. You needed so many to be certain some of them would survive, thrive, and take care of you in old age. If your needs are met, either through a good pension or UBI, you can have as many kids as you prefer. And by all indications, for most people that's actually around the natural replacement level, or fewer.
> for most people that's actually around the natural replacement level, or fewer.
Not sure where that number comes from. 2.5 is probably closer to the natural trend. Physical constraints (food, disease, etc) limited human expansion previously. The economic constraints that cause a min-max of not having kids will never be A. universal, B. persistent. A couple generations of baby recession won't impact the fate of humanity one bit. Not sure why there's so much faux concern over a fixable (and likely temporary) situation. You give a tax break of 50% on capital gains per child and the kids will be popping from the higher economic rungs.
> You give a tax break of 50% on capital gains per child and the kids will be popping from the higher economic rungs
Of course, with a perversely positive incentive like that. But it tells us nothing of the natural impulse in a neutral environment.
In a lot of the western world there is plenty of support for having kids. Ample child care leave, solid monetary support, free or affordable child care and schooling. And in the countries which have most of this, the birth rate is low but not catastrophically so. (see Germany, the Nordics..)
Whereas in the US and Japan, for example, there are certainly structural factors that now weigh against having kids. But it does not tell us much about the "default state"
This is very interesting, and unexpected at the surface level. Especially with all the doom and gloom we've always been fed about the world population getting out of control, consuming all the resources, polluting the planet into oblivion, etc.
I was expecting to read about medical/health reasons why men and women are literally becoming less fertile, but it's not that. It sounds like it's a side effect of countries/societies advancing technologically and socially. It makes sense, but I just never visualized it like that in my head. Wow, what a great problem to have!
But as you say, it is a problem, just in other ways we might not have considered before. It will be interesting to see how we figure out how to restructure society as the demographics shift. But this seems like it could be a very good thing for the environment, climate change, resource management, etc. Overall, seems like positive new to me!
I fully expect the Indian and Chinese population coming into wealth will go through a period of fairly outrageous conspicuous consumption. I have a hope that it will be fast-forwarded compared to the past 70 years of American history. Hopefully after a decade-long warmup and another decade of settling in, the novelty will wear off and there will be a move away from focusing on "More Stuff!" and toward focusing on "Less Clutter, More Experiences!"
Good thing that high-speed rail and other land transport infrastructure is being built in order to connect the entirety of Eurasia and eventually Africa, with sufficient throughput to feed multiple US economies.
> Hopefully after a decade-long warmup and another decade of settling in, the novelty will wear off and there will be a move away from focusing on "More Stuff!" and toward focusing on "Less Clutter, More Experiences!"
The western world hasn't even moved past that stage, so I highly doubt developing countries will move through it quickly.
These projections do not account for increase in life expectancy. India is projected to peak at 1.7 b, if you consider Indian subcontinent as an entity, it puts the population of South Asia at 2.25 b. Not a good sight when coupled with unreliable climate, water scarcity, unlivable summer temperatures and no direct opportunities which means corruption may lead to feudalism of the yore.
Here are two scary storylines that get discussed pretty regularly here on HN:
a) AI and machine learning will raise productivity so much that they will steal millions of jobs from people.
b) Global population will eventually go into decline, which will crash the economy by killing growth.
But, these two stories look far less scary when considered together. In fact they seem directly complementary, although the timing is not likely to work out perfectly, so it won't necessarily be smooth sailing along the way.
You jest, but the economic effects of all of this are severe. A total regression in the real-estate market (because stagnant demographics means the existing housing stock will roughly suffice or even exceed demand) will have severe effects.
Basically the end to growing demand, and thus essentially an end to growth-orientated capitalism.
Swedish authorities did a study about this for that very reason. The conclusion was that it's unlikely that people will want to move halfway across the World only go get a job changing old peoples' diapers.
My long term prediction is that once the boomers start dying off in droves, we'll face a real estate crisis as their houses flood the market...and many less desirable neighborhoods throughout suburbia will turn into mini ghost towns.
I come from northern Italy and during my relatively brief lifetime (length(life.qubex)>40) I’ve seen this happen to formerly exclusive “Beverly Hills”-type affluent residential areas (and un/gated communities). Enormous, cavernous hangar-sized homes that used to be worth millions of euros now struggling to sell for a couple hundred thousand.
Firstly that has nothing to do with redistribution.
Secondly total cost of living in a major city has gone up, not down, due to rent and realestate. Sure, i can but more polypropyl, bread and stainless steel, but what good is that if i have nowhere to live.
Well we can. Someone owns the robots (or owns shares in the corporation that owns the robots). Just change the tax code to make Social Security tax apply to all income, including capital gains, with no upper limit.
The reason why capital income is not subject to social isurance taxes is because it is fundamentally an insurance scheme. People who earn mostly wages need social insurance in retirement (when they would not be physically able to work), so they (have to) pay it, while people who earn mostly capital income do not need it (as capital income does not depend on personal health / fitness to work).
Therefore extending social insurance taxes to capital income without extending pension payments to capital earners would be unfair. Local politicians tried something similar - remove caps on social insurance, while keeping pensions capped / strongly sublinear, and it was struck down by constitutional court.
Perhaps reasonable solution would be to split pensions to tax-based UBI, and smaller contribution based 'linear' pensions.
C) We will develop anti-aging treatments due to increased funding of SENS and similar projects. Combine that with a universal basic income and robots and you get a much better picture of the future.
Edit: we are also not taking into account artificial gestation methods that may be developed in the next 100 years. In 2120 it may seem as barbaric as child labor and other 19th century atrocities to actually have a woman carry through a pregnancy, not to say that religious fundamentalists will want to continue the practice.
If we are able to keep people alive for much, much longer but don't find a way to make their brains young and elastic again, we're going to be in for a very, very special kind of dystopia.
If AI takes jobs, it doesn't cause wealth to be redistributed, it causes wealth to flow upwards to the person who owns the AI.
That might then be redistributed, but it might also not. Whether it is or isn't is largely up to the people who have the most power. In that system, which group has the most power?
Sure, because the populace had more power than they thought, and they organised. It didn't matter how rich the aristocracy were, they couldn't buy enough loyalty to defend themselves. Down the line you probably will be able to buy a robot army, and robots aren't squishy.
In democratic societies the majority decides how resources are distributed. If they can understand where their interests actually lie it shouldn’t be a problem.
If you put a referendum to the people tomorrow, saying "should we tax billionaires more than other people, and spend it on you," you'd get an overwhelming yes. The fact we don't have policies like that show the majority aren't deciding that distribution.
But you're also assuming society stays democratic. Why would it, if enough power is aggregated at the top? Who's going to stop them if they decide to form a cabal?
Or consider the alternative scenario where population keeps declining but technological advancement doesn't materialize. Which for AI and machine learning could happen soon with another 'AI winter' after people realize only narrow set of opportunities to deploy it.
The stability of society depends on technological progress and more children born in each new generation. Once this global Ponzi scheme reverses there is an incentive to manufacture lies about massive technological progress ahead of us. See buzzwords such as autonomous cars, industry 4.0 or quantum computing.
AI is just one piece of increased productivity. Even without AGI there are paths that could lead to 3x productivity faster than the population would go down by 66%.
There are other issues with an older age distribution which cannot be fixed by productivity though. There could be an oversupply of 5 bedroom homes for example.
Counterpoint: major world problems like climate change are a direct result of having too many people, and more specifically having too many people living unsustainable lifestyles. Worse, a large percentage of the world's population is now moving out of sustainable living into unsustainable living as a result of globalization (as people gain more wealth, they tend to want things like more meat and driving a car).
The net result is that a decreasing population is a good thing for the planet, but a bad thing for economics.
> Counterpoint: major world problems like climate change are a direct result of having too many people
Not exactly. The bottom 85% (in income terms) of the global population contribute very little to unsustainability. There are too many people in OECD countries, perhaps.
> Not all countries will have an overshoot day. By way of the country overshoot equation above, a country will only have an overshoot day if their Ecological Footprint per person is greater than global biocapacity per person (1.63 gha).
There’s a lot of countries not listed, i.e they do not overshoot.
It groups by country rather than income level but, reading between the lines, it seems to me almost certain that the bottom 85% (in income) of people emit more than half of the global total.
BTW it is important to consider that a large fraction of the emissions from countries like China and India are in the service of consumption in wealthy western countries. But, I googled, and even in a famously export-heavy country like China, exports only account for 17% of the GDP.
That is also partly because bottom 50% don't have decent lifestyles. Try commuting for 1.5 hrs in packed local trains in Mumbai and you will definitely wish for a slightly higher carbon footprint in exchange for a better quality of life. Off course, USA standards is unsustainable for the world, but at the least Japanese standards of living are like human rights.
The rapid and massive increase in the number of global middle class is why virtual everything will be important for the planet. If virtual services and experiences become almost as useful and enjoyable as the real world, people will burn less fuel and cause less negative externalities.
(They could be better as well! Even those who enjoy traveling, for example, don’t care for the hassles of airport queuing, getting stuck in sardine-like plane seats, finding laundry places, etc.)
Obviously, real-world experiences necessary for genuine, long-term human connections should remain.
Note: Although the birth rate is falling, the number of global middle class is expected to rise a great deal in the next few decades, largely due to rapid economic development.
The "population implosion" problem is only so because of the economic obligations that will be passed on. I'm actually surprised that the US/UK elite, with their grand history in funding Eugenics research, didn't fund studies that'd portend this uncertain fate - then again may be it's just not published.
are you serious ? UN planned this since the 70' there's policies and support for developing countries at the global scale for implementing birth control
It seems to me that birth control itself was developed for the needs of rich countries. And, the UN pushed it into poor countries because they obviously needed it too. That did help reduce unwanted pregnancies. But, until the reduction in child mortality and the mass move of couples to cities, families were still motivated to intentionally have lots of babies.
Interesting for a variety of reasons but my immediate takeaway is that the world is in a long term deflationary economic trend and any attempts to push against that, however successful in the short run, will fail.
Cash will be king and assets will be sold for pennies on the dollar, so to speak - provided you can remain solvent in the whipsaws and gyrations of the desperate attempts to stave off deflation at any cost.
Social systems are zero sum game between individuals paying in and receiving benefits from them.
Meantime the salaries are stale, salary deductions only increase, and corporations (ehem formally "charities") funnel out billions annually through tax havens and heavens.
In countries where social systems are not that mature and trustworthy (e.g. post-Communist countries) even the most qualified like doctors and engineers pick contracting as a form of the employment to skip contributing to the social systems or to contribute only the minimum required by law.
"Purge of the needy and old", something like in the Bergamo area in Italy this March and April... and marginalization of the homeless and incarcerated like in the US.
My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up.
It worked kind of like this, you have kids, you want them to have as good or better life than you have. If you've defined "better" here as wealth and social status, then you want them to have more opportunities.
Getting them those opportunities (which you may have missed out on) costs money (wealth). Examples, good schools, good nutrition, good after school programs, Etc.
Also, the developing society is putting more social status points on "successful" people (at least outwardly so by their display of wealth) which incentivizes couples to both continue their careers and "success trajectories." That path costs still more because now you have to add day care and possibly a nanny or two to the mix.
Here in the U.S. there is actually an interesting empirical example that supports this, its called foster care fraud. When the state offers to pay money to someone as a foster parent, a small number of people will exploit this by becoming foster parents for many many children to accrue the state benefit for "caring" for them. As an example, it suggests to me that if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly, the result would be larger families.
I would not argue that this "proves" the supposition that child care costs drive down the size of families, but to me it argues that it is likely a large factor in the decision.
> My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up.
I think it is pretty clear that humans (like animals generally) are more likely to adopt K strategy (smaller numbers of offspring with higher investment in each) rather than r strategy (larger numbers of offspring with smaller investment in each) in a stable, secure environment, and that this is structurally favored by the environment.
I wouldn't put much weight on the suggestion that either the number or investment piece drives the other, though.
I don't disagree (someone does though :-)) The argument is that given an expected pool of available wealth K to a couple, and a predicted cost p per offspring. Is O = K / p variable? or constant?
More simply, if you change one and not the other, does the value of O go up and down? The article was trying to look at that question by evaluating K and p and comparing O for different values.
> if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly
It's been tried, many times, without success.[1]
You could argue that those countries didn't try hard enough, but that's a fallacy the name of which escapes me for the moment.
[1] Demographers talk about a "low fertility trap": because young women grow up in a one-child environment, that is normal to them. They see their peers having one child, and they do too.
There are other factors besides re-norming: assortative mating is given a lot of weight; there are the effects of TV, social media, video games, shopping, and other distractions (measured as these things have diffused through countries and regions of countries). Check out a recent demography textbook.
(Fringe authors talk about the estrogen-like effects of obesity on sperm, and the 30% - 50% decline in micronutrients in food since the 1980s. They might be right, but they're fringe at present.)
Cool, as it turns out there are a couple of fairly recent demography texts at the library (2007, 2010) so I'll pick those up this weekend. Thanks for the pointer!
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 393 ms ] threadThere is a strong correlation also with educational levels and birth rates. the more educated the person, means both they are more successful monetarily, and they are less likely to have children, or have only a single child which is less than replacement (every child has 2 parents)
So is large numbers of uneducated people having children that statically will also be uneducated as well a "good" thing for humanity? I dont know have you watched the movie Idiocracy?
Natrually then most people will say "well we just need to educate that generation, get those nations / people educated" , this however does not solve the problem of birth rates because as you educate more and more people, as you bring more and more people to success they will also stop having children. If you reach the utopia where everyone in society has equal levels of education, then it is very likely you will see population crash.
Now technology could solve for that, extended life / extended fertility span for women for example would certainly inverse the population issue.
I don't want people to suffer unnecessarily. But the more people we add to the planet, the more we exacerbate problems with food, water, Co2 emissions, etc.
In the end, something will curtail human population growth. I really hope it's voluntary and painless.
I hope the trend stays like this. It’s not like there are 1000 people left, there are still billions extra
Philosophers have given this a lot of thought: the "repugnant conclusion" is what to Google for.
The problem of sustainably providing nutritious food people want to eat is just one of a dozen that we are not solving at acceptable levels.
You might enjoy Peter Russell's "The Global Brain" for another perspective on human population growth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1sr9x263LM .
> We are straining resources because of our bad policies and practices and politics.
It certainly seems that our carrying capacity could be much greater with sounder policies, practices, and politics.
Almost everyone I know who is really well-off/rich is having several kids. Heck, Elon Musk, who is basically spending his life trying to solve these environmental problems as his multiple businesses, has six!
Why are their social norms and thoughts on this so different from the rest of us?
Instead it's "oh, I'm doing what's right for the environment."
One of these two behaviors is intellectually dishonest. Which one do you think it is?
Aside: Most of the parents that I know are extremely involved in their kids lives, even if they pay for help.
Enough food is already produced right now to feed every person on Earth [1]. Most estimates furthermore put the Earth's carrying capacity at around 2 billion more people than we already have [2].
The problems that people think of when they think of "overpopulation" are the result of insufficient distribution systems, corruption, unconstrained capitalism, faulty human psychology, and poor education. They are problems caused by human beings screwing over their fellow human beings. Some of these problems get easier to solve when you have more people, not fewer, and in any case, nobody's yet figured out how to make things much better in a shrinking economy.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241746569_We_Alread...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Humans
Those religious minorities are quite small right now, but if they manage to sustain their current growth into the coming decades, they may end up being a much more substantial component of the population.
Article points out that it is important to slow it down so decrease is not so rapid, otherwise it will be harsh.
It's easy to slow down the birthrate if country wants it. It's much harder to raise it.
The problem isn't the quantity of those resources, the problem is in distribution. The world is abundant enough to comfortably support twice as many humans, if human inefficiencies, waste, greed and selfishness are factored out.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt...
The economy should adapt not the other way around
Some degree of distribution of wealth and multi generational households would render it tenable again.
This is, overall, splendid news. Commendable this was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The care issue is real, not so much because we need people to look after them, which potentially could be automated, but rather the new generations are the ones paying into the system and funding their pensions.
For instance if you have an asset that appreciates over time and represents true value (say because it generates more income over time) then you can't realize that appreciation if there is no-one to buy that asset from you. That is the marginal effect of having less people.
Interesting...
The only solutions are technology or rationing care.
Retirement financing in general relies on future economic growth for future cashflow. That said, you don't necessarily need a growing population to make it work. If the population declines 15%, but the average worker's productivity goes up 20% during that time, you still come out ahead.
The core unit of the economy is not cash, it's value. Saving roughly corresponds to avoiding consumption and preserving value; in a very basic economy, this would take the form of e.g. preserving grain in a granary rather than eating it all. People or government savings systems that save for retirement are then able to consume the value they saved when they retire; they don't require any value transfer from the working population.
Whether you measure the overage in units of lifetime granaries, or running annual surpluses, is primarily an accounting choice.
As a practical matter, it's impossible for one farmer to save up enough food to span their entire retirement. Storage is an expense, and food goes bad eventually. The concept of a retirement is only possible in a society that transacts value regularly.
Society doesn’t reward you based on the value you produce but based on how much fictional currency you have. This could be entirely granted to you for example in a a lottery and you never produced anything of value.
Think of a reverse Corona virus that only kills the young. Retirees have lots of money but the shops and factories are closed.
Advancements in existing technology just aren’t going to be enough at the timeline we’re looking at. Political change is another non-starter because it just won’t happen on a global scale. Then there’s the fact that for the vast majority of people alive today, the Earth’s condition in 50 or 100 years is rightly not even on their radar.
Unless we have such a population implosion that we can no longer produce food or run our factories, then we don't need to "pay for" anything. We can simply decide to distribute the resources necessary for the care of the old.
The real cost of everything is the labor required to produce it, not the dollar value it receives in a market place. I don't think anyone is talking about a complete collapse in the labor pool.
Edit: I've replied mostly along the lines of the financial costs, but the human service component is by far the largest part of it, that's the main resource consumed.
The source of the panic is the 'exponential growth forever' dingbats being confronted by a reality they don't like.
Its an active and intentional decision not to do so. Unless society collapses and the knowledge of how modern mass production works to produce so much plenty evaporates it will continue to take a tiny percentage of the whole population to provide the resources needed to survive to the rest.
We should be expecting a technological singularity before 2100, not some dystopia where all wealth evaporates and the only people with money left are under 30s who get to work 80 hours a week farming rice for grandma.
Without the young, the house of cards collapses.
In April, energy prices dropped. People stayed at home and read and just didn't mess up. If terrorists did not orchestrate the coordinated burning and looting of hundreds of USA cities, we might have kept it going. No more people telling everyone what to do from far away.
Can't have that.
So now we have to work our lives away again, just so some drunken mob does not cannibalize us from the inside.
Why is population declining? People are awful today. Horrible and cruel to one another. People work each other to death and destroy families without a second thought just for money they spendthrift away. Sharing in service, grief, passing on wealth and knowledge to the next ones up, that's all gone.
Now it's just a world of ogres. If you're kind, you're weak or weird. Everyone's looking to get one over on another. A pack of dogs cheating at cards paying monkeys to fix cars.
In human population, we should be aiming for quality, not quantity. Quality also means diversity.
If higher quantity unavoidably brings a higher proportion of human suffering, then we have no other choice but to promote quality over quantity. I fear for the future of our species. Our evolutionary instinct to multiply combined with the tech we've created is now bringing this planet to the brink.
Everyone wants to exist. But I would rather exist in a positive way, than exist at all.
Without getting into a long spiel, human intelligence appears to actually be extremely limited, compared to a theoretical perfect intelligence, and any explicit actions we may take to enforce "quality over quantity" could end up doing more "harm" than "good" as soon as 1 "move" beyond the furthest move that we're capable of calculating.
IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
Yes, in a way. But with mindfulness, one can choose different thoughts to attach to that innate survival feeling of wanting to exist and multiply. Instead of, 'We need to always multiply / population control is evil', make it, 'We need to create a better world for our species and those around us'.
> IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
Also agreed. I've read the big AI books like Nick Bostrom's and Max Tegmark's. Given their monumental knowledge, the sentiments around population control are not so much about saving so much as managing. More importantly, it's about saving the possibility of AI and superior forms of evolution to arise in the future, which are far more significant than current Homo sapiens.
One way to put this into practice is to choose to adopt a child as your own, instead of producing yet another one. I may do this in my life.
Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing. Existing homeowners will do their damnedest to prop up prices by any means possible, but it can't last forever. Housing prices will crash sooner or later. It will probably happen in each country long before a its population has halved.
Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility in many countries. Who has time to raise kids when they have to work two jobs just to pay rent? But once it becomes more affordable to raise a family, fertility trends are likely to reverse until it a new balance is reached.
This is just one of the many factors that might come into play over the next 80 years that popular predictions about 2100 tend to glance over.
It won't without policy controls, otherwise, housing units will be redeveloped into other uses (including smaller numbers of larger units designed and managed in a way to foster single-family occupancy per unit.)
> Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility.
[citation needed]
If you want a house in Ireland for example, then the country-side is dirt cheap, but if you want one in Dublin or Cork then be prepared to pay through the nose. The situation seems similar in most countries.
I'm not sure what a solution for this will be, but I'm not sure if population decline will be a major contributor.
In quite a few cities you already see quite a lot of housing just left derelict even though there's a housing shortage.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a larger part of the then-old people will want to keep living in the city, as that's where they've been living their entire lives (which differs a bit from today's old population).
I don't know ... it's really hard to predict these things. It could very well be the case that you're right, but personally I wouldn't really bet on population decline significantly reducing the pressure on the housing situation. It seems more of an economical/policy issue to me than a population issue.
No really - trends are real, this is science, and we use them to actually estimate the future, in much the same way we try to do so with climate and other things.
"It will be positive for the environment"
Possibly not true. Low-birth Westerners are already the #1 emitters of Co2 by a margin, so it's not so linear.
" population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, "
Most GDP growth does not come from resource utilisation.
So there are definitly some upsides to less people, but it's also a tremendous risk. Never before in history has this happened naturally, and it's happening fast. This is a 'really big, kind of scary' issue that we have to contend with, and as your points illustrate, there are definitely many facets let alone the social one's.
That is one of the most egregious example of not controlling for confounding factors i can think of.
People with high carbon emissions are in the group having less children. It doesnt follow they would emit less CO2 if they happened to have children.
Except that it does. Literally from the article, they state "women entering the workforce, education jobs etc" - which increases income, and this is 100% correlated to increased consumption of all forms. It's consistent everywhere.
FYI this is the de-facto neoliberal plan (not being conspiratorial here). It's more directly apparent in China's ambitions i.e. Belt and Road: "The stated objectives are "to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets" [1], but it's not like it's their 'new' idea.
The objective of the wealthier nations is to get the remaining 4 Billion people driving cars, eating Cheetos, wearing H&M (fast fashion, ie 'disposable') and living in IKEA (i.e. trendy, but generally low-quality furniture, that can be replaced every several years).
This is effectively 'the plan'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
There is tremendous risk in covering the planet with ourselves and our waste, though; imho the more relevant risk, especially since we're pretty much locked into the pattern now.
If you look at it from much longer term perspective, it's scary because it's happening extremely fast (1 generation) within nations that have reached a certain level of material prosperity and stability.
It's also 'scary' because it's never happened before.
'100 years' when we will really see the effects more globally, is not a 'long time', it's a 'quite a short time'.
We only ever knew 'one natural direction' and though it's exploded since the industrial revolution, it was at least, in normal times, 'up' to the extent the system could support it.
So yes, it's not 'scary' right now, and as you point out, Mother Earth could use a break from all of us. But thinking about the next 'few hundred' years, it's spooky.
Humans have endured and are generally resilient to population fluctuations. We and our industrial societies are not resilient to e.g., significant departure from the Holocene equilibrium[0].
[0] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115
The 'inflection point' you're really looking for is the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
But at least in that capacity - we know what happened: we harnessed energy and could provide for the material wellbeing of huge numbers of people, which can have it's downsides, but it's not all bad. Better 'more' than risking plunging towards nothing.
The 'downward plunge' is happening for somewhat unknown reasons, and it's fast, and we don't know when it's going to stop.
If you put on the afterburners on an airplane, and it goes up faster than expected, that makes sense. But if the airplanes starts falling out of the sky for no reason ... scary.
People who don't want to have a bunch of kids, don't. Does it have to be more complicated than that? Unless everyone makes this decision (which seems unlikely to me although that could just be because I have ten nieces and nephews) it's basically a self-correcting "problem". People who don't reproduce are replaced in the next generation by the offspring of people who do reproduce.
It certainly would improve our chances and reduce the rate at which conditions diverge from the baseline we've experienced for the last ~10,000 years, but it's important to recognize that we would not see meaningful total population reduction until at least 2100 even if the birth rate continued to drop dramatically and disasters claimed several billion lives[0]. There is too much inertia.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1410465111
I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
>This stuff is being pushed from the top.
Is this some kind of Sparta thing? Like you all go up to the top of the mountain and someone pushes Dad off? Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
>It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family
When and where was this? As someone who grew up Catholic it feels like that cut both ways.
To be vaguely serious for longer than I want, my wife and I just had a long, unfun conversation about how hard it is to deal with her mom's dementia and I don't know that we could do anywhere near as well with dealing with it if we didn't have a kid of our own. It's a shitty Ponzi schema, but the alternative is being Shakers.
Access to birth control and abortion, social services and welfare, trends in divorce and family court ... All of these things are top-down forces that create a tapestry heavily influencing human sexuality and the choices men and women make. One only has to look at how different things were 50 or so (or less) years ago before these things were as widespread.
Was the average person happier under these circumstances? That's what should be optimized not keeping things the same for the sake of it
If societal forces can be so effective in limiting women's choices/options, is hard to believe they could have had a hand in expanding them as well?
History goes through many stages of social belief intertwined with social control. In ancient Rome there was a plant that caused abortions and was so popular it went extinct [1]. However also in ancient Rome, Augustus patronized writers like Virgil to help instil "traditional family values" in the Roman population.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
What a bigoted thing to say. Truly the last acceptable prejudice.
It's a profoundly dis-empowering and anti-democratic message, which is of course why a lot of those rich people are happy for you to believe it.
The reality is this: in every instance we know of, making education and birth control available to women (not forcing, just giving them the option) has resulted in declining birth rates and increasing standards of living.
It's really quite inconvenient to be pregnant, to parent a newborn, and to be responsible for a child for 2+ decades. It's very rewarding, but it's also really hard. You don't need a global conspiracy to explain why many women limit or opt against it if given the chance.
The claim that the wealthy are controlling everyone's fertility is as short-sighted as it is parochial.
Given that elsewhere in this thread you explain how this is all the work of a shadow government, the label hardly seems unwarranted.
There is no cabal of They. The "shadow government" thesis is straight-up conspiracy batshit.
Unless you mean the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China who certainly authorized the two-child law just a few years back, but they're not really a shadow government. They're a regular one, just not very transparent.
Ultimately both Chinese communism (via Hegel) and Western feminism (via Wollstonecraft) trace their origins back to the French Revolution, so maybe you are being controlled by Robespierre.
"go read this book which explains my point because I can't explain it well enough to others." is not a convincing argument in the least.
The groups that are still growing are those that oppress women. Islamic countries [1] and ultra-orthodox Jews, especially. Evangelical Christians used to be higher but have now dropped down to the below-replacement US rate.
Teen pregnancies are way down in the US. So are abortions; that's not it.
Nobody really understands why. There's lots of speculation. The decline of religion? Better birth control? Video games? Declining testosterone levels? Fewer people in agriculture?
[1] Fertility rate 2.9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth
[2] Fertility rate 6.2. https://geopoliticalfutures.com/israeli-population-increase-...
[3] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/06/faith-fer...
I can see in my extended family and friends the monetary and general success of those with supportive families (especially those families with multiple brothers) that worked together versus those families that were split apart and did not have someone to rely on. They are in completely different socioeconomic classes now.
Funding cheap ubiquitous birth control on a global scale.
What they haven't realised yet is that this forum is exactly where the aforementioned illuminaATZ# NO CARRIER
First, a top dictating human sexuality is hilarious to read out of context. Also somewhat accurate.
Anyway, I don't think they mean there is a concrete system designed to keep people from reproducing. It's more of a feedback loop where the richest people in the world get concerned about things like global warming, overpopulation, and whatever else risks their way of life and so they use their social capital to dictate ideas and ideals that protect them. They can do this with things like think tanks or social media influencers or whatever. It's not some highly organized psyop but it's effective because they have so much economic influence.
There is a cultural elite, who’s effect has been so profound, they have led you to believe that such a cultural norm as we enjoy today was inevitable and have convinced the world that taking a perfectly healthy reproductive system and making it dysfunctional is “healthcare”.
There is no cultural elite brainwashing me into believe otherwise. I can arrive at this position all on my lonesome, simply by rejecting the appalling prejudices of the Catholic church (and many other religions), misogynists in general, and bigoted authoritarians (but I repeat myself); both on the basis of the crushing harm they have inflicted over the centuries, and the colossal waste of talent due to the systematic oppression of women.
As for this:
> the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual
That depends who you read. If your selectively chosen history of the last 6,000 years consists entirely of texts written by and/or documenting the fun police, I can see how you might arrive at this conclusion. On the other hand, there have always been voices otherwise. Until the Enlightenment they tended to be pilloried and/or executed, but that doesn't exactly highlight the hypocrisy in charge as something to be desired, rather something to be abandoned.
Again, unless you are amongst them.
edit: poking around, this seems to be some reference to an American college commencement speech. I'm not an American, so I didn't get the cultural allusion, sorry.
Point of fact, I don't swim in your water at all. Any assumptions you may choose to make about the cultural perspective, skin colour, second language, religious tradition(s), countr(ies) of birth/residence/affiliation/upbringing, nationality of parents and/or in-laws, immigration status, education, newspaper subscriptions, food and musical preferences, or political leanings influencing my worldview are likely flat wrong.
Contraception is not dysfunction, and this is neither a parochial, nor (what-americans-call-"liberal") liberal assertion.
And they failed also because non stigmatized contraception lowers teenage pregnancies and make aids spread less. Meaning it actually solves societal problems.
Inability to control pregnancy means less heath, particularly for women and small children.
New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."
It's economics, plain and simple. Of course there's a "top" and the "top" does dictate the structure. If you doubt that, ask: what percent of your income do you pay in taxes, and what percent of his income does your CEO pay in taxes (assuming you work at a typical bigcorp)?
I'm not saying that "yolo all the way to carrying capacity -- and beyond!" would be a better policy, but it clearly used to be the policy and isn't anymore. Personally, I think we dodged a big bullet and took a little one. The "little" bullet is still going to hurt quite a bit, though.
But I'd also hesitate to call it "top-down" influence. That would drastically downplay the autonomy we have in first-world countries. Nobody is forced to prioritize their career over everything else. In most countries, I'd say it's the complete opposite - tax incentives and benefits are usually structured to encourage child-rearing.
It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
Aside from tying healthcare to employment in the USA, what systemic issues are there?
> Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
Yet birthrates decrease with income - lower income households have higher birthrates [0]. This suggests that a lower fertility rate is indeed a choice, rather than economic necessity.
[0] - US statistics, but this is broadly the same across the world https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
top down to me equal some secret cabal of people that push an agenda
systemic to me means the way the system is but how the system got that way would be the random inputs of thousands or even millions of individual and uncoordinated actions.
People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families. In fact the largest families in the modern world come from the people with the least amount of money (not judging, just stating what I've read). So having a paycheck looks like it has the opposite effect of encouraging family. No I'm not arguing that we should therefore get less pay. Just arguing against that idea that if everyone had a paycheck large enough to support a bigger family that they'd start having bigger families.
> People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families.
Different eras, different issues. In agrarian times a large family was an investment in future labor, and as a retirement/continuity strategy. In modern society, adding children is a significant expense, and with the easy availability of birth control, it's far more of a choice. In both cases, people were following the rational incentives that society has created for them.
We can argue about whether the current economic circumstances are random or top-down, but in either case, if you change the incentives for having kids (universal healthcare, affordable childcare, food/housing security, etc.) then you will get more kids.
That, in my opinion, is taken for granted more than anything else.
I do not agree with that. In my opinion, technology advancements (say, driverless cars) will make reduce the amount of young people needed to support for older people.
What is more concerning is loneliness, but maybe VR NPCs or something.
Obviously that won’t happen overnight, but it could definitely happen gradually.
My calculus is not at all that society will support me. In fact, it’s the opposite. I anticipate no support from society, but I also don’t want to burden my family or society so I hope to be able to go out on my own terms once I am no longer self sufficient.
To the best of my knowledge, the correlation is somewhat negative--that is, rich people have lower average birth rates than poor people.
How can it be economics "plain and simple" if even people who can easily afford to raise large families choose not to? Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan could afford more kids than the Duggars. But they have two.
You forget that old calculus also included "Eh it's barely worth learning their names until they're 5 years old".
In 1900 child mortality under 5 was 35%! In 1800 it was almost 40%. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality#/media/File:Gl...
You needed 3 babies just to make 2 toddlers. Let alone adults.
Anecdotally: I've had multiple discussions with employed, unburdened men and women (particularly women) in their mid 20s who have decided not to have children for one reason: Climate change.
The planet is collapsing. Our children are likely to die of hunger, disease, or warfare as things become more destabilized over the next 50 years.
We don't believe their lives will be better than ours, and we don't want to further deplete humanity's scant resources.
From this perspective, having children is selfish.
It may help you to travel. Some time in other continents made us realize -- we have plenty of people already. The planet will do just fine without one or three more from us.
I know many would consider it a ridiculous argument but I find your label of selfishness similar.
At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids. If you do have them, the trade is that you will always be financially drained. Somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Very few will ever acquire equity in anything.
The American Dream is now working until you're 70, supporting 2 kids through college, building equity in your house, then reverse-mortgaging your property to hopefully cover your final years.
You could argue that it's an organic evolution of our profit-driven system, but that system only exists because it's what the owner-class is pushing.
Either we should accept that having children is a hobby for the rich and find other meaningful ways to live our lives, or we should have radical changes in society to increase family sizes.
I politely disagree, the childcare support and social services you have in Europe are not an incentive in anyway, for the large majority of countries here, they are a mitigation at best.
The majority of young europeans in fertile age, continue to struggle with housing costs (high rents high down payments) and salaries not in line with COL until far too late in their careers, if not indefinitely. Those two are the major drivers for 'post-poning' having children in IMHO.
As for the rest of Europe, sure, housing is expensive and all that, but people have more discretionary income now than ever, after housing and daily necessities (at least as far as I can recall from economics classes). But I do think young people's expectations have shifted as well, which makes it feel like we've got less headroom for a bunch of kids. And we certainly don't have the safe, well-paying jobs our boomer parents often lucked into.
> How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college?
College costs money. The incentives with government backed student debt has inflated that cost dramatically. This wasn't some scheme to tax parents. It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
> Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
Again, because insuring more people costs more money. Whether you're adding a child or a spouse, more insurance coverage ought to equate to higher premiums. That the economics of how insurance works. Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
> The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids.
The system does disincentive having kids but that doesn't at all imply the system was intentionally designed to do so. (A) kids cost money and that is by definition a disincentive and (B) some policies like college loans were not setup to cause this disincentive. They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
> It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
Do you really think that's unsolvable? That "bad policy" is corruption. That tuition inflation could be capped.
> Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
You would think we would all want to educate, insure, and support the next generation. Maybe some costs should be shared?
> They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
I know you're saying this unironically, but please consider that a system which allows an 18 year old to sign up to accrue tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of debt over 4+ years with no guarantee that they will be able to pay it back... well, maybe that's just not a system we should have built. You know who would love to build that system? Probably the recipients of the 18 year old's borrowed funds.
I have friends that are engineers in various fields, college educated, career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses and paying down their college debts.
It's no problem though, they just have to keep working and it's all fine. Unless they can't work for some reason, then they've got a big problem.
"career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses"
That just isn't going to work. It can't. By law in most places, the ratio of childcare workers to children is limited. The work simply doesn't scale. Suppose the ratio is 1:4, and there is a 100% markup on the wages to pay for stuff like the building. Sending 4 kids will thus cost the pay of two workers. Dividing down, just 2 kids will cost as much as the typical parent might earn.
Birthrate declines as a society becomes more prosperous and women gain control over their reproductive rights.
In fact, the correlation is the opposite of what you said; wealthier people have fewer kids than poor people in almost every country. Your suggestion that people decide not to have kids because they can't afford them is not supported by the data; those who can most afford the kids have the fewest.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
> Most billionaires have three or more children, the GoCompare analysis found. Among them, 5% had no children, 9% had one child, 23% had two children, 25% had three children, 17% had four children and 21% had five or more. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has four children, and Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of the luxury goods empire LVMH, has five. [1]
So if you're a billionaire, you're having lots of kids, but if you're making 200k/yr you're having fewer kids. It makes sense to me.
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/weird-things-top-billionaires...
Just follow orders, end up burning alive in the WTC or kidnapped in some horrible foreign job site or just being forgotten.
Covid: Young people who should be starting families are sidelined. China: Amoral lawyers want to be millionaires and take bribes. Your boss at the very top wants to kill Americans. Immigration: Want to give boss feedback? Great. Hey, train your new H1B replacement.
A complete hostility to anyone else. Nothing except selfishness. Earning just one dollar is a 100% cut throat affair. You really don't know it until you get hit hard, how little people care about you if you die as long as they make a few bucks. Make something, prepare to have every little dirty trick thrown at you until you die in prison.
People became leaders decades ago because they were just willing to do anything and debase themselves. We used to be your neighbors and family. You turned your backs on us. Won with every dirty trick you can think of. Now we're just a waste byproduct or something to churn for money. Not urbanization. You. The hell you made. I hope the mob kills you all through many bumps and bruises and broken bones. True nature will go for your throat. As you die in your sewer, you will see the paradise of my world, your sunset, because I stayed true.
Starting a family used to be the first thing you did, but now it’s more of the capstone that one could easily not burden themselves with after all of life’s bullshit.
We are psychologically and financially exhausting a generation.
I don't blame people that want to look the other way...it's not a pleasant sight.
If you view the purpose of your life through a purely hedonist lens, sure. If you view the purpose of your life as being a member of an unbroken chain going back to the very first living cell, with an incredible legacy to uphold and protect, the burden is really just a masked joy.
That's my take anyway.
The main retort to this is, what about all those people who have a gnawing pain of loneliness. Well, with fewer people that pressed to find a partner, local community engagement is down. This forces dating online which results in people screening, judging and not taking chances, leading to a low success rate. This is not a consequence of a lack of social skills. When people engage in person, there are multiple interactions that occur which are not judgemental (in dating terms), leading to more opportunities for people to see the interesting bits in others.
Yeah... I'm not so sure about that. My bet would be on easy access to porn, entertainment, and social media resulting in less in person social interaction.
Most people aren't thinking about the ROI of their kids, that ironically is a pretty modern twist.
Birth Control is way, overwhelmingly the #1 issue, so far ahead of anything else. Condoms and 'the pill' are a very new phenom. Imagine before them, when every sexual act had a pretty high change of pregnancy. And then it's easy to understand how sex<->marriage<->family are so deeply intertwined in pretty much everywhere. 'Sexually active' basically guarantees children, children need stability, so it's 'nuclear family' or bust for the most part, before the pill. An enormous amount of social conditioning is baked into this.
'Working for corporations' is better than 'working in a factory, mine, or on land you don't own' ie serfdom, which would have been the default for most of our ancestors in one way or another.
Undoubtedly, the 'thing we cannot say in public' is that double-working families has had a double effect on the family 1) less time and 2) more acerbically - the cost of living goes up, particularly for property, forcing everyone else into the same 'two workers or risk being be poor' trap.
Playing with the reproductive system (I mean social system, not so much physicality), is really, really dangerous, as I don't think our individual intentions are all that positive - but the silver lining is that the world does have quite a bit of people, and that in many places, we do need to have less kids.
Remember we're living a lot longer now as well.
So at least for the moment, if India and Nigeria can get a grip on fertility ... it has upsides.
The real challenge, and scary things is what this will mean longer term. Once Japan drops to a certain point, will they level out? Or expire?
Hopefully we can work it out.
The primary issues were first increased probability of survival to adulthood (shift focus to raising fewer kids better) and then higher opportunity cost (especially for women who gained opportunities).
In my view, the will of the people is not being reflected in the government due to corruption.
Pre-modern agricultural societies had huge families because there was so much work that you could always use an extra pair of hands. (Also, many of them died off anyway so you had to factor that in.) You are looking at the past with a seriously rose-tinted lens.
Are we arguing with the very data from this article? Clearly children are not that in demand if the fertility rate is experiencing a “jaw dropping global crash”.
everything the commenter described are not things one would “demand” before having children, but would only experience after having them. honestly, referring to having children as something that would be “in demand” is disgusting to me
Not to mention that there is no shortage of people who want to give you parenting advice, especially in schools. I deal with enough politics at work. The last thing I want is to double my burden.
Especially if you are female. Children turn your very nice life into a completely different one and take up an enormous amount of resource.
I would even go a step further that in certain cultures simply getting married turns your life from a very nice thing into something destined for drudgery. Japan is a primary example as the woman is expected to take care of both sets of parents in their old age.
Do you love some man enough to take that on? Or are you better off having sex occasionally and skipping the marriage thing?
> I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
No need. People aren't stupid and can see the consequences of their actions.
Lack of elder care support is probably becoming more crucial than lack of child care support. Children start with their needs at infinity and get more independent on a strict time schedule--elderly get more dependent on an indefinite schedule and their needs go to infinity right before they pass.
To paraphrase that kid from Boyhood: who needs robots when you can program humans ?
It was only in the recent history that it was the expectation that your child would live and go on to have greater than replacement number of children. That is evident by the fact that for most of our species history the total population was fairly static.
Pulling nitrogen out of the air and sprinkling it on domestic crops was real "unnatural" but it got us past ~3B
I hear zoos have trouble getting pandas to mate. Why don't they just add some polar bears, or leopards, or even rabbits?
What do you think the pandas would say if they could talk?
A state is a three-way bargain between the living, the state, and the unborn. The state imposes all sorts of inconveniences on us---why do we put up with it?
The constitution lists several reasons---common defense, general welfare, and to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"
Imagine, privileging one's own children over someone else's! How aggressively family-ist.
In other words, one of the primary purposes of a state is to act as a vehicle for inheritance.
That's why immigration is not a solution---the point of a state isn't "people," it's our children, specifically. Without that, no one has skin in the game.
Because of the word “global”.
Unless you are talking about interplanetary immigration.
OTOH, the real solution is “this projection of current trends into the future is likely to be just as wrong as when people were projecting the rapid rate of global population growth in the 1960s to continue without bound, or even further accelerate”.
Sure as long as they aren't chest bursters
Perhaps the new Soviet man will be free of ethno-centrism, but until then, we have to deal with the flawed people that we have.
I don't want to "whataboutism" here, but to offer a comparison: the US clearly has a problem with police violence, but we don't judge the entire country's population by it.
The people I meet and hang out with is a biased selection for sure, but the vast majority of them would be an asset for most countries because they're smart, well-educated, and generally "good" people.
Other people ... yeah, maybe not so much. But again: judge the individual.
> you seem to think that everyone in these countries is the same
Your words, not mine. Everyone is an individual. I think many of these individuals should fix their own countries before fleeing to mine. They are not the meek and downtrodden. Every one at the university has blown through at least $125K on immigration attorneys for the student visa alone.
> smart, well-educated, and generally "good" people
There is more to being good than calculus and not murdering people. Given the immense purchasing power they would have in their own countries, why aren't they raising up their own instead of fleeing? So many brahmins blowing through half a mil on a 3rd-rate US compsci degree, while people back home don't even have clean water.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/02/fgm-happened...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-religion-fgm/us-woman...
Never mind that the United States specifically also has a tradition of male genital mutilation, so ... you know.
Why should I have the personal responsibility to "fix" my county? Just because I happened to be born there? Seems like a weird take; I don't think location of birth imparts any sort of personal responsibility towards the location.
I was able to leave my own country because I didn't like it, why shouldn't other people have this opportunity? Just because someone else does something bad in their country? Meh. Most people I know aren't "fleeing"; they just want to live somewhere else for a while. Most come back as their family etc. is here and they're usually better off with the experience.
Rich people all over the world spend money on rich person's things. That's a very small minority though, and most people are just regular middle-class people (or worse) with middle-class income and jobs.
My Indonesian girlfriend will have a significantly harder time moving to Europe than I have moving to Indonesia for no other reason than her location of birth, even though she has a university degree and arguably a better job than I do.
Blue collar vs white collar makes no difference. I'm not really interested in bringing more mercenaries to my country. Instead of building-up the place, they will operate just like the paperclip maximizers that employ them: flee to another country as soon as the market changes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And yes, we will reap the most educated and skilled from less developed nations throughout this century. Which.. just condemns said countries to perpetual destitution. If the best and brightest you invested in leave to go to other countries you both have no incentive to invest in them in the first place or you wasted your economic surplus that is needed to progress your society towards becoming industrialized in itself.
The uneducated poor of the world are not useful to industrialized society. Its why every industrializing nation always adopts universal education to at least make capable laborers out of the poor. Its unlikely to change without world powers deciding to be way more altruistic about their economic exploitation of the poorest regions of the planet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't miss that the issue here is the pattern of comments by your account, not just what it posted in this thread.
It's true that we don't moderate everything. That's because we don't see everything. Flagging the worst comments is helpful, as is emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.
It seems like a lot of unmarried couples live together these days. Anecdotally, I know more unmarried couples that live together than I do unmarried couples that live separately, at least if we're talking about the kind of relationship that is anywhere close to "making babies".
https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/8whym9/rising_propo...
https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/bbimot/share_of_you...
https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ct33wa/neet_rate_in...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/8vriuq/share_of_pe...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gplbtg/share_of_yo...
Wife isn't having any more for medical and conscious decision reasons. We just feel that 2 for 2 is plenty a replacement rate for our middle class efforts.
Sure there will be a load of unplanned pregnancies, but a lot of people actively planning their family might choose to wait to see if they have a job/a place to live/are still alive after the pandemic is over.
Apparently there was a similar drop in birth-rate after the 2008 financial crash - people just held back waiting to see what happened before committing to having kids.
Then when that baby is ~2 years old, suddenly the pain of delivery, the sleepless nights and the baseless crying seem to be forgotten, and the cycle starts again.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhcrbcg8HBw
Extrapolated to society I'm not really afraid of an aging population of pensioners like Japan several years ago, because 10 years from now we'll be moving further from human controlled economic activity. But who knows if that is going to be a good thing.
I guess what I'm saying is we're going to hit Star Trek or the Matrix
I'd argue that many don't, and that many work on stuff that doesn't really matter. This includes many programmers, by the way. I've certainly done more than a fair share of meaningless "bullshit" programming work.
We're seeing costs and benefits of increased productivity/efficiency. My diet consists of fruits and vegetables that my parents could only buy a few times a year when I was a kid. My grandmother made dresses from potato and flour sacks during the war, and my great grandmother sold jams from homegrown fruits because sugar was rationed. I'm typing this comment on a machine manufactured and assembled halfway around the world, designed 30 miles from where I'm sitting, and last week took a medical test that was developed, tested, manufactured and shipped across the country in weeks.
To say that we don't benefit from increased productivity is not true - those anecdotes are all examples of how rapid industrialization across the globe and improved communications, design, manufacturing, operations, and strategy have quantifiably improved my life as a human.
I also wouldn't say that the boon in productivity demanded more labor. Particularly because the entry of women into the workforce was driven by the Great Inflation (which didn't improve productivity) and the tail end of second wave feminism which had succeeded in changing our society's attitude towards women in the workforce. The decomposition of that barrier in our society begot such productivity in our economy, it didn't respond to the demand for more.
But I agree, we're not getting all the benefits of such productivity. At least not all of us. But that's why UBI is probably the future, because eventually all our jobs are going to be automated.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503981?seq=1
To me that seems like a natural feedback loop. Once population declines to a certain level people will want to have more kids.
>However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.
...
>As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.
...
>The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than three billion people by 2100.
We're still looking at a 2billion increase in population while simultaneously 9/10 billion people from least to less developed countries will be consuming more resources as they develop. Mostly through coal and oil.
And as expected, the propaganda payload is at the end:
Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option."
So to prop-up our sham economy / pension machine for a while longer, we're going to import people who didn't maintain civil society in their own countries, and figured they'd flee to the west rather than stay put and fight the good fight?
Corporate propaganda for infinite 3rd-world labor.
I suppose people don't plan that far anymore.
the latter seems fine to me but we still need to solve the problem of paying for the social security ponzi scheme and will have to deal with increased labor costs (which could be a good thing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...
We're quickly moving from the population explosion problem to the population implosion problem. No one planned it or made it happen. But, it looks like we're not actually going to overflow the planet with people standing shoulder to shoulder. Instead, the problem we're facing moving forward is a combination of longer lifespans and less children shifting the elderly support structure from a pyramid to a column.
A big driver of this is people moving up in job prospects around the world. Clearly in rich nations like the US, Japan and UK couples are working more and putting off having kids. But, also in the poorer nations people are moving to the cities because that's where the jobs are. Once there, the combination of high rent and great reductions in child mortality means it doesn't make sense any more to have lots of kids hoping that a few survive long enough to work at a young age. Instead of having babies rapidly, women around the world are going to work to bring in that second income needed to pay the bills in the city.
It's great news, really. It's just really scary really great news because we don't know how to set up a society where there aren't enough young people to support the elderly.
What worries me is that long term this can be reversed just like current trend is reversing away from population growth. Current trend seems to be driven by job prospects, education and costs of raising kids. But what if in a future we all had basic income? No need to worry about food, shelter or education for your children. Won’t this lead to population growing again?
Not sure where that number comes from. 2.5 is probably closer to the natural trend. Physical constraints (food, disease, etc) limited human expansion previously. The economic constraints that cause a min-max of not having kids will never be A. universal, B. persistent. A couple generations of baby recession won't impact the fate of humanity one bit. Not sure why there's so much faux concern over a fixable (and likely temporary) situation. You give a tax break of 50% on capital gains per child and the kids will be popping from the higher economic rungs.
Of course, with a perversely positive incentive like that. But it tells us nothing of the natural impulse in a neutral environment.
In a lot of the western world there is plenty of support for having kids. Ample child care leave, solid monetary support, free or affordable child care and schooling. And in the countries which have most of this, the birth rate is low but not catastrophically so. (see Germany, the Nordics..)
Whereas in the US and Japan, for example, there are certainly structural factors that now weigh against having kids. But it does not tell us much about the "default state"
I was expecting to read about medical/health reasons why men and women are literally becoming less fertile, but it's not that. It sounds like it's a side effect of countries/societies advancing technologically and socially. It makes sense, but I just never visualized it like that in my head. Wow, what a great problem to have!
But as you say, it is a problem, just in other ways we might not have considered before. It will be interesting to see how we figure out how to restructure society as the demographics shift. But this seems like it could be a very good thing for the environment, climate change, resource management, etc. Overall, seems like positive new to me!
Which is still true, if the billion Indians and Billion Chinese start having American lifestyles, that is just not sustainable for the planet.
I don’t see any environmental reprieve short of drastic reductions in consumptions, including travel.
The western world hasn't even moved past that stage, so I highly doubt developing countries will move through it quickly.
That's inaccurate. The study in the link, which has those predictions:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
See the Mortality section.
Yes, India will peak at 1.7 billion, but then begin to decrease. That peak happens in 2050, which is closer to our 2020 than 2100.
a) AI and machine learning will raise productivity so much that they will steal millions of jobs from people.
b) Global population will eventually go into decline, which will crash the economy by killing growth.
But, these two stories look far less scary when considered together. In fact they seem directly complementary, although the timing is not likely to work out perfectly, so it won't necessarily be smooth sailing along the way.
Basically the end to growing demand, and thus essentially an end to growth-orientated capitalism.
Alas, the PDF seems to have been taken off-line.
Secondly total cost of living in a major city has gone up, not down, due to rent and realestate. Sure, i can but more polypropyl, bread and stainless steel, but what good is that if i have nowhere to live.
It's called “taxing capital” and we can (logically; whether we have the political will is a different question.)
Therefore extending social insurance taxes to capital income without extending pension payments to capital earners would be unfair. Local politicians tried something similar - remove caps on social insurance, while keeping pensions capped / strongly sublinear, and it was struck down by constitutional court.
Perhaps reasonable solution would be to split pensions to tax-based UBI, and smaller contribution based 'linear' pensions.
Edit: we are also not taking into account artificial gestation methods that may be developed in the next 100 years. In 2120 it may seem as barbaric as child labor and other 19th century atrocities to actually have a woman carry through a pregnancy, not to say that religious fundamentalists will want to continue the practice.
That might then be redistributed, but it might also not. Whether it is or isn't is largely up to the people who have the most power. In that system, which group has the most power?
If an AI is self-improving, why should it have an owner?
If AI improved itself, who owns the copyright?
But you're also assuming society stays democratic. Why would it, if enough power is aggregated at the top? Who's going to stop them if they decide to form a cabal?
The stability of society depends on technological progress and more children born in each new generation. Once this global Ponzi scheme reverses there is an incentive to manufacture lies about massive technological progress ahead of us. See buzzwords such as autonomous cars, industry 4.0 or quantum computing.
There are other issues with an older age distribution which cannot be fixed by productivity though. There could be an oversupply of 5 bedroom homes for example.
The net result is that a decreasing population is a good thing for the planet, but a bad thing for economics.
Not exactly. The bottom 85% (in income terms) of the global population contribute very little to unsustainability. There are too many people in OECD countries, perhaps.
Is that true? What percent do they contribute?
https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days...
> Not all countries will have an overshoot day. By way of the country overshoot equation above, a country will only have an overshoot day if their Ecological Footprint per person is greater than global biocapacity per person (1.63 gha).
There’s a lot of countries not listed, i.e they do not overshoot.
A person's ecological footprint is a multifaceted thing for which I think a single number cannot necessarily provide a very meaningful summary.
But here's some other data, that considers only CO2 emissions: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
It groups by country rather than income level but, reading between the lines, it seems to me almost certain that the bottom 85% (in income) of people emit more than half of the global total.
BTW it is important to consider that a large fraction of the emissions from countries like China and India are in the service of consumption in wealthy western countries. But, I googled, and even in a famously export-heavy country like China, exports only account for 17% of the GDP.
They are going to dominate unsustainability in the next few decades.
More coal fired power plants were built in Africa in the last decade than all other continents combined.
(They could be better as well! Even those who enjoy traveling, for example, don’t care for the hassles of airport queuing, getting stuck in sardine-like plane seats, finding laundry places, etc.)
Obviously, real-world experiences necessary for genuine, long-term human connections should remain.
Note: Although the birth rate is falling, the number of global middle class is expected to rise a great deal in the next few decades, largely due to rapid economic development.
It seems to me that birth control itself was developed for the needs of rich countries. And, the UN pushed it into poor countries because they obviously needed it too. That did help reduce unwanted pregnancies. But, until the reduction in child mortality and the mass move of couples to cities, families were still motivated to intentionally have lots of babies.
Cash will be king and assets will be sold for pennies on the dollar, so to speak - provided you can remain solvent in the whipsaws and gyrations of the desperate attempts to stave off deflation at any cost.
Meantime the salaries are stale, salary deductions only increase, and corporations (ehem formally "charities") funnel out billions annually through tax havens and heavens.
In countries where social systems are not that mature and trustworthy (e.g. post-Communist countries) even the most qualified like doctors and engineers pick contracting as a form of the employment to skip contributing to the social systems or to contribute only the minimum required by law.
How long more is this sustainable?
My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up.
It worked kind of like this, you have kids, you want them to have as good or better life than you have. If you've defined "better" here as wealth and social status, then you want them to have more opportunities.
Getting them those opportunities (which you may have missed out on) costs money (wealth). Examples, good schools, good nutrition, good after school programs, Etc.
Also, the developing society is putting more social status points on "successful" people (at least outwardly so by their display of wealth) which incentivizes couples to both continue their careers and "success trajectories." That path costs still more because now you have to add day care and possibly a nanny or two to the mix.
Here in the U.S. there is actually an interesting empirical example that supports this, its called foster care fraud. When the state offers to pay money to someone as a foster parent, a small number of people will exploit this by becoming foster parents for many many children to accrue the state benefit for "caring" for them. As an example, it suggests to me that if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly, the result would be larger families.
I would not argue that this "proves" the supposition that child care costs drive down the size of families, but to me it argues that it is likely a large factor in the decision.
I think it is pretty clear that humans (like animals generally) are more likely to adopt K strategy (smaller numbers of offspring with higher investment in each) rather than r strategy (larger numbers of offspring with smaller investment in each) in a stable, secure environment, and that this is structurally favored by the environment.
I wouldn't put much weight on the suggestion that either the number or investment piece drives the other, though.
More simply, if you change one and not the other, does the value of O go up and down? The article was trying to look at that question by evaluating K and p and comparing O for different values.
It's been tried, many times, without success.[1]
You could argue that those countries didn't try hard enough, but that's a fallacy the name of which escapes me for the moment.
[1] Demographers talk about a "low fertility trap": because young women grow up in a one-child environment, that is normal to them. They see their peers having one child, and they do too.
There are other factors besides re-norming: assortative mating is given a lot of weight; there are the effects of TV, social media, video games, shopping, and other distractions (measured as these things have diffused through countries and regions of countries). Check out a recent demography textbook.
(Fringe authors talk about the estrogen-like effects of obesity on sperm, and the 30% - 50% decline in micronutrients in food since the 1980s. They might be right, but they're fringe at present.)