I feel like there's a male birth control on the horizon every year for the last ten years. This one hasn't hit human trials yet so no point getting excited.
They tried monkeys already. Worked perfectly btw. You're welcome to volunteer for the human trials to spare the poor animals, I would except that I really really don't want to.
There is Trestolone which is studied and shown to be very effective (patients had zero sperm in their ejaculate after several months of administering the compound), but there are hormonal side effects similar to testosterone, which kind of explains why it's pretty much only used in the bodybuilding community.
The pill in the article is a non-hormonal one, which is interesting
This one requires two injections right into the most awkward bit of ye old twig and berries, the first to numb the pain from the second. Afterwards you walk around sore with a swollen scrotum for a week.
Doesn't seem that perplexing. Unless you're into that sort of thing, not that there is anything wrong with that..
Vasalgel (a.k.a. RISUG) may not be for everyone, but even 1% of the male population would be a gigantic market, and yet RISUG never found corporate backing (it's been around for 40 years).
I've been waiting for this for more than 10 years now, ever since I've learned about it.
Have you ever read about what it's like to get an IUD inserted? I would recommend checking that out and then asking whether a small injection to the genitals is really the worst possibility.
I'm sure nothing could be worse. You're welcome to volunteer to get either procedure, both, or neither. I would recommend elective medical procedures stay optional.
An ex-gf of mine gently flicked my gonads once without warning, that was no picnic either. Luckily, just like an IUD, it isn't mandatory. Horses for courses.
IUDs are a thing for women and what you are describing sounds similar to the experience putting in or taking out an IUD is according to some women who described it to me.
I don't know how long the injections last but if they last a similar time as IUDs. I think this would be acceptable. But maybe there aren't enough men that are willing to get birth control like this, to market this product. The incentive for women to take birth control is much higher after all.
Injections into the penis are probably a non starter for a lot of people. I had a vasectomy, so I don't have anything to worry about now but I'd choose a pill over a shot any day, no matter how frequent. Also, being able to stop taking a pill whenever I want is a benefit. Had I not already chosen a permanent path, I'd sign up for a trial today.
I think it's impossible to compare these things accurately but women have been taking the pill for more than half a century. It's been proven to be relatively safe and reliable for most people. Something for men would be great but I'm certainly not going to risk future fertility with something that new and untested, particularly when my partner has a much more tested and safe alternative. On top of that, men have a very simple, effective, and safe option available - condoms. They have their own downsides but they don't outweigh the risk, pain, and anxiety of an injection in the scrotum.
I would think that the pill, both the men's and the women's version, would be imminently more preferable to an injection any day of the week? Particularly injections which require preparatory injections to numb pain deemed to exceed acceptable FDA levels for humans. If there is a men's and women's version of a pill, and a men's and women's version of an injection, most men and women would choose the pill.
That seems common sense to me, not squeamish-ness. This pill will garner infinitely many more users. (I mean, assuming it works I guess?)
Women get IUDs inserted with nothing more than OTC painkillers, generally. Especially in people who have never given birth it can be cripplingly painful and cause severe cramps for weeks.
are the side effects really that much worse than what women have to deal with with their birth control? I’ve heard a lot of hormonal horror stories from women on the pill
What? Any attempt to regulate or restrict birth control against women is consistently held up as the “patriarchy” because it restricts women’s autonomy. Now not restricting it is patriarchy? Seems like literally everything is.
So far, men’s birth controls haven’t been legalized because the risks have been pretty massive. The last trial I heard of had a massive risk of suicide. “Patriarchy” has no part of it.
> The last trial I heard of had a massive risk of suicide. “Patriarchy” has no part of it.
Existing birth control options for women also have high risk of mental health issues though. So people might reasonably question why were approved for women but not for men.
A not-insignificant demographic that takes the pill do so in part to regulate hormones to the extent that it alleviates menstrual pain. It's not just to prevent pregnancy.
Heard it said that "Patriarchy" played a horrible role in how the pill was developed and tested. In first trials in South America women stopped taking it, there were uninvestigated health issues and side effects and one death from bleeding without autopsy, but since no one got pregnant, it was declared a success.
Not to say that modern options are not better.
I think it's historically accurate to say early male pill investigations have been infinitely more concerned with male health. OK to be ashamed of that.
If you live in a patriarchy many things are affected by it, even opiniones that appear contradictory.
Agree 100%. I have so many female friends who felt a ton better after getting off. There's even some evidence to suggest that it changes women's mating preferences. But the pill is one of the sacred cows of that wave of feminism, so people don't like questioning it even though it fucks over women.
But given the massive demand by women I wouldn't call it "patriarchy".
The massively potent synthetic hormones used by the pill are showing up in water supplies now. To me that externality is enough reason to ban it, people don't get to expose guys to estrogenic shit so they can avoid pregnancy.
Women should have the option to control their own bodies - that means allowing birth control and abortion.
It's also patriarchy at work that men would never tolerate even 1/10th of the risks women face in preventing pregnancy. Look at the responses to getting a small injection - "nobody would ever do that"! Hormonal birth control is great for some women, but terrible for others. It can also cause suicidality, but the side effects are routinely downplayed because women are expected to "deal with it". There's more research into how to keep men's hair from falling out and keep their dicks hard than there is into the most comfortable way to insert IUDs, or the side effects of hormonal birth control.
> It's also patriarchy at work that men would never tolerate even 1/10th of the risks women face in preventing pregnancy.
Based on what, anecdotes and your projection?
Anecdotally many men have voiced that if they could endure the pain of childbirth in place of their wives, they would. But I suppose that doesn't fit the narrative.
OP is talking about preventing pregnancy not about sharing the pain or risks in pregnancy. Of course a lot of men would share these with their partner.
Women simply have a much higher incentive to prevent pregnancy because they are much more affected by pregnancy. The worst thing that happens for a man is that they have to pay alimony. Women face the risks of pregnancy and birth or an abortion.
> The worst thing that happens for a man is that they have to pay alimony.
You mean child support, but more accurately: men would either be faced with raising the child also, or paying a hefty sum for almost 20 years. I guess that's easy to brush off?
As for preventing pregnancy, plenty of men opt for vasectomies when they know having a kid is off the table. The rate is not as high in the U.S. as other countries in the West, but it's still 1/10.
Okay. So it seems women’s birth control should be banned until it’s up to the safety standards of men’s birth control. That’ll help end the “patriarchy”, surely.
There are loads of birth control options for women. Various pills. Injections. Patches. IUDs. Implants. Research for better, safer methods is constantly ongoing. Why even pretend that no research is being done and it’s just oppression? It’s weird. Men aren’t actively trying to make women sick. The warnings are pretty clear—women choose to accept the risks and the risks of current treatments are chemical factors, not something to do with “patriarchy.” There are loads of women working in the medical research industry as well.
Honestly, there’s more safe birth control options for women than there are safe options for men to prevent hair loss. Currently, no simple or affordable treatment exists. Either you’re spending years of income for hair plugs that convince nobody up close or using chemical treatments that have mental and libido risks that often are equal to or worse than birth control pills. Boner pills also carry risks and they were basically discovered by accident.
This patriarchy stuff and pretending “patriarchy” isn’t allowing research into birth control is pure conspiracy theory stuff with all evidence proving the contrary. Those injectables men get have a very high risk of being irreversible and causing harm far greater than any modern birth control options for women—that’s why they’re not common. Dudes would love to know they can’t possibly be on the hook for child support. You’d be richer than Bezos in 5 years if you could find a solution. But it has not happened.
It's easy to blame an anomalous thing for all your woes I guess. The vast majority of men I know are 100% behind birth control for women and don't really care how they do it as long as they do it. I know that a ton of guys would be happy to take a male BC as long as it didn't kill them or cause severe symptoms. Nobody wants to have a surprise baby.
And for others it's the opposite and some women have long lasting side-effects after quitting taking the pill (unregular menstruation is a common one).
that’s absolutely not true of all women, some can’t even take hormonal birth control at all - it’s relatively common to have problems with it, sometimes even long-term
it’s nowhere close to a solved problem, unfortunately
One gf I had basically stopped having periods and cramps at all and was just fine with that. She pointed out that she was always one of the lucky ones with "light symptoms" anyway.
Since noone actually responded about the side effects of Trestolone, I can give it a try as a steroid user. The effects of Trest are very similar to testosterone. On one hand you feel great, get stronger, your workouts are more fun, libido and confidence through the roof, and you feel a general sense of well being. On other hand it's very strong and it aromatizes into methyl-estrogen, so if you don't dial in your dosage perfectly, you may experience estrogen related side effects - you can get very emotional for no reason, get hormonal acne or have your tits grow. To actually use it a proper birth control, would require every day injections and an endocrynologist to oversee your hormone levels. I suppose that's mostly why the research has been abandoned.
Yeah most AAS or SARMs makes good birth control. Downside is it often needs to be run with a test base (depending on what stack) and it can be very hard to get natural test production and fertility back to what they were after going off. PCT is often not pleasant and still may not get it all the way back. I have a few buddies who ended up on lifetime TRT in early to mid 20s doing this. Stuff like HCG can help but is more $ and hassle. There was also some research that suggested it may itself be suppressive over a long enough term, though I think that's no longer current.
Bottom line: playing with the endocrine system is risky and not always reversible. I will likely not be taking a hormonal birth control untill I see a lot more longitudinal data.
In Western countries and in Asia, fertility rates are pretty (edit: low) these days. I fear they would collapse with the introduction of a male fertility pill.
In some sense, maybe that's not bad. The world is probably overpopulated. But if fertility drops too fast it creates real demographics problems in that few young people need to support many old people.
Why? That would only be the case if a significant number of pregnancies is unwanted.
We should do everything to stop any unwanted pregnancies, and then add incentives and aid for everybody who wants to have kids (e.g. parental leave, free daycare, and so on).
Oral contraceptives are not as comfortable and easy to use as condoms, which are available everywhere. Taking drugs just to avoid pregnacy would be an alternative probably for people in relationships (instead of sometimes problematic womens contraceptives) and for people doing a lot of casual sex (who probably already use condoms/woman are on hormonal contraception).
This is not condoms vs not condoms. Condom use prevents the spread of STDs. Birth control helps prevent the spread of unwanted children and abortions. I don't find condoms comfortable at all and I'm married, so STDs are not my concern. Another kid is.
I've heard some men can't even feel the difference, but to me condoms essentially mean "why even bother?". Having sex with a condom is like saying you went swimming, but actually you went to the aquarium.
But still, in some types of encounters ya gotta do it, for safety.
For long term relationships though there are so many other options.
What if they’re actually dumb and we need other other strategies? Something to think about before banning the pill.
As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile. I don’t want to go into it here, I’m just pointing out there’s a lot of work one could do besides blocking a certain gender from equal access to birth control pills.
>Something to think about before banning the pill.
Regardless whether the strategies are bad or not, banning contraceptives should never be on the table.
>As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile.
It might be child-hostile, but is how child-hostile the environment is actually a consideration? The situation for having children has never been better, but birthrates are some of the lowest they have ever been.
The rough transition aside, would it be so bad to return to lower population levels? The only thing I'm sad about is that I won't live to see the population decline rather than increase.
Yes — it’s absolutely psychotic to hope for a mass loss of human life and the decline of our species.
There’s no reason to think it would make things better — and many to think a massive population decline would come with a technology regression and stall of our advancement.
I think such ideas are a form of mental illness, often stemming from delusions about the world.
Not a decline but a stabilisation. That's really what's needed to make our planet sustainable.
Right now the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is to have a child as a westerner.
And we're not hoping for loss of life. Just a more balanced population in the long term.
We can't keep growing until every square meter of this planet is covered with people, I'm sure that's clear. Eventually resources will be constrained too much and massive wars over control of the scraps will be inevitable. Which will solve the problem of overpopulation, sure. But it'll be better to gradually reduce population growth to zero and finally reach a balance with our environment.
We need to be really careful that in our haste to make progress in environmental protection and gender equality, we don't find ourselves heading down the dark path towards eugenics or self-extinction.
Or to not have children that you don't want, which is what the discussion is about.
We don't avoid killing ourselves or others because of its effects on the environment, which are great. We avoid killing ourselves and others due to other considerations. I bet you can name some so I don't have to.
African kids don't cause as much pollution as Europeans and Americans do. By orders of magnitude.
However yes in the long term we should not keep growing our world population as a whole. I do understand the need for Africans to have more kids though. For two reasons: A lot more of them die due to poor living conditions, and they serve as a "pension" for the parents.
Obviously these concerns will be solved by better living conditions.
Surely you can see where the issue is, don’t you? How can a westerner having a baby be any worse than an immigrant making their way to a western country, from a carbon footprint perspective? To me you can’t logically say that westerners having babies is a problem and still be OK with any amount of immigration, at least if the environment is your argument.
> It's pretty likely African immigrants can teach us a thing or two about living more in harmony with nature.
Well this is definitely a line of tortured logic I’ve never heard before in order to square “babies bad, immigrants OK.” But again, who has a higher carbon footprint? An African in Africa or an African in the USA? IMO if your concern is carbon footprint, you need to be against both western births and replacement immigration.
What we have to tackle is not immigration. It's the reason for it (too much discrepancy in standards of living), and our own pollution we put on the planet.
Because we are the main polluters on this planet, not them. We produce tens of times more pollution per person than people in Africa. The buck stops with us. We have to set a more sustainable standard of living and help others to attain it too. It's very unfair that where you're born defines your standard of living.
By looking purely at immigration you're looking only at one tiny piece of the puzzle and disregarding all the others.
The standard of living will never ever be the same all over the world. There will always be rich countries and poor countries. Always have, always will. The fact of the matter is that population growth is out of control in poor parts of the world and every last one of those people want to migrate to countries where the standard of living, and therefore carbon footprint, is higher. Which is why I find it maddening that people lecture westerners to stop having children when birth rates are already below replacement, and at the same time see no problem with allowing never ending numbers of people to instantly elevate their carbon footprint via migration. It’s just not a logically consistent set of viewpoints to hold if your primary concern is climate change.
America amd Europe should not see falling population and declining economys to compensate for other countries' massively high birth rates. I should still get my 2 kids and will not change because somebody else had 8.
There's also the colossal millitary risk of being a nation with bad demographics fighting one with good ones. Which I am not willing to take.
The "if we don't have many kids the bad guys become a bigger group" is precisely the attitude with which we will never solve these problems.
We have to stop this thinking of it being a race where we have to keep ahead of others. We have to work together or we will never solve our environmental issues.
And the thing about a kid emitting 1 ton CO2 per year is nonsense. Just bringing your kid on one international roundtrip flight already emits that much. Not to mention choices made in their name "I have to protect my kids so I have to drive an SUV tank" that I've heard many Irish parents claim. One ton is peanuts.
You have a delusion we’ve hit some kind of cap, and your belief we need to stop breeding will lead to bad outcomes relative to groups who don’t share that maladaptive belief.
This was barely coherent and mostly doesn't touch on what the article purports.
The growth rate in your western country is pegged, as a matter of policy. It's met through immigration. Whether you have kids or not is neither here nor there; they will meet their target (note that carbon footprints are high in the West, and low in 3rd world countries, to the extent that marginal differences in growth in the 3rd world are irrelevant). This will subside when the global growth rate falters, which is already projected to happen. This can be accelerated by a) improving universal access to contraceptives, and b) improving 3rd world economies through trade and just regulation. In the interim we still need to improve efficiencies in the short-run to curb carbon emissions immediately. Obviously, not having kids has zero impact on this either. Innovations like renewables, seaweed-infused animal feed, etc are entering the market and will help bridge the gap, made possible through political will and investment from the financial sector in the order of trillions.
Don't have kids if you don't want them, surely. But don't pretend it makes a dent in the environmental crusade, and by extension, don't judge parents for a natural desire to start a family.
There’s no reason to think the carrying capacity is down around what we have now, and historically growing population has been the engine through which we’ve solved those problems.
Thinking that we need to “stabilize” at the current population is a delusion leading to insane policy recommendations.
Also — yes, lots of your peers in “sustainability” are talking about massive population declines.
This planet cannot naturally sustain billions of humans. It takes all our industrial capacity and cutting nutritional corners just to feed us, and now one war in one country is to cut our supplies and put millions at risk.
Not to mention how most people don't have serious, productive jobs like doctors or lawyers. Most people have dead-end office jobs, ones that fuel global consumerism. Is that the technology you talk about losing? iPhones and videogames? And even so, unemployment is still an unsolvable problem.
You should drop your fairy tale expectations of living happily forever after. Mathematical models predict population growth and decline in nature. It is completely expected that when the average westerner is satiated emotionally and physically, they are not instinctively pushed to reproduce - why would they, there's nothing serious to work towards.
As a species on the planet? No, there's nothing bad about it. But it's going to be bad politically. It will shake up the power of countries when population numbers change and no country wants to give to power.
> it creates real demographics problems in that few young people need to support many old people
I think this problem is overrated, because at the same time they need to support many less children, youth and young adults. In other words, the ratio `adult workforce` vs. (`retired` + `children` + `in education`) is decreasing only very slowly. And we need a price tag for each of these elements to better assess its impact: How expensive is education and child care per person per year compared to pensions per person per year?
The figure that really matters for the future is purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita. This figure has been rising steadily in most industrialized countries for most of the years. There are no signs that this will change, even if birth rates continue to decline. This means that, regardless the demographic trend, more goods and services are available to everyone on average every year. The real problem is to stop the trend that only part of society benefits from economic growth.
Just chiming in to say that money isn't the only problem. You also need to restructure your healthcare system, for example, to account for more geriatrics and less pediatrics. We'd also need more carers, but presumably some proportion of teachers and babysitters could swap to that. But if you think about it, childcare is now a part-time job for many parents working other full-time jobs in engineering, law, accounting etc. Would they be caring for their elderly parents instead, to the same degree, or would we need a lot more professional carers for it?
Anyway, my point is that it's more complex than just comparing cash for this vs cash for that, we'll have to coordinate broad policies for a change like this. I think this is already happening in the West, but rather slowly.
Averages are often misleading. Another set of key figures is the distribution of created value between earned income, capital income, and welfare payments.
When the number of retirees grows relative to the size of the workforce, there is a need to increase the share of capital income and/or welfare payments, because a larger fraction of people depends on them. In reality, the reverse is more likely to happen. The share of earned income is likely to increase due to labor shortage. Retirees will then be worse off, regardless of whether they depend on social security payments or savings.
These demographic problems seem to be there arleady. Even without any further drops in the reproduction rate. At least in my country from central europe. I cannot provide any scientific discussion as a source - indeed I'd be happy if someone could share some source, but it seems pretty obvious to me. Generation baby boomer chose career over family and soon they need to be taken care of whilst they didn't produce many children themselves that could do so.
And partially related: they chose personal weahlth over a healthy planet. At least I feel betrayed, and I guess I am not the only one. So these demographic problems might be accompanied by a change of the younger generation priorities, when confronted with both, a huge old generation that they couldn't care for, even if they wanted to and even if there wouldn't be any further crisis, and a climate crisis caused by the same old generation that is now dependent on them.
This depends. Do you want someone to be able to take care of you after you retire? Medical care, that sort of thing?
If so, that means that you need people. People younger than you. People with some sort of societal attachment to you that results in them not just tossing your entire generation into a metaphorical woodchipper, because taking care of old people is a ton of work.
The traditional way to ensure that such a population of younger people exists has been to have children. Importing immigrants might solve the "people younger than you" side of things, but it is yet to be determined if it adequately solves the "societal attachment" side of things.
If new members join the scheme at the rate that old members die, and the average member expects to get out what they put in, then it is a very sustainable Ponzi scheme.
In theory you'd have the problem of inflation if each generation put all their contributions into a dedicated fund which was later used to pay their expenses in old age, but fortunately the current contributors can pay for the current beneficiaries, which mitigates that problem.
I just read an article about how immigrants (to the us) working in elder care were more culturally suited than Americans to the work, having more respect for old age. So it might be just the opposite, or perhaps respect for elders is a consequence of the demographic shift over time? Or just correlated?
> I just read an article about how immigrants (to the us) working in elder care were more culturally suited than Americans to the work
Immigrants to the US are more financially suited than Americans to the work. Same goes for immigrants in almost any country, or women, or minorities, or anyone who is willing to take a small amount of money for a lot of work. They have various and diverse cultures, just like native-born Americans do.
Isn't that what technology is for? Maybe we should stop screaming about technology putting everybody out of work for five minutes before demanding an answer about who'll do the work to take care of old people.
If I had the option to kill myself off once I hit the point that I'm no longer able to look after myself then I'd be pretty happy with that. And frankly with what I've seen of last the years of my elderly relatives lives even with care, I rather hope that I do have that option. Dementia looks no fun at all.
This is probably more than most people are willing to accept, but if modern medicine keeps going the way it is, I think we're going to have to have some frank conversations about this.
We're pretty good at preventing people from dying young, and we're pretty good at keeping the elderly barely alive. We're pretty bad at extending how long someone can take care of themselves. I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates.
You can start to see it with that new Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm. Was originally $56,000 a year, and is now $28,000. The average prognosis for Alzheimer's is 8 years, so we would be talking about an increase of $224,000 in cost of care for an Alzheimer's patient. That's between 4 and 5 years of labor at the average wage in the US. Add in nursing home care, and it won't be shocking if a lot of people's end of life care exceeds their total lifetime earnings.
I don't have a great solution for that. If insurers reduce coverage for end of life care, the effects are going to be mediated by personal wealth. The wealthy will be allowed to retire since they can pay for their own treatment, and the poor will only be allowed to die. You can tax the rich harder, but it's only going to delay the effects for a while.
> This is probably more than most people are willing to accept
You say that, but this a majority opinion amongst people I know both in my own age group (late twenties) and my parents age group (late fifties). My circles probably skew liberal, but even so I think that most people now have first-hand experience of elderly loved ones with dementia and the effects of that on both the person themselves and those who have to care for them. I can't see many people wanting that either for themselves of their descendants.
> I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates.
And massive birth rates aren't sustainable either. That only pushes the problem back a few decades. This is why I'd ultimately prefer to my life to be cut short. The only alternative on a societal level is to work much harder while I am alive. I'd rather enjoy my time here and then go and let others have their turn.
Just speaking hypothetically why wouldn't you have that option (I mean unless you were quadraplegic or just mentally completely out of it)? I have my own plan for that but hopefully that is decades and decades in the future. Also make sure to do a living will.
Well there's usually a way, but at least here in the UK it's illegal which makes it trickier than it needs to be. I'd much prefer there to be a painless way (carbon monoxide poisoning seems like it'd be the best option) which didn't involve my family having to deal with my body, or risking them getting prosecuted for assisting suicide if they knew about it (which would also be preferable - I'd like to be able to prepare them and say goodbye).
When does it end? First we make generations of long-living old people, now we need generations of young people to care for them?
We are close to making fully functional life support and robotic nurses. It's more ethical to have robots do this labour than force young people out of their happiest days.
This has nil bearing on exponential growth by virtue that the fertility rate in the West is stagnant. Countries with high fertility rates tend to be more impoverished.
Assuming that we don't crack the immortality problem, a population can continue to have children without that population growing. A population of 8 billion for example with sufficiently good medical care that the average person lives to 75 could have about 100 million children a year without having net population growth.
If a population is depending on continued net growth it has to very careful. If there is some constant above which it needs to maintain its growth rate growth will be an exponential process and exponential processes can blow up on you way faster than you might expect.
As an example, suppose we were depending on 1% annual population growth indefinitely and bad things would happen if we could not sustain that. Let's try to put an upper limit on how long we could theoretically sustain that.
Assumptions: we do not develop faster than light travel, do not discover any extra dimensions of spacetime that we can occupy, every human now in existence is near Earth, we don't need space for anything other than holding people, and you can't pack people tighter than 16 people per m^3 (the number of present day people you could fit in a 1m x 1m x 1m cube if we were versatile shape shifters who could take on arbitrary shapes but not change our volume).
Given those assumptions, then N years from now every human in existence must be within N lightyears of Earth. Take the volume of that sphere at year Y and divide it by the number of people that would be alive in year Y at 1% annual growth and we get how much space is in the most optimistic case available per person.
Q: How long before that space per person is less than 1/16th of a cubic meter?
A: ~12000 years.
If we can drop the growth rate to 0.5% we get about 24500 years. If we can drop it to 0.1% we get around 127000 years.
We don't, and the global population rate is poised to level off in 50-100 years anyway. Chasing the growth dragon is nice for the elites right now (and sold to us as a virtue and/or "good for the economy"), but it's unsustainable in the very long run, and has consequences in the short-run at certain thresholds. Always a source of amusement because the absurdity of perpetual growth is gleefully acknowledged by the left, but as it pertains to population, the blinders go on.
We have two potential paths as a society between a return to Serfdom, and a future where people still own things.
I see this comment about not enough young people to take care of the old. Why is this concern so common among, presumably, young people? Of the older people I know or have known, none are/were being taken care of by younger people. I'm a 57 bachelor and I know I'll never be taken care of by anybody.
I think most younger people are acutely aware that their retirement/pension payments aren’t earmarked for them, but are already being used for today’s retirees.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but to use your case as an example: you might not have anybody in particular taking care of you, but you might collect social security for the next three or four decades. After your initial investment, the majority of that money will be coming from the current working-age population.
I don't think it'll make a big difference. We're already at the point where people only have kids when they want to. It might reduce some accidents but I think that's good. Not nice for a child to be unwanted.
Good! One of our collective goals as a species should be to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies to 0. Nobody should be a parent unless they want to be. Every child deserves loving parents who made the choice to have kids.
We will get there eventually. Nothing will stop scientific progress.
What happens to YCT529 when it's used up or if more than is used up in the body is taken? Is excess urinated out? What impact does that have on the environment?
If the body broke it down it wouldn’t be effective, so it would pass through and be expelled like most everything else the body is confused what to do with.
Anything that affects mammalian fertility can have downstream effects unless the molecule is particularly unstable. Instability however is contrary to a birth control business model, as it introduces uncertainty (see: biodegradable conditions).
I agree completely. The title — even though it’s the original — should be changed because it’s deceptive; e.g. by replacing “prevents” with “could prevent”.
My understanding is that RISUG (similar) is in late phase human clinical trials in India. Lack of that issue (sensitization of immune system) was supposed to be one of the benefits of RISUG, right?
I don't know what kind of longitudinal research exists with this drug but it seems shutting off anything in the testes for long enough causes them to start atrophying. I fear this might be the case even if it doesn't present like the juicehead shrivled nuts.
It’s kinda wild that women are basically expected to take on all the side effect risk of birth control and no one even questions it unless side effects are actually death (Remember Yaz?).
I’m also curious about how blocking vitamin A doesn’t have side effects - don’t I need vitamin A?
Men can get a vasectomy, if they are 100% sure they don't want kids, ever.
Women can get a copper IUD with no hormonal side effects inserted in a few minutes and will be protected against pregnancy for up to 10 years (or can opt to have it removed at any time).
If pregnancy occurs, women can just order pills online [0] that will stop it (as long as they detect it in the early stages). Men have no control in the matter. If a woman decides to go forth with a pregnancy against the man's will, he can either abandon his child and have his wages garnished for 18 years, or accept his new situation and become a father.
To be clear, I think the idea that a woman's partner should have any control over whether she gets an abortion is absurd. But women clearly have the advantage when it comes to reproductive choices right now. I hope male birth control pills can help change that.
Historically, it's not actually all that wild when you consider that women are the ones that take on all the medical risk and took on most of the economic risk associated with being pregnant and later with having a child.
Remember that in many societies up until recent times sex outside of marriage was seriously frowned upon but the woman was often punished much more harshly than the man (if the man was even punished at all).
Women, then, needed birth control more than men did because pregnancy had more severe consequences for women than for men. Relying on men to take care of birth control requires the woman to put a lot of trust in the man, who might not have nearly as strong an interest as the woman in that birth control being successful.
"without side effects" is a hyper-bold statement, to be really sure about side effect any drug demand around 10 years after a certain level of adoption...
For instance vasectomy for years was considered "safe" even if "definitive" know we know, at least many suggest that vasectomy increase risk of prostate and testicular cancers.
So far the only "permanent" (well, for a certain number of years) contraceptive method we have is the copper IUD, it have menstrual cycle side effect but nothing irreversible or really dangerous.
Birth control pills for men are great and all, but there is an aspect to it where having kids would require both parents' stated preferences and revealed preferences to align, and that sounds like some interesting relationship game theory.
Given both sexes have multiple options for reliable birth control, there is no serendipidy, accidents, or "fate," which previously means at least one of them has to own the decision of being open to the likelihood of conception. Adding a male birth control pill means both have to actively decide to forego birth control to concieve. From a probability perspective, one person "forgetting," can happen, but both? In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, "not bloody likely."
I would forsee the impact of a male pill as, at absolute minumum, a decimation of replacement level fertility, if not a total evolutionalry select-out of cultures and populations that adopted it. Males who inevitably moralize not propagating will necessarily die off from a genetic perspective. Nice to have the option as a teenager, but in aggregate, as a strategy it seems unwise.
I've posted about this game theory before. With male and female birth control, there are 4 possible outcomes:
1. Man and woman don't use birth control.
Conception is likely.
2. Man uses birth control. Woman doesn't.
Conception is unlikely.
3. Man doesn't use birth control. Woman does.
Conception is unlikely.
4. Man and woman use birth control.
Conception is extremely unlikely.
Conception is only likely when both partners want it.
When only women have access to effective birth control, risk of pregnancy is dominated by their decisions. They have a lot more leverage and therefore power:
1. Man has no birth control. Woman doesn't use hers.
Conception is likely.
2. Man has no birth control. Woman uses hers.
Conception is unlikely.
Interesting, but the model may benefit from the deception cases, which would have an impact on conception in general, but not just between the two partners. I'd probably include a male paramour case in each scenario, with random participation and strategy in each round. This is to say, I would wonder whether this game is indeed finite and normal form, or at least I'd suspect the dominant strategy does not come from playing it as one.
The type I am really hopeful about target the flagellum. The only portion of the human body to have this would be sperm cells. Backing up a bit, it's very hard to target a medicine to something highly specific, since it circulates through the body, which re-uses proteins all over the place. This, though, represents a single target.
It's a shame. Vasectomy can have complications which are often not discussed in the slightest. My father had some of those, though not as bad as others. Occasionally, the results are permanent, despite a reversal of the vasectomy. To paraphrase Orwell, imagine a boot stamping on a your balls—for ever. I am trying to remember the musician who killed himself over it.
172 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadThe pill in the article is a non-hormonal one, which is interesting
Doesn't seem that perplexing. Unless you're into that sort of thing, not that there is anything wrong with that..
I've been waiting for this for more than 10 years now, ever since I've learned about it.
I don't know how long the injections last but if they last a similar time as IUDs. I think this would be acceptable. But maybe there aren't enough men that are willing to get birth control like this, to market this product. The incentive for women to take birth control is much higher after all.
Pass.
I would think that the pill, both the men's and the women's version, would be imminently more preferable to an injection any day of the week? Particularly injections which require preparatory injections to numb pain deemed to exceed acceptable FDA levels for humans. If there is a men's and women's version of a pill, and a men's and women's version of an injection, most men and women would choose the pill.
That seems common sense to me, not squeamish-ness. This pill will garner infinitely many more users. (I mean, assuming it works I guess?)
So far, men’s birth controls haven’t been legalized because the risks have been pretty massive. The last trial I heard of had a massive risk of suicide. “Patriarchy” has no part of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yabNRlqCCk
Existing birth control options for women also have high risk of mental health issues though. So people might reasonably question why were approved for women but not for men.
But given the massive demand by women I wouldn't call it "patriarchy".
The massively potent synthetic hormones used by the pill are showing up in water supplies now. To me that externality is enough reason to ban it, people don't get to expose guys to estrogenic shit so they can avoid pregnancy.
It's also patriarchy at work that men would never tolerate even 1/10th of the risks women face in preventing pregnancy. Look at the responses to getting a small injection - "nobody would ever do that"! Hormonal birth control is great for some women, but terrible for others. It can also cause suicidality, but the side effects are routinely downplayed because women are expected to "deal with it". There's more research into how to keep men's hair from falling out and keep their dicks hard than there is into the most comfortable way to insert IUDs, or the side effects of hormonal birth control.
Based on what, anecdotes and your projection?
Anecdotally many men have voiced that if they could endure the pain of childbirth in place of their wives, they would. But I suppose that doesn't fit the narrative.
Women simply have a much higher incentive to prevent pregnancy because they are much more affected by pregnancy. The worst thing that happens for a man is that they have to pay alimony. Women face the risks of pregnancy and birth or an abortion.
You mean child support, but more accurately: men would either be faced with raising the child also, or paying a hefty sum for almost 20 years. I guess that's easy to brush off?
As for preventing pregnancy, plenty of men opt for vasectomies when they know having a kid is off the table. The rate is not as high in the U.S. as other countries in the West, but it's still 1/10.
There are loads of birth control options for women. Various pills. Injections. Patches. IUDs. Implants. Research for better, safer methods is constantly ongoing. Why even pretend that no research is being done and it’s just oppression? It’s weird. Men aren’t actively trying to make women sick. The warnings are pretty clear—women choose to accept the risks and the risks of current treatments are chemical factors, not something to do with “patriarchy.” There are loads of women working in the medical research industry as well.
Honestly, there’s more safe birth control options for women than there are safe options for men to prevent hair loss. Currently, no simple or affordable treatment exists. Either you’re spending years of income for hair plugs that convince nobody up close or using chemical treatments that have mental and libido risks that often are equal to or worse than birth control pills. Boner pills also carry risks and they were basically discovered by accident.
This patriarchy stuff and pretending “patriarchy” isn’t allowing research into birth control is pure conspiracy theory stuff with all evidence proving the contrary. Those injectables men get have a very high risk of being irreversible and causing harm far greater than any modern birth control options for women—that’s why they’re not common. Dudes would love to know they can’t possibly be on the hook for child support. You’d be richer than Bezos in 5 years if you could find a solution. But it has not happened.
Perhaps there are different kinds but this is what I'm told..
it’s nowhere close to a solved problem, unfortunately
Bottom line: playing with the endocrine system is risky and not always reversible. I will likely not be taking a hormonal birth control untill I see a lot more longitudinal data.
Mouse more than man, yes I am ;)
In some sense, maybe that's not bad. The world is probably overpopulated. But if fertility drops too fast it creates real demographics problems in that few young people need to support many old people.
We should do everything to stop any unwanted pregnancies, and then add incentives and aid for everybody who wants to have kids (e.g. parental leave, free daycare, and so on).
> Unintended pregnancies are at an all-time low in the U.S. but still represent about 45 percent of all pregnancies.
45% is wild, and doubly so that this is an all time low.
I could find a million dollars and it would be unintended but not unwanted.
I’d be curious to survey asking those two questions - did you want this child? Did you intend to have this child?
Condoms do both. They are 97% effective if used properly, which isn't hard.
I think "perfect use" of the pill is more difficult, consequently I think the true failure rate is higher. The implants are very effective though.
I've heard some men can't even feel the difference, but to me condoms essentially mean "why even bother?". Having sex with a condom is like saying you went swimming, but actually you went to the aquarium.
But still, in some types of encounters ya gotta do it, for safety.
For long term relationships though there are so many other options.
As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile. I don’t want to go into it here, I’m just pointing out there’s a lot of work one could do besides blocking a certain gender from equal access to birth control pills.
Regardless whether the strategies are bad or not, banning contraceptives should never be on the table.
>As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile.
It might be child-hostile, but is how child-hostile the environment is actually a consideration? The situation for having children has never been better, but birthrates are some of the lowest they have ever been.
There’s no reason to think it would make things better — and many to think a massive population decline would come with a technology regression and stall of our advancement.
I think such ideas are a form of mental illness, often stemming from delusions about the world.
Right now the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is to have a child as a westerner.
And we're not hoping for loss of life. Just a more balanced population in the long term.
We can't keep growing until every square meter of this planet is covered with people, I'm sure that's clear. Eventually resources will be constrained too much and massive wars over control of the scraps will be inevitable. Which will solve the problem of overpopulation, sure. But it'll be better to gradually reduce population growth to zero and finally reach a balance with our environment.
Nobody is speaking of a massive decline.
The problem is not running out of material or energy, but the effect of pollution.
By this logic one can rationally claim the best thing you can do for the environment is to die.
We need to be really careful that in our haste to make progress in environmental protection and gender equality, we don't find ourselves heading down the dark path towards eugenics or self-extinction.
We don't avoid killing ourselves or others because of its effects on the environment, which are great. We avoid killing ourselves and others due to other considerations. I bet you can name some so I don't have to.
I'm not sure who this "we" is. Your reasons and mine may be different, and sadly some people can't accept any of these reasons.
It's just about avoiding pregnancies that are not even wanted.
That may well be true for most people. Luckily the environment isn't the only factor in ethical considerations.
>> Right now the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is to have a child as an African. [0]
Because today's African babies are tomorrow's European migrants, who will bolster the ranks of the polluting global elite.
But we don't want to go here do we?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
However yes in the long term we should not keep growing our world population as a whole. I do understand the need for Africans to have more kids though. For two reasons: A lot more of them die due to poor living conditions, and they serve as a "pension" for the parents.
Obviously these concerns will be solved by better living conditions.
Just out of curiosity, are you also opposed to immigration from third world countries into first world ones?
The issue is that the source of our wealth externalises the cost to the environment. The problem is really with our western society, not the people.
It's pretty likely African immigrants can teach us a thing or two about living more in harmony with nature.
Well this is definitely a line of tortured logic I’ve never heard before in order to square “babies bad, immigrants OK.” But again, who has a higher carbon footprint? An African in Africa or an African in the USA? IMO if your concern is carbon footprint, you need to be against both western births and replacement immigration.
Because we are the main polluters on this planet, not them. We produce tens of times more pollution per person than people in Africa. The buck stops with us. We have to set a more sustainable standard of living and help others to attain it too. It's very unfair that where you're born defines your standard of living.
By looking purely at immigration you're looking only at one tiny piece of the puzzle and disregarding all the others.
There's also the colossal millitary risk of being a nation with bad demographics fighting one with good ones. Which I am not willing to take.
We have to stop this thinking of it being a race where we have to keep ahead of others. We have to work together or we will never solve our environmental issues.
And the thing about a kid emitting 1 ton CO2 per year is nonsense. Just bringing your kid on one international roundtrip flight already emits that much. Not to mention choices made in their name "I have to protect my kids so I have to drive an SUV tank" that I've heard many Irish parents claim. One ton is peanuts.
The growth rate in your western country is pegged, as a matter of policy. It's met through immigration. Whether you have kids or not is neither here nor there; they will meet their target (note that carbon footprints are high in the West, and low in 3rd world countries, to the extent that marginal differences in growth in the 3rd world are irrelevant). This will subside when the global growth rate falters, which is already projected to happen. This can be accelerated by a) improving universal access to contraceptives, and b) improving 3rd world economies through trade and just regulation. In the interim we still need to improve efficiencies in the short-run to curb carbon emissions immediately. Obviously, not having kids has zero impact on this either. Innovations like renewables, seaweed-infused animal feed, etc are entering the market and will help bridge the gap, made possible through political will and investment from the financial sector in the order of trillions.
Don't have kids if you don't want them, surely. But don't pretend it makes a dent in the environmental crusade, and by extension, don't judge parents for a natural desire to start a family.
There’s no reason to think the carrying capacity is down around what we have now, and historically growing population has been the engine through which we’ve solved those problems.
Thinking that we need to “stabilize” at the current population is a delusion leading to insane policy recommendations.
Also — yes, lots of your peers in “sustainability” are talking about massive population declines.
Not to mention how most people don't have serious, productive jobs like doctors or lawyers. Most people have dead-end office jobs, ones that fuel global consumerism. Is that the technology you talk about losing? iPhones and videogames? And even so, unemployment is still an unsolvable problem.
You should drop your fairy tale expectations of living happily forever after. Mathematical models predict population growth and decline in nature. It is completely expected that when the average westerner is satiated emotionally and physically, they are not instinctively pushed to reproduce - why would they, there's nothing serious to work towards.
It'll cause some demographic issues in the short term but we'll just have to deal with that.
Also the planet will be just fine, it is us we’re worried about.
I would define it as a complex ecosystem of interconnected species and we're doing a lot of damage to that that goes far beyond ourselves.
I think this problem is overrated, because at the same time they need to support many less children, youth and young adults. In other words, the ratio `adult workforce` vs. (`retired` + `children` + `in education`) is decreasing only very slowly. And we need a price tag for each of these elements to better assess its impact: How expensive is education and child care per person per year compared to pensions per person per year?
The figure that really matters for the future is purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita. This figure has been rising steadily in most industrialized countries for most of the years. There are no signs that this will change, even if birth rates continue to decline. This means that, regardless the demographic trend, more goods and services are available to everyone on average every year. The real problem is to stop the trend that only part of society benefits from economic growth.
Anyway, my point is that it's more complex than just comparing cash for this vs cash for that, we'll have to coordinate broad policies for a change like this. I think this is already happening in the West, but rather slowly.
When the number of retirees grows relative to the size of the workforce, there is a need to increase the share of capital income and/or welfare payments, because a larger fraction of people depends on them. In reality, the reverse is more likely to happen. The share of earned income is likely to increase due to labor shortage. Retirees will then be worse off, regardless of whether they depend on social security payments or savings.
And partially related: they chose personal weahlth over a healthy planet. At least I feel betrayed, and I guess I am not the only one. So these demographic problems might be accompanied by a change of the younger generation priorities, when confronted with both, a huge old generation that they couldn't care for, even if they wanted to and even if there wouldn't be any further crisis, and a climate crisis caused by the same old generation that is now dependent on them.
If so, that means that you need people. People younger than you. People with some sort of societal attachment to you that results in them not just tossing your entire generation into a metaphorical woodchipper, because taking care of old people is a ton of work.
The traditional way to ensure that such a population of younger people exists has been to have children. Importing immigrants might solve the "people younger than you" side of things, but it is yet to be determined if it adequately solves the "societal attachment" side of things.
In theory you'd have the problem of inflation if each generation put all their contributions into a dedicated fund which was later used to pay their expenses in old age, but fortunately the current contributors can pay for the current beneficiaries, which mitigates that problem.
Immigrants to the US are more financially suited than Americans to the work. Same goes for immigrants in almost any country, or women, or minorities, or anyone who is willing to take a small amount of money for a lot of work. They have various and diverse cultures, just like native-born Americans do.
We're pretty good at preventing people from dying young, and we're pretty good at keeping the elderly barely alive. We're pretty bad at extending how long someone can take care of themselves. I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates.
You can start to see it with that new Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm. Was originally $56,000 a year, and is now $28,000. The average prognosis for Alzheimer's is 8 years, so we would be talking about an increase of $224,000 in cost of care for an Alzheimer's patient. That's between 4 and 5 years of labor at the average wage in the US. Add in nursing home care, and it won't be shocking if a lot of people's end of life care exceeds their total lifetime earnings.
I don't have a great solution for that. If insurers reduce coverage for end of life care, the effects are going to be mediated by personal wealth. The wealthy will be allowed to retire since they can pay for their own treatment, and the poor will only be allowed to die. You can tax the rich harder, but it's only going to delay the effects for a while.
You say that, but this a majority opinion amongst people I know both in my own age group (late twenties) and my parents age group (late fifties). My circles probably skew liberal, but even so I think that most people now have first-hand experience of elderly loved ones with dementia and the effects of that on both the person themselves and those who have to care for them. I can't see many people wanting that either for themselves of their descendants.
> I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates.
And massive birth rates aren't sustainable either. That only pushes the problem back a few decades. This is why I'd ultimately prefer to my life to be cut short. The only alternative on a societal level is to work much harder while I am alive. I'd rather enjoy my time here and then go and let others have their turn.
We are close to making fully functional life support and robotic nurses. It's more ethical to have robots do this labour than force young people out of their happiest days.
If a population is depending on continued net growth it has to very careful. If there is some constant above which it needs to maintain its growth rate growth will be an exponential process and exponential processes can blow up on you way faster than you might expect.
As an example, suppose we were depending on 1% annual population growth indefinitely and bad things would happen if we could not sustain that. Let's try to put an upper limit on how long we could theoretically sustain that.
Assumptions: we do not develop faster than light travel, do not discover any extra dimensions of spacetime that we can occupy, every human now in existence is near Earth, we don't need space for anything other than holding people, and you can't pack people tighter than 16 people per m^3 (the number of present day people you could fit in a 1m x 1m x 1m cube if we were versatile shape shifters who could take on arbitrary shapes but not change our volume).
Given those assumptions, then N years from now every human in existence must be within N lightyears of Earth. Take the volume of that sphere at year Y and divide it by the number of people that would be alive in year Y at 1% annual growth and we get how much space is in the most optimistic case available per person.
Q: How long before that space per person is less than 1/16th of a cubic meter?
A: ~12000 years.
If we can drop the growth rate to 0.5% we get about 24500 years. If we can drop it to 0.1% we get around 127000 years.
Exponentials are scary.
We have two potential paths as a society between a return to Serfdom, and a future where people still own things.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but to use your case as an example: you might not have anybody in particular taking care of you, but you might collect social security for the next three or four decades. After your initial investment, the majority of that money will be coming from the current working-age population.
I'm pretty sure this will be much lower in Europe though, as we have much less taboos on sexual education.
We will get there eventually. Nothing will stop scientific progress.
Anything that affects mammalian fertility can have downstream effects unless the molecule is particularly unstable. Instability however is contrary to a birth control business model, as it introduces uncertainty (see: biodegradable conditions).
> will begin testing in human clinical trials in the third or fourth quarter of 2022
Conspiracy whatever, given the normal effects of vasectony (sensitization of the immune system to sperm) I suspect that's been the problem with it.
I’m also curious about how blocking vitamin A doesn’t have side effects - don’t I need vitamin A?
I guess there are child support for males wrt to (b), which could very well incentivize the use of a male pill.
But the basic point is that, it’s only even considered a possible option for men if there are no side effects.
Yet all forms of birth control for women have side effects.
Women can get a copper IUD with no hormonal side effects inserted in a few minutes and will be protected against pregnancy for up to 10 years (or can opt to have it removed at any time).
If pregnancy occurs, women can just order pills online [0] that will stop it (as long as they detect it in the early stages). Men have no control in the matter. If a woman decides to go forth with a pregnancy against the man's will, he can either abandon his child and have his wages garnished for 18 years, or accept his new situation and become a father.
To be clear, I think the idea that a woman's partner should have any control over whether she gets an abortion is absurd. But women clearly have the advantage when it comes to reproductive choices right now. I hope male birth control pills can help change that.
[0] https://www.plancpills.org/
Also, morning after pills are also not without side effects.
Remember that in many societies up until recent times sex outside of marriage was seriously frowned upon but the woman was often punished much more harshly than the man (if the man was even punished at all).
Women, then, needed birth control more than men did because pregnancy had more severe consequences for women than for men. Relying on men to take care of birth control requires the woman to put a lot of trust in the man, who might not have nearly as strong an interest as the woman in that birth control being successful.
wcgw
For instance vasectomy for years was considered "safe" even if "definitive" know we know, at least many suggest that vasectomy increase risk of prostate and testicular cancers.
So far the only "permanent" (well, for a certain number of years) contraceptive method we have is the copper IUD, it have menstrual cycle side effect but nothing irreversible or really dangerous.
There is no consensus on this, though, and meta analysis suggest that there is no significant connection [1].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Edit: oh I guess you mean that men will pretend they're not taking the pill while they are. I agree with you then.
I would forsee the impact of a male pill as, at absolute minumum, a decimation of replacement level fertility, if not a total evolutionalry select-out of cultures and populations that adopted it. Males who inevitably moralize not propagating will necessarily die off from a genetic perspective. Nice to have the option as a teenager, but in aggregate, as a strategy it seems unwise.
It's a shame. Vasectomy can have complications which are often not discussed in the slightest. My father had some of those, though not as bad as others. Occasionally, the results are permanent, despite a reversal of the vasectomy. To paraphrase Orwell, imagine a boot stamping on a your balls—for ever. I am trying to remember the musician who killed himself over it.