Yeah and as I read it I saw a guy called anonymous armadillo writing a section on how falling birth rates are due to the MeToo movement. Is this all just crowd sourced random guesswork with no evidence?
Saying that "falling birth rates are due to the MeToo movement" is the same as "criticism of MeeToo" cheapens the word "criticism" and definitely dilutes impact of both document and what you say.
If in the same message you refer to movement that whose part were multiple real world lawsuits and at least temporary attempts to get some rights to situations with quite serious harassments as "hashtag-activism movement", then you cheapens even more words.
We've been soliciting additional information, counter evidence, criticism, etc. from folks who read the Google Doc since we would like our understanding of the subject to be as clear-eyed as possible. That said, we've disabled comments/suggestions temporarily since a ton of people are reading it concurrently and we want to be able to properly review suggested additions before many other people start reading them; we'd like to vet the ideas in it as much as possible.
Thanks for sharing this, I’m not an expert on the subject but I’m curious about it and, skimming through the document, it seems to touch many different aspects of it.
I also appreciate the amount of graphs and links, and the direct and clear language you used.
My impression is that this is way better than a typical news article touching this subject. Might not be saying much, but I’m going to keep a copy as the reference on this topic.
We appreciate the kind words! Ping us if you feel like there's an area that could use more thorough research, there is counter evidence we should be considering and featuring, etc.
I for one see more dystopian scenery originating in the hell-bent overpopulation we've been witnessing on the planet for the past 100 years or so. We're looking at ~1'000 places with a population of 500'000 up to 37'000'000 these days (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities); they comment, quite correctly IMHO: There are quite a number of popular and culturally rich cities that have smaller populations, often making for higher living standards for their residents. Barcelona, Sydney, Berlin and Vancouver all have fewer than five million residents, but are very popular choices for city living. There are also some comparatively very small cities with big cultural, historical or political reputations, such as Sarajevo (314,000), Edinburgh (502,000), and Venice (631,000), demonstrating that small cities can be highly significant regardless of the size of their population.
For almost the entire history of mankind, one million people in one place was a singularly big place, and non-existent as recently as maybe 3'000 years ago (personal estimate). Mankind must learn how to live with a shrinking population. I hope figures will cap out at ~10b people as predicted by the UN; after that, I consider ~1b people as a goal, that's the figure from 1800, so 200 years ago. Even when I was born in the 1960s we had but a paltry 3 .. 4 billion people on this planet and we made it to the moon for heaven's sake. Should be good enough, right?
Addendum Quote "The economic systems of virtually all developed countries are predicated on an assumption of constant growth"—I'm with you that shrinking societies will be facing a wholly new set of societal problems. However an economic system that is predicated on constant growth will necessarily fail at some point in the future because physics. We as a species have to find ways to prevent that from happening. To keep adding people is not an option. If we can live with 10 billion people or maybe with 20 billion people (shudder, but who knows) then at some point–100 billion? 200 billion?–there must come a point at which it is with absolute certainty not going to work.
Cute counterexample, I'll grant you that, but the parent posts were – if implicitly – talking abound unbounded growth.
Bounded growth on the other hand might mathematically indeed continue for an infinite length of time, but for all practical purposes can most certainly be rounded down to zero past a certain point.
You are right and I am glad I didn't write 'because Maths'. The sum you're quoting from is monotonically growing but at an ever shrinking clip. However, the series does not describe the kind of growth that our economy seemingly needs and our politicians like to promise, nor does it AFAICS describe the OP's idea of continued population growth given his recommendation to shun shrinking populations with fertility below replacement rate; theirs is a constant or in the midterm increasing growth and notwithstanding [minority opinions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XTVZXww) claiming that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... equals -1/12 such a series cannot have a finite sum, hence is physically unfeasible to represent.
I'd have to brush up on my math but even that feels bounded. Per cent is just division by 100, you take it out as a common divisor and you still arrive at the same sum.
When creating this document, our goal wasn't to give people the impression that our populations should expand in number indefinitely (especially not on Earth alone). You're right that expecting the planet to shoulder indefinite population growth is impractical.
We're just trying to highlight the hazards of population decline that hits humanity like a tidal wave and produces unnecessary suffering and damage. There are ways for populations to sustainably decline without wiping out entire cultures, for example.
We, personally, care a lot about memetic/cultural diversity and worry that a population collapse for which we don't prepare will eliminate loads of perspectives that would otherwise contribute great new innovations and technologies to humanity's future.
We also think it's important that people know that population decline will affect certain fundamentals upon which their lives are based (e.g. "I put all my retirement savings in the stock market because on average the stock market always goes up" isn't going to be a healthy thought when population decline accelerates).
I'm happy to hear that the overall perspective is relatable and sober although I can not agree on 'tidal wave' and 'apocalypse'. 'Antideluge' or 'negative tsunami', anyone?
You know, you could even blame Russia's current war on its declining population (their leader desperately trying to keep together the country and the people) but I know of another Great War that was fought under the pretense of having the right to expand b/c of a growing population (and they happened to have laid their eyes on the same stretches of fertile farmland). I do not believe in either, the reasons being in both cases largely unrelated to demographic growth or lack thereof. Given that this former event did cause stocks to take a plunge, well, that's what trouble and disorder give you, trouble and disorder. And that can have so many reasons that I'm not afraid of the shrinking population => economic setback linkage, even if and so far as it does have predictive value.
I really hope our civilization can go from 7 billion people to 1 billion without a total collapse. Unfortunately we might not be ready. Will we be able to keep our technological level? Our current understanding of math, physics and nature? That requires quite a lot of people to transmit and learn. It certainly is theoretically possible but in practice? It's exponential. This has the potential to creep on us really soon.
The issue lies in who those 1 billion people will be. The most anti-LGBT, anti-women, anti-education, low income cultures which have the most kids? Or a "controlled landing" in which most of the Western world doesn't become a ghost town or has its culture more or less replaced because it couldn't reproduce itself?
“Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this type is pari passu multiplying and perpetuating those direst evils in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots.”
-- Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922
In hindsight I should've probably not make 1b (1800) but rather the 1.65b of 1900 the goal, just because from a time frame and as a vision it is so much easier to communicate: around the turn of the century we already had electric streetcars, electric underground, electric lighting, motorcars, elevators, entire countries with rail networks and so on. I do not see why a slow-ish-ly shrinking population should entail tossing all of our advances since then—in medicine, computers, telecommunication, chemistry, virtually all fields, not least agriculture (although the way we do it now is utterly unsustainable). Rather, I believe that in a situation where you have an extremely high birthrate and a doubling of the population in a matter of just 15 or 30 years you end up with half of population being rather young and lacking experience; you will also, as an economy, have a hard time to build enough schools and housing. People will and already do live, in many places, in cities that are almost entirely without any built history to speak of. This is what erodes local traditions, customs, awareness; I see this and not the OP's notion of 'shrinking societies cause cultural attrition and global homogenization' (paraphrased from memory) as a major cultural problem. Population growth, not shrinkage, is a great contributor to cultural loss.
This is one of the reasons why we put together this document. We (as authors) see there being many benefits to smaller human populations on earth, but we think that any transition made needs to be made very thoughtfully.
So far we we can see, there is very little (effective) proactive action being taken to ensure that as population levels decline, things we value (like technological progress, women's rights, diversity of cultures, etc.) are protected.
There have been quite a few posts on here about how AGI is still really far away. I wouldn't put all your hopes on our machine descendant species appearing this century. Nevertheless this is touched on in the linked document; indeed there's an entire section on it.
It's... unpredictably far away! We suck so bad at estimating these kinds of things, that whether it's tomorrow or 500 years from now, I'm convinced we'll be totally surprised, unprepared, and our nor even sincere effort to stear things down a good path (eg. OpenAI and such...) will be either worthless or detrimental!
We should simply pursue "organic growth" eg. grow as much people as we can care for and educate properly. Unfortunately our elites seem really hell bent of keeping the social landscape hyperconpetitive so the resources we have don't really get distributed... and as a consequence of course (rational) pople have fewer children! Also there's an intellectual war fought on "traditional values" that enabled stuff like extended famimlies to exist and make child rearing at least bearable by sharing the load of caring for the nasty little critters.
Whether we "need" humans depends on where one's values are; for those who would like humans in some form to continue to exist, the idea of AGI making humans obsolete isn't terribly comforting. Even those who might really like the idea of humans sort of evolving into AI (and eventually ceasing to biologically exist) might not be keen to rush toward human obsolescence if they're not thrilled with initial versions of AGI (diversity and optionality is nice).
I only care about makind sure that all essential and valuable human characteristics, perspective, thought patterns and values get carried on to whatever the next thing is :) Extinction of bio-humans can be perfectly fine if it happens without information loss imo.
EDIT+: Counterintuitively, it might be more benefficial to have way more people in the (maybe short) era before the passing of bio-humans, to increase the probability that as many as possible of the valuable human ideas get passed on to our AGI descendents! If AGI is finally achieved by eg. "three middle aged white guys surviving some apocalypse in some bunker", then that AGI will only have and carry on the values and mindsets of those "three middle aged white guys"!!! Ironically, "unification under one umbrella of AGI research efforts" like eg. OpenAI folks try to do increase the likelihood the "three middle aged white guys fathering a narrow-minded AGI", instead of encouraging a diversified competition landscape...
We seem to be handling the upcoming birth of AGI just as well as we "handled" this pandemic...
Human underpopulation as an existential threat is also extremely far away. Ok, less people means a weaker economy. It still won’t be as bad as an event like World War II which killed tens of millions but that humanity still recovered from. I actually want longer AGI timelines because I don’t trust AGI to share my values.
Thanks for recommending the at section of the document. I’ll take a peak at it. I’m not really worried about yhe birthraye decline case because I think there would be subgroups of humanity with higher birthrates. Both small communities like the Amish and large communities like Nigerians still have birth rates well above replacement level. Africa is industrializing fast and could become an industrial powerhouse like China, if automation doesn’t remove the competitive advantage that high population otherwise would give them. Many African countries GDPs are growing at 10% every year.
This comment of mine goes a little off topic but I think the stuff I’m addressing is interesting and important for predicting the future.
Declining birthrates alarmists are essentially sponsoring the great replacement theory. Not with words or by shilling the conspiracy online but with their alarmism as conflated to just particular geographic areas without looking at the whole globe. Global population is still growing and will continue to do so during our lifetime.
The relative distribution of cultures , language, accents, religions... will change but that has always happened. It's crazy to just focus on a particular region. It's as crazy as saying: let's sacrifice present day Swedes and Norwegians to bring back the ancient Romans and Greeks .
I think it's just good to have open discussion on what these demographics changes might mean in the context of different societies. Both Europe and North America will see increasing migration from more overpopulated and poorer parts of the world, and this obviously presents its challenges to societies in the both ends of the flow.
I don't believe in "great replacement theory", what is happening is just a natural consequence of massive differences in standards of living and population growth in different parts of the world. Yet at the same time I can also see that this development isn't always without its troubles, like Sweden suffering from a wave of gun violence due to its failure to integrate many migrants who lack education and language skills, and many developing countries suffering from brain-drain. These are small-scale issues compared to the environmental impact of overpopulation, but they should still be discussed.
Totally agreed that the implications of population shifts warrant investigation. Demographic changes have significant impacts on variety of factors—even if one ONLY cares about maximizing investment gains, it's an important subject.
Mainly those that are already having trouble feeding their populations. For example in Africa and Middle-East many countries are in trouble with the effects of the Russian invasion. I can only imagine what will happen in these parts of the world if climate change really starts to disrupt farming.
Of course this is just one way to look at the issue. If we look at resource consumption then worst offenders are elsewhere. After all, even current population levels could be sustained if nobody consumed more than the minimum they really need, food was distributed equally and green energy was dominant.
I see. Would you consider Las Vegas overpopulated? Nothing grows there, there is no water, everything has to be shipped from outside. If the supply-chain is affected by some catastrophe, people there will starve.
Sure you can have this "discussion" but it comes off as needless (and probably racist) concern trolling. The Sweden thing is a favorite among reactionaries trying to mask their racism. The homicide rate in Sweden is lower than Canada. It's lower than Finland.
Indeed Sweden as a whole is safe, but organized crime related gun violence has become a problem of different size than here in Finland for example. It's quite worrying as gunfights between gangs do carry a high risk to other people who just happen to be nearby. A typical stabbing at least here in Finland involves drunks or drug addicts and happens in a private apartment.
On page 12 you can see statistic of gun-violence related deaths per million inhabitants in Nordic countries. Sweden is clearly doing worse than other countries, where overall trend has been declining rather than rising. The higher rates in Finland at the beginning are due to statistics also including stabbings.
The fact that "Declining birthrates alarmists are essentially sponsoring the great replacement theory" is one of the reasons we put together this document.
Demographic collapse as a risk (and related risks related to declining populations) deserves to be explored from a non-racially/religiously motivated angle. Just because some racially/religiously motivated groups care about a problem does not mean that everyone who cares about that problem is racially/religiously motivated.
We also don't argue in the document that people should NOT be having kids in certain countries, nor do we argue that certain groups should not have so many kids. We don't even argue that people in general should have more kids (having kids is not for everyone). We merely attempt to take a sober approach to issues around population decline and potential solutions.
We do think that demographic collapse can be "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale." There was, admittedly, internal debate about using alarmist language in the title, though, and we appreciate the criticism (everything in this document is subject to change based on feedback).
We care about what happens to humanity after we die. We acknowledge that not everyone does. No judgment there. This document is more relevant to people who care about what happens to humans beyond their own personal lifespans.
Exactly. Perhaps one of the biggest barriers slowing down solutions to problems caused by demographic collapse = people not being willing to discuss demographic collapse merely because some racist/religiously extreme groups refer to demographic shifts in some of their arguments.
Just because hitler self-identified as a vegetarian doesn't mean that other people who self-identify as vegetarians condone Hitler's views.
Something like this needs trigger warnings. That's a way to start breaking down those barriers. People won't engage seriously unless they're presented with something seems a little less like stealth hate speech.
There is nothing to embellish or present. When the numbers are still going up it's obvious that the person complaining or being concerned only has their stance because they think they are going up in the wrong places.
It's better not to embellish , at least DJT was honest and didn't try to pretend he said something else.
Not sure if poster is also author, but generally when you want to share a Google docs document to be read (not edited) you should go to the "file"s menu > "share" > "publish to web"
The published version isn't added to readers drive, it loads fast, is not limited by the number of concurrent readers, etc. etc.
Thanks! One of the authors here. We originally planned on having folks actively contribute edits and comments, though we've temporarily turned that on as there are quite a few people reading it now.
Outside of high-tech solutions (external wombs, anti-aging) there's one social: a totalitarian country forcing women to have kids. The only country I could see it happening is China.
In the absence of one of the three solutions, technological civilization will peak this century. It's not poverty or culture that leads to not having kids, it's industrialization. Any culture that automates agriculture to a sufficient level will eventually go extinct in the absence of a technological solution. Totalitarianism can work for a while but it's inherently brittle - at best it can give more time for a real technological solution.
Maybe it's the great filter.
>Even if life extension technology does begin to roll out, any model we can conjure for its use based on current economic systems will limit access to the top fraction of a percent of the population, socioeconomically speaking, and thus be irrelevant in combating the above trend.
Completely unsupported assumption. In theory antiaging could even be delivered via a virus that infects almost everyone.
> Any culture that automates agriculture to a sufficient level will eventually go extinct in the absence of a technological solution
Sample size: zero. Apart from that I doubt a society should reduce agricultural and horticultural occupations to zero. This is not healthy. We're already using by far too much machinery in developed countries.
By that logic it's impossible to say that any species is going extinct before it actually disappears.
The entire developed world is slowly going extinct, and drastic changes are needed to stop that. Some countries like South Korea are collapsing faster than others.
I'm not saying humanity itself will go extinct - because the industrial civilization will collapse first, stopping the demographic collapse - but under the current trend the culture will be gone, most likely viewed as degeneracy of the arrogant ancients.
Your logic is flawless, not every statement with a sample size of zero is false just because no such event has happened before. However, there are a number of causal relationships being made in the original statement with no reasoning offered and no hint why those causal relationships should hold; as such, it amounts to an unfounded assertion. What does seem to hold is that people see less value in having more children when affluence, welfare and education are in reach. But we have yet to see people stopping to get children altogether because of this.
And again, I think that calling South Korea a 'collapsing' society is quite dramatic. According to the projection offered by https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-popu... they will take to the year 2100 or so (~80 years from now) to undo the population growth sustained since 1960 (~60 years before now), going back from ~52m to ~25m (observe that the curve shown at the address is not zero-grounded so somewhat misleading at first sight); this means going from a bit over 500 people per km² today (rank 26 of 234 regions, so rather high) to 250 people per km² in 2100 (rank 50 in today's terms), roughly equivalent to the population densities of Luxemburg, between the UK (278p/km²) and Germany (233p/km²).
So instead of talking about a 'collapsing South Korean population' without coming forth with any figures we should rather take note that South Korea is thought to have settled on a demographic course that will bring them to a state resembling today's UK, Luxemburg or Germany, within a time span of three to four generations. Whether that will indeed happen is, of course, like any prediction about the future, in principle open; fertility rates could go up or down in the future, and, yes, logically speaking, in theory some day in the future could see the last elderly Korean passing away because no-one cared to reproduce anymore; the Korean Dolly Pentreath so to speak. That's one possibility, however unlikely.
However, for those who shudder in the light of such bleak predictions, let me offer the following observations:
* As noted, South Korea had ~25m inhabitants in 1960. Theirs was a time of population growth, so a time with plenty of young labor force entering the market who could on a yearly basis get educated to enter the many budding businesses and technologies that are responsible for the Korean Wirtschaftswunder. True, but even so, if those 25m had been growing slower or had just stayed at that number, one would assume that South Korea's rise might have slowed to a less meteoric rise, given its unprecedented clip (caveat: 'unprecedented' is own assumption).
* Now if South Korea should maintain its predicted course for some decades, it will be up to the Koreans at that time in the future to decide on their fertility numbers. With the country having to feed and shelter that many less people—be it in the hundreds of thousands or millions—there will be space for more people if need be or the wish arises. Conversely, since unbounded demographic growth is a dead end (because at some point the country will have no more space or offer tolerable living conditions), such growth will simply force the only humane option onto the people of the future, to have fewer or no children, and do it fast.
Seeing as one of the more densely populated places on Earth is embarking on a journey to a less-densely populated future should be seen as a sign of hope, not despair.
Outside high tech solutions, we could just make raising children cheap again. The cost of raising children into adulthood skyrocketed in the last century. No surprise people gave up on being parents. Just make sure housing is affordable, and subside public daycare, education up to university, and health assistance for would be parents, and a lot of people would proudly step forward.
We address this somewhat in the document. It seems the effect affordable childcare has is more limited than one would hope, though it certainly helps!
That said, having kids above repopulation rate might not just be about making things affordable. If people don't have a strong reason to have more than two kids, and if kids don't have tactical value like they did when they contributed to the family business (e.g. did farm labor, helped around a household, provided old-age care), then it can be difficult to justify having more than two even if raising kids is totally cost neutral (simply because it's more complicated to have a larger family—more of a logistical and mental burden).
How cheap kids are is irrelevant. Population grew much faster when people lived in abject poverty. People empirically don't want kids, full stop. Raising them could be free and tfr would still be below 2.
"I can't afford kids" is an excuse used by people who don't want kids but are unable to admit that. You can't actually afford kids if they would be under a real risk of starvation - which is a real risk in North Korea, not any Western country.
Don't read me wrong, I'm not saying here having kids is an obligation.
Birth rates for humans are self-regulating, like with any other animal population. We are nearing the point of saturation of how many people the current environment can bear. Good. If there will be some mass extinction, or new resources available, birth rates will increase accordingly. No need for intervention here.
This is not about deaths (mass extinctions usually not follow from resource exhaustion, but from some crisis), this is about less people being born. Which is how human population self-regulates given the estimation of resource availability.
This is definitely one view—and it's totally valid. We put together this document for those who are concerned about the implications of some mass extinction (e.g. that populations that survive the mass extinction are far less likely to be gender egalitarian, so it may be that groups who want to protect women's rights over the long run will care more while groups optimizing for other things will care less).
This. I wish more people realised there were about 200 million humans on the planet during the Roman Empire's existence. Nobody was worrying about eugenics or world crises.
What I'm worrying about is raising children in a continually prohibitive and hostile world where we sacrifice the quality of life in the name of the environment and financial frugality. What's the point? Where is the incentive to reproduce?
Humans will not disappear naturally. Anyone who's seen a Lotka-Volterra model will not be surprised we haven't reached equilibrium. There is no equilibrium. There is no infinite growth.
My sense was that this interpretation of work on the “behavioral sink” is quite off. I think most reasonable biologists and ecologists would agree that density-dependent stress tends to cause the pathologies of the type that are described in Calhoun’s work.
The fact that there are occasional sparse zones in the pen is relevant insofar as it usually implied strong individuals excluding access to those parts of the pen; it’s not a very strong argument against crowding as a chief mechanism for the sink.
That said, there is probably something interesting going on right now with regard to density and abnormal behavior - I’m just not sure that falling birth rates will exacerbate that.
We're not sure either (I wrote this with the primary author), but we agree there's something interesting going on. The research is brought up in the deep dive more as an interesting reference point and less as any sort of primary argument.
To play along more with the ideas you guys are raising, I think that strong spatial heterogeneity driven by falling birth rates in sink-type effects are having an outsized effect on how we think about nations even if the sink is due to density. Societies and cultures which are pre- or post-sink might look at clusters of pathological behaviors as signs of cultural or genetic inferiority, causing some degree of conflict and bias.
...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children! Give people guranteed free life-time education from daycare to university + some standard of free universal healthcare (sure, you'll have to pay for your antiaging, but not for a broken leg!) and more people will enjoy having more children. Maybe engineer the world so that people who choose to "chill t f out" can still enjoy both wealth and security because we do generate surplus value no matter what some people want to make you think. Just prevent some people from overconsuming at the same time that we prevent other from overproducing and give social climbing advantages to less competitive and workaholic people.
One reason why I'm 100% for a mildly-socialistic world government thinggy putting some brakes on mindless growth and eavening things out - handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others. Instead we have a global kabal that manufactures scarcity all over the place, and wars in some even less lucky places, and instead of family planning we have... wars, disease & famine. No idea why we've made these tradeoffs as a species!
Some of the "economical and technological growth" in our societies and economies is really not the right kind of growt (it's more like "cancerous growth"), and some mild redistribution plus hitting the breaks a bit would allow for a more thoughtful type of development so that we can handle safely the transmission of human intelligence and values to bio-humanity's descendents when that comes sooner or later...
Ah yes, the old “More from the fit, less from the unfit” view of reproduction. Where “fit” of course is “like me.” There’s a long history of this sort of eugenics.
This is NOT a view expressed in the document (nor is it a view held by its authors).
One of the key risks this document highlights is the risk that many populations, which contribute helpful diversity and different perspectives to the world, go extinct before people find a way to sustain them (e.g. Koreans, Japanese, Jains, Parsi, Emirates, Tanka, Macanese, Taiwanese, Italians, etc.).
This is not about "I want the 'good' people to reproduce and the 'bad' people to stop;" this is about raising awareness of various implications of population decline, which affect not just cultural/ethnic diversity, but also the viability of many major cities, stock markets, and governing formats.
I was not replying to the document, but to catchclose8919's comment where he advocated "handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others."
"Handling contraception" is almost zero cost (so can even be done in bad economie where stuff like child support can't work) and is about choice, not forcing anyone to do anything!
If you want to play the "contraception is eugenics" card, have fun with whatever ultra-cristian uneducated mid-american audience you find for that...
It's eugenics when you force it. It's social engineering when you alter the incentives/rewards landscape to get better outcomes. And it's... evolution when nature does it anyway.
Just labeling it as generically "bad" and charicaturising it in a way that bundles it with other despicable tendencies like maybe racism brings no insight to the discussion. Only muddies the waters and makes the whole discussion stupider.
No. Let's take a look at the first two definitions that popped up in my search:
> a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population,[3][4] historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.
Those judged to be superior in this case being those in "healthy" societies.
> The study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.
You described a method whereby your goal was to arrange reproduction (birth control to one group, child support to another group), based on their characteristics, on the assumption that those characteristics are heritable. You are simply advocating eugenics. Yes, the theory is based on the theory of evolution. No, most people don't even think it works anymore, whether forced, voluntary, or otherwise.
While this argument makes intuitive/emotional sense, it's not the case that humans start having more kids once they can finally "chill t f out"—though I totally understand where you're coming from.
In practice, populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids.
The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.
All that said, we are not arguing in favor of making life more stressful for any group, be they in developed nations or nations facing severe hardship. We're simply pointing out that "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates.
> populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids
That's the problem we should solve. We don't want just "more children". We want "more children in the environments where there are resources available for their proper development". The "more children" in places like you describe problem is currently solved by more polytical instability, more war, more disease etc..
> "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates
Nothing's proven until you run an experiment to f prove it! You're the perfect example of "thinking prfoundly, but in the wrong direction" - under the whole flawed paradigm of "social science" you take the problems to be solved as "implacable natural tendencies" and from this you build flawed arguments against why the actual problems to be solved "can't be solved".
> The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.
That's the freakin problem you need to solve, not a "trend" to placidly observe. We need to run experiments on multiple ways to alter/reverse this human behavior that's not natural but a product of the nasty society we've build for ourselves. OK, it was a price for a faster evolution towards post-industrial stage, but now we can tweak it and adjust the externalities.
We might want to start with the fact that people are rarely "educated and comfortable". Education often makes people slaves of social-loops where they need to work harder to keep the higher status they've got used to and so on. Most higher educated people are more stressed and less happy than lower education people. We need to give people stuff like "job tenures" etc. to create stability - the lower class people actually have this stability by virtue of being "rock bottom", eg. "it's hard to fall any lower down the social ladder, so at least you can lay back and feel good and comfy about it, with whatever rationalizations you can concoct, then start having some kids to get a feel of meaning in life, yey!".
We need to think active social engineering not passive social-"science". We've sold ourselved a bunch of feel good stories about "how things are" in our "society", instead of realizing that society is nothing but a mechanism with thousands of levers we can start tweaking until we get better outcomes...
> ...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children!
If they're so educated and intelligent, why don't they opt out of that?
...bc (1) educated != intelligent, and (2) intelligence is highly multidimensional, maybe the "dumb" people are the ones more intelligent in the dimension of intelligence requiring to "figure out they should opt out".
Also, in general very vey few people are "meta-socially intelligent" and the few that are are semi-psychopaths in positions of power so they probably enjoy the hell out of riding this hellish social machine.
Hey, i've read the intro and the first part: a remark to the authors: Calhoun experiment haven't been published, this is vrey much popsci, and it is hard to look at the "results" and make conclusions or inference about human behavior. A much better study was by hammock[0], with control group and no anthropomosrphism from the author.
I have some contempt for papers using Calhoun. It's fine for movies, but not for serious business. If "The limit to growth" used him for his models, nobody would have taken them seriously. If you want more impact an credibility, you might want to reword everything and use newer studies of overpopulation "in mice" (or not a all, and present this like a partisan point of view, imho it is better than justifying by bad science)
That's an entirely valid point. We'll seriously consider taking it out. It provides an interesting case study and allows for some interesting conjecture, but it certainly isn't core to the arguments we hope to make and its lack of credibility probably does more harm than good to our overall arguments.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadNazis had/have a specific, violent ideology. Criticism of a hashtag-activism movement, has nothing to do with it.
If in the same message you refer to movement that whose part were multiple real world lawsuits and at least temporary attempts to get some rights to situations with quite serious harassments as "hashtag-activism movement", then you cheapens even more words.
We've been soliciting additional information, counter evidence, criticism, etc. from folks who read the Google Doc since we would like our understanding of the subject to be as clear-eyed as possible. That said, we've disabled comments/suggestions temporarily since a ton of people are reading it concurrently and we want to be able to properly review suggested additions before many other people start reading them; we'd like to vet the ideas in it as much as possible.
I also appreciate the amount of graphs and links, and the direct and clear language you used.
My impression is that this is way better than a typical news article touching this subject. Might not be saying much, but I’m going to keep a copy as the reference on this topic.
I for one see more dystopian scenery originating in the hell-bent overpopulation we've been witnessing on the planet for the past 100 years or so. We're looking at ~1'000 places with a population of 500'000 up to 37'000'000 these days (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities); they comment, quite correctly IMHO: There are quite a number of popular and culturally rich cities that have smaller populations, often making for higher living standards for their residents. Barcelona, Sydney, Berlin and Vancouver all have fewer than five million residents, but are very popular choices for city living. There are also some comparatively very small cities with big cultural, historical or political reputations, such as Sarajevo (314,000), Edinburgh (502,000), and Venice (631,000), demonstrating that small cities can be highly significant regardless of the size of their population.
For almost the entire history of mankind, one million people in one place was a singularly big place, and non-existent as recently as maybe 3'000 years ago (personal estimate). Mankind must learn how to live with a shrinking population. I hope figures will cap out at ~10b people as predicted by the UN; after that, I consider ~1b people as a goal, that's the figure from 1800, so 200 years ago. Even when I was born in the 1960s we had but a paltry 3 .. 4 billion people on this planet and we made it to the moon for heaven's sake. Should be good enough, right?
Nonsense. And the audacity to add "because physics" at the end. Newton himself proved this wrong.
1+ 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125....
Is this sequence constant growing? Yes. Is this sequence infinitely increasing? Yes. Does this sum up to a finite value? Also yes!
Bounded growth on the other hand might mathematically indeed continue for an infinite length of time, but for all practical purposes can most certainly be rounded down to zero past a certain point.
1% + 0.5% + 0.25% + 0.125%....
Is this sequence constant growing? Yes. Is this sequence infinitely increasing? Yes. Does this sum up to a finite value? _Sadly no_
Unless you mean something like
Which is indeed unbounded.We're just trying to highlight the hazards of population decline that hits humanity like a tidal wave and produces unnecessary suffering and damage. There are ways for populations to sustainably decline without wiping out entire cultures, for example.
We, personally, care a lot about memetic/cultural diversity and worry that a population collapse for which we don't prepare will eliminate loads of perspectives that would otherwise contribute great new innovations and technologies to humanity's future.
We also think it's important that people know that population decline will affect certain fundamentals upon which their lives are based (e.g. "I put all my retirement savings in the stock market because on average the stock market always goes up" isn't going to be a healthy thought when population decline accelerates).
You know, you could even blame Russia's current war on its declining population (their leader desperately trying to keep together the country and the people) but I know of another Great War that was fought under the pretense of having the right to expand b/c of a growing population (and they happened to have laid their eyes on the same stretches of fertile farmland). I do not believe in either, the reasons being in both cases largely unrelated to demographic growth or lack thereof. Given that this former event did cause stocks to take a plunge, well, that's what trouble and disorder give you, trouble and disorder. And that can have so many reasons that I'm not afraid of the shrinking population => economic setback linkage, even if and so far as it does have predictive value.
“Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this type is pari passu multiplying and perpetuating those direst evils in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots.” -- Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922
So far we we can see, there is very little (effective) proactive action being taken to ensure that as population levels decline, things we value (like technological progress, women's rights, diversity of cultures, etc.) are protected.
Some say in ice...
We should simply pursue "organic growth" eg. grow as much people as we can care for and educate properly. Unfortunately our elites seem really hell bent of keeping the social landscape hyperconpetitive so the resources we have don't really get distributed... and as a consequence of course (rational) pople have fewer children! Also there's an intellectual war fought on "traditional values" that enabled stuff like extended famimlies to exist and make child rearing at least bearable by sharing the load of caring for the nasty little critters.
Whether we "need" humans depends on where one's values are; for those who would like humans in some form to continue to exist, the idea of AGI making humans obsolete isn't terribly comforting. Even those who might really like the idea of humans sort of evolving into AI (and eventually ceasing to biologically exist) might not be keen to rush toward human obsolescence if they're not thrilled with initial versions of AGI (diversity and optionality is nice).
EDIT+: Counterintuitively, it might be more benefficial to have way more people in the (maybe short) era before the passing of bio-humans, to increase the probability that as many as possible of the valuable human ideas get passed on to our AGI descendents! If AGI is finally achieved by eg. "three middle aged white guys surviving some apocalypse in some bunker", then that AGI will only have and carry on the values and mindsets of those "three middle aged white guys"!!! Ironically, "unification under one umbrella of AGI research efforts" like eg. OpenAI folks try to do increase the likelihood the "three middle aged white guys fathering a narrow-minded AGI", instead of encouraging a diversified competition landscape...
We seem to be handling the upcoming birth of AGI just as well as we "handled" this pandemic...
Thanks for recommending the at section of the document. I’ll take a peak at it. I’m not really worried about yhe birthraye decline case because I think there would be subgroups of humanity with higher birthrates. Both small communities like the Amish and large communities like Nigerians still have birth rates well above replacement level. Africa is industrializing fast and could become an industrial powerhouse like China, if automation doesn’t remove the competitive advantage that high population otherwise would give them. Many African countries GDPs are growing at 10% every year.
This comment of mine goes a little off topic but I think the stuff I’m addressing is interesting and important for predicting the future.
'Wait! Not in those shithole countries!'
Declining birthrates alarmists are essentially sponsoring the great replacement theory. Not with words or by shilling the conspiracy online but with their alarmism as conflated to just particular geographic areas without looking at the whole globe. Global population is still growing and will continue to do so during our lifetime.
The relative distribution of cultures , language, accents, religions... will change but that has always happened. It's crazy to just focus on a particular region. It's as crazy as saying: let's sacrifice present day Swedes and Norwegians to bring back the ancient Romans and Greeks .
I don't believe in "great replacement theory", what is happening is just a natural consequence of massive differences in standards of living and population growth in different parts of the world. Yet at the same time I can also see that this development isn't always without its troubles, like Sweden suffering from a wave of gun violence due to its failure to integrate many migrants who lack education and language skills, and many developing countries suffering from brain-drain. These are small-scale issues compared to the environmental impact of overpopulation, but they should still be discussed.
Of course this is just one way to look at the issue. If we look at resource consumption then worst offenders are elsewhere. After all, even current population levels could be sustained if nobody consumed more than the minimum they really need, food was distributed equally and green energy was dominant.
On page 12 you can see statistic of gun-violence related deaths per million inhabitants in Nordic countries. Sweden is clearly doing worse than other countries, where overall trend has been declining rather than rising. The higher rates in Finland at the beginning are due to statistics also including stabbings.
https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/744136/ON_Luod...
Demographic collapse as a risk (and related risks related to declining populations) deserves to be explored from a non-racially/religiously motivated angle. Just because some racially/religiously motivated groups care about a problem does not mean that everyone who cares about that problem is racially/religiously motivated.
We also don't argue in the document that people should NOT be having kids in certain countries, nor do we argue that certain groups should not have so many kids. We don't even argue that people in general should have more kids (having kids is not for everyone). We merely attempt to take a sober approach to issues around population decline and potential solutions.
Sober..."The Demographic Apocalypse".
Also what population decline? You and I will both be dead before the peak is even in.
We care about what happens to humanity after we die. We acknowledge that not everyone does. No judgment there. This document is more relevant to people who care about what happens to humans beyond their own personal lifespans.
Just because hitler self-identified as a vegetarian doesn't mean that other people who self-identify as vegetarians condone Hitler's views.
Something like this needs trigger warnings. That's a way to start breaking down those barriers. People won't engage seriously unless they're presented with something seems a little less like stealth hate speech.
It's better not to embellish , at least DJT was honest and didn't try to pretend he said something else.
The published version isn't added to readers drive, it loads fast, is not limited by the number of concurrent readers, etc. etc.
In the absence of one of the three solutions, technological civilization will peak this century. It's not poverty or culture that leads to not having kids, it's industrialization. Any culture that automates agriculture to a sufficient level will eventually go extinct in the absence of a technological solution. Totalitarianism can work for a while but it's inherently brittle - at best it can give more time for a real technological solution.
Maybe it's the great filter.
>Even if life extension technology does begin to roll out, any model we can conjure for its use based on current economic systems will limit access to the top fraction of a percent of the population, socioeconomically speaking, and thus be irrelevant in combating the above trend.
Completely unsupported assumption. In theory antiaging could even be delivered via a virus that infects almost everyone.
Sample size: zero. Apart from that I doubt a society should reduce agricultural and horticultural occupations to zero. This is not healthy. We're already using by far too much machinery in developed countries.
By that logic it's impossible to say that any species is going extinct before it actually disappears.
The entire developed world is slowly going extinct, and drastic changes are needed to stop that. Some countries like South Korea are collapsing faster than others.
I'm not saying humanity itself will go extinct - because the industrial civilization will collapse first, stopping the demographic collapse - but under the current trend the culture will be gone, most likely viewed as degeneracy of the arrogant ancients.
And again, I think that calling South Korea a 'collapsing' society is quite dramatic. According to the projection offered by https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-popu... they will take to the year 2100 or so (~80 years from now) to undo the population growth sustained since 1960 (~60 years before now), going back from ~52m to ~25m (observe that the curve shown at the address is not zero-grounded so somewhat misleading at first sight); this means going from a bit over 500 people per km² today (rank 26 of 234 regions, so rather high) to 250 people per km² in 2100 (rank 50 in today's terms), roughly equivalent to the population densities of Luxemburg, between the UK (278p/km²) and Germany (233p/km²).
So instead of talking about a 'collapsing South Korean population' without coming forth with any figures we should rather take note that South Korea is thought to have settled on a demographic course that will bring them to a state resembling today's UK, Luxemburg or Germany, within a time span of three to four generations. Whether that will indeed happen is, of course, like any prediction about the future, in principle open; fertility rates could go up or down in the future, and, yes, logically speaking, in theory some day in the future could see the last elderly Korean passing away because no-one cared to reproduce anymore; the Korean Dolly Pentreath so to speak. That's one possibility, however unlikely.
However, for those who shudder in the light of such bleak predictions, let me offer the following observations:
* As noted, South Korea had ~25m inhabitants in 1960. Theirs was a time of population growth, so a time with plenty of young labor force entering the market who could on a yearly basis get educated to enter the many budding businesses and technologies that are responsible for the Korean Wirtschaftswunder. True, but even so, if those 25m had been growing slower or had just stayed at that number, one would assume that South Korea's rise might have slowed to a less meteoric rise, given its unprecedented clip (caveat: 'unprecedented' is own assumption).
* Now if South Korea should maintain its predicted course for some decades, it will be up to the Koreans at that time in the future to decide on their fertility numbers. With the country having to feed and shelter that many less people—be it in the hundreds of thousands or millions—there will be space for more people if need be or the wish arises. Conversely, since unbounded demographic growth is a dead end (because at some point the country will have no more space or offer tolerable living conditions), such growth will simply force the only humane option onto the people of the future, to have fewer or no children, and do it fast.
Seeing as one of the more densely populated places on Earth is embarking on a journey to a less-densely populated future should be seen as a sign of hope, not despair.
That said, having kids above repopulation rate might not just be about making things affordable. If people don't have a strong reason to have more than two kids, and if kids don't have tactical value like they did when they contributed to the family business (e.g. did farm labor, helped around a household, provided old-age care), then it can be difficult to justify having more than two even if raising kids is totally cost neutral (simply because it's more complicated to have a larger family—more of a logistical and mental burden).
"I can't afford kids" is an excuse used by people who don't want kids but are unable to admit that. You can't actually afford kids if they would be under a real risk of starvation - which is a real risk in North Korea, not any Western country.
Don't read me wrong, I'm not saying here having kids is an obligation.
If you want to make kids cheap, you have to reduce the competition for resources, or increase resource abundance.
Neither one is particularly achievable through bureaucratic policy.
Yet, Life will go on. With or without humans.
Don’t take it personally. It’s just Nature.
What I'm worrying about is raising children in a continually prohibitive and hostile world where we sacrifice the quality of life in the name of the environment and financial frugality. What's the point? Where is the incentive to reproduce?
Humans will not disappear naturally. Anyone who's seen a Lotka-Volterra model will not be surprised we haven't reached equilibrium. There is no equilibrium. There is no infinite growth.
The fact that there are occasional sparse zones in the pen is relevant insofar as it usually implied strong individuals excluding access to those parts of the pen; it’s not a very strong argument against crowding as a chief mechanism for the sink.
That said, there is probably something interesting going on right now with regard to density and abnormal behavior - I’m just not sure that falling birth rates will exacerbate that.
One reason why I'm 100% for a mildly-socialistic world government thinggy putting some brakes on mindless growth and eavening things out - handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others. Instead we have a global kabal that manufactures scarcity all over the place, and wars in some even less lucky places, and instead of family planning we have... wars, disease & famine. No idea why we've made these tradeoffs as a species!
Some of the "economical and technological growth" in our societies and economies is really not the right kind of growt (it's more like "cancerous growth"), and some mild redistribution plus hitting the breaks a bit would allow for a more thoughtful type of development so that we can handle safely the transmission of human intelligence and values to bio-humanity's descendents when that comes sooner or later...
One of the key risks this document highlights is the risk that many populations, which contribute helpful diversity and different perspectives to the world, go extinct before people find a way to sustain them (e.g. Koreans, Japanese, Jains, Parsi, Emirates, Tanka, Macanese, Taiwanese, Italians, etc.).
This is not about "I want the 'good' people to reproduce and the 'bad' people to stop;" this is about raising awareness of various implications of population decline, which affect not just cultural/ethnic diversity, but also the viability of many major cities, stock markets, and governing formats.
If you want to play the "contraception is eugenics" card, have fun with whatever ultra-cristian uneducated mid-american audience you find for that...
So you tell me, what is the definition of a "healthy society" so I can understand which groups you wish would just stop breeding and disappear.
Just labeling it as generically "bad" and charicaturising it in a way that bundles it with other despicable tendencies like maybe racism brings no insight to the discussion. Only muddies the waters and makes the whole discussion stupider.
No. Let's take a look at the first two definitions that popped up in my search:
> a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population,[3][4] historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.
Those judged to be superior in this case being those in "healthy" societies.
> The study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.
You described a method whereby your goal was to arrange reproduction (birth control to one group, child support to another group), based on their characteristics, on the assumption that those characteristics are heritable. You are simply advocating eugenics. Yes, the theory is based on the theory of evolution. No, most people don't even think it works anymore, whether forced, voluntary, or otherwise.
In practice, populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids.
The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.
All that said, we are not arguing in favor of making life more stressful for any group, be they in developed nations or nations facing severe hardship. We're simply pointing out that "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates.
That's the problem we should solve. We don't want just "more children". We want "more children in the environments where there are resources available for their proper development". The "more children" in places like you describe problem is currently solved by more polytical instability, more war, more disease etc..
> "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates
Nothing's proven until you run an experiment to f prove it! You're the perfect example of "thinking prfoundly, but in the wrong direction" - under the whole flawed paradigm of "social science" you take the problems to be solved as "implacable natural tendencies" and from this you build flawed arguments against why the actual problems to be solved "can't be solved".
> The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.
That's the freakin problem you need to solve, not a "trend" to placidly observe. We need to run experiments on multiple ways to alter/reverse this human behavior that's not natural but a product of the nasty society we've build for ourselves. OK, it was a price for a faster evolution towards post-industrial stage, but now we can tweak it and adjust the externalities.
We might want to start with the fact that people are rarely "educated and comfortable". Education often makes people slaves of social-loops where they need to work harder to keep the higher status they've got used to and so on. Most higher educated people are more stressed and less happy than lower education people. We need to give people stuff like "job tenures" etc. to create stability - the lower class people actually have this stability by virtue of being "rock bottom", eg. "it's hard to fall any lower down the social ladder, so at least you can lay back and feel good and comfy about it, with whatever rationalizations you can concoct, then start having some kids to get a feel of meaning in life, yey!".
We need to think active social engineering not passive social-"science". We've sold ourselved a bunch of feel good stories about "how things are" in our "society", instead of realizing that society is nothing but a mechanism with thousands of levers we can start tweaking until we get better outcomes...
If they're so educated and intelligent, why don't they opt out of that?
Also, in general very vey few people are "meta-socially intelligent" and the few that are are semi-psychopaths in positions of power so they probably enjoy the hell out of riding this hellish social machine.
I have some contempt for papers using Calhoun. It's fine for movies, but not for serious business. If "The limit to growth" used him for his models, nobody would have taken them seriously. If you want more impact an credibility, you might want to reword everything and use newer studies of overpopulation "in mice" (or not a all, and present this like a partisan point of view, imho it is better than justifying by bad science)
[0] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Behavioral-changes-due...