Multi-decadal anti-natalist campaign might have permanently shifted the culture against having kids. Be interesting to see whether Republic of Korea can change this; interestingly DPRK is outpacing the south on fertility and may end up demographic winners of the Korean conflict
More than a goal, it is a prerequisite. Without it, a society sustains itself only as much as the robin sustains its family after a cuckoo kicks out her eggs, but the nest remains the same.
It that was all we cared about, e.g. we’d allow rape.
It’s _some_ peoples goals (respectable), and I imagine they also have others they balance.
The beautiful thing about humanity is that we are no longer bound by some of our basic biological drives. Sure they play a factor, but they don’t dominate.
It that was all we cared about, e.g. we’d allow rape.
No. That's not how it works. Rape isn't actually the best way to pass on your genes. Society has determined that marriage is. Hence, rape is universally rejected by all cultures.
Lets not get into a debate over how legal abstractions cover up the reality of rape and sexual abuse, but keep in mind that rape is staggeringly underreported.
I wonder how different countries will react to this exceptional context in the next two decades. To give an idea of the novel nature of this demographic crisis:
1. Some demographers say that for the first time in recorded history the total fertility rate of the world will be just under replacement this year (2022 TFR=2.24, world replacement level being 2.23, as opposed to ~2.1 for first world countries).
2. Middle income countries are en-masse entering a stage of low fertility, a phenomenon that 50 years ago was only observed in few high-income countries. Even some poor countries have a rapidly declining fertility with few of them under replacement, and a bit more poor countries are expected to join this under-replacement stage. This means that immigration as we know it will change in demographics and magnitude, since the source countries will have their own problems as well.
3. Aging developed countries will perhaps have to change their approach to immigration: Canada is the poster child on what not to do and is being observed by several researchers around the world to have a glimpse of what's to come. A vicious cycle is born: Their native youth has not a broad margin by which to start families, so to compensate they take in high levels of immigrants relative to their population (Century initiative, as called by their government), little jobs or housing is added (for a variety of reasons, not all of them political) and home prices go up while wages in several professions are depressed, back to square one. This is particularly pernicious in Canada given their welfare system for elderly citizens, their immigrants aren't having enough children to compensate and in some regions their TFR is actually lower than that of the native population. The bane of a generous pension system is an inverted population pyramid, this is only exacerbating the problem. To ensure non-collapse either migrants have to put a lot more than they give or they take increasingly more immigration. It seems Canada already choose, and has a window of a couple decades given what I just said in point 2.
4. How will other developed countries react? Will they become high-tax gerontocracies like future Italy where the youth has to escape from for professional and entreprenurial aspirations? Or will they battle for high-quality immigration instead and make their economies more competitive and dynamic? Will they rely on their diaspora in Latin-America to compensate (such as german, spanish, japanese, croatian, italian, portuguese) like Spain and Italy are already doing, in the style of a great recalling? Will they, like Canada, start recalling mennonite communities from Mexico? In the US, will the amish carry the bulk of births in rural counties and Hasidic jews offset the birth crisis in urban areas (they both have a falling TFR, but still greatly above replacement)? Israel's TFR is solid and their population pyramid is actually a pyramid, do we look at them on what to do? Many african cities are on the brink of having sub-replacement TFR, will they have internal migration within the same continent instead of external movements?
I personally see this as a positive temporary trend.
We are just collectively too many on our planet, and can quite easily cope with reducing our total number by e.g. 25% over the next 2-3 generations or so.
Unfortunately there's going to be a hump of older people with less younger people providing services and care - it's probably going to be my generation that suffers this - but hopefully on the other side we will have reduced our global footprint and will have worked out how to maintain the same standard of living, but in a more sustainable way without constant unconstrained growth.
What makes you think this trend is temporary? Why would it reverse in a couple of generations? Many European and East Asian countries are currently 2-3 generations ahead of the globally average countries in demographic terms yet those high income countries have birth rates that are marching ever further lower
If I were to guess what it could be, I would assume that the biggest reason is due to republic of Korea having a mixture of the worst of two worlds.
Essentially its conservative/collectivist culture is counter productive to those who wish to establish themselves and have a family (enforcement of gender norms, restrictive demands towards the individuals of said family, attitudes towards minority families such as lgbt and general view stomping down a liberal individualism).
On the the liberal/individualistic side of things, the issue is that the work towards equaility is such low hanging fruit, any change is seen as unfair and threatening by the male population, but also liberal ideals do only tend to want to focus on female issues, in fact it's said it's one reason the current president of South Korea won thanks to the previous government work with feminism while ignoring the male side of issues.
And individual expression in this case is essentially only in practice seen as a means to get an edge in the rat race that is get more money or status (social or romantic), which at some point causes young people to see relationship more as a burden (as stated before) and debilitating (essentially the low hanging fruit of dating is gone, thus it fuels a feeling of doubt of how you can date and actually be together).
Mind you this is a cultural phenomenon in much of Asia.
even if you're economically good, it's logical that urban people don't want kids.
- with 8-5, 5 days a week work schedule, there's too little time to do anything. Raising kids are huge commitment and time sink
- even with time, if you don't have good standing at the population, it'll risk that your kids will have a hard time in the future
- there's too much entertainment and distraction (even travel plans) available nowadays that are too precious to miss just because you need to take care of kids
You are right. To add, the real problem is that a lot of the urban populace also wants to have kids - but later. This is because until the age of 30, people are not settled in any careers that pays well enough. They are burdened with debt. They are also having a hard time finding long-term partners. All of these cause delay in family planning.
But the delay is hard on fertility. Women go through years and years of ART (IUI, IVF etc.) to get 1 viable pregnancy. Many women can't even get pregnant.
Asking couples to do so much in life and still be able to produce and raise kids is insane.
Urban environments in general are population dense (which goes against wanting to add more people), and resource rich (so lots of other distractions, and ability to suppress fertility through birth control).
Thinking ‘I’ll just have them later’ is standard delusional thinking. It’s like someone saying they’ll ‘start eating healthy next week’.
Not judging, just recognizing. Been there, done that.
The reality is, except for being locked up in solitary confinement or being held on a deserted island with no members of the opposite sex, it really doesn't take much for a woman to get pregnant. In fact, without work to stop it, it's common for women be pregnant nearly all the time in any mixed social environment.
I think what you're referring to is 'not possible to start a family with the circumstances and standard of living desired', which is a different problem.
It's always about prioritization and choices. Most of the time, we just don't want to recognize the choices we're implicitly making - and there are a lot of reasons for it.
Delusions are a survival mechanism, and we evolved them for a reason, after all.
I recently started to view religion as a mental operating system that enables people to do things that are not possible with other operating systems.
Having kids is one of those things. For example, in the US a woman who is considered religious based on frequency of services attendance has on average almost one child more than a woman considered nonreligious. ([0] presents one such chart for the United States.)
Except for Buddhism. For some reason, Buddhist women have lower fertility than even atheists [1] I find this surprising and don't really understand the reason.
So anyways, Korea seems to be doubly affected - it has one of the world's highest rates of non religiosity [2], and out of those few who are religious, most are Buddhist.
It seems like if you want to encourage population growth in your country, you want to encourage adherence to an Abrahamic religion or Hinduism.
> Having kids is one of those things. For example, in the US a woman who is considered religious based on frequency of services attendance has on average almost one child more than a woman considered nonreligious.
Is all of this causitive? Could say similar about daycare, which incidentally churches also often provide.
Your reasoning is speculation and your sources only really show evidence for your claim that religiosity is declining.
Another correlation with birthrate is wealth. Wealthy countries have more expensive costs associated with raising children, such as housing and childcare. Given that children can't effectively work for 15-20 years, they are a financial burden. In poor countries, children become another set of hands that can be put to use from only a few years old.
Perhaps instead of thinking of religion as "operating systems" you think instead about society as a whole.
Religion is just a type of politics. A set of ideas and values.
The factor you're masking is gender equality as it ties to religion. India has a significant gender imbalance of children skewed towards boys due to girls being aborted. Because due to religion were less valued and was reflected in inheritance laws.
Korea recently elected an antifeminist leader driven by popularity with young men. Doesn't make them attractive unless we go back to the times of forced marriage. Though I do hear there's activists in the west preaching "enforced monogamy"
There are other factors that are more impactful.
Like cost of living being significantly higher resulting in adults spending more years working to get to the same financial position as the previous generation.
If you need to work until you're 30 to be in the same relative position as your parents when they were 24 then that makes a huge impact when it comes to starting a family.
Also factor in that more educated people have fewer children worldwide, and university education adds more years before a person starts working.
Among people I know from both camps, atheists and religious people, the biggest factor seems to be the environment they live in, mostly money but really child care. They simply cannot afford or would stretch their budget too much to have another child. Maybe there's a correlation between religiousness, especially ability to attend service every week and income possibly?
I would find this surprising... in much of the West, it seems to be the wealthy & highly educated who are more irreligious (ex. [0]). Churches, rather than something one is privileged to attend, tend to serve as a social safety net for those in poverty, and allow savings by eg. promoting those in the congregation to help each other with tasks like childcare. The ability to disconnect from religious communities and still be financially/socially healthy tends to be an indicator of higher personal wealth.
Caveat that I'm mostly talking about generic Christianity, for numbers & personal experience reasons - Judaism, for instance, has a strong positive correlation with wealth.
EDIT: also, in my experience, "child care" isn't at all an limiting issue with attending services. At Catholic masses, even small infants are very welcomed.
-- its normal conversation here - usually we put the reason on - 헬조선: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon - also - there is a big problem with a gender clash - women are learning about modern feminism - rejecting traditional system - young men are not accept it - it causing a lot of tension - more women tell me - i prefer to die alone than have traditional Korean husband - many of my Ewha ("feminist university") friend won't wear school brand clothes for fear of assault - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaenam --
-- complicated - patriarchal - more intense than many cultures - its common to hear a Korean man say - the woman needs to be in her place - or - i own my wife as i own my car --
I find it fascinating that South Korea bans pornography and is very religious.
I thought pornography was supposed to lower fertility and religion was supposed to raise it.
Granted these are randomly chosen countries. If you want to invest the effort and plot fertility rate vs. religion for all countries where data are available to see what correlation (!= causation) emerges, be my guest.
I'm fairly certain I can tell you exactly what is happening.
In societies where the women were staying home, they weren't doing nothing. They were providing child care, maintaining the social networks that bind society together, doing all the at home work that makes it possible for the other partner to work a full time job.
40+ hours a week really requires a second person to do all the other stuff to be sustainable. It was never supposed to be the case that you have two people both working full time and then trying to do all the other stuff on weekends and evenings. That's insane! Especially since men seem to not be doing their fair share of that other work- why would any woman want to take on a full time job and do all the rest?
If you want to have gender equality- and you absolutely should want that- then as a society, you need to reduce work weeks to 20 hours. Otherwise you are just running the whole thing into the ground.
I see a lot of people pointing towards religious beliefs as the proximate cause here- but have you considered that the places that are the most religious are also the places where there is a single breadwinner? Are you sure it's the religion and not the extra social slack that is responsible? Because there is a clear and plausible mechanism for the extra slack of a single breadwinner being relevant, but for religion by itself, it's a much more tenuous connection.
You could probably make things work with a somewhat longer work week- say, 30 hours- if you also supplied families of young children with 100% free child care and subsidized housing.
You got downvoted - maybe people read you as arguing for a return to the old ways and days - but I find your basic argument that two people working 40+ hours can have a very hard time fitting the infant years of child-rearing into their time table quite compelling. Doing a good job as a parent requires time. If you don't have any it can be hard to reconcile it with your conscience.
Korean work culture is particularly demanding (I've lived there) and unforgiving when it comes to private matters interfering with work performance. I'll grant you it's a factor. Few couples manage to pull this off without one partner stopping to work (and it's usually the woman). Increasingly few people want to do so.
If we want this to be different, I think we do have to change the time equation society-wide. Korean society today places virtually no importance on giving adults the time they need to have and raise kids. Koreans themselves will more often cite economic reasons, but this is basically by proxy - the economics don't work out if you don't put the hours into work, etc. The success machine is feeding itself.
Thank you! I was actually assuming I was downvoted because I asserted that each partner should really be working 50% of the hours, or 20 hours only, which conflicts with the ingrained calvinist belief system that says that activities you don't get paid for have little or no value. So in that mindset, if you're working less, you're wasting time, and all downtime or personal time or social time or unpaid time caring for others is just sloth and therefore sinful, or at best, "womens work". Now I don't think that's true at all, but I think many people believe that on such a deep level that it's never occurred to them to question whether it's true.
But, maybe you're right and people were just skimming what I wrote without really paying attention and assuming I was advocating a return to strictly segregated gender roles. Which I am not.
Korea is simply on the same trajectory as Japan, offset 20-30 years or so (because of the civil war). They hate it if you tell them, but they developed on the same blueprint Japan popularized across the area.
So, on the one hand, people who fear malthusian predictions often are presented with the concept of "peak child" which will occur at some point once much of the world is developed and the rest of the world naturally reaches a low fertility rate. On the other hand, under the current system we have (and I'm not sure if there really is any other stable system), we rely on a growing population to provide for everyone and keep the wheels turning.
I just felt like there is this clear cognitive dissonance here, either a growing population is good or it is bad. I do get the sense that "certain groups" growing is "bad" for some people whereas "other groups" (often their own) growing is good and them stagnating is bad...so there clearly are a lot of discussions around this happening in bad faith. Still, even the good faith discussion seems to have this contradiction here that I haven't really seen anyone resolve.
I suppose one argument is "no, we really will grow forever and it will be okay." And while we are probably nowhere near the growth limit yet, I'm not sure I have seen an argument that convinces me of this either.
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[ 15.0 ms ] story [ 1364 ms ] threadIt that was all we cared about, e.g. we’d allow rape.
It’s _some_ peoples goals (respectable), and I imagine they also have others they balance.
The beautiful thing about humanity is that we are no longer bound by some of our basic biological drives. Sure they play a factor, but they don’t dominate.
No. That's not how it works. Rape isn't actually the best way to pass on your genes. Society has determined that marriage is. Hence, rape is universally rejected by all cultures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_laws_by_country
Lets not get into a debate over how legal abstractions cover up the reality of rape and sexual abuse, but keep in mind that rape is staggeringly underreported.
There is no near-term danger of running out of people in South Korea and the birth rate can be raised if needed.
1. Some demographers say that for the first time in recorded history the total fertility rate of the world will be just under replacement this year (2022 TFR=2.24, world replacement level being 2.23, as opposed to ~2.1 for first world countries).
2. Middle income countries are en-masse entering a stage of low fertility, a phenomenon that 50 years ago was only observed in few high-income countries. Even some poor countries have a rapidly declining fertility with few of them under replacement, and a bit more poor countries are expected to join this under-replacement stage. This means that immigration as we know it will change in demographics and magnitude, since the source countries will have their own problems as well.
3. Aging developed countries will perhaps have to change their approach to immigration: Canada is the poster child on what not to do and is being observed by several researchers around the world to have a glimpse of what's to come. A vicious cycle is born: Their native youth has not a broad margin by which to start families, so to compensate they take in high levels of immigrants relative to their population (Century initiative, as called by their government), little jobs or housing is added (for a variety of reasons, not all of them political) and home prices go up while wages in several professions are depressed, back to square one. This is particularly pernicious in Canada given their welfare system for elderly citizens, their immigrants aren't having enough children to compensate and in some regions their TFR is actually lower than that of the native population. The bane of a generous pension system is an inverted population pyramid, this is only exacerbating the problem. To ensure non-collapse either migrants have to put a lot more than they give or they take increasingly more immigration. It seems Canada already choose, and has a window of a couple decades given what I just said in point 2.
4. How will other developed countries react? Will they become high-tax gerontocracies like future Italy where the youth has to escape from for professional and entreprenurial aspirations? Or will they battle for high-quality immigration instead and make their economies more competitive and dynamic? Will they rely on their diaspora in Latin-America to compensate (such as german, spanish, japanese, croatian, italian, portuguese) like Spain and Italy are already doing, in the style of a great recalling? Will they, like Canada, start recalling mennonite communities from Mexico? In the US, will the amish carry the bulk of births in rural counties and Hasidic jews offset the birth crisis in urban areas (they both have a falling TFR, but still greatly above replacement)? Israel's TFR is solid and their population pyramid is actually a pyramid, do we look at them on what to do? Many african cities are on the brink of having sub-replacement TFR, will they have internal migration within the same continent instead of external movements?
We are just collectively too many on our planet, and can quite easily cope with reducing our total number by e.g. 25% over the next 2-3 generations or so.
Unfortunately there's going to be a hump of older people with less younger people providing services and care - it's probably going to be my generation that suffers this - but hopefully on the other side we will have reduced our global footprint and will have worked out how to maintain the same standard of living, but in a more sustainable way without constant unconstrained growth.
So some countries might, other countries won’t. So we’re also talking about population imbalances by country/region.
Essentially its conservative/collectivist culture is counter productive to those who wish to establish themselves and have a family (enforcement of gender norms, restrictive demands towards the individuals of said family, attitudes towards minority families such as lgbt and general view stomping down a liberal individualism).
On the the liberal/individualistic side of things, the issue is that the work towards equaility is such low hanging fruit, any change is seen as unfair and threatening by the male population, but also liberal ideals do only tend to want to focus on female issues, in fact it's said it's one reason the current president of South Korea won thanks to the previous government work with feminism while ignoring the male side of issues.
And individual expression in this case is essentially only in practice seen as a means to get an edge in the rat race that is get more money or status (social or romantic), which at some point causes young people to see relationship more as a burden (as stated before) and debilitating (essentially the low hanging fruit of dating is gone, thus it fuels a feeling of doubt of how you can date and actually be together).
Mind you this is a cultural phenomenon in much of Asia.
- Urban births are much lower than rural births. If it were not for rural women, the births would trickle down much lower
- There are many couples who want to have children but can't because of fertility issues
- Becoming a parent and maintaining parenthood is difficult if these things drive you to poverty, especially in a class driven society like S. Korea.
- with 8-5, 5 days a week work schedule, there's too little time to do anything. Raising kids are huge commitment and time sink
- even with time, if you don't have good standing at the population, it'll risk that your kids will have a hard time in the future
- there's too much entertainment and distraction (even travel plans) available nowadays that are too precious to miss just because you need to take care of kids
But the delay is hard on fertility. Women go through years and years of ART (IUI, IVF etc.) to get 1 viable pregnancy. Many women can't even get pregnant.
Asking couples to do so much in life and still be able to produce and raise kids is insane.
Thinking ‘I’ll just have them later’ is standard delusional thinking. It’s like someone saying they’ll ‘start eating healthy next week’.
It is easy to judge. In reality, circumstances often make it impossible to start a family sooner.
The reality is, except for being locked up in solitary confinement or being held on a deserted island with no members of the opposite sex, it really doesn't take much for a woman to get pregnant. In fact, without work to stop it, it's common for women be pregnant nearly all the time in any mixed social environment.
I think what you're referring to is 'not possible to start a family with the circumstances and standard of living desired', which is a different problem.
It's always about prioritization and choices. Most of the time, we just don't want to recognize the choices we're implicitly making - and there are a lot of reasons for it.
Delusions are a survival mechanism, and we evolved them for a reason, after all.
It's worse than that. For a lot of people 8-5 becomes 7 to 6.
Taiwan has highest vaxx rate of the three and is catching up:
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/depopulation-of-taiwan
Having kids is one of those things. For example, in the US a woman who is considered religious based on frequency of services attendance has on average almost one child more than a woman considered nonreligious. ([0] presents one such chart for the United States.)
Except for Buddhism. For some reason, Buddhist women have lower fertility than even atheists [1] I find this surprising and don't really understand the reason.
So anyways, Korea seems to be doubly affected - it has one of the world's highest rates of non religiosity [2], and out of those few who are religious, most are Buddhist.
It seems like if you want to encourage population growth in your country, you want to encourage adherence to an Abrahamic religion or Hinduism.
[0] https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secula...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.worldatlas.com/amp/feature/...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irrelig....
but...
56.1% No religion 27.6% Christianity 15.5% Korean Buddhism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea
Is all of this causitive? Could say similar about daycare, which incidentally churches also often provide.
Another correlation with birthrate is wealth. Wealthy countries have more expensive costs associated with raising children, such as housing and childcare. Given that children can't effectively work for 15-20 years, they are a financial burden. In poor countries, children become another set of hands that can be put to use from only a few years old.
Religion is just a type of politics. A set of ideas and values.
The factor you're masking is gender equality as it ties to religion. India has a significant gender imbalance of children skewed towards boys due to girls being aborted. Because due to religion were less valued and was reflected in inheritance laws.
Korea recently elected an antifeminist leader driven by popularity with young men. Doesn't make them attractive unless we go back to the times of forced marriage. Though I do hear there's activists in the west preaching "enforced monogamy"
There are other factors that are more impactful.
Like cost of living being significantly higher resulting in adults spending more years working to get to the same financial position as the previous generation.
If you need to work until you're 30 to be in the same relative position as your parents when they were 24 then that makes a huge impact when it comes to starting a family.
Also factor in that more educated people have fewer children worldwide, and university education adds more years before a person starts working.
Caveat that I'm mostly talking about generic Christianity, for numbers & personal experience reasons - Judaism, for instance, has a strong positive correlation with wealth.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-...
EDIT: also, in my experience, "child care" isn't at all an limiting issue with attending services. At Catholic masses, even small infants are very welcomed.
https://www.koreasociety.org/images/pdf/KoreanStudies/Monogr...
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_South_Korea
https://asiasociety.org/education/womens-role-contemporary-k...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/south-korean-women-hit-ba...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
Koreans tend to force everything by overdoing it, thinking they might change things overnight.
South Korea: 1.1 fertility rate, 56% no religion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea
USA: 1.8 fertility rate, 29% no religion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
Mexico: 2.1 fertility rate, 15% no religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico
Niger: 6.6 fertility rate, 0.1% no religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger
Granted these are randomly chosen countries. If you want to invest the effort and plot fertility rate vs. religion for all countries where data are available to see what correlation (!= causation) emerges, be my guest.
Source for fertility rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
In societies where the women were staying home, they weren't doing nothing. They were providing child care, maintaining the social networks that bind society together, doing all the at home work that makes it possible for the other partner to work a full time job.
40+ hours a week really requires a second person to do all the other stuff to be sustainable. It was never supposed to be the case that you have two people both working full time and then trying to do all the other stuff on weekends and evenings. That's insane! Especially since men seem to not be doing their fair share of that other work- why would any woman want to take on a full time job and do all the rest?
If you want to have gender equality- and you absolutely should want that- then as a society, you need to reduce work weeks to 20 hours. Otherwise you are just running the whole thing into the ground.
I see a lot of people pointing towards religious beliefs as the proximate cause here- but have you considered that the places that are the most religious are also the places where there is a single breadwinner? Are you sure it's the religion and not the extra social slack that is responsible? Because there is a clear and plausible mechanism for the extra slack of a single breadwinner being relevant, but for religion by itself, it's a much more tenuous connection.
You could probably make things work with a somewhat longer work week- say, 30 hours- if you also supplied families of young children with 100% free child care and subsidized housing.
Otherwise, your civilization is eating its young.
Korean work culture is particularly demanding (I've lived there) and unforgiving when it comes to private matters interfering with work performance. I'll grant you it's a factor. Few couples manage to pull this off without one partner stopping to work (and it's usually the woman). Increasingly few people want to do so.
If we want this to be different, I think we do have to change the time equation society-wide. Korean society today places virtually no importance on giving adults the time they need to have and raise kids. Koreans themselves will more often cite economic reasons, but this is basically by proxy - the economics don't work out if you don't put the hours into work, etc. The success machine is feeding itself.
But, maybe you're right and people were just skimming what I wrote without really paying attention and assuming I was advocating a return to strictly segregated gender roles. Which I am not.
I just felt like there is this clear cognitive dissonance here, either a growing population is good or it is bad. I do get the sense that "certain groups" growing is "bad" for some people whereas "other groups" (often their own) growing is good and them stagnating is bad...so there clearly are a lot of discussions around this happening in bad faith. Still, even the good faith discussion seems to have this contradiction here that I haven't really seen anyone resolve.
I suppose one argument is "no, we really will grow forever and it will be okay." And while we are probably nowhere near the growth limit yet, I'm not sure I have seen an argument that convinces me of this either.