Good. Most of our modern problems are due to too many people. House prices, inflation, traffic, pollution, climate change, food scarcity, water, etc...
It's not. We can sustain many more, probably 10B+. The problem is everyone wants to live in the same few places. This is mainly driven by economics (workplaces). The WFH revolution will solve a lot of this if it can be sustained.
Imagine if you can dig a well, get solar or any type of non-grid energy, and internet. There are no limits to where you can live, and most of the acreage in the US is cheap. You don't need to have millions of people in the same few square miles, at least in the US. We can go back to smaller communities of people more spread out, instead of 5-10 megacities and 50 or so big cities in the US.
Everyone living in megacities is better than urban sprawl, which clears forests and woodlands. More agriculture is required for more people, which means more land clearing. Renewable energy infrastructure needs energy and resources to build and needs to be replaced at EOL. Whether acreage is cheap or not only refers to money, not the environmental cost. And I haven't even said anything about the environmental costs of manufacturing and shipping goods. People won't go back to a "simpler" way of life because it's a backward step in lifestyle. People don't want to sacrifice their lifestyle to do their very small part to help stave off a catastrophe.
Strictly speaking in the US, it's already cleared. The center of the country, the Great Plains, has almost no trees. Much of the US is pastureland, and you don't have to clearcut a place to live there.
>More agriculture is required for more people, which means more land clearing.
Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of.
>Renewable energy infrastructure needs energy and resources to build and needs to be replaced at EOL.
I'm talking create your own grid living, not create a renewable grid.
>And I haven't even said anything about the environmental costs of manufacturing and shipping goods.
Manufacturing cost is already there, but you're right about shipping. We do have extensive railroads and a massive river system already.
>People won't go back to a "simpler" way of life because it's a backward step in lifestyle.
Some people won't and they can live in cities. Currently, nearly everyone has to live in a city for economic reasons (workplace). Once that stops being a thing, the people that want to move away from a city, and the crime, and the traffic, can do that.
>People don't want to sacrifice their lifestyle to do their very small part to help stave off a catastrophe.
With all the talk about climate change, I've seen very few people do any type of personal sacrifice to change it.
> Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of.
Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me.
> With all the talk about climate change, I've seen very few people do any type of personal sacrifice to change it.
If some person earns 100k annually and another 100M - it means they have to do different sacrifices for holding the climate change. My opinion is that progressive taxation might solve the issue (but I afraid that rich people has both some anticipation of progressive taxation idea and some abilities to obstruct the idea).
>Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me.
No it doesn't we're already efficient. We've known how to sustainably farm for generations. Efficiency comes from mechanization and computerization and both of those are already done. We're so efficient the government pays farmers to not grow crops. What do you farm?
I am groving most foods I consume, not for business but mostly for pleasure to deal with the soil.
We (the humanship) are efficient but not sustainable if to consider few decades only (because intensive farming makes more harm to soil per one dinner), but if to consider at least few hundreds years then the situation is opposite - we are sustainable by the sacrification of efficiency. That's why I consider your argumentation as faulty.
I understand a mechanization point but do not understand how computerization can help me, computerization means just counting faster, store more information and probably self-driving tractors instead of man-driving ones.
It's bc we moved away from nature - to the cities, that we allowed the environmental destruction to occur.
Had we all been rural still - and as bored as you get out there, we would've noticed more of the incremental stuff first hand.
A sole conversation with your family "outdoorsman" - typically a boomer tho, if so you gotta be real careful they don't realize your asking about climate change or else all you will hear is the stories about that one time in 67 it got this cold before - totally normal.
If you can have a candid conversation with someone that has spent a life outside about how different things are today - you will hear lots and lots of things.
It's possible that someday all the animals alive left in the world will either be our livestock or as our pets/entertainment.
Already today to many people most animals exist only in zoos or on TV. The city removed us from nature physically and conceptually.
Plus it's convenient that all that "forest and woodland" you think is "safer" is owned by somebody that wants you to stay in the city.
Try to leave the city. Where I live all the same farm families buy every bit of land that is sold as even remotely agricultural - many have accumulated 10-20 "homesteads" - original farms with a house and garage etc...
They rip out all of the buildings and plow it down. They used to sell the house and buildings as its own thing - they don't do that anymore.
It's not about money. It's about keeping everyone else away - in the cities.
Problem is people with heavy carbon footprint are not the people in high population regions. Therefore depopulation might not help the environment all that much.
such a simple point -- how come no one will accept this? And the rich nations with heavy footprints "wants" the rest of the world to "achieve" the same lifestyle.
There are a few big problems - waste management, particularly plastic and other toxic forever chemicals; overuse of toxic chemicals in agri that ends up in the food chain; depletion of soil and water; not enough will to tackle problems sustainably.
So a few people can consume more and more -- exacerbated by marketing ads and infinite profit motives.
NIMBYism, combination of bad monetary policy and a supply shock, and bad urban planning. Tokyo has cheaper homes and less traffic than cities with a fraction of the population in America.
Yes and no. In the US, the vast majority of Americans want to own a single family home, not a condo or apartment [1]. That brings with it the necessity of personal vehicle ownership, which then compounds urban planning and traffic issues. And of course, you can't make more land near cities where people want to live, so you end up in a scarcity situation as the population grows (US population grows by over 1 million per year, whereas Japan's is shrinking - those million+ people have to live somewhere).
We can say that American preferences are causing a lot of these issues, but then you have to make the argument that people shouldn't be able to get what they want.
> then you have to make the argument that people shouldn't be able to get what they want
This is basically acknowledging scarcity exists. There will always be fewer places with large plots near people than people want, irrespective of the number of people.
> In the US, the vast majority of Americans want to own a single family home, not a condo or apartment
IMO there's 2 points to consider regarding this though:
One can't underestimate the fact it's illegal to build densely in a lot of the USA [1], so it isn't only preferences driving the market. Even if most people prefer single-family homes, and 50% want them to be "away from it all", there's reason to believe that the population that does want to live densely isn't being met with enough supply, and thus prices are still being artificially increased.
In terms of the high preference for low density, there's the unfortunate reality that the density is better in a dense context, but that's not something many people in the USA can experience. In New York, for example, ubiquitous density has meant one can live a convenient life without owning a car. An apartment in LA has all the disadvantages of an apartment, without the advantages of a dense city. That's the perception many people who do experience apartment living might have of it.
So overall, low density in the USA isn't purely preference-driven, and there's an argument to believe if more density _were_ built, preferences would change. It's worth keeping in mind.
And how is Japanese population growing considering they have none of American problem of "bad urban planning", "bad monetary policy" , "NIMBYism" and so on?
If you live in a place like Tokyo it's expensive and depending on your salary you're not going to get much government assistance. In my case it's equivalent to $60 USD per month, for two kids. People on HN will often decry such things but it's a huge factor in the way people make decisions on starting a family or adding more kids.
No, this actually exemplifies the problem. Japan is arguably the most developed country in the world and despite their incredible wealth and societal prosperity - Japan doesn't have a very bright future.
The data appears to present progress itself as the enemy of population growth.
The more developed an economy, the higher the quality of life the fewer offspring people have. The higher the education level, the fewer kids - more money, less kids to spend it.
Part of it is a money issue - not as much as people make it out to be.
My best friend had a kid at 23 while working as a server in a restaurant - his college job (he dropped out) and he raised his son just fine, wasn't ideal but he's alive and here.
If your not having a kid bc of money and you really want to have one - there will never be enough money, there will always be another big project or promotion to work for, we all could use a bigger house.
The joy kids bring to life cannot be measured in financial terms - I wouldn't trade the memories of the moments I've spent with my nephews for all the money.
Tokyo also has earthquakes. Real estate is not an asset that appreciates in value in Japan, because it's eventually damaged or destroyed during an earthquake.
> Real estate is not an asset that appreciates in value in Japan, because it's eventually damaged or destroyed during an earthquake
This has nothing to do with it. Several other real estate markets are seismically active and dissimilar. Japan regularly razed and builds. That, along with limited immigration and a unique monetary policy, keeps housing prices down or depreciating.
Not really. If your building is up to code it should get by just fine, and it's not uncommon to see places that are getting bowled. People here prefer moving into a place that's brand new. The land you purchase will retain its value though, assuming you're in one of the main centers.
The weirdest part is that I’m pretty sure women generally want a replacement rate (or more!) number of children when surveyed, but feel like they’re unable to support that number. Why can’t we address those?
Being pregnant, birthing kids, breastfeeding them, and raising them to age ~3 sucks for a woman.
It could just be that evolution did not bestow humans with a sufficiently easy and risk free process to reproduce, hence the price women demand is too high (in an environment where women can actually price their sacrifice in birthing and raising children due to achieving in financial independence).
its not global so much as prosperity-trap nations, there's enough of those these days (c.f. China) that it lets you say that generally globally, its true
There were predictions 10+ years ago that illustrated this _global_ trend. One stuck with me in particular, I might of found it through /. or Ars, not sure can't find the exact paper. But it predicted all but a handful of nations would be at or below replacement rates by 2050. It was spattering of African countries and Yemen. I think there was one another non African country but it escapes me. It stuck with me because I scoffed at the idea, yet every year and now seemingly every week we see more and more data that shows we are quickly lining up with that prediction.
I don't think we'll be able to navigate this decline with any semblance of grace. Not with the state of our culture and politics. We'll see tremendous instability leading to further erosion of rights, we'll see wealth inequality skyrocket... I mean we are barely even talking about the birth rate issue let alone at a point where we could perhaps have strategies to confront this rapidly approaching future.
maybe, but American fertility rates are equal or higher than countries like Sweden, Norway, and Finland which have great welfare and social safety nets.
Perhaps SV needs to disrupt the existing moribund market. Think bootcamp contracts, but targeted to infants. Pay to... exist. If you believe IQ is all genetics, there should be at least ~250K players in the SV market.
I am not sure it always just boils down to resources. I know cases where she decided to have no more kids after her first, because she realized raising kids is psychologically stressful. Being able to take the easy way out is definitely a factor, the question is how much it weights.
Some of it is a real concern, such as cost associated.
Some of it is pressures we put on ourselves: a lot of people think you basically need to be perfect to be a parent. No one is perfect, and I see a lot of shit from people without kids expecting parents to be so.
Surveys in general like this are kind of useless, you have to see what people actually do.
Almost everyone when surveyed says they want to reduce pollution and help the environment, but do they actually do things (especially things that inconvenience them)?
Perhaps, instead, we can see this as a good thing and plan a graceful way back to a more sustainable population over the course of a century. Just yesterday yet another in a long line of reports talked about how humanity has not just bent but likely broken many of the Earth's ecological boundaries that humans and non-humans alike depend upon. We've known this for decades -- mountains upon mountains of studies in ecology, climate science, and many more fields. We've largely chosen to ignore it all and keep forging ahead with resource consumption and waste production.
Part of the challenge to conventional logic of what I wrote above is that the economy, in standard neoclassical economic thought, is separate from the ecosystem. The two interact, but are entirely distinct. Sometimes human society is another distinct third bubble. Instead, ecologists have long known that the ecosystem of today (and likely for the decades of concern here) contains human society which contains the human economy. So, we're better off planning a graceful descent -- one that will have less competition for resources and less harm to the global ecosystem.
I think the answer is the opposite. Consumption of resources is proportional to standard of living: it takes resources to make the most modern lifestyle available. The demographic collapse, however, is evident in highly industrialized societies like Korea, while backwards regions with a low standard of living still have high birthrates. Subsaharan Africa, for example, consumes less than Korea per capita but has a higher birthrate. It seems more likely that higher rates of resource consumption are correlated with lower birthrates.
>Consumption of resources is proportional to standard of living
It's not and you know this. It's at best correlated. The resources have to be used effectively, and right now they're definitely not. My quality of life does not go up because using up more resources instead of living sustainably.
Higher living standards are directly correlated with higher energy and resource consumption.
Unless you're living in a far distant village or in the middle of the woods producing everything you use, you're using an immense amount of resources in your everyday life.
Recycling, not buying the latest tech and curbing your diet don't make any significant dent into the amount of resources you're indirectly consuming by simply living and being active in a well-off, first-word or even "second-world" society.
Nah. I moved from Canada to Japan last year, and my quality of life has increased at the same time that my consumption has decreased. Correlation is not causation.
I agree with this sentiment but wonder… as long as there are humans, is an ever increasing resource consumption and waste production inevitable? Isn’t this unquenchable desire for more intrinsic to humans? Yes, this means we will probably blow the planet it up, but is there any other way?
With a sufficiently low and stable population, of, say, 50 million, renewable resources, such as water, wood, nitrogen, and fertilizer could be reused indefinitely. But non renewable resources, like oil, natural gas, and metals will eventually become permanently extinct, like oil and natural gas, or will have to be recycled in perpetuity, like metals. This is what awaits us sooner or later anyway.
I've seen this take before, especially around climate and the environment. It's correct that having 20,000 humans on Earth would be more (actually indefinitely) sustainable.
These "degrowth" strategies mean tremendous suffering. People have to die to make degrowth possible. Those who stick around have to suffer of curable medical complications. They have to live hard lives without the comforts of modern life.
Why do we need to descend? It's not strictly necessary: the "environment" has enough fissionable material for nearly limitless electrical power. The "environment" has enough raw material to increase the amount of computation on our planet by many orders of magnitude. And that's if we stay here on Earth -- if you want to think on "indefinitely" timescales, Earth's constraints may not apply.
It's profoundly cynical. I don't actually understand it. All of this technology, this art, this incredible organization that the modern world provides, and think "we need to turn back, tail between our legs, and give up."
well, we don't have a choice. when the standard of living drops so low that you can't even provide enough shelter for a couple, how are you going to have kids? all those ipads and electricity you mentioned won't help you one bit when you're out on the street.
Is there a number between 20,000 (which seems so low as to not be a serious suggestion I have ever seen anyone make) and "growing forever"--for which there was that great analysis done by the physicist arguing with the economist, to whom they were trying to explain that even small amounts of growth forever led to us boiling our oceans with heat output to satisfy everyone's energy needs--that would work for you?
> These "degrowth" strategies mean tremendous suffering. People have to die to make degrowth possible.
But nobody's saying they have to die early. A fertility rate under replacement will lead to degrowth. Yes, it's going to be difficult during the degrowth phase (less young people to support the aged), but eventually the population will stabilize at a lower level and that will be better from both a sustainability and resources standpoint.
The alternative is continue killing trillions of animals a year and polluting the air, water and soil until our biosphere is no longer suitable for many species including humans. At that point we can forget about exploring the stars or whatever.
The alternative to degrowth is actually trying to transcend these problems. I'm not blind to the problems we have here. They are hard, but human beings are pretty clever. We eradicated polio. Polio! I'd be dead in a week if a biologist I've never met hadn't invented a way to use bacteria as a nano-factory to mass-produce a molecule which does not exist in nature.
What you're saying is like saying "Let's not play the World Series, let's just go home and settle for 2nd. We'll still be a playoff team!"
Degrowth is death. We must adapt or die - this rule of evolution still applies to all of us.
Less people is bad. All of us matter but only as long as humanity continues.
Degrowth is stagnation. We must survive tho - even at the expenses of the Earth if that is what it takes.
We are the highest evolutionary life this planet has produced - the only life able to exploit all other life. The entire purpose of evolution could be to create life as we are.
If it's all just random and we ended up as we are solely due to genetic mistakes over time - our existence is even more unfathomable, a seemingly infinite number of things had to occur exactly as they did so that we exist as we do now.
We are the most important thing on Earth - potentially far, far more so.
The Webb telescope has viewed into the past and didn't see so many things it would have if the universe was full of advanced intelligent life - with all the data we possess now, we cannot say that we are not the first to "wake up"and only "if" indeed the universe will ultimately create an infinite number of species with our capabilities.
That's a real big if.
We can't take that chance on something as stupid sounding as "degrowth"
There are currently about 8 billion of us. At some point in the past there were 4 billion of us (Bard tells me the population reached 4Billion on April 11, 1974). We're we somehow worse off when there were 1/2 as many of us on earth? Would we somehow be worse off if we slowly (like over the course of 100 years) returned back to that number? I fail to see how it would be problematic. Somehow we survived and got what we needed to get done in 1974 with only 4B people. If we were to settle back down to that number and stabilize there why would that be a problem? Or, how about stabilizing at 6B?
Degrowth is about shifting our focus as a society from growth at all costs to sustainability and quality of life. It's not about killing people, it's not about worse medical care, it's not about less food.
Our current growth strategy is not sustainable. Growth as a goal has failed. If we need to take a step back to reevaluate how to do it right going forward, that's fine.
Do you think the world can sustain the lifestyle of the average American if the whole of Africa and China have it too? We need to change, and frankly those with privileges need to. Otherwise they would rightly claim that it is unfair.
I think what is more likely to happen is, as China and India become the worlds largest economic powers, and it will happen, it's just a matter of time, they will basically make the west poorer, that's how that issue will be solved. We just won't be able to afford the things we used to have.
Americans will mostly be jobless and replaced by automation, many goods will be exported and China will likely fair a lot better because it's already a place where "social credit" and other policies already exist which are more acceptable than what the USA will tolerate. Americans hate the idea of free healthcare and UBI for example.
I know the US media likes to pretend China is finished, but I really don't think that's the case, it will continue to grow, even if only by inertia.
A lot of Americans would actually like free healthcare and UBI was actually had been around in America for 100's of years since the beginning, it's not new as an idea. China has a whole host of problems they too can't grow forever with ghost cities, etc but they like America have a political need to always be growing.
> The "environment" has enough raw material to increase the amount of computation on our planet by many orders of magnitude. And that's if we stay here on Earth -- if you want to think on "indefinitely" timescales, Earth's constraints may not apply.
There is no indication that humanity will be colonizing other planets any time soon. The greatest scientific minds on the planet cannot even run a sustainable Antarctic outpost. Maybe we can take baby steps towards getting McMurdo station self sufficient before we try colonizing Mars.
All jesustech and techno-optimism aside... countries that are educated and have high standards of living consume a vast amount of resources. No amount of green technology and renewables has been able to reverse this trend. Check out the 2022 mineral baby for the US. https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/mining-minerals-infor...
The reality is that population decline will be needed to save the planet.
The best "degrowth" argument I have seen is from a physicist [0]. His argument is based on hard limits to the amount of waste heat produced by energy consuming (i.e. all) activities of humanity. He shows that if the current rate of economic growth continued for the next 400 years then humanity would be consuming more energy than in all the sunlight reaching earth and would produce enough waste heat that the surface of the earth would boil.
So continuous growth is physically impossible, even alloting for nuclear fusion and miracle technologies.
That's just considering energy/electricity, which is optimistic because civilization has on the order of at least hundreds or thousands of necessary inputs that aren't fungible. Water, air, food, and other raw materials for our bodies and technologies will become scarce more quickly.
A huge amount of growth has been due to "free" value provided by ecosystems, fossil fuels, minerals, the sun, etc. If we get to the point where all the free stuff from nature is not enough and we have to fission and fusion our raw materials we will be living in a society of such profound scarcity that we could probably only subsist as rows of brains in vats.
So the degrowth argument is not that humans should voluntarily suffer to preserve a sentimental gaia aspect, but that suffering is inevitable due to unsustainability and that it would be better to spread it out over a longer time than suffer a major crash.
The post you're referencing is great, undoubtedly true, and one that I have bookmarked and return to often.
However.
We are still very early in the curve. We are warming the planet, but not because of any energy we are producing, merely because of a chemical inbalance in the atmosphere. We are not close to any of the limits specified there.
When energy costs 0.0001 / kWh, we may re-evaluate. But we have a long way to go before we get there.
This entire comment is a complete non-sequitur. There is nothing in the parent comment advocating for suffering, and zero evidence that the voluntary individual choices about reproduction we see in free societies today would lead to that.
This is just straight-up substance-free fear-mongering.
IMO "AI" and Robotics will completely destroy any chance of this happening.
Imagine armies of robots working 24/7 strip mining everything, logging everything, way faster and way smarter than people ever could. This is what we're making, this is what capitalism will absolutely love. There is no sign of any regulation here from governments, they will want it even more, "GDP! GDP! GDP!".
I was really hopefully we'd actually get to a nice place, it would be rough with climate change, but there would be less people and we'd look back on the 21st century with disdain and try live more simple lives, slower lives, it looks like we're going to try 100x everything instead.
If we get to the stage where people do live much longer, this will be the next issue, people never dying and the Earth basically filling up. It will be the next drama we can obsess over :)
I might be wrong, maybe we'll start mining asteroids or maybe the economy will collapse quick enough the singularity will be cancelled due to lack of demand (funny I know).
It's very hard to say, but I hope I'm wrong and you're right!
Your vision is unrealistic. Society would eventually distill down to two bots trading increasingly large amounts of money between eachother until the end of time after first jettisoning themselves into space.
Population growth will continue whether you're having children or not. Western economies are Ponzi schemes and the ones needing your votes know it. You may not have any kids, but there are millions of Africans, Indians, and Chinese ready and willing to flood your country, and there are politicians only too eager to see them pouring across undefended borders. Some of these countries are seeing 9+ births per woman; there will be no shortage of new people to replace your non-existent grandchildren.
The solution would require some degree of ethnonationalism, else how do you argue against this policy? From a "we are all the same" viewpoint, it is unremarkable if Canada is 100% ethnically Indian and Chinese in 200 years; if Britain and Australia are African colonies; if America is... American. The very thought of racial discrimination in immigration, however, is totally unpalatable and unconscionable to most Westerners, and thus there is still no solution.
Your descendants' positions will be filled. There is no depopulation fantasy in the West's future. There can only be replacement.
>Perhaps, instead, we can see this as a good thing and plan a graceful way back to a more sustainable population over the course of a century.
I love the optimism but it's difficult to see this as a positive.
Lets consider china. For decades they had a 1 child policy and according to their own numbers even worse problem killing their daughters. "sex selective abortions" then most believe.
China has a huge proportion of incel men who probably at no fault of their own cannot find a wife. They blame themselves and they become violent. Stemming from loneliness, and feeling of failure.
Nothing is new here. History has tons of these examples and 100% of the time the host country of the incels can't keep them at home. So they are sent abroad. Who is planning to take millions of incel men from china? Yikes... so it 100% of the time has led into an invasion. Imagine having 100 million men who want to be violent and you can invade a neighbour? That's what you do. Will it be different this time for the first time? I doubt it.
Man there's a lot of nuance here. Fertility as you are thinking of it is also greatly reduced, but confusingly "fertility rate" and "birth rate" are highly correlated measures which basically measure the thing the article is actually talking about. So, kinda, but not really?
> Wouldn’t birth rate be a better word instead of fertility?
Birth rate and fertility rate are related but different measures.
Birth rate: # of live births per population per unit time
(General) Fertility Rate: # of live births in a time period per woman of childbearing age (15-44 is one definition, not sure if it is the most common.)
(Total) Fertility Rate: splitting up a definition of childbearing age (often, slightly wider than that used for GFR on the high end; I’ve seen 15-49 used where 15-44 is used for GFR), into equal size age bands (e.g., 5 year bands), calculate the GFR for women in each band on an annual basis, multiply by the width of the bands, and sum; this represents an approximate measure of the expected lifetime births per woman.
Yes, this technical usage conflicts with some common uses of “fertility”, but technical jargon is that way.
As the article points out, having a choice, and not being pressured by society into having kids one doesn't want, certainly is a good thing. On the other hand, as the article notes:
> [...] cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages [...]
the financial aspect is a huge blocker for those who want to have children. We live in a world where the majority of young people can't afford to live in a city center without 2+ roommates, let alone afford a lifestyle where they have any amount of disposable income, of which a lot is needed to have children.
This policy and societal failure of squeezing every bit of wealth out of the new generation and not giving them anything will eventually drain cities of young people and those cities will be left behind as times change with the newer generations. The cities will miss out on culture, societal change, modernity, eventually of sheer people. See San Francisco, New York, Seoul, etc. It doesn't seem like countries are treating this as the problem it is and I fear for the future of all these currently-popular cities.
At least in my case, I moved to a city for more infrastructure, public transport and my job. I had absolutely no plans to raise kids there. In fact, most people I know move out of the city center to the suburbs once they have kids. I dont follow your analysis why less childbirth would automatically lead to deserted cities.
Why? What if those left alone in rural areas end up moving to cities for the exact reasons they already do? At least that is what happens right now. Rural areas do nothing to make the young stay. If you don't own a car, you are lost. Most jobs are mechanical in nature, software almost nowhere to be found. And the cities are growing, slowly, but they are. What maes you think this effect would be changed just because overall, population goes down?
Haha, if we are talking about the final outcome of zero population, of course the cities are empty. But until then, there is still some way to go. And I am pretty convinced people will flock together in cities instead of withering away lonely in the countryside.
IMO this is getting a bit too ahead of ourselves. IIRC, Russia and Japan are the countries with the most population shrinkage, and they've just lost 5 million and 2.5 million people off their peak.
- 5 million / 148 million is 3% down from peak for Russia.
- 2.5 million / 128 million is 2% down from peak for Japan.
Most importantly, Russia's population decline (which started before Japan's) has leveled off. It hit a local minima in 2008. It has wobbled up and down, but stayed close to 143m for almost 20 years [1].
This is how populations usually work; they level off and oscillate around their carrying capacity. It's often studied in biology [2].
Shaving off 3% of the population of a country doesn't lead to deserted cities any more than other factors do. Natural resource depletion and economic factors are and will most definitely keep being bigger worries for cities (ie, droughts leading to water shortages, big employers moving out, etc).
Unless Japan's birthrate picks up, its population is slated to fall by a lot more than 2% from its peak. Try 50% or more. A birthrate below 2.1 children per woman leads to extinction.
This is true, Japan's population pyramid [1] looks way more dire that Russia's [2]. Russia's does seem to suggest shrinkage after the big generation born in the 80's passes away, but oscillation afterwards. Japan's is an inverted pyramid.
Russian population decline has been compensated for with a great number of immigrants from Central Asia (plus occupied Crimea; that's not recognized internationally but is obviously a factor for their economy). It'd probably be more like 138 million modulo those and their children, perhaps less.
That's an interesting point; Crimea has about 2 million people. This doesn't seem to show on the charts though, when in theory it should look like a spike around 2014, no?
Well Russian charts do show it, because since 2015 Russia includes Crimea in internal stats. As you can see it's also growing in 2022, despite there being consistently more deaths than births for years on end. I suppose we can infer what this means.
I've thought about this, and I'm no expert, but I've come to be convinced this is how reaching carrying capacity is meant to feel.
It's easy to imagine it as some sort of famine, where there isn't enough food to feed children, or overcrowding so extreme that everyone lives in slums and it's simply impossible to have kids. If it ever reached that point, a population graph would show a sharp fall, not a steady leveling-off.
When I think about previous generations in my country (Mexico) they seem more care-free. They loved someone, they had babies. One single head of household could afford to buy a house. It was a house too, not some tiny apartment!
I look at my life though and it just seems a little more stressful in a bunch of small ways. The squeeze is gentle, not abrupt, but it's there. Living spaces seem smaller, which adds a little stress. Comparing vs old photos, the city just looks more crowded, more full of traffic, which adds a little stress. In their 20s my parents weren't thinking about the environment, but I am, which adds a little stress. I think about the living standard I could give my kids more than my parents seemed to; I just can't shake the thought that my kids need to stand out from the huge crowds of people there's now, which adds a little stress. At the end of the day all these little bits of stress add up and lead to me not wanting kids any time soon.
Perhaps this is what approaching a population cap is meant to feel like. Just stress here and there, leading to less fertility, rather than some hard physical limit.
In other words, we are like a mouse population. If a cap is reached, fertility sinks (but for mice also mortality rises as well. We humans are lucky in a way compared to mice.)
Total population has oscillated for 20 years, but it would be mistaken to conclude that it's reached steady state because it's also been aging all the while. Meanwhile, TFR in Russia has been sub-replacement since at least 1990.
Russia: Eh, no. That's just a temporary blip caused by a lot of the people born before 1945 not having made it that far, so the population was unnaturally skewed young. Few elderly to be dying off at the time because a large portion of those people died off 50-60 years prior.
They're set for sharp decline going forward, and changes in geopolitics look likely to dry up or outright reverse their modest immigrant flows from former USSR countries.
You're right. Japan's population pyramid is inverted [1]. Personally, I wouldn't call the rate ever more rapid— it's seems quite linear given that fertility rate has been pretty steadily around 1.3 since the 90s [2], but it is definitely still shrinking.
Russia's population pyramid does seem to suggest a big dip once the generation born in the 80s passes away, but it doesn't look like a reversed pyramid just yet. The generation born in 2021 doesn't seem considerably smaller than the one born 20 years ago [3].
More likely - dried out husks of small cities that shrivel up and die. Look to the US rust belt as a historical indicator.
For modern times, climate change has made it impossible to insure some areas of the US (Norther CA fire country, Florida hurricane corridor, etc). Insurers are going out of business or just not paying claims.
Small cities died because of increased crop farming efficiency, factory livestock farming and decreased heavy industry/manufacturing in the US.
I absolutely love the doomerism in your second paragraph. If you listen to those who buy into the whole climate armageddon thing, you would think that by 2030 large swaths of the US are going to be uninhabitable or under water.
No, the West isn’t going to burn away. We just need to resume good forestry practices and not build houses in precarious places.
Similarly in FL, this has little to do with “climate change” but rather an elimination of Government subsidized risk taking so the full insurance cost is bore by the property owners and not taxpayers.
> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population.
If the USA was net neutral on immigration (as many people entered as left), the birth rate would be too low, there would be some tens of millions of dwelling units either empty or never having been built.
This is a very important point that gets almost no discussion. Two classic "liberal" policy objectives, immigration and affordable housing, are at war with each other.
This is not an "own the libs" comment. Both policy objectives can be morally right, and still work badly with each other.
Immigration makes it much harder to fix affordable housing. That's just reality. It seems to be completely ignored by politicians, though - including those on the right, who seem to have ignored this as a club for beating up politicians on the left.
There is a simple solution to fix unaffordable housing that is effective regardless of immigration levels. And that's to allow more housing to be built by relaxing zoning restrictions.
Support for both immigration and zoning reform are in no way incompatible.
the material standard of living has been dropping and it's now getting to the point where people can't afford shelter any more and thus no more kids. CA's birthrate has already plummeted to a level lower than in the great depression several years ago.
What i don't get is why decreasing fertility is always presented so negatively in the media. falling fertility is a huge blessing in the long run. we can't keep growing our population exponentially.. there's already way more people on the planet than the planet can support (see overshoot theory; climate change, earth mineral shortages, shelter shortages, etc). Humans outnumber other animals (non-domesticated) by orders of magnitude: it's not natural or sustainable.
Because the population decline isn’t evenly distributed, it’s happening as the article points out, to rich people. Who of course complain the problem is that they simply don’t have enough money and that’s why they don’t have more kids.
That's just a function of changing economic conditions. Do you care about Detroit the same way you care about SF? It had a roaring culture in the 40s-60s, but is now little more than a derelict husk.
Not having children at any particular level of "poverty" is still a choice. African women have >4 children in conditions that makes a food stamp life look like king's.
One of the issues you mentioned is inherent to city living itself. Although we have been led to believe that city living is more efficient, let's examine whether this perception holds true. The cost of constructing single-family homes in non-dense areas is significantly lower, averaging around $150 per square foot. In contrast, high-rise buildings can cost five to ten times more, with an average of $800 to $1500 per net rentable square foot. Infrastructure costs, including roads and utilities, typically range from $30 to $60 per square foot for a 1500 square foot area, with sewer systems being the most expensive component. Yes, you don’t get paved road in rural. But gravel road is just fine there.
Considering these figures, it becomes evident that city living cannot be deemed cheaper based solely on the cost per square foot.
However, the lower cost of construction in non-dense areas doesn’t translate to ample of low cost housing because it has its own zoning and regulation that prohibit from happening.
Drawing from my personal experience as a software engineer turned builder/developer, these observations are rooted in real projects and data.
Those economic explanations are searching for keys under the lamp post. As Tanner Greer notes[1]:
> Structurally the arguments in both countries go like “life is so hard, and things generally so depressing, that I have no desire to bring children into the world.”
> In both cases generations previous, who lived through events far more harrowing and whose material circumstances were far worse, did not express similar beliefs at any scale.
Improving living conditions is always nice, so it is shoehorned into every conversation. What arguments could he raised against improving the atrocious housing situation (at least on the level of vague sentiment, "time to build", not necessarily YIMBY activism)? None at all, the very attempt amounts to a political suicide.
Yet when you see basically the same trends and very similar absolute values in countries as dramatically distinct as Argentina, Belgium, England, Iran and Russia [2], it becomes increasingly clear that no economic variable suffices, no charitable materialist analysis can account for the cultural shift. The real answer is simply the perceived value of children and lifestyle amenable to their existence plummeting worldwide. Now, even minor (by the standards of our predecessors) inconveniences and contrived long-term considerations like climate change can be cited as legitimate reason to not have any (or not have more than one).
Modernity sees no point to children. And as nations age and budget decisions are weighted in favor of older and childless people, as urban infrastructure itself evolves to make children more of a labor-intensive chore a working person would not be expected to afford, any possible remaining point becomes even less compelling. But to begin with, rationalizing the child-free lifestyle with material excuses is just a vestige of old normative morality, token respect for traditional natalism.
In fact, we would advance the discourse more if we paid attention to outliers both in terms of fertility and in terms of its trend, those being, to my knowledge: Israel, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. And no, it's not entirely about low-education traditionalist groups, certainly not in Israel.
> And no, it's not entirely about low-education traditionalist groups, certainly not in Israel.
Yes it is, Israel’s high fertility rate is driven by tribes that either explicitly or implicitly influence how many children they want by restricting their financial independence. Same story with all the other countries you listed.
> The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998, and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose from 6.91 in 1980 to 8.51 in 1996. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrahi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996.[30] In 2020 the overall Jewish TFR in Israel (3.00) was for the first time measured higher than Arab Muslim TFR (2.99).
Look at the graph here of the fertility rates of different types of Jews:
What motivates people to provide sources that refute their own argument? The Bedouin (Muslim), Google says, make up 200,000-250,000 out of Israel's 9,3 million people. Or as your source puts it:
> Of Israel’s population of 9.5m, Israeli Arabs, mostly Muslim, make up about 21% of the total, while Jews account for roughly 74%.
> Though Haredim are just 13% of the population, their offspring make up 19% of Israeli children under the age of 14, and 24% of those under the age of four.
So the majority of modern Israeli population are Jews, mainly secular and moderately religious (61%). It seems most children there also belong to those categories, although somewhat less than their parents' population share. And as stated in the headline, Muslims are in decline and have already converged to the average national rate. So there is strictly no way for Israel's fertility rate to be driven only by traditionalist minorities. They explain the increase.
> Look at the graph here of the fertility rates of different types of Jews:
As can be seen, secular Jews are roughly at 2 children per woman and "religious" (but not Haredi) are at 4. Once again, other OECD countries are roughly between 1.0 and 1.7 and falling. And they, too, have a share of religious traditionalists.
All that said, a good article. Some interesting bits:
> If an Israeli woman has fewer than three children, she feels as if she owes everyone an explanation—or an apology.” That, at any rate, is the view of a leading Israeli demographer. When she visits London she is struck by its dearth of toy shops.
> …But it is harder to explain why secular Jewish Israelis also have more children than the norm. Most work; paid leave for Israeli parents is not especially generous. Nor is child care cheaper than in other rich places. Some argue that Jewish Israelis make more babies because they foresee a rosier future: Israel ranks among the world’s top ten countries in happiness.
> Another reason may be that the state encourages baby-making by, for instance, bankrolling fertility treatment. It subsidises in-vitro fertilisation to the tune of $150m a year. Tiny Israel has about the same number of frozen embryos as America. This may have only a slight effect on Israel’s birth rate, but it signals that the government wants its citizens to procreate.
> One more explanation may be that Israeli grandparents tend to help out more than their peers in many other rich countries. Since Israel is small and densely populated, grandma is never far away. In one survey 83% of secular Jewish mothers aged 25-39 said they were supported by their child’s grandparents, whereas only 30% of German mothers said the same. In Israel the traditional family structure is still strong. In France and Britain more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. In Israel it is under 10%.
So, no, this isn't about "tribes" restricting financial independence. This is about a modern secular society that isn't blatantly antinatalist, plus coexists with sizable non-modern groups. Perhaps we could learn something from them, on both accounts.
>What motivates people to provide sources that refute their own argument?
I do not see how the data I offered does. This quote specifically seems to support my claim that tribes that "restrict" or maintain certain "expectations" of women are disproportionately responsible for pulling the fertility rate up (which is 3 compared to other countries of being less than 2).
>Though Haredim are just 13% of the population, their offspring make up 19% of Israeli children under the age of 14, and 24% of those under the age of four.
>As can be seen, secular Jews are roughly at 2 children per woman and "religious" (but not Haredi) are at 4. Once again, other OECD countries are roughly between 1.0 and 1.7 and falling. And they, too, have a share of religious traditionalists.
I agree that it is notable that secular Jews are at a higher fertility rate, but note that it is not much higher. There are 2 factors at play here, the biological costs of having children, which are immutable, and the "economic" costs of having children, which are mutable. You make a good point here:
>In one survey 83% of secular Jewish mothers aged 25-39 said they were supported by their child’s grandparents, whereas only 30% of German mothers said the same. In Israel the traditional family structure is still strong. In France and Britain more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. In Israel it is under 10%.
It takes a village to raise a baby, and it may be true that given enough familial support, a woman would be more likely to have ~2 children rather than 0 or 1 as is being seen in other developed countries that lack the familial support system for myriad reasons. However, even with familial support, I think few women would opt for 3 children, and a very small minority would opt for 4 or more.
1,5 (or 1,2) vs 2 is a lot. It is close to 3 so confidently above replacement for the whole secular+non-Haredim religious group (reminder that nominally the US is nearly completely "religious") and very close to replacement rate for secular Jews only; they will not experience significant population contraction in the next 100 years even if left on their own. This is important in that it means they also will never run into dependency ratio problems and necessity of mass immigration to prop up the failing economy, at the current rate; they will also never experience the cultural impact of extreme geriatrization of the society (some European nations are at average age 45 and higher now). Trends are also completely different, there is no precipitous decline (in fact it looks like a slow wobble and their TFR may return to 2+). If secular Jews were their own country they'd have been doing fine, arguably better than now and clearly unlike the rest of OECD TFR-wise.
> the biological costs of having children, which are immutable, and the "economic" costs of having children, which are mutable.
While the biological costs are not trivially mutable, there is a world of difference between having a child at 21, 27 or 35. The toll childcare takes on the body ramps up rapidly with age, while the ability to provide care declines. Older people fail to function well in a sleep-deprived state. We are doing everyone and especially women a disservice by suggesting that this decision is most wise to postpone.
>We are doing everyone and especially women a disservice by suggesting that this decision is most wise to postpone.
Absolutely! Another component of all of this is before the costs of pregnancy and birth and raising the kid, which is matching up two people to procreate and create a life together.
I have numerous cousins and friends who would rather be single than commingle their life with a partner who they think would make their life worse, a phenomenon with many causes, but one particular one that sticks out to me is the lack of social pressure to pair up, and especially on women's side, a safe society with the ability for them to live alone without needing a man makes the compromise not make sense.
What’s most concerning is that this might be a negative spiral. I think one reason young people these days get so squeezed financially is that proportionately more retirees/near retirees in the population means that, structurally, economic output needs to be taxed or otherwise transferred (from rents, dividends, capital gains) from those who are working to those who are retired. If this squeezing causes people to reduce their birthdates, it continues the age pyramid inversion and necessitates even more squeezing later on.
Suggesting we treat housing as a good (which should be easily accessible and inexpensive) rather than an investment would surely help and isn’t controversial here. But it does pose a systemic problem as many current and upcoming retirements at present hinge on housing prices, which is how we got into this mess.
Perhaps a more controversial suggestion: fund retirements based on taxes or other forms of “cash flow” rather than through investments. Tax policy has directly incentivized investment as a way of funding retirement. At a societal level increasing the capital base probably makes us more efficient but we are shifting so much more economic output/returns from labor to capital that you can easily be much, much wealthier in retirement than as a worker. And people wouldn’t need to save and invest so much if they knew they’d get a reasonable pension.
As good as it is for people in their 50s and beyond, I think turning everybody into an investor has created inherent age-based inequality which becomes especially impactful in the prices of housing (and probably other markets that are expected to retain value, even if not investments, like art).
I don’t buy the hypothesis that it’s simply lack of means driving the lack of fertility. Poorer countries and poorer times both came hand in hand with higher fertility than we see today.
My hypothesis isn’t that it’s not affordable, it’s that people don’t stand to personally benefit from having kids, and birth control is available, so they don’t. If you‘re willing to tolerate any quality of life, well you might just be able to afford kids.
I also think our attitude towards education specifically is a key driver of low fertility. We have invented a system where we literally take the horniest most fertile members of the population and we have them compete in a boundless contest to accumulate more and more prestigious, time consuming, and necessarily more irrelevant accreditations.
It's not about an objective level of means, but more about one's relative standing and its security.
Take a modern young couple in a place like NYC. Having to work incredibly hard in an uncertain job - both of them - never too far from being unable to pay rent (or mortgage, although that now tends to come later in life). Meanwhile bombarded by ads of all kinds (and people they see around, both in real life and online) to have consumption of a certain level just to maintain the status quo of their social standing.
Add to that a complete lack of positive vision for the 'developed' world but plenty of negative ones. A complete lack of any sort of utopian thinking. Including the fact that whoever does end up having children will end up with those children later having to support all the pensioners.
---------
So in a way, the poor are more secure in their poverty than the young people in the middle, and therefore they procreate. So do the more wealthy that are secure in their wealth.
> As the article points out, having a choice, and not being pressured by society into having kids one doesn't want, certainly is a good thing.
Why? If elevating individual “choice” and doing what you “want” results in a society that literally cannot perpetuate itself, I struggle to see how that’s a “good thing” much less “certainly” so. To me, it sounds like the sign of an evolutionary dead end—one that’s sustainable in the short term only by arbitraging a world order where wealth inequalities drive many people to leave their homelands for these otherwise terminal places.
Affordability is a factor, but also one of several. Affordability, among other issues, certainly would lead some couples to decide to have fewer children than they otherwise might (1 instead of 2, or 2 instead of 3).
Besides affordability, more recent generations focusing more on career, quality of life, freedom, overall thrill- and experience-seeking, has led people to make lifestyle choices that do not involve children, as children can be a hindrance to some of those lifestyle choices. Because of those choices, many of these same people simply don't value children [of their own] as much and thus have fewer or none at all. Career aspirations, increasing wealth/income, and keeping a majority control over one's time and obligations has become more important than accepting the stresses and challenges of raising one's own family, even when considering the special kind of joy that also arises from pursuing that endeavor.
Adding onto that, say what you will about organized religions, but the increasing level of secularism is perhaps also a factor in leading to a declining birthrate, as most organized religions tend to "bake in" a kind of enthusiasm and social "nudging" to have more children.
I think that as the number of choices and opportunities in life go up, the opportunity cost of giving up a portion of this naturally increases. You might end up with "more" overall than past generations even after having kids, but loss aversion makes you feel the part you're giving up more keenly which steers some people away.
It's the same reason some people can't just relax and turn off. We're able to be so efficient/productive now, 30 minutes "wasted" costs a lot more now than it did in 1990 or earlier.
> This policy and societal failure of squeezing every bit of wealth out of the new generation and not giving them anything will eventually drain cities of young people and those cities will be left behind as times change with the newer generations. The cities will miss out on culture, societal change, modernity, eventually of sheer people. See San Francisco, New York, Seoul, etc. It doesn't seem like countries are treating this as the problem it is and I fear for the future of all these currently-popular cities.
Or.. we will have smaller populations. It's difficult to cite new cities. The US ostensibly has a lot of land area to make new cities - but if you get into the details there are a variety of reasons that the existing cities are where they are (including wildfire/water risks).
To me all this just sounds like price mechanisms are working and overpopulation is a self correcting problem. As labor grows scarce over time automation will take over. We all know society is an enormously complex system, yet we spend hours upon hours of our limited waking lives fretting about things we can't possibly, as individuals, understand or change.
Scary part is population collapse is a slow moving train wreck that is hard to avoid. The population projection for decades from now are set in stone. Yet we are powerless to anything about it.
IMO calling it "population collapse" and a "train wreck" is the wrong way to describe it. This isn't so much a collapse, it's a leveling-off. A train isn't supposed to wreck, but populations are supposed to reach a maxima.
The fact historical short-sightedness meant we didn't plan for it properly is an issue. The problem here should be framed around our economic system though, not fertility rates.
In nature, a population reaches a maxima but it's a survivorship bias metric. Populations that _didn't_ level off struggled to find the now scarce food, and died off too fast to re-populate, or some other reason died off.
Humans are the only species so far to be able to exploit more resources as population grew, and have the technology to prevent such a collapse (by constantly expanding the resource acquisition game). In the future, i would expect space exploration to be space resource collection. Therefore, we will not reach maxima because there's no such thing. No natural force should be able to kill off humans or their expansion.
I've come to believe this is what reaching carrying capacity is supposed to feel like. A gradual desire to have fewer kids due to stress, rather than an abrupt calamity that cuts of populations all of a sudden.
This is the angle here. Don't stop the AI bandwagon!
> With that in mind, recent advances in ai could not have come at a better time. An über-productive AI-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually ai may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence.
An economic system that depends on an ever-growing population is by definition not a sustainable economic system. Wether shortages happen this century or N centuries from now, at some point, like any population, a cap will be reached
If this is dire to the economy, we are better off thinking at once about changing the economic system, not the fertility rate.
Exactly. Just a few years ago people were panicky because earth cannot support the "billions and growing" human inhabitants.
Don't forget every human conceived less on earth also means fewer cars, plane trips etc.
We need to change from a growth-oriented capitalist consumption economy to an elastic (robust against dynamically growing and shrinking) sustainable economy.
Part of this is to chain the attitudes about consumption, but part of it is also re-organizing production and supply chains after globalization in ways that ensure goods are produced as locally as possible and as globally as necessary to reduce transportation pathways.
There is no economic system that is sustainable where there are more elderly people not working / unable to work than there are young people who do work. That's the problem. Many countries are experiencing this problem. The US evaded it currently due to immigration.
> There is no economic system that is sustainable where there are more elderly people not working / unable to work than there are young people who do work.
I don't think this is true. At the micro-economic level, it's not outlandish to see households where a working generation sustains not only their kids, but also their parents. At a macro-economic level, we'd certainly have to adjust our expectations of profits and growth, but that's because we are used to an always-growing economy.
You're going against the evidence present in front of you (eg, read the article). If the fertility is collapsing, people don't have children. In particular, elders don't have children. Elders don't have anyone to take care of them.
The worlds population is/was racing towards 10B. It's just too much. 2-3B is realistic. AI can take over where new workers would have filled in. A small elite living in an AI paradise just as SciFi predicted is the right time to be alive.
I've been wondering a lot about fertility lately. Almost every married woman that I know of my age group is seemingly unable to have children, despite, in most cases, wanting to. This is often accompanied by PCOS, thyroid problems, or other strange but undiagnosed illnesses. The one exception to this seems to be those of Italian American vintage. Having grown up in Rhode Island I know quite a lot of Italian Americans, and while they all have those strange illnesses, they do seem to be able to have kids almost universally.
Something really strange is going on, and it's awful to watch. In some instances the women have actually considered self harm because of their desire and inability to have children, even after tens of thousands spent on IUI and IVF. This can't be accidental, but I have no idea what could be causing it and how anyone would go about proving the connection. I hear all sorts of wild theories such as birth-control in the water, or plastics imitating estrogens, or pesticides interrupting hormone pathways, but they're all correlative when I've investigated. Never really seen it any truly compelling evidence. In fact, I've never even seen real evidence to prove that this is a phenomenon that's actively occurring, but man, it feels like nearly every fertile-age woman I know is having problems, and the few that aren't probably just aren't talking about it.
From a personal and selfish standpoint, I now have two kids and it sucks not having any friends that have kids.
Beyond pollutants, which isn't at all far-fetched to think is affecting fertility rates, there's also just life. I know plenty of people who want to have kids, but there's a lot of reasons to wait before having them. The later one waits, the harder (physically) it is to have kids.
I think there's a lot of people who see some level of stability and financial padding on the horizon, far away but within reach given a few years. Because this group sees that glimmer, they chase it and hold off on having kids in hopes of reducing the chances of ending up in dire straits thanks to the expenses that come building a family.
The argument against this is that impoverished areas have higher birth rates, and that's probably because they don't see the glimmer. These people are more likely to have resigned themselves to their fate of being poor and kids either don't change that equation or even add value (as they can serve as farmhands and such).
If we rewind several decades to when long-term financial stability wasn't so difficult to achieve, the birth rate wasn't an issue. People achieved stability when young and started having kids. If we want to bring the birthrate back up, I think it's going to be necessary to make that possible again.
How old is your age group? I noticed the same thing among my friends, but then also noticed they all didn't start having kids until mid-30s. It turns out career-oriented women are choosing to start having kids much later in their lives than in previous decades, which is definitely a compounding factor.
I blame stress and netflix/vod binge watching more than any chemical.
Go in some place where people live more outside, typically a city with warm climate close to the beach and you will see people spending less time in front of a screen, fucking all the tine and having lots of kids while being generally exposed to the same chemicals That is my experience having moved in different parts of europe.
You have to take into accounts that women are finally fertile a small amount of time in each cycle.
Having said that I don't think this need to be fixed. We are way too many trying to have such a wasteful standard of living for the planet to handle. I somehow regret having given birth to 2 kids in that regard.
In one of the world's sunniest and most remote cities, next to a gorgeous coastline with fabulous beaches, world class surf and a very outdoor culture . . .
> The total fertility rate in Greater Perth dipped from 1.76 in 2018 to 1.66 in 2021, spot on the national average.
For reference, large scale studies have indicated that infertility rates have plateaued from 1995 to 2019 [1]. Studies from years prior to 1995 indicated that fertility rates were actually _declining_ up until 1995.
I've noticed a pretty common trend of assuming low fertility rates are automatically related to infertility rates, especially in discussions here on HN. The fundamental issue with low fertility is really just that less couples are starting families, and those that are starting families are having closer to 1-3 children instead of 4-7 like in times past (independent of infertility issues).
Every comment I read about this is how low housing, low income, no time, etc is the cause of a global fertility drop, but I don't buy. Humans have been having boatloads of kids in horrible horrible times and they haven't been stopped until now.
Freedom from being forced to reproduce in recent/modern times for women, and the fact that a lot of women now have a lot of choices (such as going career focused).
Not to mention the fact that a lot of younger people would prefer to have financial security "setup" first, before embarking on the journey of child raising (but unfortunately, this takes a lot of time, and fraught with uncertainty).
As children, humans are receiving a torrent of new information all the time. For hundreds of thousands of years, the torrent slows as the human becomes an adolescent, puberty kicks off, and then they have children as the product of the latest new sensation. All that is upended, now. Not only are people continuing to have an available torrent of information into their twenties, but now it is possible to just never stop, so the transition to the next stage of life doesn't happen for more and more, and we just stay (functionally) children into the thirties, forties, or later, after which it's too late for more than half of us.
Yeah most people saying they can't afford to have children probably are in the richest 10% of the world's population. They can absolutely afford a child.
The cost they don't want to pay isn't monetary, it's time/commitment. And to avoid the time/commitment, you need lots and lots of money, and even then you still lose control of your life; suddenly there's other forces that require you to do things you don't want to do.
That's my point. It is not a monetary issue. It is a matter of priorities. People should just say that having children is not high on their priority list, instead we get a bunch of excuses (cost of living, global warming, etc.).
True, but we're seeing a measurable decline of standard of living in the west, which forces people to make sacrifices in their lifestyles. Millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that they're gonna be worse off in adulthood than their parents were and one of the easiest ways to try to maintain their standard of living is not to have children. It's not just about how many raised kids in squalor, it's about how many people are experiencing socioeconomic decline.
It's also purely anecdotal, but anti-natalist sentiment is very much on the rise in my community. I meet more and more people concerned that bringing a child into the world now means condemning them to suffer the worst consequences of climate change. No idea if this is represented at all on a global scale, but it's very present in my area.
> seeing a measurable decline of standard of living in the west
is this really true? With the exception of the covid lockdown causing issues, i've found that i've been able to acquire all my necessary material needs, and more.
It is true that my purchasing power is being clawed away via inflation, but this is counteracted by wage increases and investment returns (on average).
America has far and away the highest poverty rate of the modern world[0], there's a very strong economic divide in America.
I earn about $175K as a software engineer, which easily puts me into the top 1% of income earners in my generation. Just because life is good to me does not mean that I reflect the average lifestyle in America.
> That is a measure of income inequality... not poverty.
Same thing? What is a measure of poverty if not a measure of income inequality? The concept of poverty categorizes people who do not earn enough to live in society. How are these different?
> The concept of poverty categorizes people who do not earn enough to live in society
no, the concept of poverty is one where a person is dying due to a lack of basic necessities such as food, shelter. Everything else is not required, such as luxuries etc. It's just that as a country gets richer, what some people consider as basic necessities seems to expand - it has now become a basic necessity to have electricity, internet, transport - things that a hundred years ago, would've been considered the realms of the aristocracy.
The distance to median income is not a measure of poverty, but a measure of how far you are from the typical person in said country - a relative measure. An absolute measure of poverty is caloric intake, access to water and shelter.
Thing is, the marginal cost of kids has shot through the roof. It’s no longer a sensible thing to do - in the horrible times you mention, children were investments - you spend ~ 10years raising them, and after that they worked for you, almost free labor. And a lot more things required labor to function.
Now, kids are almost all cost, as the government / society itself captures their economic output, and doesn’t give enough back to the family that did the work to raise them.
So now you have kids because you want to, and its no longer rational act, more emotional one.
Counter point... or more of a theory.. everyone who wants to have a child wants to be as good as, or a better parent than their own, and want to provide for their children's childhood as good as, or better than their own. I don't have references to back this up but it seems to be the case with most parents or aspiring parents I talk to.
In the western world we compare ourselves to our parents who bought their 1st houses when they were in their twenties.. something we are less likely to achieve even with the same status job until much later on.
Collapsed? We're 0.2 above replacement rate coming off of a major worldwide pandemic. I'm forecasting that number to remain stable or even rise and I don't see much disagreement from mainstream news.
You wanna talk about collapse? Let's talk about South Korea.
We better get energy technology sorted out this generation! Because from what I see it's going to become impossible soon - there won't be enough available productive people.
It's already hard to hire people to produce all the services people want. (You can pay more for one particular thing, but then other things don't have enough people - it's a zero sum game.)
With a declining birth rate it's going to become impossible.
Consider Victorian era Britain, when the average person is much poorer, the air is heavily polluted with coal use, and the medical care is almost non-existant by modern standards. Fertility rate is about 5-6. Then it dropped to around 3 over 100 years and has been on a steady downward trajectory ever since.
This pattern is broadly replicated everywhere that industrializes.
Whatever the cause, it's not due to wealth per capita or personal health. It's probably cultural. Contraceptives / family planning definitely plays a big part too.
I think this popular narrative of "kids are too expensive" is mostly a media fiction. It's more about individual comfort. Money can be a factor in comfort, but it's hardly the only one.
Poorer immigrants tend to have many children. Even today, poorer people in general have more kids than wealthy folks. Just look at the data - it contradicts the headlines.
As Peter Zeihan likes to say, kids were free labor for the farm and made life easier. In today's world, they're expensive furniture for your condo or apartment and they break things.
People are focused on their own lives and careers and aren't ready to take a back seat and turn attention to children. They're main characters. I think a lot of folks feel that having children turns you into an NPC.
Poor people aren't climbing the corporate ladder. They don't need to worry about keeping their calendars clear for meetings. They're not filling their Instagram with travel photos.
Middle income folks have access to social media and easy dopamine hits. They want to stretch being single or unmarried or not having kids out longer and enjoy it more.
It's society, not wealth and cost of living, that is causing the dip in children.
>It's society, not wealth and cost of living, that is causing the dip in children.
Yes, people want to party and be free and not have to be tied down and spend money on raising kids. Having kids is a pretty fulfilling experience though. It's not something I understood until I had some. The people that don't have kids will really struggle when they get old and infirm with no one to take care of them.
Your aunt’s quality of life probably depended on the labor supplied by a large working age population. Assuming the pace of automation cannot keep up with proportion of working age population declines (i.e. total supply of labor), then it makes sense to predict higher competition for labor, via higher labor AND higher taxes/lower benefits and the political fight for those.
I don't think the data supports your hypothesis, at least if we're talking recent declines in rich countries from their prior levels and not trying to answer "why does the US have a lower birth rate than Mauritania".
Birth rate declines in the US in the past 15-20 years have been entirely among the poor. Among the higher-income they've been basically stable.
Throwing money at the problem (e.g. subsidizing healthcare, maternity leave, etc) probably doesn't help. Look at e.g. Australia and other rich western nations. Per capita health care spending is very high. Per capita wealth is very high. Amount of government money spent on various family support programmes is extremely high. Fertility is still low. Lower than poorer nations, in fact.
Partly I think it's because teenagers / young adults are heavily discouraged from pregnancy. Maybe we should as a society push people to marry early, e.g. soon as they finish high school / during uni.
The reason only partially is due to economic factors(gets rehashed alot) but one major thing everybody overlooks is the simple fact that males and females, in this era, are having difficulties pairing up! Platforms like Tinder are only making it harder for the majority* of people to build lasting bonds. I personally make good money and have a decent home but have never been able to find a mate in my entire 28 years of life.
People are today essentially stand-ins for robots to work for elites who collude with each other and anyway deeply despise the 'plebs'. Little wonder, in this mad pursuit, there has been a big collapse in diversity of people, traditions, languages, cultures, are all a miniscule fraction of what they were when the world population was < 1B.
You can extend this to the way we treat animals and the world and things automatically make sense. Obviously uniformity has been good for control and productivity. And for what ?
Even the act of bringing up your child in a manner not dictated by the state and state-allied academics is seen as a act of iconoclasm in this day across the world. Little wonder it's very close to being criminalized.
As much as Brave New World is discounted as being about a dystopian society, being able to automate fertility would be a game changer for humanity. We can’t depend on hoping people voluntarily make irresponsible financial decisions by having children in order to save the economy.
Couldn’t be worse than the ethical horror show we’re have today. There are people in positions of power who have created laws with the aim of forcing millions of people to bear pregnancies to term, against their will. This is just taking the coercion out of the equation.
Where is this the case? I've only heard of incentive-driven programs to drive fertility (economic help, fertility-positive ad campaigns, etc). I haven't heard of countries forcing millions to bear pregnancies to term against their will.
It would absolutely be worse, I can't believe I'm reading a take like this. Automating the creation of humanity could very easily be one of the biggest steps towards creating a slave class born explicitly to fulfill labor demands. Yeah, societal pressure from various angles may nudge people in that direction today, but building technology to serve this purpose explicitly is absolutely worse.
> building technology to serve this purpose explicitly is absolutely worse
The end result of the current trends in population trees will be the collapse of many nations, and pretty much a four horsemen situation that'll follow. Supplementing the unhealthy fertility rates might help stave this off, if we're lucky, and there's no reason to believe it would create any worse of a wage slavery system than already exists. I can't imagine that it would be more dystopian than the future we're already making a beeline toward.
> there's no reason to believe it would create any worse of a wage slavery system than already exists.
Yes there is. As terrible as the system is today, people willingly to choose (in most cases) to bring children into the world and (in most cases) accept the responsibility of raising them. Who raises the kids in a world where they're bred via technology? There's a long and ugly history involving church and state-run homes for orphaned kids. You'd be creating a system that would be ripe for exploiting kids at a systemic scale we've never before seen (and to be clear, we've seen global child sex abuse scandals).
> As terrible as the system is today, people willingly to choose (in most cases) to bring children into the world and (in most cases) accept the responsibility of raising them
People are hard at work on removing the 'willingly' part of this right now. We have the wealthiest man on earth backing people who are headed down a road where contraception will be outlawed.
> Who raises the kids in a world where they're bred via technology?
People who voluntarily adopt them. You could have babies made to order for people with fertility problems, or merely for people who don't want to undertake the risk of carrying a pregnancy to term in a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world[1].
I think there is an interesting aspect of the depopulation that I haven't seen discussed yet: the scientific progress.
If we have less and less people, there will be less brain power to innovate while as far as I can tell the innovation is getting more and more difficult as we moving forward. Just imagine inventing the wheel was probably easier than inventing the combustion engine.
I have a feeling that the huge technological advancements of the 20th century happened because of the exponentially increasing population. Also having more advanced technology helped back the population growth too.
So I think if the shrinking population will cause technological stagnation on top of the constant hardship due to the proportionally increasing number of elderly who need support.
I think AI is just as, if not more of a threat, than population decline in this regard. With the ability to generate endless amounts of content on demand, an already overburdened and under-resourced education system is nowhere near sophisticated enough to deal with tools like ChatGPT. And scientific progress cannot happen unless we cultivate and nurture our education system.
We're already seeing younger people not understanding basic computing concepts like file systems because they grew up on locked-down mobile OSes that abstract this from users. AI is going to remove the affordances needed to learn on a scale we've never seen before.
Building a useful wheel isn't chipping it from stone. There is a lot of materials science and engineering evolved to make one, I wouldn't short change the effort in it. Anyway who cares if tech stagnates? I'd be more worried about a backslide where we lose hard won knowledge.
every shortage is followed by glut which is followed by shortage. It's the opposite of the boomer era
> The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners
that was never taken for granted, the expansion of welfare was a happy accident of the largest generation the world will ever see. Also, the idea that real estate prices will keep going higher should not be taken for granted. Ideas like these are taken for granted because "boomer" generations were so dominant numerically -- and that s the reason why they loved democracy so much. We might see a regression in democracy as the world is becoming more and more expensive for everyone but the boomers.
Anti-fertility is driven by the anomalous cost structures that we have created: children require physical space , they are physical objects after all. But real estate is extremely unaffordable compared to most of history (when people just built their own homes), and nobody talks about it as a global crisis (people are worried that housing prices might fall and actively discourage buildiung for environmental reasons). Instead, luxuries such as travel , tourism and touchscreens are cheap and people flock to them.
Ironically low fertility will be used as a weapon for wages to go up, way up
There are quite a few comments here about "you need money to raise kids". There are similar statements made about housing size, cost, etc. and those end up on "but you don't need 8,000 sq ft to live!"
These are, frankly IMHO, bizarre arguments that seem conditioned on socio-commercial training along the lines of "you need a diamond to propose!".
Absolutely none of these are true:
- People had sex and stable relationships before diamond mines existed.
- You, strictly speaking, don't need any amount of square footage to live. You might be cold, wet, and miserable, but you'll be alive.
- Children existed for millions of years before money and will alarmingly, and generally, grow and learn regardless of what you do. You may not be happy with the outcome, but it'll happen.
A friend of mine is recently pregnant and focused on giving birth, but the medical expenses and doctor visits are becoming a burden. I mentioned to her that my grandmother gave birth to 12 children without a doctor on a farmhouse table at zero cost and no doctor visits. What she's paying for is not having a baby, but reducing child and mother mortality.
I have loads of family in South Korea, a country in near terminal population decline, and the reason I've always heard is "it's expensive to raise a child". But the real reason is, it's expensive to train a child to get into a top-3 university. Raising a child to adulthood is possible even in abject poverty.
We (us), as a civilization(s), are fundamentally dishonest about what our problems are, and it makes it difficult to reason about our solutions. "Children are expensive" turns into "have less kids" rather than "the road to top-3 universities are expensive" -> "let's be okay with kids getting into lesser schools or not any school at all" or "let's figure out how to make higher education more accessible".
We don't understand what we're even paying for, and why, and we need to relearn it and rethink it.
> are fundamentally dishonest about what our problems are
It's more like, we make up excuses because we don't know our real motives or don't want to outright say we dont want kids because it's societally unacceptable.
I believe statistics show there is a rise in childlessness , but people having kids have on average the same kids as a few decades ago.
> I have loads of family in South Korea, a country in near terminal population decline, and the reason I've always heard is "it's expensive to raise a child". But the real reason is, it's expensive to train a child to get into a top-3 university. Raising a child to adulthood is possible even in abject poverty.
Isn't the fact that mothers are expected to drop their career and 100% focus on their children also a factor? Women instead decide not to have babies at all so they can have a career of their own.
And incomes wouldn't have stagnated if we hadn't doubled the workforce by telling women they would actually be happier if the didn't have kids but instead had a career.
I don't think it's bizarre. I'd attribute it to a common and timeless sentiment applied to the modern age.
I have no reason to believe maternal/paternal love, expressed as the desire that your kids live a better life than you, is a particularly modern idea. IMO that's why its common to see declining fertility rate in countries with large economies and countries with declining economies.
It's heartbreaking to think your child will live a life that's worse than yours. In a poor country, even if you don't have much money, it's easy to think they could do better and live happier than you. In a rich country, even if you have all the means to give them a "good enough" life, it's not as easy to think this.
This is definitely a cultural issue. It happens to be the case rich countries got rich by placing a lot of value in "success", wealth, high achievement and individuality, not in meeting base necessities and being content/grateful with what one has. Which is exactly what you allude to:
> But the real reason is, it's expensive to train a child to get into a top-3 university. Raising a child to adulthood is possible even in abject poverty.
I'm not South Korean, but what I've gathered from friends and media is that it's a hyper-capitalist society that's very, very invested into certain ideals of "success" (academic, beauty, economic, etc). I'm thus not surprised that, if associate that with happiness, the idea of rising a child to be happy is daunting.
Not only do we not see those tempretures here, we stopped using Farenheit before I was born and the locals lived happily for several tens of thousands of years semi nomadically with minimal shelter requirements.
You might have missed the global part of the discussion topic and of the HN forum.
>You might have missed the global part of the discussion topic and of the HN forum.
Indeed, because it's a global discussion it's important to point out that the point is not globally applicable, because there are lots of areas where people indeed do need shelter to survive. Just because it's possible in some downtown with favorable external conditions doesen't make it very viable generally
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadImagine if you can dig a well, get solar or any type of non-grid energy, and internet. There are no limits to where you can live, and most of the acreage in the US is cheap. You don't need to have millions of people in the same few square miles, at least in the US. We can go back to smaller communities of people more spread out, instead of 5-10 megacities and 50 or so big cities in the US.
Strictly speaking in the US, it's already cleared. The center of the country, the Great Plains, has almost no trees. Much of the US is pastureland, and you don't have to clearcut a place to live there.
>More agriculture is required for more people, which means more land clearing.
Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of.
>Renewable energy infrastructure needs energy and resources to build and needs to be replaced at EOL.
I'm talking create your own grid living, not create a renewable grid.
>And I haven't even said anything about the environmental costs of manufacturing and shipping goods.
Manufacturing cost is already there, but you're right about shipping. We do have extensive railroads and a massive river system already.
>People won't go back to a "simpler" way of life because it's a backward step in lifestyle.
Some people won't and they can live in cities. Currently, nearly everyone has to live in a city for economic reasons (workplace). Once that stops being a thing, the people that want to move away from a city, and the crime, and the traffic, can do that.
>People don't want to sacrifice their lifestyle to do their very small part to help stave off a catastrophe.
With all the talk about climate change, I've seen very few people do any type of personal sacrifice to change it.
Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me.
> With all the talk about climate change, I've seen very few people do any type of personal sacrifice to change it.
If some person earns 100k annually and another 100M - it means they have to do different sacrifices for holding the climate change. My opinion is that progressive taxation might solve the issue (but I afraid that rich people has both some anticipation of progressive taxation idea and some abilities to obstruct the idea).
No it doesn't we're already efficient. We've known how to sustainably farm for generations. Efficiency comes from mechanization and computerization and both of those are already done. We're so efficient the government pays farmers to not grow crops. What do you farm?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
>it means they have to do different sacrifices for holding the climate change.
That sounds like an excuse to not do anything. This is pretty common.
>My opinion is that progressive taxation might solve the issue
It won't as long as the government is corrupt. Plus, you have to figure out how to get polluters like China to stop.
We (the humanship) are efficient but not sustainable if to consider few decades only (because intensive farming makes more harm to soil per one dinner), but if to consider at least few hundreds years then the situation is opposite - we are sustainable by the sacrification of efficiency. That's why I consider your argumentation as faulty.
I understand a mechanization point but do not understand how computerization can help me, computerization means just counting faster, store more information and probably self-driving tractors instead of man-driving ones.
Had we all been rural still - and as bored as you get out there, we would've noticed more of the incremental stuff first hand.
A sole conversation with your family "outdoorsman" - typically a boomer tho, if so you gotta be real careful they don't realize your asking about climate change or else all you will hear is the stories about that one time in 67 it got this cold before - totally normal.
If you can have a candid conversation with someone that has spent a life outside about how different things are today - you will hear lots and lots of things.
It's possible that someday all the animals alive left in the world will either be our livestock or as our pets/entertainment.
Already today to many people most animals exist only in zoos or on TV. The city removed us from nature physically and conceptually.
Plus it's convenient that all that "forest and woodland" you think is "safer" is owned by somebody that wants you to stay in the city.
Try to leave the city. Where I live all the same farm families buy every bit of land that is sold as even remotely agricultural - many have accumulated 10-20 "homesteads" - original farms with a house and garage etc...
They rip out all of the buildings and plow it down. They used to sell the house and buildings as its own thing - they don't do that anymore.
It's not about money. It's about keeping everyone else away - in the cities.
There are a few big problems - waste management, particularly plastic and other toxic forever chemicals; overuse of toxic chemicals in agri that ends up in the food chain; depletion of soil and water; not enough will to tackle problems sustainably.
So a few people can consume more and more -- exacerbated by marketing ads and infinite profit motives.
NIMBYism, combination of bad monetary policy and a supply shock, and bad urban planning. Tokyo has cheaper homes and less traffic than cities with a fraction of the population in America.
We can say that American preferences are causing a lot of these issues, but then you have to make the argument that people shouldn't be able to get what they want.
[1] https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-...
This is basically acknowledging scarcity exists. There will always be fewer places with large plots near people than people want, irrespective of the number of people.
IMO there's 2 points to consider regarding this though:
One can't underestimate the fact it's illegal to build densely in a lot of the USA [1], so it isn't only preferences driving the market. Even if most people prefer single-family homes, and 50% want them to be "away from it all", there's reason to believe that the population that does want to live densely isn't being met with enough supply, and thus prices are still being artificially increased.
In terms of the high preference for low density, there's the unfortunate reality that the density is better in a dense context, but that's not something many people in the USA can experience. In New York, for example, ubiquitous density has meant one can live a convenient life without owning a car. An apartment in LA has all the disadvantages of an apartment, without the advantages of a dense city. That's the perception many people who do experience apartment living might have of it.
So overall, low density in the USA isn't purely preference-driven, and there's an argument to believe if more density _were_ built, preferences would change. It's worth keeping in mind.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...
Or -0.5% growth is impressive indeed?
The data appears to present progress itself as the enemy of population growth.
The more developed an economy, the higher the quality of life the fewer offspring people have. The higher the education level, the fewer kids - more money, less kids to spend it.
Part of it is a money issue - not as much as people make it out to be.
My best friend had a kid at 23 while working as a server in a restaurant - his college job (he dropped out) and he raised his son just fine, wasn't ideal but he's alive and here.
If your not having a kid bc of money and you really want to have one - there will never be enough money, there will always be another big project or promotion to work for, we all could use a bigger house.
The joy kids bring to life cannot be measured in financial terms - I wouldn't trade the memories of the moments I've spent with my nephews for all the money.
This has nothing to do with it. Several other real estate markets are seismically active and dissimilar. Japan regularly razed and builds. That, along with limited immigration and a unique monetary policy, keeps housing prices down or depreciating.
Edited to ask: some replies seemed skeptical so I went to find what I based this idea off of. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want
It could just be that evolution did not bestow humans with a sufficiently easy and risk free process to reproduce, hence the price women demand is too high (in an environment where women can actually price their sacrifice in birthing and raising children due to achieving in financial independence).
Some of it is pressures we put on ourselves: a lot of people think you basically need to be perfect to be a parent. No one is perfect, and I see a lot of shit from people without kids expecting parents to be so.
Almost everyone when surveyed says they want to reduce pollution and help the environment, but do they actually do things (especially things that inconvenience them)?
Part of the challenge to conventional logic of what I wrote above is that the economy, in standard neoclassical economic thought, is separate from the ecosystem. The two interact, but are entirely distinct. Sometimes human society is another distinct third bubble. Instead, ecologists have long known that the ecosystem of today (and likely for the decades of concern here) contains human society which contains the human economy. So, we're better off planning a graceful descent -- one that will have less competition for resources and less harm to the global ecosystem.
It's not and you know this. It's at best correlated. The resources have to be used effectively, and right now they're definitely not. My quality of life does not go up because using up more resources instead of living sustainably.
Unless you're living in a far distant village or in the middle of the woods producing everything you use, you're using an immense amount of resources in your everyday life.
Recycling, not buying the latest tech and curbing your diet don't make any significant dent into the amount of resources you're indirectly consuming by simply living and being active in a well-off, first-word or even "second-world" society.
These "degrowth" strategies mean tremendous suffering. People have to die to make degrowth possible. Those who stick around have to suffer of curable medical complications. They have to live hard lives without the comforts of modern life.
Why do we need to descend? It's not strictly necessary: the "environment" has enough fissionable material for nearly limitless electrical power. The "environment" has enough raw material to increase the amount of computation on our planet by many orders of magnitude. And that's if we stay here on Earth -- if you want to think on "indefinitely" timescales, Earth's constraints may not apply.
It's profoundly cynical. I don't actually understand it. All of this technology, this art, this incredible organization that the modern world provides, and think "we need to turn back, tail between our legs, and give up."
How much energy is in all of the uranium that can be mined?
But nobody's saying they have to die early. A fertility rate under replacement will lead to degrowth. Yes, it's going to be difficult during the degrowth phase (less young people to support the aged), but eventually the population will stabilize at a lower level and that will be better from both a sustainability and resources standpoint.
Billions of old people, dying alone.
I do not want to live in that world. Let alone encourage it!
What you're saying is like saying "Let's not play the World Series, let's just go home and settle for 2nd. We'll still be a playoff team!"
Less people is bad. All of us matter but only as long as humanity continues.
Degrowth is stagnation. We must survive tho - even at the expenses of the Earth if that is what it takes.
We are the highest evolutionary life this planet has produced - the only life able to exploit all other life. The entire purpose of evolution could be to create life as we are.
If it's all just random and we ended up as we are solely due to genetic mistakes over time - our existence is even more unfathomable, a seemingly infinite number of things had to occur exactly as they did so that we exist as we do now.
We are the most important thing on Earth - potentially far, far more so.
The Webb telescope has viewed into the past and didn't see so many things it would have if the universe was full of advanced intelligent life - with all the data we possess now, we cannot say that we are not the first to "wake up"and only "if" indeed the universe will ultimately create an infinite number of species with our capabilities.
That's a real big if.
We can't take that chance on something as stupid sounding as "degrowth"
Remember, adapt or die.
That's what we do
If Earth is going to heat up than it
There are currently about 8 billion of us. At some point in the past there were 4 billion of us (Bard tells me the population reached 4Billion on April 11, 1974). We're we somehow worse off when there were 1/2 as many of us on earth? Would we somehow be worse off if we slowly (like over the course of 100 years) returned back to that number? I fail to see how it would be problematic. Somehow we survived and got what we needed to get done in 1974 with only 4B people. If we were to settle back down to that number and stabilize there why would that be a problem? Or, how about stabilizing at 6B?
I’ve read some statistics that say there’s more than an 80% chance that everyone alive right now will die at some point.
Our current growth strategy is not sustainable. Growth as a goal has failed. If we need to take a step back to reevaluate how to do it right going forward, that's fine.
Americans will mostly be jobless and replaced by automation, many goods will be exported and China will likely fair a lot better because it's already a place where "social credit" and other policies already exist which are more acceptable than what the USA will tolerate. Americans hate the idea of free healthcare and UBI for example.
I know the US media likes to pretend China is finished, but I really don't think that's the case, it will continue to grow, even if only by inertia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_in_th....
There is no indication that humanity will be colonizing other planets any time soon. The greatest scientific minds on the planet cannot even run a sustainable Antarctic outpost. Maybe we can take baby steps towards getting McMurdo station self sufficient before we try colonizing Mars.
All jesustech and techno-optimism aside... countries that are educated and have high standards of living consume a vast amount of resources. No amount of green technology and renewables has been able to reverse this trend. Check out the 2022 mineral baby for the US. https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/mining-minerals-infor...
The reality is that population decline will be needed to save the planet.
So continuous growth is physically impossible, even alloting for nuclear fusion and miracle technologies.
That's just considering energy/electricity, which is optimistic because civilization has on the order of at least hundreds or thousands of necessary inputs that aren't fungible. Water, air, food, and other raw materials for our bodies and technologies will become scarce more quickly.
A huge amount of growth has been due to "free" value provided by ecosystems, fossil fuels, minerals, the sun, etc. If we get to the point where all the free stuff from nature is not enough and we have to fission and fusion our raw materials we will be living in a society of such profound scarcity that we could probably only subsist as rows of brains in vats.
So the degrowth argument is not that humans should voluntarily suffer to preserve a sentimental gaia aspect, but that suffering is inevitable due to unsustainability and that it would be better to spread it out over a longer time than suffer a major crash.
[0] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
However.
We are still very early in the curve. We are warming the planet, but not because of any energy we are producing, merely because of a chemical inbalance in the atmosphere. We are not close to any of the limits specified there.
When energy costs 0.0001 / kWh, we may re-evaluate. But we have a long way to go before we get there.
It's so early!
This is just straight-up substance-free fear-mongering.
Imagine armies of robots working 24/7 strip mining everything, logging everything, way faster and way smarter than people ever could. This is what we're making, this is what capitalism will absolutely love. There is no sign of any regulation here from governments, they will want it even more, "GDP! GDP! GDP!".
I was really hopefully we'd actually get to a nice place, it would be rough with climate change, but there would be less people and we'd look back on the 21st century with disdain and try live more simple lives, slower lives, it looks like we're going to try 100x everything instead.
If we get to the stage where people do live much longer, this will be the next issue, people never dying and the Earth basically filling up. It will be the next drama we can obsess over :)
I might be wrong, maybe we'll start mining asteroids or maybe the economy will collapse quick enough the singularity will be cancelled due to lack of demand (funny I know).
It's very hard to say, but I hope I'm wrong and you're right!
I hear this a lot, but it seems more like a slogan.
Ecologists have disproven dialectical materialism? Or Hegelian idealism? I doubt that very much.
Population growth will continue whether you're having children or not. Western economies are Ponzi schemes and the ones needing your votes know it. You may not have any kids, but there are millions of Africans, Indians, and Chinese ready and willing to flood your country, and there are politicians only too eager to see them pouring across undefended borders. Some of these countries are seeing 9+ births per woman; there will be no shortage of new people to replace your non-existent grandchildren.
The solution would require some degree of ethnonationalism, else how do you argue against this policy? From a "we are all the same" viewpoint, it is unremarkable if Canada is 100% ethnically Indian and Chinese in 200 years; if Britain and Australia are African colonies; if America is... American. The very thought of racial discrimination in immigration, however, is totally unpalatable and unconscionable to most Westerners, and thus there is still no solution.
Your descendants' positions will be filled. There is no depopulation fantasy in the West's future. There can only be replacement.
I love the optimism but it's difficult to see this as a positive.
Lets consider china. For decades they had a 1 child policy and according to their own numbers even worse problem killing their daughters. "sex selective abortions" then most believe.
China has a huge proportion of incel men who probably at no fault of their own cannot find a wife. They blame themselves and they become violent. Stemming from loneliness, and feeling of failure.
Nothing is new here. History has tons of these examples and 100% of the time the host country of the incels can't keep them at home. So they are sent abroad. Who is planning to take millions of incel men from china? Yikes... so it 100% of the time has led into an invasion. Imagine having 100 million men who want to be violent and you can invade a neighbour? That's what you do. Will it be different this time for the first time? I doubt it.
There is a difference between not wanting and not being able.
> Fertility rate determines the birth rate but, not the other way around.
I think fertility rate is the better metric here, so using fertility seems appropriate as well.
Birth rate and fertility rate are related but different measures.
Birth rate: # of live births per population per unit time
(General) Fertility Rate: # of live births in a time period per woman of childbearing age (15-44 is one definition, not sure if it is the most common.)
(Total) Fertility Rate: splitting up a definition of childbearing age (often, slightly wider than that used for GFR on the high end; I’ve seen 15-49 used where 15-44 is used for GFR), into equal size age bands (e.g., 5 year bands), calculate the GFR for women in each band on an annual basis, multiply by the width of the bands, and sum; this represents an approximate measure of the expected lifetime births per woman.
Yes, this technical usage conflicts with some common uses of “fertility”, but technical jargon is that way.
> [...] cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages [...]
the financial aspect is a huge blocker for those who want to have children. We live in a world where the majority of young people can't afford to live in a city center without 2+ roommates, let alone afford a lifestyle where they have any amount of disposable income, of which a lot is needed to have children.
This policy and societal failure of squeezing every bit of wealth out of the new generation and not giving them anything will eventually drain cities of young people and those cities will be left behind as times change with the newer generations. The cities will miss out on culture, societal change, modernity, eventually of sheer people. See San Francisco, New York, Seoul, etc. It doesn't seem like countries are treating this as the problem it is and I fear for the future of all these currently-popular cities.
- 5 million / 148 million is 3% down from peak for Russia.
- 2.5 million / 128 million is 2% down from peak for Japan.
Most importantly, Russia's population decline (which started before Japan's) has leveled off. It hit a local minima in 2008. It has wobbled up and down, but stayed close to 143m for almost 20 years [1].
This is how populations usually work; they level off and oscillate around their carrying capacity. It's often studied in biology [2].
Shaving off 3% of the population of a country doesn't lead to deserted cities any more than other factors do. Natural resource depletion and economic factors are and will most definitely keep being bigger worries for cities (ie, droughts leading to water shortages, big employers moving out, etc).
[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=R...
[2]: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/hs-biology/x4c6733622308...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Russian_...
[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=R...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#After_W...
It's easy to imagine it as some sort of famine, where there isn't enough food to feed children, or overcrowding so extreme that everyone lives in slums and it's simply impossible to have kids. If it ever reached that point, a population graph would show a sharp fall, not a steady leveling-off.
When I think about previous generations in my country (Mexico) they seem more care-free. They loved someone, they had babies. One single head of household could afford to buy a house. It was a house too, not some tiny apartment!
I look at my life though and it just seems a little more stressful in a bunch of small ways. The squeeze is gentle, not abrupt, but it's there. Living spaces seem smaller, which adds a little stress. Comparing vs old photos, the city just looks more crowded, more full of traffic, which adds a little stress. In their 20s my parents weren't thinking about the environment, but I am, which adds a little stress. I think about the living standard I could give my kids more than my parents seemed to; I just can't shake the thought that my kids need to stand out from the huge crowds of people there's now, which adds a little stress. At the end of the day all these little bits of stress add up and lead to me not wanting kids any time soon.
Perhaps this is what approaching a population cap is meant to feel like. Just stress here and there, leading to less fertility, rather than some hard physical limit.
In other words, we are like a mouse population. If a cap is reached, fertility sinks (but for mice also mortality rises as well. We humans are lucky in a way compared to mice.)
They're set for sharp decline going forward, and changes in geopolitics look likely to dry up or outright reverse their modest immigrant flows from former USSR countries.
Japan: Is shrinking ever more rapidly, not less.
Russia's population pyramid does seem to suggest a big dip once the generation born in the 80s passes away, but it doesn't look like a reversed pyramid just yet. The generation born in 2021 doesn't seem considerably smaller than the one born 20 years ago [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
[2]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
[3]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Russian_...
Like in many other countries Russia's population is sustained by migration from countries with higher birth rates (at least it was until recently).
For modern times, climate change has made it impossible to insure some areas of the US (Norther CA fire country, Florida hurricane corridor, etc). Insurers are going out of business or just not paying claims.
I absolutely love the doomerism in your second paragraph. If you listen to those who buy into the whole climate armageddon thing, you would think that by 2030 large swaths of the US are going to be uninhabitable or under water.
No, the West isn’t going to burn away. We just need to resume good forestry practices and not build houses in precarious places.
Similarly in FL, this has little to do with “climate change” but rather an elimination of Government subsidized risk taking so the full insurance cost is bore by the property owners and not taxpayers.
Where are they going to move to? Or are you saying that there simply won't be any young people anywhere, because they were never born?
Or look at it this way: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...
> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population.
If the USA was net neutral on immigration (as many people entered as left), the birth rate would be too low, there would be some tens of millions of dwelling units either empty or never having been built.
This is not an "own the libs" comment. Both policy objectives can be morally right, and still work badly with each other.
Immigration makes it much harder to fix affordable housing. That's just reality. It seems to be completely ignored by politicians, though - including those on the right, who seem to have ignored this as a club for beating up politicians on the left.
Support for both immigration and zoning reform are in no way incompatible.
Wasn't overall population growth higher back when housing was more affordable?
What i don't get is why decreasing fertility is always presented so negatively in the media. falling fertility is a huge blessing in the long run. we can't keep growing our population exponentially.. there's already way more people on the planet than the planet can support (see overshoot theory; climate change, earth mineral shortages, shelter shortages, etc). Humans outnumber other animals (non-domesticated) by orders of magnitude: it's not natural or sustainable.
Please explain
Considering these figures, it becomes evident that city living cannot be deemed cheaper based solely on the cost per square foot.
However, the lower cost of construction in non-dense areas doesn’t translate to ample of low cost housing because it has its own zoning and regulation that prohibit from happening.
Drawing from my personal experience as a software engineer turned builder/developer, these observations are rooted in real projects and data.
> Structurally the arguments in both countries go like “life is so hard, and things generally so depressing, that I have no desire to bring children into the world.”
> In both cases generations previous, who lived through events far more harrowing and whose material circumstances were far worse, did not express similar beliefs at any scale.
Improving living conditions is always nice, so it is shoehorned into every conversation. What arguments could he raised against improving the atrocious housing situation (at least on the level of vague sentiment, "time to build", not necessarily YIMBY activism)? None at all, the very attempt amounts to a political suicide.
Yet when you see basically the same trends and very similar absolute values in countries as dramatically distinct as Argentina, Belgium, England, Iran and Russia [2], it becomes increasingly clear that no economic variable suffices, no charitable materialist analysis can account for the cultural shift. The real answer is simply the perceived value of children and lifestyle amenable to their existence plummeting worldwide. Now, even minor (by the standards of our predecessors) inconveniences and contrived long-term considerations like climate change can be cited as legitimate reason to not have any (or not have more than one).
Modernity sees no point to children. And as nations age and budget decisions are weighted in favor of older and childless people, as urban infrastructure itself evolves to make children more of a labor-intensive chore a working person would not be expected to afford, any possible remaining point becomes even less compelling. But to begin with, rationalizing the child-free lifestyle with material excuses is just a vestige of old normative morality, token respect for traditional natalism.
In fact, we would advance the discourse more if we paid attention to outliers both in terms of fertility and in terms of its trend, those being, to my knowledge: Israel, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. And no, it's not entirely about low-education traditionalist groups, certainly not in Israel.
1. https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/165885018362973389...
2. https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1662234743851700224
Yes it is, Israel’s high fertility rate is driven by tribes that either explicitly or implicitly influence how many children they want by restricting their financial independence. Same story with all the other countries you listed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel
> The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998, and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose from 6.91 in 1980 to 8.51 in 1996. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrahi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996.[30] In 2020 the overall Jewish TFR in Israel (3.00) was for the first time measured higher than Arab Muslim TFR (2.99).
Look at the graph here of the fertility rates of different types of Jews:
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/08/18/...
> Of Israel’s population of 9.5m, Israeli Arabs, mostly Muslim, make up about 21% of the total, while Jews account for roughly 74%.
> Though Haredim are just 13% of the population, their offspring make up 19% of Israeli children under the age of 14, and 24% of those under the age of four.
So the majority of modern Israeli population are Jews, mainly secular and moderately religious (61%). It seems most children there also belong to those categories, although somewhat less than their parents' population share. And as stated in the headline, Muslims are in decline and have already converged to the average national rate. So there is strictly no way for Israel's fertility rate to be driven only by traditionalist minorities. They explain the increase.
> Look at the graph here of the fertility rates of different types of Jews:
I did. For convenience: https://archive.is/8FAsi/4ca20b298a776c0318c24337c475fa4dce0...
As can be seen, secular Jews are roughly at 2 children per woman and "religious" (but not Haredi) are at 4. Once again, other OECD countries are roughly between 1.0 and 1.7 and falling. And they, too, have a share of religious traditionalists.
All that said, a good article. Some interesting bits:
> If an Israeli woman has fewer than three children, she feels as if she owes everyone an explanation—or an apology.” That, at any rate, is the view of a leading Israeli demographer. When she visits London she is struck by its dearth of toy shops.
> …But it is harder to explain why secular Jewish Israelis also have more children than the norm. Most work; paid leave for Israeli parents is not especially generous. Nor is child care cheaper than in other rich places. Some argue that Jewish Israelis make more babies because they foresee a rosier future: Israel ranks among the world’s top ten countries in happiness.
> Another reason may be that the state encourages baby-making by, for instance, bankrolling fertility treatment. It subsidises in-vitro fertilisation to the tune of $150m a year. Tiny Israel has about the same number of frozen embryos as America. This may have only a slight effect on Israel’s birth rate, but it signals that the government wants its citizens to procreate.
> One more explanation may be that Israeli grandparents tend to help out more than their peers in many other rich countries. Since Israel is small and densely populated, grandma is never far away. In one survey 83% of secular Jewish mothers aged 25-39 said they were supported by their child’s grandparents, whereas only 30% of German mothers said the same. In Israel the traditional family structure is still strong. In France and Britain more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. In Israel it is under 10%.
So, no, this isn't about "tribes" restricting financial independence. This is about a modern secular society that isn't blatantly antinatalist, plus coexists with sizable non-modern groups. Perhaps we could learn something from them, on both accounts.
For more in-depth research: https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
I do not see how the data I offered does. This quote specifically seems to support my claim that tribes that "restrict" or maintain certain "expectations" of women are disproportionately responsible for pulling the fertility rate up (which is 3 compared to other countries of being less than 2).
>Though Haredim are just 13% of the population, their offspring make up 19% of Israeli children under the age of 14, and 24% of those under the age of four.
>As can be seen, secular Jews are roughly at 2 children per woman and "religious" (but not Haredi) are at 4. Once again, other OECD countries are roughly between 1.0 and 1.7 and falling. And they, too, have a share of religious traditionalists.
I agree that it is notable that secular Jews are at a higher fertility rate, but note that it is not much higher. There are 2 factors at play here, the biological costs of having children, which are immutable, and the "economic" costs of having children, which are mutable. You make a good point here:
>In one survey 83% of secular Jewish mothers aged 25-39 said they were supported by their child’s grandparents, whereas only 30% of German mothers said the same. In Israel the traditional family structure is still strong. In France and Britain more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. In Israel it is under 10%.
It takes a village to raise a baby, and it may be true that given enough familial support, a woman would be more likely to have ~2 children rather than 0 or 1 as is being seen in other developed countries that lack the familial support system for myriad reasons. However, even with familial support, I think few women would opt for 3 children, and a very small minority would opt for 4 or more.
1,5 (or 1,2) vs 2 is a lot. It is close to 3 so confidently above replacement for the whole secular+non-Haredim religious group (reminder that nominally the US is nearly completely "religious") and very close to replacement rate for secular Jews only; they will not experience significant population contraction in the next 100 years even if left on their own. This is important in that it means they also will never run into dependency ratio problems and necessity of mass immigration to prop up the failing economy, at the current rate; they will also never experience the cultural impact of extreme geriatrization of the society (some European nations are at average age 45 and higher now). Trends are also completely different, there is no precipitous decline (in fact it looks like a slow wobble and their TFR may return to 2+). If secular Jews were their own country they'd have been doing fine, arguably better than now and clearly unlike the rest of OECD TFR-wise.
> the biological costs of having children, which are immutable, and the "economic" costs of having children, which are mutable.
While the biological costs are not trivially mutable, there is a world of difference between having a child at 21, 27 or 35. The toll childcare takes on the body ramps up rapidly with age, while the ability to provide care declines. Older people fail to function well in a sleep-deprived state. We are doing everyone and especially women a disservice by suggesting that this decision is most wise to postpone.
Absolutely! Another component of all of this is before the costs of pregnancy and birth and raising the kid, which is matching up two people to procreate and create a life together.
I have numerous cousins and friends who would rather be single than commingle their life with a partner who they think would make their life worse, a phenomenon with many causes, but one particular one that sticks out to me is the lack of social pressure to pair up, and especially on women's side, a safe society with the ability for them to live alone without needing a man makes the compromise not make sense.
Suggesting we treat housing as a good (which should be easily accessible and inexpensive) rather than an investment would surely help and isn’t controversial here. But it does pose a systemic problem as many current and upcoming retirements at present hinge on housing prices, which is how we got into this mess.
Perhaps a more controversial suggestion: fund retirements based on taxes or other forms of “cash flow” rather than through investments. Tax policy has directly incentivized investment as a way of funding retirement. At a societal level increasing the capital base probably makes us more efficient but we are shifting so much more economic output/returns from labor to capital that you can easily be much, much wealthier in retirement than as a worker. And people wouldn’t need to save and invest so much if they knew they’d get a reasonable pension.
As good as it is for people in their 50s and beyond, I think turning everybody into an investor has created inherent age-based inequality which becomes especially impactful in the prices of housing (and probably other markets that are expected to retain value, even if not investments, like art).
My hypothesis isn’t that it’s not affordable, it’s that people don’t stand to personally benefit from having kids, and birth control is available, so they don’t. If you‘re willing to tolerate any quality of life, well you might just be able to afford kids.
I also think our attitude towards education specifically is a key driver of low fertility. We have invented a system where we literally take the horniest most fertile members of the population and we have them compete in a boundless contest to accumulate more and more prestigious, time consuming, and necessarily more irrelevant accreditations.
Take a modern young couple in a place like NYC. Having to work incredibly hard in an uncertain job - both of them - never too far from being unable to pay rent (or mortgage, although that now tends to come later in life). Meanwhile bombarded by ads of all kinds (and people they see around, both in real life and online) to have consumption of a certain level just to maintain the status quo of their social standing.
Add to that a complete lack of positive vision for the 'developed' world but plenty of negative ones. A complete lack of any sort of utopian thinking. Including the fact that whoever does end up having children will end up with those children later having to support all the pensioners.
---------
So in a way, the poor are more secure in their poverty than the young people in the middle, and therefore they procreate. So do the more wealthy that are secure in their wealth.
Why? If elevating individual “choice” and doing what you “want” results in a society that literally cannot perpetuate itself, I struggle to see how that’s a “good thing” much less “certainly” so. To me, it sounds like the sign of an evolutionary dead end—one that’s sustainable in the short term only by arbitraging a world order where wealth inequalities drive many people to leave their homelands for these otherwise terminal places.
Besides affordability, more recent generations focusing more on career, quality of life, freedom, overall thrill- and experience-seeking, has led people to make lifestyle choices that do not involve children, as children can be a hindrance to some of those lifestyle choices. Because of those choices, many of these same people simply don't value children [of their own] as much and thus have fewer or none at all. Career aspirations, increasing wealth/income, and keeping a majority control over one's time and obligations has become more important than accepting the stresses and challenges of raising one's own family, even when considering the special kind of joy that also arises from pursuing that endeavor.
Adding onto that, say what you will about organized religions, but the increasing level of secularism is perhaps also a factor in leading to a declining birthrate, as most organized religions tend to "bake in" a kind of enthusiasm and social "nudging" to have more children.
It's the same reason some people can't just relax and turn off. We're able to be so efficient/productive now, 30 minutes "wasted" costs a lot more now than it did in 1990 or earlier.
Or.. we will have smaller populations. It's difficult to cite new cities. The US ostensibly has a lot of land area to make new cities - but if you get into the details there are a variety of reasons that the existing cities are where they are (including wildfire/water risks).
The fact historical short-sightedness meant we didn't plan for it properly is an issue. The problem here should be framed around our economic system though, not fertility rates.
This is an assumption.
In nature, a population reaches a maxima but it's a survivorship bias metric. Populations that _didn't_ level off struggled to find the now scarce food, and died off too fast to re-populate, or some other reason died off.
Humans are the only species so far to be able to exploit more resources as population grew, and have the technology to prevent such a collapse (by constantly expanding the resource acquisition game). In the future, i would expect space exploration to be space resource collection. Therefore, we will not reach maxima because there's no such thing. No natural force should be able to kill off humans or their expansion.
I will believe this once a way is found to reverse entropy.
but, if entropy itself were ever to be the "last problem left" - I've no doubt that we would solve that problem also.
We are far closer to literally living Star Trek lives (without space travel) than we are away from it.
Before millennials die we will hear terms like "post scarcity" - assuming we live long enough and society doesn't fall apart.
There are no constraints preventing population from growing other than people not wanting to have kids.
That’s not a normal constraint. That’s … kind of bizarre.
I've come to believe this is what reaching carrying capacity is supposed to feel like. A gradual desire to have fewer kids due to stress, rather than an abrupt calamity that cuts of populations all of a sudden.
> With that in mind, recent advances in ai could not have come at a better time. An über-productive AI-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually ai may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence.
> Welcome to Costco. I love you.
If this is dire to the economy, we are better off thinking at once about changing the economic system, not the fertility rate.
Don't forget every human conceived less on earth also means fewer cars, plane trips etc.
We need to change from a growth-oriented capitalist consumption economy to an elastic (robust against dynamically growing and shrinking) sustainable economy.
Part of this is to chain the attitudes about consumption, but part of it is also re-organizing production and supply chains after globalization in ways that ensure goods are produced as locally as possible and as globally as necessary to reduce transportation pathways.
Imagine all the iron mines. Not like we could just have a hand full of mines. We’d have to have tons of them all over.
Same with … everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x64f7NxQKKk
I don't think this is true. At the micro-economic level, it's not outlandish to see households where a working generation sustains not only their kids, but also their parents. At a macro-economic level, we'd certainly have to adjust our expectations of profits and growth, but that's because we are used to an always-growing economy.
What are you basing this on? Meaning, why is it too much, why is 2-3B the sweet spot?
Something really strange is going on, and it's awful to watch. In some instances the women have actually considered self harm because of their desire and inability to have children, even after tens of thousands spent on IUI and IVF. This can't be accidental, but I have no idea what could be causing it and how anyone would go about proving the connection. I hear all sorts of wild theories such as birth-control in the water, or plastics imitating estrogens, or pesticides interrupting hormone pathways, but they're all correlative when I've investigated. Never really seen it any truly compelling evidence. In fact, I've never even seen real evidence to prove that this is a phenomenon that's actively occurring, but man, it feels like nearly every fertile-age woman I know is having problems, and the few that aren't probably just aren't talking about it.
From a personal and selfish standpoint, I now have two kids and it sucks not having any friends that have kids.
I hope it gets figured out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMtLdE5Zq-8
I think there's a lot of people who see some level of stability and financial padding on the horizon, far away but within reach given a few years. Because this group sees that glimmer, they chase it and hold off on having kids in hopes of reducing the chances of ending up in dire straits thanks to the expenses that come building a family.
The argument against this is that impoverished areas have higher birth rates, and that's probably because they don't see the glimmer. These people are more likely to have resigned themselves to their fate of being poor and kids either don't change that equation or even add value (as they can serve as farmhands and such).
If we rewind several decades to when long-term financial stability wasn't so difficult to achieve, the birth rate wasn't an issue. People achieved stability when young and started having kids. If we want to bring the birthrate back up, I think it's going to be necessary to make that possible again.
In 2017 it was 26.8. In the kinds of places people on this site usually hail from, it was near 30. (MA being oldest, at 29.3)
Being quite a few years older than when people typically had kids a generation ago, is probably going to result in some differences in how easy it is.
Not saying that's a full explanation either, but it's likely at least part of it.
Go in some place where people live more outside, typically a city with warm climate close to the beach and you will see people spending less time in front of a screen, fucking all the tine and having lots of kids while being generally exposed to the same chemicals That is my experience having moved in different parts of europe.
You have to take into accounts that women are finally fertile a small amount of time in each cycle.
Having said that I don't think this need to be fixed. We are way too many trying to have such a wasteful standard of living for the planet to handle. I somehow regret having given birth to 2 kids in that regard.
> The total fertility rate in Greater Perth dipped from 1.76 in 2018 to 1.66 in 2021, spot on the national average.
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/baby-d...
( bit further north about the same coastline )
I've noticed a pretty common trend of assuming low fertility rates are automatically related to infertility rates, especially in discussions here on HN. The fundamental issue with low fertility is really just that less couples are starting families, and those that are starting families are having closer to 1-3 children instead of 4-7 like in times past (independent of infertility issues).
[1] - https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
Not to mention the fact that a lot of younger people would prefer to have financial security "setup" first, before embarking on the journey of child raising (but unfortunately, this takes a lot of time, and fraught with uncertainty).
Not sure how seriously I take this. :)
It's also purely anecdotal, but anti-natalist sentiment is very much on the rise in my community. I meet more and more people concerned that bringing a child into the world now means condemning them to suffer the worst consequences of climate change. No idea if this is represented at all on a global scale, but it's very present in my area.
is this really true? With the exception of the covid lockdown causing issues, i've found that i've been able to acquire all my necessary material needs, and more.
It is true that my purchasing power is being clawed away via inflation, but this is counteracted by wage increases and investment returns (on average).
I earn about $175K as a software engineer, which easily puts me into the top 1% of income earners in my generation. Just because life is good to me does not mean that I reflect the average lifestyle in America.
0: https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/ameri...
That is a measure of income inequality... not poverty.
Here is a measure of inflation adjusted household income over time for to address the original point[1].
People are not getting poorer
[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Same thing? What is a measure of poverty if not a measure of income inequality? The concept of poverty categorizes people who do not earn enough to live in society. How are these different?
no, the concept of poverty is one where a person is dying due to a lack of basic necessities such as food, shelter. Everything else is not required, such as luxuries etc. It's just that as a country gets richer, what some people consider as basic necessities seems to expand - it has now become a basic necessity to have electricity, internet, transport - things that a hundred years ago, would've been considered the realms of the aristocracy.
The distance to median income is not a measure of poverty, but a measure of how far you are from the typical person in said country - a relative measure. An absolute measure of poverty is caloric intake, access to water and shelter.
A country in which 100% of people earn exactly $1 a day is not somehow less poor than the United States
Now, kids are almost all cost, as the government / society itself captures their economic output, and doesn’t give enough back to the family that did the work to raise them.
So now you have kids because you want to, and its no longer rational act, more emotional one.
In the western world we compare ourselves to our parents who bought their 1st houses when they were in their twenties.. something we are less likely to achieve even with the same status job until much later on.
You wanna talk about collapse? Let's talk about South Korea.
It's already hard to hire people to produce all the services people want. (You can pay more for one particular thing, but then other things don't have enough people - it's a zero sum game.)
With a declining birth rate it's going to become impossible.
This pattern is broadly replicated everywhere that industrializes.
Whatever the cause, it's not due to wealth per capita or personal health. It's probably cultural. Contraceptives / family planning definitely plays a big part too.
I think this popular narrative of "kids are too expensive" is mostly a media fiction. It's more about individual comfort. Money can be a factor in comfort, but it's hardly the only one.
Poorer immigrants tend to have many children. Even today, poorer people in general have more kids than wealthy folks. Just look at the data - it contradicts the headlines.
As Peter Zeihan likes to say, kids were free labor for the farm and made life easier. In today's world, they're expensive furniture for your condo or apartment and they break things.
People are focused on their own lives and careers and aren't ready to take a back seat and turn attention to children. They're main characters. I think a lot of folks feel that having children turns you into an NPC.
Poor people aren't climbing the corporate ladder. They don't need to worry about keeping their calendars clear for meetings. They're not filling their Instagram with travel photos.
Middle income folks have access to social media and easy dopamine hits. They want to stretch being single or unmarried or not having kids out longer and enjoy it more.
It's society, not wealth and cost of living, that is causing the dip in children.
Yes, people want to party and be free and not have to be tied down and spend money on raising kids. Having kids is a pretty fulfilling experience though. It's not something I understood until I had some. The people that don't have kids will really struggle when they get old and infirm with no one to take care of them.
I often hear this, but it sounds like nonsense? Why obsess about what happens when you're old and infirm? It's going to suck regardless.
One of my great aunts had no kids. She had a great life and lived to 95.
As for avoiding struggling, I have a small kid and struggle. If you want to avoid struggle, having kids is a terrible idea.
Birth rate declines in the US in the past 15-20 years have been entirely among the poor. Among the higher-income they've been basically stable.
Here's a simple chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...
From 2005-2021, the change in birth rates by group:
Below poverty level - down 25%
Income 100-199% of poverty level - down 15%
Income 200%+ of poverty level - up 2%.
Partly I think it's because teenagers / young adults are heavily discouraged from pregnancy. Maybe we should as a society push people to marry early, e.g. soon as they finish high school / during uni.
People are today essentially stand-ins for robots to work for elites who collude with each other and anyway deeply despise the 'plebs'. Little wonder, in this mad pursuit, there has been a big collapse in diversity of people, traditions, languages, cultures, are all a miniscule fraction of what they were when the world population was < 1B.
You can extend this to the way we treat animals and the world and things automatically make sense. Obviously uniformity has been good for control and productivity. And for what ?
Even the act of bringing up your child in a manner not dictated by the state and state-allied academics is seen as a act of iconoclasm in this day across the world. Little wonder it's very close to being criminalized.
Reminds me of the 'Clone army' from star wars.
The end result of the current trends in population trees will be the collapse of many nations, and pretty much a four horsemen situation that'll follow. Supplementing the unhealthy fertility rates might help stave this off, if we're lucky, and there's no reason to believe it would create any worse of a wage slavery system than already exists. I can't imagine that it would be more dystopian than the future we're already making a beeline toward.
Yes there is. As terrible as the system is today, people willingly to choose (in most cases) to bring children into the world and (in most cases) accept the responsibility of raising them. Who raises the kids in a world where they're bred via technology? There's a long and ugly history involving church and state-run homes for orphaned kids. You'd be creating a system that would be ripe for exploiting kids at a systemic scale we've never before seen (and to be clear, we've seen global child sex abuse scandals).
People are hard at work on removing the 'willingly' part of this right now. We have the wealthiest man on earth backing people who are headed down a road where contraception will be outlawed.
> Who raises the kids in a world where they're bred via technology?
People who voluntarily adopt them. You could have babies made to order for people with fertility problems, or merely for people who don't want to undertake the risk of carrying a pregnancy to term in a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world[1].
[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
If we have less and less people, there will be less brain power to innovate while as far as I can tell the innovation is getting more and more difficult as we moving forward. Just imagine inventing the wheel was probably easier than inventing the combustion engine.
I have a feeling that the huge technological advancements of the 20th century happened because of the exponentially increasing population. Also having more advanced technology helped back the population growth too.
So I think if the shrinking population will cause technological stagnation on top of the constant hardship due to the proportionally increasing number of elderly who need support.
We're already seeing younger people not understanding basic computing concepts like file systems because they grew up on locked-down mobile OSes that abstract this from users. AI is going to remove the affordances needed to learn on a scale we've never seen before.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
> The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners
that was never taken for granted, the expansion of welfare was a happy accident of the largest generation the world will ever see. Also, the idea that real estate prices will keep going higher should not be taken for granted. Ideas like these are taken for granted because "boomer" generations were so dominant numerically -- and that s the reason why they loved democracy so much. We might see a regression in democracy as the world is becoming more and more expensive for everyone but the boomers.
Anti-fertility is driven by the anomalous cost structures that we have created: children require physical space , they are physical objects after all. But real estate is extremely unaffordable compared to most of history (when people just built their own homes), and nobody talks about it as a global crisis (people are worried that housing prices might fall and actively discourage buildiung for environmental reasons). Instead, luxuries such as travel , tourism and touchscreens are cheap and people flock to them.
Ironically low fertility will be used as a weapon for wages to go up, way up
These are, frankly IMHO, bizarre arguments that seem conditioned on socio-commercial training along the lines of "you need a diamond to propose!".
Absolutely none of these are true:
- People had sex and stable relationships before diamond mines existed.
- You, strictly speaking, don't need any amount of square footage to live. You might be cold, wet, and miserable, but you'll be alive.
- Children existed for millions of years before money and will alarmingly, and generally, grow and learn regardless of what you do. You may not be happy with the outcome, but it'll happen.
A friend of mine is recently pregnant and focused on giving birth, but the medical expenses and doctor visits are becoming a burden. I mentioned to her that my grandmother gave birth to 12 children without a doctor on a farmhouse table at zero cost and no doctor visits. What she's paying for is not having a baby, but reducing child and mother mortality.
I have loads of family in South Korea, a country in near terminal population decline, and the reason I've always heard is "it's expensive to raise a child". But the real reason is, it's expensive to train a child to get into a top-3 university. Raising a child to adulthood is possible even in abject poverty.
We (us), as a civilization(s), are fundamentally dishonest about what our problems are, and it makes it difficult to reason about our solutions. "Children are expensive" turns into "have less kids" rather than "the road to top-3 universities are expensive" -> "let's be okay with kids getting into lesser schools or not any school at all" or "let's figure out how to make higher education more accessible".
We don't understand what we're even paying for, and why, and we need to relearn it and rethink it.
It's more like, we make up excuses because we don't know our real motives or don't want to outright say we dont want kids because it's societally unacceptable.
I believe statistics show there is a rise in childlessness , but people having kids have on average the same kids as a few decades ago.
Isn't the fact that mothers are expected to drop their career and 100% focus on their children also a factor? Women instead decide not to have babies at all so they can have a career of their own.
I have no reason to believe maternal/paternal love, expressed as the desire that your kids live a better life than you, is a particularly modern idea. IMO that's why its common to see declining fertility rate in countries with large economies and countries with declining economies.
It's heartbreaking to think your child will live a life that's worse than yours. In a poor country, even if you don't have much money, it's easy to think they could do better and live happier than you. In a rich country, even if you have all the means to give them a "good enough" life, it's not as easy to think this.
This is definitely a cultural issue. It happens to be the case rich countries got rich by placing a lot of value in "success", wealth, high achievement and individuality, not in meeting base necessities and being content/grateful with what one has. Which is exactly what you allude to:
> But the real reason is, it's expensive to train a child to get into a top-3 university. Raising a child to adulthood is possible even in abject poverty.
I'm not South Korean, but what I've gathered from friends and media is that it's a hyper-capitalist society that's very, very invested into certain ideals of "success" (academic, beauty, economic, etc). I'm thus not surprised that, if associate that with happiness, the idea of rising a child to be happy is daunting.
I'd argue that you do, considering it's -4 to -22F outside for half of the year, and historically have gone as low as -58F
Not only do we not see those tempretures here, we stopped using Farenheit before I was born and the locals lived happily for several tens of thousands of years semi nomadically with minimal shelter requirements.
You might have missed the global part of the discussion topic and of the HN forum.
Indeed, because it's a global discussion it's important to point out that the point is not globally applicable, because there are lots of areas where people indeed do need shelter to survive. Just because it's possible in some downtown with favorable external conditions doesen't make it very viable generally
True. But in fact, most of us will pay a lot for those things.