Besides feeding the economy (and by that, I mean buying consumerist stuff from large corps) and providing the army with cannon fodder, I still haven’t haven’t heard a lot of good arguments for having these babies.
Humanity would shrink (I think this is calculated to start after 2050 or so), but besides those two reasons, does that matter? Where is the foundation of the argument that we must have population growth to sustain? Or where is the research that shows if we halve the population, everything will be terrible?
Grandparents who lived lot more poorly or had their siblings die as babies? Lot more babies survive and their living standards are much higher. Maybe that is reasonable trade-off...
My grandparents are dead, but I doubt they would have much to say about it; they had kids (in the 1940s) because their parents would not accept anything less; religion + marriage + kids. They often told me and my parents they didn't want kids and they were supposed to have as many as possible but they only had one and promised to have more but never did.
But what great insights would they come up with pray tell? In those days (it was WOII) it was to work the land (economy), cannon fodder and pension plan (have them take care of you). What else?
We are an accidental blib in a cold vast cosmos; nothing and no-one would think of us or remember us if the earth explodes today (or if someone hits the nuke button). I 'value' my life in so far that I am not in pain and I was born in the right location with the right interests (math + computing) to do whatever I want to sit it out until I die.
How is any of it a reason to make more babies though or a sign we have a shortage just because we make less than we need to create a population equilibrium or growth?
"You, an existing person, find you prefer to stay alive" is not an argument for "more babies are always better". If the reason that there are fewer babies is that potential parents don't want them, then it's possible that there are exactly the right amount of babies, and the ensuing problems should be solved by other means than pressuring these unenthused couples to reproduce.
I think that creating more happy people is better, not more people per se.
An aging population that lives longer and longer + shrinking workforce means
- the pension system can't be sustained, but also
- more and more people need support of doctors, nurses, care homes, etc. but can't find it or it becomes more and more expensive (but see problem above regarding their pensions).
Historically children take care of their parents when they are old and in need; in the past century more and more of this has been delegated to society at large. In both cases though you need young people.
It is also question of what level of care and investment to elderly is accepted. Many of us want to live as long as possible, but maybe there needs to be some qualitative cut off. Age and situation this happens varies but at some point society can't pay things like life support forever...
If you'd like to implement it you're welcome to go tell your largest voting bloc that your primary objective is to almost completely remove their entitlements and leave them to starve to death. Who knows, maybe after they are finished lynching you you might get elected.
As johngladtj says, there might be one, but it's not the current one.
And the articles states that "some estimates now put the number of babies each woman has below the global replacement rate of about 2.2. The U.S. long ago passed that level." - so even finding one that works at replacement birth rates could not be enough.
> I still haven’t haven’t heard a lot of good arguments for having these babies.
A larger population means bigger numbers on the everything that's on a normal distribution, like intelligence. That one genius in a 100 million? With 1B population, you only have 10 of them. With 8B population, there are 80. That's 8x more chances one of them does or finds something revolutionary, 8x chances that person is not perishing somewhere in a cobalt mine as a kid. It slashes times waiting for a genius to appear 8x.
A bigger population also enables extreme specialisation in very niche fields. It enables bigger recruitment pools for complex processes and manufacturers like, for example, ASML.
It's, in a short word, massive parallelism.
Now, a counter-argument to everything I said is looking at the demographics of geniuses, revolutionaries, specialists and noticing most of them were well-fed, well-educated and raised in stable, liberal societies (liberal as opposed to, say, taliban-like societies). So, in theory, we could get by with a smaller population, if it was a rich, western-like, population. In that case, the only constraint would become genetics; so an 100M population would have to wait a couple of generations for their genius, instead of a 8B pop potentially getting them all at once.
I always hear this from people who are unwilling to fix current problems. They always push it onto some future genius that is going to pop up and act as the second coming of Jesus. In reality the average person is already more intelligent both in terms of education and IQ than people from a hundred years ago. The difference is that you are no longer losing them to mining accidents. Meanwhile the growth strategy glorifies the mining accidents as something that can be compensated simply by having more people. It's ok if our "geniuses" die, because we have eight times more. There is a deeply misanthropic logic behind this since one is discounting vast amounts of the population.
The average person has a higher IQ, true, but the problems we face also require a higher IQ (and higher specialisation) than in the past.
It might sound misanthropic, but the average person is average. Nothing wrong with it, morally or otherwise, but they won't be doing revolutionary work in specialist fields, they will be raising families and be happy.
Like I said in my original comment, we can get by with a smaller population with western levels standard of living, and then only be constrained by genetics.
Like I mentioned in my original comment (weird how many times I had to type this today), we can get by having a smaller population with western levels standard of living; there's a bit more detail on this in my last paragraph of my comment.
On the bright side, we're probably a couple of centuries away from being able to genetically engineer geniuses and avoid having to play the numbers game.
Genetic engineering might also be a way out of the reproductive Ponzi scheme. Grow ready-made adults in pods! No painful stupid 25-year investment period with uncertain payoff.
Your generation's genius is currently wasting his life on a 12 hour minimum wage job to barely pay the rent on his shitty old tiny flat. He will not have the brainspace and time left to invent hyperspace interplanetary travelling.
Fix the former first if you want the latter to happen.
I feel like my original comment fully addresses your point, but I will restate here in a shorter form for your convenience: 1) bigger population means more chances a potential genius is born in the right circumstances 2) we can have a smaller population if everyone lives at western standards (and then genetics becomes the bottleneck)
More people also mean a bigger, smarter pool for recruitment into mental health professions. Again, the key word is massive parallelism: more people working in specialised fields, at the same time. And there are A LOT of specialised fields nowadays.
If you expect x plumbers to be needed in year y and x/2 not many years later (within the span of a plumber's working life), how many should choose to become plumbers in each year? How about buildings and other infrastructure with long lifetimes?
Rapid change makes those things difficult. Don't want random home owners to have to speculate on that, and for some of them to lose their shirts when the population is too low to find a buyer for their home.
How haven't these problems _always_ existed? What do they have to do with drop in overall population? If change is the problem, then both population growth and movement of populations are already problems and always have been.
They always exist. Sometimes they're a minor problem, the steepness of the expected change makes them a major problem in some areas.
But this kind of thing always exists. For example, logistics companies have problems hiring in some countries right now because young people don't see driving trucks as a viable career for forty years, but the logistics companies need drivers for the next ten years or more.
Because we're idiots and terrible at forward planning. Currently pensions and retirement ages are based on the idea that there will be some large cohort of people working to pay the pensions of the folks that are retired. In fact, governments are even borrowing against future pension contributions made by that cohort, so it's not even that the future cohort needs to pay for the current cohort, they need to cover it and some to make up for the lending. Realistically, this is never going to happen, and this is where fiscal policy starts to deviate from mathematical first principles.
In case there is some kind of reduction in the workforce, then we do not have a plan to care for our elderly. Already, young adults are finding it difficult to afford homes for themselves, even with a higher proportion of families with two incomes.
We would see an increase in the chasm between the rich and poor, as those able to own property would be able to both look after themselves and their families, and would be able to continue to grow their wealth by charging rent to those who are unable to afford to buy. This especially would be accentuated if population decline were gradual, as then the rich would be able to continue to snap up the homes that come onto the market and rent them out.
A short sharp halving of the population would likely leave a surplus of homes on the market, at affordable prices for everyone, and would perhaps even lead to a better quality of life for most. But that's not an organic process, and certainly leads to a worse quality of life for the unlucky half...
I do some fantasy world-building in the little free time I have. The setting is diesel-punk/atom-punk, so 1950s era. A little bit of disco-punk mixed in too. Essentially, modern post-war USA.
So, when I try to model a city, or a country in this era, you gotta go after the data. Because we actually have it for this setting.
Medieval data is just horrible in comparison. The high fantasy settings will get a little bit of data on city dynamics and some on 'nation' level data and the like. But most of the modeling is starting from pretty much guessing with wide errorbars.
But in the atom-punk setting I have, there is just mountains of data from all over the world. It makes modeling really easy and you can get really fine-grained about it (much to the detriment of story-telling, I get lost in those tables and charts, happily so).
One thing that really stands out in trying to model this data is that population is literally everything.
How grimy a city is, how tall the skyscrapers are, the walking speed of people in the city, the talking speed of bank tellers, the number of patents per capita, the monthly charge for sewer access, tonnage of warships, the length of subway track and it's heights, etc. Pretty much every metric will correlate best with the population of the area. It's not just cities, it's states and countries and smaller towns too. Really anything about the setting and world-building is best modeled by looking at the population first and then working from there.
To be clear here, not the population density. The only metric I could find in my notes that better correlated with population-density was the number of subway stops on a line. I'm sure there are other examples, too.
But, in the years that I've been doing this, the number one thing that seems to pop out to me is: Raw population is everything.
Now, I'm mostly interested in themes and settings and the like. But most of the data is coming from the motivation of trying to increase the quality of life of people. So I get to stare at that a lot and make graphs.
And I can say from my eyeballing of all this data over the last few years: More people = better.
Most of the metrics we use to quantify if things are 'good' or 'bad' will correlate with more people = better. It's not, by any means, a 1-1 thing. This is human population stuff, If you see a r2 value of, like, 0.6, that's pretty darn good. There is a lot of noise here and the stats that are taken have just huge issues with them.
I'm not going to be able to really prove this, I'm just mucking around with a setting and world-building. But from the years that I have been staring at my poorly organized notes and the various governmental and NGO data tables, the underlying message is that things get better with more people around.
The societies we live in are a precarious balance based on assumptions like we can grow food and we don't all try to kill each other. One part has become: our population continues to grow. It is less dramatic than those others, but it's impact should not be ignored.
It sounds more like this might be a choice you feel strongly about but are projecting selfishness on to others?
This can be a totally fine choice for someone to make personally (which I support), but also not good for society as a whole. Both things can objectively be true.
Are you saying it's selfish to not have kids? Other than accidental parents, I've never met any who didn't have kids because they wanted them. How were they not acting selfishly?
It's interesting to see this comment downvoted. I'm honestly curious as to the thinking here. How are parents having kids because they want them not acting selfishly?
Actually both parents and non-parents exhibit selfishness, just of different flavors.
Parents have natural urges to have kids (literally, evolution!). So it is self-explanatory.
Non-parents will need a younger generation when they grow old for satisfying all the Maslow hierarchies of needs (food, medical care, entertainment, funding social safety nets etc). So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.
People in both categories may not be aware of their own flavor of selfishness.
> So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.
When my father was dying, I out of all his children was able to help him the most since I don't have children of my own. Clearly I could devote my life to helping old people and do more overall good for that group, then just producing children (who may or may not do so). In fact, I could make the claim that "the ones who *are* producing kids by choice are consciously producing more work for future generations to do hence acting selfishly". That position would be similarly asinine.
But sure if you understand there is no inherent good to parenting and it's basically just people doing what they want to do (well when having the children by choice anyway), then I guess you maybe show a little humility. I may someday have children, but I'm under no illusion that I'd be doing the world a favor.
I was saying the opposite. The parent poster is implying that there are only selfish reasons that someone would want society to have more families/kids.
I was saying that it didn’t feel like they were arguing in good faith by ascribing only selfish motivations for those who advocate for that point of view.
Having an aging workforce means you lose available skills.
And aging population means you have more dependents than caretakers for them.
An aging population in some parts of the world means you have fewer men to fight in a conflict (assuming your adversary doesn’t have an aging population).
There’s loss of specialization, loss of skill transfer, younger people do more manual labor like harvesting food.
You need people of a certain age range to basically run society.
I suppose it's a subject I've long wondered about - am I just some sort of biological robot fulfilling some pre-determined program? Or have I actually been equipped with some sort of agency? I guess it's the old free will question and it may be unanswerable. That said, I can't say I've ever really felt much instinctual desire to reproduce, and if I have, perhaps I have reasoned myself out of the idea in some way. Either way it would seem that I am an evolutionary dead end. Am I supposed to feel some way about that? It seems like having an opinion on g=9.8m/s2 or the boiling point of water; useless.
Free will is so self-evident that deniers of free will have to give lectures at universities to convince everyone else that the universe is making illusions for fun at the cost of thermodynamic efficiency.
It’s impossible to define it or do anything requiring verbs if you don’t have free will, so it’s tautologically impossible to satisfy this class of solipsistic ideas.
If there is no free will, it’s tautologically impossible to define anything, therefore there is no reason to make an argument for free will, because in doing so I would be using free will.
This argument is not logically valid. Nothing changes with respect to the possibility of defining something if there is no free will - defining something is merely mapping an identifier to a representation of meaning. A purely mechanical device can define things just fine. Free will is demonstrably not necessary to define things.
It is logically valid, because it’s like asking a candle flame to flicker in a certain pattern to prove it can control how it flickers to other candle flames.
If we have no free will we are just like candle flames; any argument that says we are more than candle flames is not valid when you assume we are candle flames.
Your argument does not hold at all. In fact I'd go so far as to say it is total nonsense.
If I were to ask you to act a certain way and you do, this would neither prove nor disprove free will, because it tells me nothing about whether causality required you to act that way or differently and whether or not you deviated from causality, and so your analogy is meaningless. It is not what we'd ask you to do in order to prove free will.
You're using an assumption about an invalid argument as an argument in favour of free will, and that's no more valid than the original invalid argument.
To prove free will you need to prove that there are decisions in the brain that does not follow a) strict causality, b) randomness, c) any combination of the two. As you've pointed out, experiments where you ask a subject to act in specific ways do not produce evidence for it, as they can just as well just be causality in action. That the strawman hypothesis you presented is not valid does not prove the inverse, nor does it release any obligation of proponents of the idea of free will from providing evidence, or even just a definition to support their idea.
Free will is an absolutely extraordinary claim in that respect, because it implies a third category of events that is not a mix of strict cause-effect chains and random events, but introduces a "will-effect" chain that has no direct causal link but at the same time is not random.
As it stands, without a definition, the notion of free will is not even a fanciful hypothesis - to suggest it is a hypothesis would imply a fully formed idea. But the concept is so woolly and meaningless it tells us nothing.
It's at most a fervent wish or hope of not being an automaton. But a wish is not evidence, nor an argument, or even a hypothesis.
If you want to produce a valid argument for free will, you need to be able to either proffer a hypothesis for how such a "will-effect" chain can exist, or demonstrate physical transitions in a mind that are demonstrably not cause-effect or random byproducts of ordinary physics.
Even just come up with a coherent definition and you will be world famous, as you'd have introduced a new area of logic. If you can prove a physical mechanism for it, you'll have Nobel Prize in physics in the bag.
Thanks for the engagement (whether you had a choice or not ;)!
The main issue is that we approach the topic with a different set of axioms. E.g. your limitation of requiring a proof involving (a-c) is analogous to asking someone to build a steel bridge with three colors of legos.
Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
If your starting point is that no one is actually conscious, it’s impossible to disprove, and it’s obviously wrong (and any attempt to prove it’s not obviously wrong would knee-cap itself since it’s impossible ‘to logic’ without a reasoning engine).
> The main issue is that we approach the topic with a different set of axioms. E.g. your limitation of requiring a proof involving (a-c) is analogous to asking someone to build a steel bridge with three colors of legos.
Well, yes. The alternative is for you to give me a definition of free will that allows for it within the constraints of cause-effect and randomness.
Without such a definition, the option we are left with is inherently "breaking free" of that, and then we need another category of effect.
I don't believe either is possible, but we specifically do not have evidence that such other category of "will-effect" transition is possible, no observed mechanism, no observation of such a category, nor a hypothesis that provides even the starts of a coherent definition of what it would even mean.
So yes, the point is that the problem appear obviously impossible to resolve in favour of free will without either new logic or a definition of free will I don't think possibly can meet expectations.
> Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
Only partially, in the positive case. Consciousness would seem to need to exist for free will to exist, but in the event free will does not, there's no reason to presume that affects the possibility of consciousness.
> It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
It does not have the same issue. Whether you have free will or not, there's no reason why that need to affect your life at all. Clearly we think we make choices. Whether we make those choices or not, we act as if we do. As it is, we already have solid evidence that our conscious "decision" often is not causally linked to the actual "choice", so we can't rely on our introspection to even give us an accurate description of what "choices" we make, or why, and we know from e.g. split brain experiments that the brain can easily be made to rationalise how it "chose" things it never did. Accordingly, whether the mechanism actually controlling actions exercise free will or not, we'd expect our consciousness to experience it the same way.
This interview with Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist Roger Penrose describes a framework where quantum mechanical time hopping during a measurement removes this cause-and-effect concern you have. E.g. The nature of reality of time and matter fields is even more complicated than we understand, and our macros scale understanding of cause and effects might be too limiting when considering constraints of consciousness.
The economists are worried because (retirement) savings are nothing more than a claim on future labor. As people grow older and are less capable of taking care of themselves other people need to care for them. People can be secure in their retirement when the number they have saved is sufficient to purchase the labor they need later in life.
But what will the price of that labor be when birth rates collapse and there aren't sufficient people around to do this labor? Retirement savings mean nothing when the people needed to do the work are not available. For wealthy western countries immigration is the only realistic solution address the shortage of working-age people. It's not a silver bullet, though. Immigration scares people and populist politicians will exploit this fear of change.
We should also remember that politicians in rich countries are very old. They care a great deal about anything that affects their own retirement. To young people who don't have high expectations for their quality of life in their last couple of decades on earth this panic about demographic change may seem silly. But baby boomers care and they are the ones making policy.
The fact is that my parents generation (currently retiring) made a bet on the younger generations supporting them through the retirement [insert socialism joke if you're from the US]. I never signed up to this tho, I have been born into it. Now I agree that the whole thing is in principle a good idea, but all fairness goes out of the window as soon as a your demographics are such that the biggest voting block is at the same time not working. So a class of old politicians constantly keeps putting off needed changes in the way retirement works, a price for which younger generations have to pay. The same happens in infrastructure, climate change etc.
At some point my generation will have to question the validity of that social contract.
What do you suggest regarding the social contract?
I'm asking because whatever policy you'd like to see applied to the current elderly, is to be applied with twice the intensity to yourself, as the generation behind you is even smaller.
I think of this as a generic problem that happens when the (in this case) age structure of the representatives differs from the working population.
So any fix would involve changing the age structure of representation. The particulars of the fix would depend on the specifics of a particular system, but one idea that could fix things would be absolute limits to the time you can be in office. So for example a rule that states any person may serve only X years in parliament over the course of their life. Those limits might have other benefits.
Maybe even an absolute age limit would make sense, e.g. retirement age + X years. Of course old people should get political representation, but maybe putting a cap on it would work to make it more a government of working people.
Another idea would be a voting multiplier, that gives proportionally more power to representatives that are from age brackets that are underrepresented in the governing body.
All of these might have unanticipated side effects and there are probably even better ideas, but the point is: whatever it is, it has to be something that gives true concessions to the young people, otherwise there can be no true political negotiation between the retired many and the working few.
First, I'd say that if those politicians are so worried, then perhaps they should work on building societies that people actually want to bring children into.
Mainly though, I wonder - where is all the extra productivity that has supposedly developed over the last half century or so? Shouldn't that be able to cover over a declining population?
David Graeber argues much of that productivity has been sucked up by the managerial and administrative class. Any increase in productivity is offset by a new layer of middle management.
I think we can also make a Moore's law analogy here. As CPUs get faster we write slower code.
We can ensure adequate supply of basic necessities... to the standard of the 1960's (food choices and availability, houses, cars, medical care, entertainment options etc). Problem is that someone living 1960's lifestyle would be considered poor today. And if old people realize that they are going to have a "poor lifestyle" in their retirement, a lot of political problems will follow.
I don’t really understand why we would be limited to the 60’s. My house was actually built in the 50’s though. It’s think a modern car built with 60’s amenities but modern engine management and design could be crazy efficient and affordable; I’d be a buyer there for sure. And obesity was much lower back then, so it hardly sounds like the food situation was bad. I guess the problem for me is that I live a fairly poor lifestyle already and actually rather enjoy it, so it’s hard for me to imagine it as such a problem.
Because the environment exist it is my duty to pollute less? That's so sad! /s
We do this all the time, including with debt, pensions, etc. Once born, the currently unborn have the choice to take care of their parents or not, to decide en masse not to become a doctor or nurse, to emigrate to a different country without a pension system (or to just be jobless forever to avoid paying for that)...
That listing of people seems pretty comprehensive. If that’s not the “whole world” it comes pretty close! And to be clear, us parents think that being “childfree” is shallow and selfish, like being one of those sovereign citizens who doesn’t want to pay taxes. It’s basically being the ultimate hipster—thinking of oneself as being too special for something hominids have been doing for millions of years.
The idea that parenting makes a huge difference in kids is 20th century anti-Catholic propaganda perpetuated by WASPs. Outside the extremes, parenting doesn’t make much of a difference: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/parenting-.... For the vast majority of people, biology will kick in and make them love and adequately raise their kids, regardless of their individual “wants.”
I don't think that's true, or at least, overstates it. I think there are a lot of people who don't feel strongly about becoming parents that end up being great parents.
The selfish/selfless thing has never made much sense to me apropos of children; they seem to be about fulfilling some personal want. Is the woman who has 3 kids from 3 different dads being selfless? I've never heard anyone say they want to have kids to go onto work menial jobs and pay taxes; frankly that's my every day and I don't have much interest in inflicting it on some poor, unsuspecting child.
For society to continue existing, which let’s say is axiomatically desirable, on average each person must reproduce themselves. Those kids, moreover, must be raised and socialized into the rules of the society, which requires labor. By having kids, therefore, you’re performing a function that enables society to keep existing. It’s a contribution to society in kind, similar to how taxes are a contribution to society in money. Someone who doesn’t play their part in that is selfish, in the same way as someone who doesn’t pay taxes or perform other obligations that enable society to exist.
If a society structures itself in such a way that no one wants (or is able) to continue it, then it will die and others may arise in its place.
For myself I don't believe I have the wherewithal for it regardless of my view on the matter of selfishness.
>The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies. Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support, we hypothesize that parental status differences in happiness are smaller in countries providing more resources and support to families. Our analyses of the European Social Surveys (ESS) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) reveal considerable variation in the parenthood gap in happiness across countries, with the U.S. showing the largest disadvantage of parenthood. [0]
I agree with your first point. Societies that socialize people to prioritize individual “happiness” over fulfilling social obligations will die out and better societies will take their place.
I don't think it's about happiness (scare quotes or otherwise), I think it's about avoiding ruin. In a society where you have to run as fast as you can to keep up, children will slow you down and you might end up consumed by the predators that surround you. That's why the line from the abstract "Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support" rings so true to me.
The response to the above tends to be something like, it's not so bad, kids don't really need that much anyway. Which always leaves me with the question - how much money do you make? Could it be expressed as "several times the median US household income"?
Sure—but that just means I get to indulge my kids with private school and trips to Japan. By contrast our neighbors are probably right around the median, and had kids in their 20s like we did, and their kids are just as happy. (At the end of the day—both sets of kids value the fact that the respective grandparents live nearby more than anything money can buy.)
The point you’re trying to make is contradicted by the demographics of who is having kids. My friends from law school are the ones who disproportionally aren’t having kids. Meanwhile my wife’s step mom’s rural Idaho family is bursting at the seams with kids.
It doesn't actually seem contradictory; not that I know much about law (hell, I think I lost my belief in it sometime in the last decade or so), but my impression is that it's a fairly all-consuming profession between school and a very grinding early career and very competitive; taking time out to raise children could be very costly. And I bet a lot are coupled with other lawyers so there's not much likelihood of one being a homemaker.
For those without good career prospects, ruin is not such a big deal. I looked it up, and no surprise that medicaid pays for a huge share of births in rural Idaho; if anything, 48% is lower than I'd expect.
> Medicaid coverage is even higher for births in rural Idaho. For instance, 48% of births in Lemhi County involved mothers covered by Medicaid. [0]
But that’s the selfishness I’m talking about. If a professional career is even in the cards for someone, then they started with a huge (and unearned) cognitive advantage over others. But they’re not going to have kids because they might have to compromise their lifestyle? (Or regard living like a normal person equivalent to “ruin?”)
That’s what I’m calling selfish. These people could have kids. They just choose to prioritize their lifestyle, and the pursuit of their individual career. They forgo the fundamental pillar of the human experience for marginally better odds at a career that makes some giant corporation marginally more money.
What is living like a "normal" person? Paying exorbitant premiums for health insurance for the family? Worrying about making your rent that increases 10% every year? Being one car breakdown from losing your job and the above? Have you considered that people are not selfish but perhaps anxious? That we've built a system to extract labor from people via precarity and they are responding as stressed people will? And if people live in such a state, they might see it as selfless to spare children from such an existence? That "Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor" might be a useful model to explain peoples' behavior? It's just weird to me to think that after a few hundred thousand years of being human and reproducing, we have in the span of a century become (evolved) to be too "selfish" to do so; to me it makes more sense to think in terms of environment.
I think Asian societies have a higher collectivist "the collective over the individual" culture than others, and their populations are the fastest declining currently.
That’s because Asian societies spent the last several generations harnessing that collectivist impulse to socialize people into not having kids. The idea that limiting reproduction was essential to lifting society out of poverty was drummed into generations of Asians: https://www.prb.org/resources/did-south-koreas-population-po...
Family planning was one of my dad’s specialities in public health, and most of our family friends are in that field. At a party a few years ago, someone jokingly asked if my wife and I planned to have a fourth kid, and someone reflexively interjected “nobody needs four kids.”
Arguably it was a necessary policy at the time, but has probably doomed countries like Korea and Japan to extinction.
Kids are expensive. I get a break on daycare from family friends. I dont know what I would do if I had to pay full price. If everyone is so worried they should subsidize childcare and make having children less financially stressful.
Sometimes the simplest explanation is best. In record time, we went from a situation where having children is required at the personal level to a situation where it is a personal choice.
When given the choice, most still want children. How many? 2. As some want 0 or 1, this averages out to the typical 1.5 - 2.0 range as seen in most countries. Which is below replacement.
Most people maxing out at 2 children makes sense. Two children already give a full and rich family experience, both the joy and its burdens.
There's no incentive to go for 3, 4, 5. You may not have space for them in your home, car or schedule. A cold thing to say perhaps, but there's diminishing returns.
Money doesn't fix this, it doesn't move the needle. Yet people will passionately argue that if only homes were cheaper and childcare free, we'd boost that number. It makes little difference. There is no quick policy fix for this.
It's also extremely hard to get people to care about this because for anybody alive today, they'll experience the world as getting ever more crowded for another 4 decades.
Fundamentally, I think individualism is at the root of the problem. We've sacrificed the institute of family and community to the economy. Modern couples are increasingly financially independent workers. We outsource childcare to strangers so that we can maximize work. There's no neighborhood or community support network because they are at work too. We outsource elderly care, again so that we can maximize work.
The irony of a dual income career culture is that it drives up the cost of living but an even more counter-intuitive effect is that it's a major cause of worker shortages. Why? Because all the wealth this labor produces fuels an ever growing demand, of which much is consumerist bullshit.
We won't change though. We will have all our bells and whistles and double down on this path.
The other day my boss said something along the lines of "there's too many people in the world", and seemed genuinely surprised when I pointed out articles like this one showing overall humanity is on the road to start shrinking over the next few decades. I think a lot of people still believe we're in the population bomb scenario Ehrlich painted in 1968, when actually we're looking more like a sad "Children of Men" scenario, particularly in developed countries.
I wonder what the end game of this decline is. The population of countries couldn't go to zero (right?). So at some point fertility rate must rebound. But at what point? 50% of the current population? 20%? 5%? Could we (or our great grand children, if we have any) see a world with just 2 million people living in Japan, finally beginning to grow again?
It seems to me if there is ANY sub group in the country reproducing above the 2.1 replacement rate, eventually they will come to dominate the population, if they pass this inclination on to their children. The "bottoming out" of the population might be determined by the relative size of that sub group today, and how much over replacement rate they are reproducing at. So maybe in America, the population bottoms out at 100 million people, with Mormons making up 50% of those, and as time goes on the population slowly grows and becomes more and more Mormon.
The other thing I think may happen, at least in more authoritarian countries like China, is that the state steps in directly. If offering tax breaks and free day care just aren't moving the needle (which they haven't so far), governments set up, for lack of a better term, "baby farms". Giving birth is turned into a full time job, completely separate from raising the children, which is done by some other state institution, and the population is stabilized that way.
We can simultaneously have "too many people" and be on the verge of decline. We aren't there yet. Most countries are still growing, just at a decelerating rate.
And the reason isn't a Children of Men biological fertility collapse. We've spent 60 years telling women to get jobs, everyone to defer employment for higher education and housing age childcare are both the most scarce and expensive they've ever been. This isn't a mystery collapse. It's money. Always has been.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadHumanity would shrink (I think this is calculated to start after 2050 or so), but besides those two reasons, does that matter? Where is the foundation of the argument that we must have population growth to sustain? Or where is the research that shows if we halve the population, everything will be terrible?
please talk to your grandparents about the topic and report back to us.
But what great insights would they come up with pray tell? In those days (it was WOII) it was to work the land (economy), cannon fodder and pension plan (have them take care of you). What else?
That's what is else, your very existence!
I'm sure you would agree, your life has value and meaning beyond a utilitarian or disposable cog in a wheel.
By extension therefore all lives are equally valuable and necessary.
It does? Measured by what? That's what I say; I'm a consumer, but beyond that, how am I valuable? How are you?
> By extension all lives are equally valuable and necessary.
You are a vegan? Are plants lives lives?
Also, putting too much pressure on the planet with over population makes it the opposite of valuable.
We are an accidental blib in a cold vast cosmos; nothing and no-one would think of us or remember us if the earth explodes today (or if someone hits the nuke button). I 'value' my life in so far that I am not in pain and I was born in the right location with the right interests (math + computing) to do whatever I want to sit it out until I die.
How is any of it a reason to make more babies though or a sign we have a shortage just because we make less than we need to create a population equilibrium or growth?
I think that creating more happy people is better, not more people per se.
- the pension system can't be sustained, but also
- more and more people need support of doctors, nurses, care homes, etc. but can't find it or it becomes more and more expensive (but see problem above regarding their pensions).
Historically children take care of their parents when they are old and in need; in the past century more and more of this has been delegated to society at large. In both cases though you need young people.
If you'd like to implement it you're welcome to go tell your largest voting bloc that your primary objective is to almost completely remove their entitlements and leave them to starve to death. Who knows, maybe after they are finished lynching you you might get elected.
And the articles states that "some estimates now put the number of babies each woman has below the global replacement rate of about 2.2. The U.S. long ago passed that level." - so even finding one that works at replacement birth rates could not be enough.
A larger population means bigger numbers on the everything that's on a normal distribution, like intelligence. That one genius in a 100 million? With 1B population, you only have 10 of them. With 8B population, there are 80. That's 8x more chances one of them does or finds something revolutionary, 8x chances that person is not perishing somewhere in a cobalt mine as a kid. It slashes times waiting for a genius to appear 8x.
A bigger population also enables extreme specialisation in very niche fields. It enables bigger recruitment pools for complex processes and manufacturers like, for example, ASML.
It's, in a short word, massive parallelism.
Now, a counter-argument to everything I said is looking at the demographics of geniuses, revolutionaries, specialists and noticing most of them were well-fed, well-educated and raised in stable, liberal societies (liberal as opposed to, say, taliban-like societies). So, in theory, we could get by with a smaller population, if it was a rich, western-like, population. In that case, the only constraint would become genetics; so an 100M population would have to wait a couple of generations for their genius, instead of a 8B pop potentially getting them all at once.
Like: flying costs a lot in terms of resources, but is it more than 1% of the perceived living standards?
It might sound misanthropic, but the average person is average. Nothing wrong with it, morally or otherwise, but they won't be doing revolutionary work in specialist fields, they will be raising families and be happy.
Like I said in my original comment, we can get by with a smaller population with western levels standard of living, and then only be constrained by genetics.
It’s the most stupid of arguments for growth. Everyone in funnel optimization knows that.
Genetic engineering might also be a way out of the reproductive Ponzi scheme. Grow ready-made adults in pods! No painful stupid 25-year investment period with uncertain payoff.
Fix the former first if you want the latter to happen.
If you expect x plumbers to be needed in year y and x/2 not many years later (within the span of a plumber's working life), how many should choose to become plumbers in each year? How about buildings and other infrastructure with long lifetimes?
Rapid change makes those things difficult. Don't want random home owners to have to speculate on that, and for some of them to lose their shirts when the population is too low to find a buyer for their home.
But this kind of thing always exists. For example, logistics companies have problems hiring in some countries right now because young people don't see driving trucks as a viable career for forty years, but the logistics companies need drivers for the next ten years or more.
Others have listed why this will be bad.
In case there is some kind of reduction in the workforce, then we do not have a plan to care for our elderly. Already, young adults are finding it difficult to afford homes for themselves, even with a higher proportion of families with two incomes.
We would see an increase in the chasm between the rich and poor, as those able to own property would be able to both look after themselves and their families, and would be able to continue to grow their wealth by charging rent to those who are unable to afford to buy. This especially would be accentuated if population decline were gradual, as then the rich would be able to continue to snap up the homes that come onto the market and rent them out.
A short sharp halving of the population would likely leave a surplus of homes on the market, at affordable prices for everyone, and would perhaps even lead to a better quality of life for most. But that's not an organic process, and certainly leads to a worse quality of life for the unlucky half...
I do some fantasy world-building in the little free time I have. The setting is diesel-punk/atom-punk, so 1950s era. A little bit of disco-punk mixed in too. Essentially, modern post-war USA.
So, when I try to model a city, or a country in this era, you gotta go after the data. Because we actually have it for this setting.
Medieval data is just horrible in comparison. The high fantasy settings will get a little bit of data on city dynamics and some on 'nation' level data and the like. But most of the modeling is starting from pretty much guessing with wide errorbars.
But in the atom-punk setting I have, there is just mountains of data from all over the world. It makes modeling really easy and you can get really fine-grained about it (much to the detriment of story-telling, I get lost in those tables and charts, happily so).
One thing that really stands out in trying to model this data is that population is literally everything.
How grimy a city is, how tall the skyscrapers are, the walking speed of people in the city, the talking speed of bank tellers, the number of patents per capita, the monthly charge for sewer access, tonnage of warships, the length of subway track and it's heights, etc. Pretty much every metric will correlate best with the population of the area. It's not just cities, it's states and countries and smaller towns too. Really anything about the setting and world-building is best modeled by looking at the population first and then working from there.
To be clear here, not the population density. The only metric I could find in my notes that better correlated with population-density was the number of subway stops on a line. I'm sure there are other examples, too.
But, in the years that I've been doing this, the number one thing that seems to pop out to me is: Raw population is everything.
Now, I'm mostly interested in themes and settings and the like. But most of the data is coming from the motivation of trying to increase the quality of life of people. So I get to stare at that a lot and make graphs.
And I can say from my eyeballing of all this data over the last few years: More people = better.
Most of the metrics we use to quantify if things are 'good' or 'bad' will correlate with more people = better. It's not, by any means, a 1-1 thing. This is human population stuff, If you see a r2 value of, like, 0.6, that's pretty darn good. There is a lot of noise here and the stats that are taken have just huge issues with them.
I'm not going to be able to really prove this, I'm just mucking around with a setting and world-building. But from the years that I have been staring at my poorly organized notes and the various governmental and NGO data tables, the underlying message is that things get better with more people around.
- economists & businesspeople who can't conceive of a world without growth
- religious people who think God wants them to be fruitful and multiply
- atheists who think we have some kind of evolutionary imperative
- parents who think that being childfree is an affront to their choices
It sounds more like this might be a choice you feel strongly about but are projecting selfishness on to others?
This can be a totally fine choice for someone to make personally (which I support), but also not good for society as a whole. Both things can objectively be true.
Parents have natural urges to have kids (literally, evolution!). So it is self-explanatory.
Non-parents will need a younger generation when they grow old for satisfying all the Maslow hierarchies of needs (food, medical care, entertainment, funding social safety nets etc). So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.
People in both categories may not be aware of their own flavor of selfishness.
When my father was dying, I out of all his children was able to help him the most since I don't have children of my own. Clearly I could devote my life to helping old people and do more overall good for that group, then just producing children (who may or may not do so). In fact, I could make the claim that "the ones who *are* producing kids by choice are consciously producing more work for future generations to do hence acting selfishly". That position would be similarly asinine.
But sure if you understand there is no inherent good to parenting and it's basically just people doing what they want to do (well when having the children by choice anyway), then I guess you maybe show a little humility. I may someday have children, but I'm under no illusion that I'd be doing the world a favor.
I was saying that it didn’t feel like they were arguing in good faith by ascribing only selfish motivations for those who advocate for that point of view.
And aging population means you have more dependents than caretakers for them.
An aging population in some parts of the world means you have fewer men to fight in a conflict (assuming your adversary doesn’t have an aging population).
There’s loss of specialization, loss of skill transfer, younger people do more manual labor like harvesting food.
You need people of a certain age range to basically run society.
Procreation kinda is an evolutionary imperative- atheism or not
I've yet to meet anyone able to do so coherently.
You've also presented no argument for why it is impossible to define. If free will is possible, there should be no reason you can't define what it is.
If we have no free will we are just like candle flames; any argument that says we are more than candle flames is not valid when you assume we are candle flames.
People forget that logic requires axioms.
If I were to ask you to act a certain way and you do, this would neither prove nor disprove free will, because it tells me nothing about whether causality required you to act that way or differently and whether or not you deviated from causality, and so your analogy is meaningless. It is not what we'd ask you to do in order to prove free will.
You're using an assumption about an invalid argument as an argument in favour of free will, and that's no more valid than the original invalid argument.
To prove free will you need to prove that there are decisions in the brain that does not follow a) strict causality, b) randomness, c) any combination of the two. As you've pointed out, experiments where you ask a subject to act in specific ways do not produce evidence for it, as they can just as well just be causality in action. That the strawman hypothesis you presented is not valid does not prove the inverse, nor does it release any obligation of proponents of the idea of free will from providing evidence, or even just a definition to support their idea.
Free will is an absolutely extraordinary claim in that respect, because it implies a third category of events that is not a mix of strict cause-effect chains and random events, but introduces a "will-effect" chain that has no direct causal link but at the same time is not random.
As it stands, without a definition, the notion of free will is not even a fanciful hypothesis - to suggest it is a hypothesis would imply a fully formed idea. But the concept is so woolly and meaningless it tells us nothing.
It's at most a fervent wish or hope of not being an automaton. But a wish is not evidence, nor an argument, or even a hypothesis.
If you want to produce a valid argument for free will, you need to be able to either proffer a hypothesis for how such a "will-effect" chain can exist, or demonstrate physical transitions in a mind that are demonstrably not cause-effect or random byproducts of ordinary physics.
Even just come up with a coherent definition and you will be world famous, as you'd have introduced a new area of logic. If you can prove a physical mechanism for it, you'll have Nobel Prize in physics in the bag.
The main issue is that we approach the topic with a different set of axioms. E.g. your limitation of requiring a proof involving (a-c) is analogous to asking someone to build a steel bridge with three colors of legos.
Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
If your starting point is that no one is actually conscious, it’s impossible to disprove, and it’s obviously wrong (and any attempt to prove it’s not obviously wrong would knee-cap itself since it’s impossible ‘to logic’ without a reasoning engine).
Well, yes. The alternative is for you to give me a definition of free will that allows for it within the constraints of cause-effect and randomness.
Without such a definition, the option we are left with is inherently "breaking free" of that, and then we need another category of effect.
I don't believe either is possible, but we specifically do not have evidence that such other category of "will-effect" transition is possible, no observed mechanism, no observation of such a category, nor a hypothesis that provides even the starts of a coherent definition of what it would even mean.
So yes, the point is that the problem appear obviously impossible to resolve in favour of free will without either new logic or a definition of free will I don't think possibly can meet expectations.
> Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
Only partially, in the positive case. Consciousness would seem to need to exist for free will to exist, but in the event free will does not, there's no reason to presume that affects the possibility of consciousness.
> It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
It does not have the same issue. Whether you have free will or not, there's no reason why that need to affect your life at all. Clearly we think we make choices. Whether we make those choices or not, we act as if we do. As it is, we already have solid evidence that our conscious "decision" often is not causally linked to the actual "choice", so we can't rely on our introspection to even give us an accurate description of what "choices" we make, or why, and we know from e.g. split brain experiments that the brain can easily be made to rationalise how it "chose" things it never did. Accordingly, whether the mechanism actually controlling actions exercise free will or not, we'd expect our consciousness to experience it the same way.
“Well, yes. The alternative is for you to give me a definition of free will that allows for it within the constraints of cause-effect and randomness.”
https://youtu.be/itLIM38k2r0?si=1wTeSVdX28UlB2jf
This interview with Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist Roger Penrose describes a framework where quantum mechanical time hopping during a measurement removes this cause-and-effect concern you have. E.g. The nature of reality of time and matter fields is even more complicated than we understand, and our macros scale understanding of cause and effects might be too limiting when considering constraints of consciousness.
But what will the price of that labor be when birth rates collapse and there aren't sufficient people around to do this labor? Retirement savings mean nothing when the people needed to do the work are not available. For wealthy western countries immigration is the only realistic solution address the shortage of working-age people. It's not a silver bullet, though. Immigration scares people and populist politicians will exploit this fear of change.
We should also remember that politicians in rich countries are very old. They care a great deal about anything that affects their own retirement. To young people who don't have high expectations for their quality of life in their last couple of decades on earth this panic about demographic change may seem silly. But baby boomers care and they are the ones making policy.
At some point my generation will have to question the validity of that social contract.
I'm asking because whatever policy you'd like to see applied to the current elderly, is to be applied with twice the intensity to yourself, as the generation behind you is even smaller.
So any fix would involve changing the age structure of representation. The particulars of the fix would depend on the specifics of a particular system, but one idea that could fix things would be absolute limits to the time you can be in office. So for example a rule that states any person may serve only X years in parliament over the course of their life. Those limits might have other benefits.
Maybe even an absolute age limit would make sense, e.g. retirement age + X years. Of course old people should get political representation, but maybe putting a cap on it would work to make it more a government of working people.
Another idea would be a voting multiplier, that gives proportionally more power to representatives that are from age brackets that are underrepresented in the governing body.
All of these might have unanticipated side effects and there are probably even better ideas, but the point is: whatever it is, it has to be something that gives true concessions to the young people, otherwise there can be no true political negotiation between the retired many and the working few.
Mainly though, I wonder - where is all the extra productivity that has supposedly developed over the last half century or so? Shouldn't that be able to cover over a declining population?
I think we can also make a Moore's law analogy here. As CPUs get faster we write slower code.
We do this all the time, including with debt, pensions, etc. Once born, the currently unborn have the choice to take care of their parents or not, to decide en masse not to become a doctor or nurse, to emigrate to a different country without a pension system (or to just be jobless forever to avoid paying for that)...
For myself I don't believe I have the wherewithal for it regardless of my view on the matter of selfishness.
>The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies. Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support, we hypothesize that parental status differences in happiness are smaller in countries providing more resources and support to families. Our analyses of the European Social Surveys (ESS) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) reveal considerable variation in the parenthood gap in happiness across countries, with the U.S. showing the largest disadvantage of parenthood. [0]
[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28082749/
The response to the above tends to be something like, it's not so bad, kids don't really need that much anyway. Which always leaves me with the question - how much money do you make? Could it be expressed as "several times the median US household income"?
The point you’re trying to make is contradicted by the demographics of who is having kids. My friends from law school are the ones who disproportionally aren’t having kids. Meanwhile my wife’s step mom’s rural Idaho family is bursting at the seams with kids.
For those without good career prospects, ruin is not such a big deal. I looked it up, and no surprise that medicaid pays for a huge share of births in rural Idaho; if anything, 48% is lower than I'd expect.
> Medicaid coverage is even higher for births in rural Idaho. For instance, 48% of births in Lemhi County involved mothers covered by Medicaid. [0]
[0]https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/11/28/idahos-infant...
That’s what I’m calling selfish. These people could have kids. They just choose to prioritize their lifestyle, and the pursuit of their individual career. They forgo the fundamental pillar of the human experience for marginally better odds at a career that makes some giant corporation marginally more money.
Family planning was one of my dad’s specialities in public health, and most of our family friends are in that field. At a party a few years ago, someone jokingly asked if my wife and I planned to have a fourth kid, and someone reflexively interjected “nobody needs four kids.”
Arguably it was a necessary policy at the time, but has probably doomed countries like Korea and Japan to extinction.
Edited for grammar.
When given the choice, most still want children. How many? 2. As some want 0 or 1, this averages out to the typical 1.5 - 2.0 range as seen in most countries. Which is below replacement.
Most people maxing out at 2 children makes sense. Two children already give a full and rich family experience, both the joy and its burdens.
There's no incentive to go for 3, 4, 5. You may not have space for them in your home, car or schedule. A cold thing to say perhaps, but there's diminishing returns.
Money doesn't fix this, it doesn't move the needle. Yet people will passionately argue that if only homes were cheaper and childcare free, we'd boost that number. It makes little difference. There is no quick policy fix for this.
It's also extremely hard to get people to care about this because for anybody alive today, they'll experience the world as getting ever more crowded for another 4 decades.
Fundamentally, I think individualism is at the root of the problem. We've sacrificed the institute of family and community to the economy. Modern couples are increasingly financially independent workers. We outsource childcare to strangers so that we can maximize work. There's no neighborhood or community support network because they are at work too. We outsource elderly care, again so that we can maximize work.
The irony of a dual income career culture is that it drives up the cost of living but an even more counter-intuitive effect is that it's a major cause of worker shortages. Why? Because all the wealth this labor produces fuels an ever growing demand, of which much is consumerist bullshit.
We won't change though. We will have all our bells and whistles and double down on this path.
I wonder what the end game of this decline is. The population of countries couldn't go to zero (right?). So at some point fertility rate must rebound. But at what point? 50% of the current population? 20%? 5%? Could we (or our great grand children, if we have any) see a world with just 2 million people living in Japan, finally beginning to grow again?
It seems to me if there is ANY sub group in the country reproducing above the 2.1 replacement rate, eventually they will come to dominate the population, if they pass this inclination on to their children. The "bottoming out" of the population might be determined by the relative size of that sub group today, and how much over replacement rate they are reproducing at. So maybe in America, the population bottoms out at 100 million people, with Mormons making up 50% of those, and as time goes on the population slowly grows and becomes more and more Mormon.
The other thing I think may happen, at least in more authoritarian countries like China, is that the state steps in directly. If offering tax breaks and free day care just aren't moving the needle (which they haven't so far), governments set up, for lack of a better term, "baby farms". Giving birth is turned into a full time job, completely separate from raising the children, which is done by some other state institution, and the population is stabilized that way.
We can simultaneously have "too many people" and be on the verge of decline. We aren't there yet. Most countries are still growing, just at a decelerating rate.
And the reason isn't a Children of Men biological fertility collapse. We've spent 60 years telling women to get jobs, everyone to defer employment for higher education and housing age childcare are both the most scarce and expensive they've ever been. This isn't a mystery collapse. It's money. Always has been.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/suddenly-there-aren-t...
JSON-only, no cruft:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1mhbxT