This is so profoundly nonsensical I can't even engage with it point by point.
> Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population. But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past.
not having kids is borrowing from the future to pay for your own wants now.
All of civilization in all of history is a ponzi scheme, where you invest heavily in the next generation to keep it moving forward. That's not a profound takedown it's literally why you have a desk job at a computer instead of digging up potatoes to starve to death in a cave.
It's "Ponzi" if it requires an ever increasing future population. In reality we don't, the population can stabilise at some time in the future, there may be some economic shock along the way, but we'll be fine.
I sure hope it stabilizes at some point in the future. The world population has more than doubled during my lifetime, which seems fundamentally unsustainable if everyone is to have even half the resources consumed by the current western lifestyle.
Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme. But our current financial system that has never-ending growth as an axiom, where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be.
And yet, we are discussing a movement that wants to artificially increase birth rates that have fallen too low for their tastes. It seems you don't actually need to force control birth rates, just give women agency over their own lives.
Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given" it is definitely not a given. We will suffer the fate of every other organism that exceeds the carrying capacity of their environment. And right now our civilization is based on mining energy from previous hundreds of millions of years in the form of (C-H bonds) which is the definition of unsustainable.
It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.
Thought experiment: let's suppose we have a stable population that produces & consumes two things: food & TV shows. The food is sustainably produced so it doesn't contribute to economic growth or decline.
But the TV shows cumulate. Therefore generation X+1 is richer than generation X since it has access to more TV shows.
And "TV shows" in this thought experiment can be physical objects too. An iPhone 12 is more valuable than an iPhone 11 despite being smaller and using less resources to create.
Of course we're a long way from sustainable infinite growth. But it is possible.
But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve.
> where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be
This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork.
[0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.
> In that sense, civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Let's just give up.
I think this is incredibly disingenuous. A steady state population that lives within the means of what the sun and planet can provide, without exceeding planetary boundaries, is an ambitious yet reasonable goal. A planet with a population that must grow forever to pay off debt today incurs against tomorrow without tomorrow's consent is simply not realistic, a "spherical cow."
When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children. What does this tell us? It tells us that the global population boom was driven by lack of agency and contraceptive access for women. What did most socioeconomic systems do with this "demographic dividend"? Capitalism, leading to wealth inequality, and also incurring substantial debts to pay for the future (both financial and physical system). And now this system is in material structural peril.
So, should we listen to the pro-natalism harpies that everyone should have more kids to continue to allow a suboptimal economic system predicated on returns and debt to continue to trudge on unimpeded? Or should we continue to empower women and force the economic systems to serve humans instead of using them as a resource? Managing a rapid total fertility rate decline resulting from self determination of a population cohort isn't giving up; it is living within our means as a species and respecting human rights.
It seems disingenuous to you because you’re unfamiliar with the underlying statistics. A steady state population is what pronatalists want, and they’re generally quite comfortable with the idea that this might require structuring society to better enable women who’d like to have a child. The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline.
8 billion (today) to 10 billion people (~2100) is not a reasonable steady state based on all available evidence. We'll head towards half that over the next 200-250 years as total fertility rates approach 0.5-1 on average, and 4B people is certainly more approachable to support sustainably vs 8B-10B (under the assumption of living standards somewhere between Europe and the US). South Korea is at 0.72, China at 1, Japan at 1.2, Mexico City at 0.96, (all 2023 figures as of this comment) and the rest of the world is not far behind.
> The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline.
I don't understand what you mean. A TFR of 0.5-1 means that every generation is about 2-4 times smaller than the one which came before it. In what sense can that be or get us to a steady state?
Society might have the will to move towards economic policies that would encourage a fertility rate closer to replacement rate as the global population halves. Today's politicians clearly don't, but 50-150 years from now, new folks will be in positions of power who might make it worth potential parents' time and effort. Unfortunately, if you can't convince women it's worth their one life to raise children "for the good of society" or whatever the messaging is, you're up a creek without a paddle and the situation is likely hopeless. Society should make them a very compelling offer (exceptionally robust support to be a parent), if it is willing and can, otherwise, prepare for the consequences of people having free will and self determination.
Wouldn't it be better if a movement to promote natalism - "pronatalist", if you will - convinces politicians to address the problem now? After 150 years of population decline, we're going to have substantial secondary issues. (Who's taking care of the disproportionate number of elderly people?)
I think there are a lot of problem now to attend to, and there is only so much human time to go around, which is currently better spent taking care of humans here today and fixing the problems we have already incurred. Future humanity will need to figure out a way forward due to past humanity being reckless. There is a debt to be unwound, and it has to start somewhere. Here is a fine place to start.
> (Who's taking care of the disproportionate number of elderly people?)
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... ("57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them")
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-fert... ("South Korea's fertility rate, already the world's lowest, continued its dramatic decline in 2023, as women concerned about their career advancement and the financial cost of raising children decided to delay childbirth or to not have babies.")
> Some of the reasons for this trend in Latin America are similar to those elsewhere: There is less social pressure for women to have babies at a young age. Contraception is more accepted and more available. People are living longer and spending more time in school before entering the workforce. Couples tend to wait until achieving a certain standard of living before considering children.
> But there are also reasons specific to Latin America. Simone Cecchini, director of the demographic center at the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, says the region has made considerable progress in reducing the number of teenage pregnancies. On the other hand, he notes, its recurrent macroeconomic crises and financial uncertainties tend to discourage people’s interest in becoming parents.
> In 1950, Latin America’s fertility rates were similar to Africa’s. By the end of this century, he says, they will match Europe’s. Demographically speaking, “this is a very significant and rapid change.”
I also highly recommend the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Pop...
So when I look at the list of countries that have declining birthrates, all are wealth post-industrial.
Also note that according to Pew, the reasoning does not differ across gender: "For the most part, the experiences of adults without children and the reasons they give for not having them don’t vary much by gender. This is the case across both age groups."
So that diminishes the claim that "When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children." as it is both men and women choosing this.
Hence my questioning that Women empowerment is the main driver.
It appears to me that the main driver is societal wealth, societal cost and also a desire to focus on the self.
>They want to focus on other things, such as their career or interests (44% vs. 21%)
We in the west have had a massive change in our values and society since the last baby boom. We had the 60's where we rejected alot of the traditional values and then up through the 80's we had "greed is good" and a large focus on the self rather than society as a whole.
We also spread these views and cultural outlook wildly via Hollywood.
Definitely an argument to ensure, through systems, future women have both financial and physical security, regardless of what the sociopolitical macro looks like. Would I say it is a call to arm women? Maybe? Depends on what the landscape looks like. Hard to predict the future.
Some systems, not all. Asymmetric power and force is available and material in such matters. If the argument is "women empowerment is in danger due to not enough children being born who will champion women empowerment," the problem statement is "how do you robustly equip women to empower and defend themselves as well as future women as structural demographics lock in a population decline?" Doesn't necessarily mean you need more people, it means you need more leverage and force projection, systemized, depending on what you're defending against. I agree we need to be mindful about how and what to build (in a world of less humans) to maintain high levels of women empowerment and self defense into the future.
I don't see this happening. Love of life is stronger than other incentives, we've been evolving for this target for millions of years.
If the current system doesn't produce new generations of humans then people will eventually convert to other systems that do. And when that happens no one will care whether these other systems empower women or not, not even women themselves. Empowerment is inconsequential compared to life.
We shouldn’t have embraced the Haber & Bosch ammonia creation process for crop fertilisation just like that, without any baby boom control, so as to prevent an implosion like the one we’re about to live
> The Guano Islands Act (11 Stat. 119, enacted August 18, 1856, codified at 48 U.S.C. ch. 8 §§ 1411-1419) is a United States federal law passed by the Congress that enables citizens of the United States to take possession of unclaimed islands containing guano deposits in the name of the United States. The islands can be located anywhere, so long as they are not occupied by citizens of another country and not within the jurisdiction of another government. It also empowers the president to use the military to protect such interests and establishes the criminal jurisdiction of the United States in these territories.
The alternative would have been the b̶a̶t̶ bird shit wars.
Funny how everyone is obsessed with "sustainability" nowadays but you get frowned upon for mentioning unsustainable birth rates. I honestly don't understand what's the point of having sustainable energy and water sources in a society that fades away.
What population would be too much for earth? 15 billion? 100 billion? Never understood the unlimited growth argument. We aren't going to colonize Mars.
This isn't talking about 'unlimited growth.' It's talking about sustaining our current population structure or even tapering it off gracefully rather than facing the steep decline we're dealing with now.
Depends entirely on the tech. If all you have is bronze, about 10 million. If we mass produced greenhouses and tile the deserts etc., I've heard a trillion claimed as possible.
Not with an attitude like that we aren't. I always preferred oneill cylinders anyway. They seem much more doable and they avoid the pesky gravity well problem and the enormous energy requirement to climb out of it.
By "unsustainable growth rates" you mean an ever-expanding population on a planet that cannot realistically offer up the resources for this population to live in moderate wealth, right?
Pro-natalism however does not care about sustainable world population (the relevant metric for resources in a globalized world), but "grow as fast as you can to outcompete the brown or Muslim people", as many pronatalists comments here remind us -- all the "societies that don't breed quickly are all conquered" comments.
No, you are misreading what I'm saying. GP clearly means the current birth rate when talking about "unsustainable birth rates". I am pointing out that the pronatalist position is the actually unsustainable one. It's not hard to understand, really: we do not have the resources on this planet to give everyone an acceptable standard of living, let alone a US one. Any effort to reduce the resource usage via sustainability measures will be completely eaten up if we insist on increasing the human population of this planet. That is quite unsustainable -- far more so than a country having a birth rate under replacement for a while.
> I am pointing out that the pronatalist position is the actually unsustainable one. It's not hard to understand, really: we do not have the resources on this planet to give everyone an acceptable standard of living, let alone a US one.
This makes no sense. Sustainability means an ability to maintain the current trajectory. Yes, standards of living are not the same in different places but it has nothing to do with what "sustainability" means.
On a side note if you actually care about the bottom-line standard of living then you probably should wish for bigger population and bigger economy. The correlation between the two is very strong, many things we have now (like microchips) become unaffordable if you scale down production.
We very literally do not have the resources to lift up every human on this planet onto US living standards. There is not enough oil, not enough uranium, not enough rare earths that we know how to extract to provide the whole world with the glut of energy that the average American requires for their standard of living. I most certainly do NOT need to wish for bigger populations in order to increase the bottom-line standard of living.
> I most certainly do NOT need to wish for bigger populations in order to increase the bottom-line standard of living.
Well maybe, just maybe, try once looking at the historical data [1] to see how it works? Economy is not a zero-sum game where dividing resources among the smaller number of players gives you a win.
Yes, with the current technology stack lifting everyone to the current US level is impossible, that's precisely why it's so important to keep pushing. Earth continuously receives 44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of solar energy on average it's more than plenty to have decent standards of living for everyone if captured. The problem is, development of technology is extremely expensive, effectively impossible unless you spread the cost among a huge number of end-consumers.
If the population didn't grow like crazy in the past centuries we wouldn't have the technology we have today and the bottom-line standard of living would be way lower than what we have today. And so would be the US standard of living because US wouldn't be sitting on top of a 8-billion-people economic pyramid.
Very lucky for the world's poorest (and for all of us) that we didn't listen to cries of de-growers in the 18th century. In principle not much have changed since then. Amount of energy at our disposal is still laughable, so the road ahead is longer than what we did so far.
The current population is made possible by fossil fuels and if we get off of them too fast, million will die... We don't have nearly enough of any alternative to actually get off of fossil fuels in general. In addition, only fossil fuels make sense for military operations, which will forever be a necessity.
That isn't what the comment I replied to said. Paraphrasing, they said in present tense, that we have enough alternatives to support the current population and that we can only survive if we eliminate fossil fuels. But the truth is we desperately need fossil fuels now and alternatives are still mostly lame and undeveloped. Furthermore, we need more energy than ever to run AI according to current projections. People on here are quick to condemn people for eating meat but they're fine with dubious uses of electricity for lame AI.
Any birth rate significantly different from replacement levels is unsustainable on the timescale of centuries, regardless of if it's above or below replacement.
2.4 children per woman is 8.9-fold growth after 300 years of 25 years between generations. 1.6 children per woman is a reduction to 6.9% of your initial population in the same way.
(Also, sustainability is a function of tech: the 1930s way of life was not long-term sustainable at any recorded population level).
The problems we need addressing could be happening in decades (some are manifesting already) so the rates of today do not have to be the ones in 50 years. I would rather focus on the closer dangers, than on what might happen in centuries... we are already over 8 billions, why would I worry if in centuries we are a billion less? Humanity will be still around and that looks to me like the only important gain.
The environmental problems we have today already have solutions in the lab, it's just about making them economical and scaling them up.
> why would I worry if in centuries we are a billion less?
Indeed, this is my position too. Hyperbolic discounting of the future: we don't know what's coming, let the future sort itself out and worry about the next 5 years.
25 years, we might get AI good enough for robot workforce and we can all retire instantly with no need for more kids entering the workforce to replace the pensioners, might get anti-aging and an end to old-age pensions, might get both, might get neither.
(That said, the example I gave was a reduction to, not by, 6.9%; it would be a global population of 552 million).
Really? So far as I can tell, only used in avgas (and being phased out), banned in paints in many countries. Food legal limits are outside my ability to judge — though I know they exist, I don't know if the legal limits are "the smallest reliability detectable level at the time the law was written" or something else.
That said, if you know how to turn any lab-only solution into an economically viable solution, please do — the world has plenty of room for improvement! :D
My point is we cannot leave it to market research and forces to solve this for us. Unwavering collective action is required to overcome the greed and apathy that allows things like lead to continue to destroy our minds and environments.
I think you can make a good argument that collective action helped end slavery, I don't think you can make a good argument that anything other than market forces is bringing us the transition to renewable energy.
Where's lead in that? I don't know. I don't even know if it's the same answer for each of your three uses of lead.
Ozone was easy to get an international agreement to fix, because it already had economic alternatives.
* and if you want to argue semantics over "are economic forces anything other than the de-facto collective action of the agents in the economy?", which I'm sure someone has energy for, but I'm not that someone, so I'll acknowledge it and move on.
While technically true, I think 2.4 and 1.6 present two extremely different flavors of "unsustainability", there's very little in common between these two scenarios.
2.4 actually has been sustainable for a couple of millennia by now, mostly because our technology (primarily the food production) was able to keep up with the exponential growth of population. How long this can last is a question, but even if it doesn't last -- going from 2.4 to 2.1 is not hard.
With 1.6 you don't even need to wait for millennia or even aforementioned 300 years to get into trouble. After two generations you get into the situation where working people have to share their income with too many elderly AND elderly don't only consume resources but also directly compete for them with the youth (the other class of people who consume without producing) which makes the fertility economics even worse. You can plug some holes with immigration and foreign trade but on the macro-level it's a death spiral. Very easy to get from 1.6 to 1.0, but extremely hard to return to 2.1.
Maybe I'm missing something but countries like Italy or Spain look to me like trains rushing into concrete wall. And it seems that people are mostly concerned about whether the train is running on a carbon-neutral fuel.
That number of children surviving to adulthood* has not been our experience for the last few millennia — we had far more births, but most died before they grew up and became parents themselves, leading to the estimated population of the world only doubling from 200 million in 1 AD to 400 million in 1000 AD, which would be 2.035 children per woman (assuming 25 year generational gap).
If it had been 2.4 children per woman* over that time frame, the current world population would have been 200e6 * (2.4/2)^(1000/25) = about 300 billion in 1000 AD, and 200e6 * (2.4/2)^(2024/25) = 514 trillion today.
> elderly don't only consume resources but also directly compete for them with the youth (the other class of people who consume without producing) which makes the fertility economics even worse.
Only if the elderly continue to consume pensions. If the economy collapses, pensioners protesting or voting for the other party in a democracy stops being an interesting threat, for the same reason they weren't much of a threat in 1889 when people were first taking ideas like "state pension" (in their modern usage and not e.g. medieval almshouses, and universal not e.g. what the Romans did for the military) seriously.
* I know I didn't mention "surviving to reproductive age" before, but that distinction is more of relevance to historical comparisons than future ones. I have no reason to think infant mortality will go up, after all.
> Only if the elderly continue to consume pensions.
Well no, unless you literally starve them to death. State pensions or money in general is just a redistribution mechanism which doesn't change average available resources. What really matters on a higher level is the fact that a big part of population (elderly and youth) consumes but doesn't produce. Whatever they consume is either directly produced by the working part of the population or comes from the foreign exchange of the same said produce.
So if the state pensions system collapses it just means that instead of feeding your parents through taxes you now do it directly, which on average is almost the same (difference coming from elderly who don't have kids to feed them). Which still means you have less resources to spend on your kids.
> Well no, unless you literally starve them to death. State pensions or money in general is just a redistribution mechanism which doesn't change average available resources.
The way this is currently playing out in the UK, is that pension ages are increasing.
At the extreme case, there's no more state pension: if you don't have a private pension, you're working until just before you die.
I was thinking more of heating (and, increasingly, cooling) rather than starvation: Food specifically isn't the main concern here, unlike in the 1800s, because of how few farmers we need to feed the entire population.
(And this whole thing may be inverted at short notice in a whole bunch of different ways; UBI is basically a pension age of zero, but I'm only expecting that when AI gets good enough, and IMO that's "at least five years after self driving cars, whenever that is".
Claim 1: A “sustainable birth rate” is bounded by the efficiency of resource extraction and the repair rate of the environment for the damage the extraction does to it.
Claim 2: It would appear that technology has accelerated so far very closely at the same rate as global population growth.
Claim 3: Our efficiency of resource extraction has sky rocketed.
Claim 4: Our damage to the environment has exceeded its repair rate as this has increased.
Claim 5: A collapsed society would not immediately loose all of its population, and would likely be the most damaging to the environment in the shortest period of time. We won’t forget how to burn oil, but we won’t be using high efficiency well maintained engines when we do it.
With that. Seems like there are two options before humanity:
1. Burn it all down, reduce population growth rate (doesn’t matter if it’s controlled [Mao] or uncontrolled [The West Today]), eventually loose genetic entropy, and before that loose (or automate and replace) the labor force that allowed for the resource extraction.
The outcomes here are:
a) Society collapses (genetic entropy, climate change damage that has already been done, destabilization caused by population reduction measures, etc)
b) We automate labor and humans either are replaced entirely
c) or a small oligarchy of humans exist to rule that automation. That population must keep genetic entropy through gene editing (requires a lot of novel advancement which is harder with fewer people, unless we’re curating)
- or -
2. Address the reasons why people aren’t having kids in the west to maintain labor and genetic entropy, which mainly has to do with economic opportunity of young adults. And ensure that our resource extraction continues more efficient and that we either develop ways to limit damage or ways to accelerate the repair.
Outcomes are:
A) We fail to accelerate repair or reduce damage, and society collapses
B) We succeed and we’ve managed not to damage genetic entropy and don’t risk a conflict over population control.
The problem with option 1 is the implementation won’t be uniform, and population reduction globally cannot be achieved without some type of concerted effort. Consider for a moment how that is supposed to be implemented.
If things go wrong in that effort, that leads to conflict. It seems very likely that society collapses as well.
The other issue is considering the population number as the solution is it is a very short jump to the justification of genocide or some other form or population reduction. That also seems like it would accelerate conflict and therefore society collapse.
The problem with option 2 is there is only so much time before our damage exceeds allowable levels.
Well the goal of sustainability is the continuation of society in a particular way. By itself it can be important or unimportant, my problem is with people who somehow have it both ways.
> The pronatalist movement is ... premised on the belief that ever-larger populations are needed to spur economic growth
No, the pronatalist movement is premised on the belief that humans should not go extinct. If the entire world had the Korean birthrate (and it does seem to be moving that way), extinction would happen in 25 generations.
This is no more likely than malthusian predictions of over population leading to mass starvation. It turns out that human populations self regulate when a basic level of needs are met.
Agreed, but if we build an economy that maximizes extraction by artificially threatening basic needs, we could stay in the exponential decline for quite some time.
And now, thanks to increased control over the environment due to technology and science, there are new tools in our repository that our ancestors did not have, like actually sitting down and planning how to avoid an ecological collapse -- and waging war with advanced weapons that negate a pure "breed fast" strategy. It sure would be nice if we didn't have to return to regular periods of widespread starvation like they did back in the Middle Ages, when they were too uninformed to not remove all forests and powerless to avoid staying away from the carrying capacity of their world for any amount of time.
no need to conquer anybody — just fuck up the rest of the world and get net population increase through immigration from places where people don’t want to live
Citation needed, I don't think I've ever seen a historian make the argument that the determining factor in civilisational conflict was birth rates. Guns, germs, steel, and various other resources. Access to ruminants and horses, sure. But birth rates. That's a new one.
Exactly. Making policy decisions now for what the world will look like in 600 years is absurd. Humanity has proven to be quite bad at making good policy decisions for the current generation, much less 5 or 10 generations from now.
Fair point. Though I wonder how much the original authors/participants were thinking about the long impact of history vs the more immediate needs and impacts. (In the great tradition of internet commenting, this statement was made with minimal detailed knowledge. Perhaps the authors were primarily focused on the long sweep of history.)
I do think my original point still stands that we seem to be quite bad at making good decisions for more immediate generations. Considering our rather pressing current challenges (climate change, continued warfare, etc.) I'd settle for getting the next few generations in a better place before thinking about 25 generations from now.
It’s not a 25 generations from now problem. South Korea expects that in just 50 years, they’ll have a 25% smaller population where a near-majority of people are over 65.
I wasn't arguing that falling populations is something we only need to worry about 25 generations from now. I was saying we should probably look at solving problems in a more immediate time-frame.
For South Korea specifically, the population challenges are probably more immediate than other countries.
But surely something would change partway through those 25 generations?
Why would anyone assume that just because we enter a decline that we would remain on that same trajectory?
Surely when there is enough decline, resources become plentiful for those that remain, and people have more kids because of that? Just my naive thought.
I don’t see why we would expect plentiful resources to lead to more kids.
People today have fewer kids than they did 100 years ago, despite having many more material resources.
I’m also not sure that population decline would lead to plentiful resources in a sense that matters. Do people in Detroit feel rich because houses are so plentiful after the 1950s population high?
Well, one of the things that's changing is the creation of pro-natalism movements....
But there is reason to expect the trajectory to change. Currently the expectation is that, even if most people died out, there are very fecund (and very religious) groups that would repopulate the world. So the pro-natalism movement isn't needed to save humanity, just to save the 'normal' people.
The key element of making dire predictions is that you can't assume anything will change as a result of publishing that prediction. Otherwise your prediction will no longer be dire.
The problem is that such a decline has intense inertia. When you have declining birth rates, average ages go up. Caring for elderly becomes a more significant chunk of the budget of a society. An only child for example has to care for 2 parents, potentially grandparents, themselves, and if they have a kid, half a kid. When you socialize this, people who have kids subsidize people who don't.
You can see how this would spiral. The society that makes it out of such a spiral is unfortunately the society that stops caring for it's elderly. The transition period would obviously be extremely unsavory and socially catastrophic. What winds up happening is people become incentivized to have kids so that they have someone to take care of them, and those who have more kids inherit the society a couple of generations down. That's what reversal of this trend looks like, it's not just about population numbers, median age is an even more consequential factor.
> If the entire world had the Korean birthrate (and it does seem to be moving that way), extinction would happen in 25 generations.
Well, let's kind of obvious why Korea's birthrdate is low. It's because it's extremely expensive to have a child in a small country with limited resources and competition for them. Women are also getting more educated and emancipated and want more out of life than being somebody's wife, mother, and tons of unpaid labor: cleaning, cooking, etc. That was possible in the past, but capitalism has advanced so much that women are also expected to work in addition to their other chores, in order for the family to make ends meet. Hence, when Korean women have a choice nowadays, increasingly, their choice is to focus on themselves and not start a family.
The less people there are, the more free resources and less competition, hence more incentive and possibility to have a child. Korea is a hyper competitive capitalist society with huge incomes disparity, expensive childcare, soaring rents, and little living space. If you want high birth rates, make the country the opposite, make it more social: long parental leave, high job security, worker protection programs, social housing, low inequality, accessible healthcare, early retirement age, etc.
> No, the pronatalist movement is premised on the belief that humans should not go extinct
Yeah, but what are their real motives? How I see it, if you are a:
- pronatalist and a capitalist, you want more drones for your factories and offices
- pronatalist and religious, you want more souls for your deity of choice
- pronatalist and a nationalist, you want more people to fight your wars
- pronatalist and old, you want other people to take care of you and pay your pension
My point is, it's infuriating that we live in a system where paying rent working two jobs is near impossible, but at the same time people complaining that there are no children. Fix capitalism, and people'd start having children.
Korea is perhaps the clearest disproof of the resources -> children argument, because it was an order of magnitude poorer within living memory. Do modern South Koreans really feel more resource-constrained today than they did in the 1960s, when the most common housing was literal mud huts and 80% of people had no running water?
> Do modern South Koreans really feel more resource-constrained today than they did in the 1960s,
Probably feelings wise, yes. It's one thing to be dirt poor along with everyone else around you, and another thing to be dirt poor in 9m2 apartment, and seeing skyscraper lofts from your window where 1 month rent is equivalent to your yearly salary.
> Korea is perhaps the clearest disproof of the resources -> children argument,
Wrong. Korea is, in reality, a perfect example of resources -> children argument, a perfect example of how bad capitalism is for society.
That means a huge portion of the population is considered poor. Hence, a large portion of their population feels like they don't have the resources to have children, afford daycare, rent, food, etc.
Absolutely! Or at least the perception of financial inequality.
In the 60s after the war, the country was industrializing which increased inequality.
Only in the 80s that temporarily stopped, known as the "Miracle on the Han River”. After the 80s, inequality has just been increasing, with increased number of the population KNOWING about it. It's the reason why you have movies like Parasite, shows like Squid Games, and the rising discontent for the chaebols.
In any case, people FEEL largely so downtrodden and without access to resources, that they don't want to have children. Solve that feeling of inequality (by investing in social welfare programs and taxing the s*it out the rich), and you solve the population crisis.
A few years back the then-prime minister of Norway (Solberg) encouraged women to have more children. I’m not sure if there were some actual incentives. Well in any case, women writers started responding to her about how they can’t have children because X, Y, and Z.
What stunned me about that was that they took the admonition seriously to begin with. That a statesperson telling you to have more children or have children at all “for Norway” was worth responding to.
Why? If the prime minister wants to accomplish a goal, shouldn't they outright state it and shouldn't the public respond with the blockers to reaching that goal?
Should what? Haven’t I already expressed that I think it’s absurd for them to care? Am I now, on your prompt, supposed to rattle off the reasons why they should do it when I think it’s hard to understand to begin with?
I mean, is this not true? My understanding is US provides relatively little child support, ensuring that burden has to fall on someone. Isn't that usually the mother?
Why is spending time caring for your child a "burden", but having to go work for a profit driven corporation is not?
Shouldn't we be giving parents (mothers AND fathers) more flexibility and freedom to choose to spend time with their children?
Progressives almost always emphasize support for care outside the home and pushing to keep more parents in the corporate work force, and very little about supporting parents caring for their children inside the home.
(And don't get me started on the Republicans. I am well aware they did not support extending the Child Tax Credit, while continuing to claim it was the Democrats who aren't supporting families with children.)
There's a lot of false dichotomy in your thinking. Humans can be both good and bad. And all you're doing is taking umbrage with the arguments. If you actually listen to people espousing a lot of the ideas behind having more babies, a lot of them are misogynistic or racist.
Another disingenuous argument ignoring what was actually said. It seems you know that many pronatalists are deeply racist ("we must secure a future for the white race and out children") and view women's agency over their own bodies and lives as a fundamental problem, but are unwilling to deal with it.
But luckily, you declared the argument closed before actually taking time to read the comment...
> But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves.
High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there.
Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion.
I have been thinking about this a lot. Its quite easy to find arguments to having kids that bring benefits to parents and / or the parent generation in general.
I dont have a philosophy background, so I would be really interested to hear arguments for what benefits an unconceived child receives from being conceived in todays world.
Even when assuming that not all outcomes are necessarily going to be bad, there is a real risk that they will experience a really troubled world. What justifies exposing someone intentionally without their consent to that (any?) risk of suffering?
I've noticed that very few of the pronatalist ideologues focus on the lived experience of the children after they're born. They consider it very important for people to have lots of babies but absolutely no concern for the babies after they become people. Thus the massive effort to ban abortion in the US but absolutely no concern for the life of the mother. She's already been born, after all.
When we brought women into the formal economy, we didn't reduce men's hours and meet in the middle, we just doubled the labor supply. Of course the proceeds went to capital. The market-induced-labor-quota (cost of living / hourly wage) now says a married couple has to devote 80 hours per week instead of 40 to the formal economy in order to afford the same house and suddenly nobody has the time/money to afford kids. How could it be?
The solution isn't to go back to oppressing women, the solution is to put downwards pressure on formal economy hours/week until people have time to raise their own kids again. This can be done in a gradual and non-sexist way with overtime policy.
Health care and education are important sidekicks in this drama. Our policies to individualize and increase the costs (and yes, that's policy: everyone knows what happens if you train too few doctors, everyone knows who loses if John Smith, BCBS North Dakota, and Canada are bargaining against each other for drug prices, and everyone knows what happens if you flood a competitive market with debt) also provide steep disincentives to raising children. Start fixing these problems, you start fixing the birth rate.
Of course, you should expect to be fought tooth and nail at every turn by those who profit from the problem, but what else is new?
This is hard to read. The author suggests that the alternatives to having children are:
-More immigrants
-More pension contributions
The former overlooks the fact that those are just someone else's children, so the suggestion appears to be to drain other countries off of their workforce - provided it even exists as fertility rates have been plummeting across the board.
The latter has been, in a way, tried in some places in Europe and net effect is birth rates plummeting and an increase in illegal employment.
In any case we're way past talking about going above replacement fertility - currently the conversation is focused on preventing a downward spiral that will negatively affect everyone's quality of life.
Increased pension contribution also assumes immigrant labor to administer care.
Many people in their old age will need a lot of assistance. No amount of savings and judicious planning will help of there’s a labor shortage. We’d have to pay $1500/hour for a day nurse.
It's so hard to read because the author is still thoroughly steeped in their overabstracted models - eg this whole "economic growth" thing works as a metric, but not a target. They noticed a crack starting to form in one of their assumptions, but instead of this causing them to examine the rest and wonder what else they might be missing, they're merely entertaining dropping that single one while doubling down on the rest.
It's as if they assumed all else would remain equal, even though we know that's not the case.
It's like when Ben Shapiro said that if people were really anticipating warming oceans to engulf coastal cities, they would be selling their properties, to which one man rebutted with "To whom? To fucking Aquaman?".
Yeah, it's tough because it feels like more trashing and churn that will never lead to any sort of understanding, just like where they had come from. Optimizing for line-goes-up is exactly how we got to this place where most women are forced to work full time. Then if they want kids, their family has to scavenge that now-additional time from somewhere. It's more egalitarian for sure, but the economic system has transmuted it into equality of losing.
I don't know if that rebuttal about oceanfront property really makes sense - even if you're concerned today about future destruction, you can generally find a buyer who won't be. I think the situation is more like people will happily continue enjoying what they have, and plan on being bailed out when something catastrophic does happen. There are also ways to get the equity out of the properties without having to sell them (eg reverse mortgage), and the carrying costs likely aren't that high having been mortgaged under ZIRP. So like the rest of the property bubble, the calculus is ongoing mortgage payment versus expected appreciation, not any type of core asset value.
So basically, you're admitting that it is a ponzi scheme.
That "everyone's quality of life" is dependent on an ever increasing population.
And, 8 billion people isn't enough? What about 10 billion? 12 billion?
Every argument in favor of this ever increasing population is based on an imaginary structure called finance. While completely ignoring a physically real structure called nature.
At what point does the imaginary structure acknowledge it's impact on the real structure? What is the capitalist plan in identifying when the population is large enough, and instituting a transition at that point? The simple answer is of course, never. That's what makes it a ponzi scheme.
Even looking at historical trends doesn't support the argument that increased population supports "everyone's quality of life". The US population has approx. doubled in the last 50 years, and yet the economic position/buying power of almost all people have diminished in that same time. Instead all economic growth in that period has gone to the equity class, with no mitigation of this trend in sight.
This really brings us to the questions of: Who is "everybody"? and What constitutes their "quality of life"? Does another billion really improve Elon's?
There's more than enough prosperity, but it's very unequally distributed.
Apaparently heating the atmoshpere, melting the poles, clear cutting the rain forrests, extincting many species, depleting fresh water supplies, depleting soil fertility is all on the table, but spreading the wealth around so retiring old people can live indoors is absolutely not an option.
>Pushing baby booms to boost economic growth amounts to a Ponzi scheme
Lmao, the entire western economy is built on this premise for decades. Pensions, social security, and even 401ks. It's all passing on the bagholding to someone else. It all depends on a newer/younger generation to pay in to allow the older ones to cash out. And it all implodes when the younger can't afford to buy in because of economic wealth hoarding by the older that wants to cash out.
They propose immigration to solve the inverting population pyramid problem.
I wonder how they expect it to work in large countries like China. At the moment they would need to take over half of Africa to make the numbers work. Insanity.
According to your link, their fertility rate is changing from 7 to 4. But the population keeps growing exponentially.
> Having said that, the reduction in the number of children per woman does not keep the population from continuing to rise in Africa because fertility rates remain high.
Population momentum [1] [2] [3] [4]. The same reason global population is headed to 10 billion people by 2100 from 8 billion today even though the fertility rate is rapidly declining today. Think of it like the "long and variable lag" of monetary policy (where it takes time for the system to change when inputs are changed). Africa's population will continue to increase like a roller coaster peaking from historical fertility rate, and then begin the decline incurred by the current fertility rate decline.
How quickly the fertility rate continues to decline in Africa is a function of how quickly the continent develops/urbanizes, and how robust women empowerment and education continues into the future.
The world has entered an interesting phase where a large portion of the world that is inhospitable to investment of capital has become a breeding grounds with high birth rates, and western societies poach a top percent of their talent, plus whoever can brave the Darien gap or a risky oceanic raft journey.
In a way it's best we continue to encourage socialist and other capital hostile policies in their territories to ensure our dominance and a continually screening of a fraction of their populace for immigration to man the levers.
1) Minimally support raising children through some token property tax etc to pretend you support the children
2) Praise children
3) Have none yourself
4) Offload most costs of raising and make childhood appropriate independence illegal so they won't be in your way, narc to CPS if they're in public without a parent and you find it a nuisance.
5) Wait for kid to be raised, tax shit out of the kid
6) Collect a full share of the social security revenue from the tax generators who's raising you mostly offloaded to everyone else.
So, I work with a lot of population data for worldbuilding/stats/curiosity [0].
The number one thing when modeling really anything interesting about a setting or story is (drum roll): Population
Pretty much everything is keyed to population [1], and I mean pretty much everything. The number of movie theaters, the tonnage of your aircraft carriers, the walking speed in your downtowns, it's all about population.
Generally, I've seen that as population rises, things get better. There are more patents per capita, better ratios of MDs to patients, more ranks in your Fire departments, etc. Yeah, there are exceptions here, but not all that many.
Most things get more efficient as you get more people [2]. Your gas stations have more customers per day, your sewer lines handle more people, your libraries have more patrons per day, etc.
So, when I see a lot of discourse that we somehow need to allow for less people to be alive, to encourage less births, well, that makes me a bit sad. Yes, yes, climate change, I agree, we need to desperately fix that. But from the data that I work with, all I see is that more people = good [3].
To me, the data suggests that we don't need to have less people, that would lead to a less vibrant and progressing world. What we need to figure out a way to grow our population without the effects on the rest of the world. And yeah, I know, impossible. But the data tells me that shrinking is not the way. Somehow, I feel that technology is really the best way forward.
[0] Honestly, I'm a weird nerd that really just likes to play with excel sheets, graphs, and wikipedia info boxes.
[1] the only thing that isn't, in my meanderings through BLS data sheets, wikipedia, etc is the number of stops on any particular subway/rail line. That's most closely correlated to population density. And, really, that's pretty much it. Just that one thing.
[2] again, not population density, it's easy enough to control for that, it's just raw numbers of people from what I have seen.
[3] again, generally. Not all cases, not all places, not all times.
Could it also be the data is better when there are more people? So the accuracy is lower is sparser areas? Which could hide advantages to sparse living?
The US's BLS data is quite comprehensive. You can drill down to individual zip codes, neighborhoods, etc, some of which have very low population densities and generally low populations. I know that the French also have such detailed lists, but as my French is very poor, I'm less familiar with that data. Commonwealth countries generally are lacking in comparison in the detail of the population data they freely provide. Something about francophone countries and those like the US with a long philosophical interchange with France seems to be more 'free data' centric.
Still, based on my work with such data, I don't see that a lack of data in more rural areas has much affect on the 'goodness' of things. From my work I see that it really mostly is just more people = more better.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] thread> Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population. But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past.
not having kids is borrowing from the future to pay for your own wants now.
All of civilization in all of history is a ponzi scheme, where you invest heavily in the next generation to keep it moving forward. That's not a profound takedown it's literally why you have a desk job at a computer instead of digging up potatoes to starve to death in a cave.
> All of civilization in all of history is a ponzi scheme.
But I don't understand how not having kids is borrowing anything from the future.
Wouldn't feeding in the ponzi scheme be what borrows from the future?...
It seems like you are saying two different things here.
It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.
Thought experiment: let's suppose we have a stable population that produces & consumes two things: food & TV shows. The food is sustainably produced so it doesn't contribute to economic growth or decline.
But the TV shows cumulate. Therefore generation X+1 is richer than generation X since it has access to more TV shows.
And "TV shows" in this thought experiment can be physical objects too. An iPhone 12 is more valuable than an iPhone 11 despite being smaller and using less resources to create.
Of course we're a long way from sustainable infinite growth. But it is possible.
But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve.
> where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be
This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork.
[0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.
I think this is incredibly disingenuous. A steady state population that lives within the means of what the sun and planet can provide, without exceeding planetary boundaries, is an ambitious yet reasonable goal. A planet with a population that must grow forever to pay off debt today incurs against tomorrow without tomorrow's consent is simply not realistic, a "spherical cow."
When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children. What does this tell us? It tells us that the global population boom was driven by lack of agency and contraceptive access for women. What did most socioeconomic systems do with this "demographic dividend"? Capitalism, leading to wealth inequality, and also incurring substantial debts to pay for the future (both financial and physical system). And now this system is in material structural peril.
So, should we listen to the pro-natalism harpies that everyone should have more kids to continue to allow a suboptimal economic system predicated on returns and debt to continue to trudge on unimpeded? Or should we continue to empower women and force the economic systems to serve humans instead of using them as a resource? Managing a rapid total fertility rate decline resulting from self determination of a population cohort isn't giving up; it is living within our means as a species and respecting human rights.
> The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline.
This gets us to steady state.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/...
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
> (Who's taking care of the disproportionate number of elderly people?)
Whomever is left at that point.
Are those the only factors that are affecting the decision?
Are they even the main factors?
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... ("Our World in Data: What explains the declining fertility rate?")
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... ("57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them")
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("Why more U.S. adults are choosing not to have kids: 64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/population-policies-0... ("Chinese women unimpressed by government's plan to make more babies")
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/the-last-gener... ("‘The last generation’: the young Chinese people vowing not to have children")
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-fert... ("South Korea's fertility rate, already the world's lowest, continued its dramatic decline in 2023, as women concerned about their career advancement and the financial cost of raising children decided to delay childbirth or to not have babies.")
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-07/latin-... | http://archive.today/RFf3U ("Bloomberg: The Age of the Big Latin American Family Is Over")
> Some of the reasons for this trend in Latin America are similar to those elsewhere: There is less social pressure for women to have babies at a young age. Contraception is more accepted and more available. People are living longer and spending more time in school before entering the workforce. Couples tend to wait until achieving a certain standard of living before considering children.
> But there are also reasons specific to Latin America. Simone Cecchini, director of the demographic center at the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, says the region has made considerable progress in reducing the number of teenage pregnancies. On the other hand, he notes, its recurrent macroeconomic crises and financial uncertainties tend to discourage people’s interest in becoming parents.
> In 1950, Latin America’s fertility rates were similar to Africa’s. By the end of this century, he says, they will match Europe’s. Demographically speaking, “this is a very significant and rapid change.”
I also highly recommend the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Pop...
Also note that according to Pew, the reasoning does not differ across gender: "For the most part, the experiences of adults without children and the reasons they give for not having them don’t vary much by gender. This is the case across both age groups."
So that diminishes the claim that "When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children." as it is both men and women choosing this.
Hence my questioning that Women empowerment is the main driver.
It appears to me that the main driver is societal wealth, societal cost and also a desire to focus on the self.
>They want to focus on other things, such as their career or interests (44% vs. 21%)
>They can’t afford to raise a child (36% vs. 12%)
Korea had a sudden birth rate drop after running an ad campaign about how children are a burden. https://www.prb.org/resources/did-south-koreas-population-po...
We in the west have had a massive change in our values and society since the last baby boom. We had the 60's where we rejected alot of the traditional values and then up through the 80's we had "greed is good" and a large focus on the self rather than society as a whole.
We also spread these views and cultural outlook wildly via Hollywood.
Are we sure this had had no impact?
It tells me that unless we find a solution, women of the future won't be empowered.
If the current system doesn't produce new generations of humans then people will eventually convert to other systems that do. And when that happens no one will care whether these other systems empower women or not, not even women themselves. Empowerment is inconsequential compared to life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
> The Guano Islands Act (11 Stat. 119, enacted August 18, 1856, codified at 48 U.S.C. ch. 8 §§ 1411-1419) is a United States federal law passed by the Congress that enables citizens of the United States to take possession of unclaimed islands containing guano deposits in the name of the United States. The islands can be located anywhere, so long as they are not occupied by citizens of another country and not within the jurisdiction of another government. It also empowers the president to use the military to protect such interests and establishes the criminal jurisdiction of the United States in these territories.
The alternative would have been the b̶a̶t̶ bird shit wars.
I don't think you're approaching this conversation honestly.
This makes no sense. Sustainability means an ability to maintain the current trajectory. Yes, standards of living are not the same in different places but it has nothing to do with what "sustainability" means.
On a side note if you actually care about the bottom-line standard of living then you probably should wish for bigger population and bigger economy. The correlation between the two is very strong, many things we have now (like microchips) become unaffordable if you scale down production.
Well maybe, just maybe, try once looking at the historical data [1] to see how it works? Economy is not a zero-sum game where dividing resources among the smaller number of players gives you a win.
Yes, with the current technology stack lifting everyone to the current US level is impossible, that's precisely why it's so important to keep pushing. Earth continuously receives 44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of solar energy on average it's more than plenty to have decent standards of living for everyone if captured. The problem is, development of technology is extremely expensive, effectively impossible unless you spread the cost among a huge number of end-consumers.
If the population didn't grow like crazy in the past centuries we wouldn't have the technology we have today and the bottom-line standard of living would be way lower than what we have today. And so would be the US standard of living because US wouldn't be sitting on top of a 8-billion-people economic pyramid.
Very lucky for the world's poorest (and for all of us) that we didn't listen to cries of de-growers in the 18th century. In principle not much have changed since then. Amount of energy at our disposal is still laughable, so the road ahead is longer than what we did so far.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo...
2.4 children per woman is 8.9-fold growth after 300 years of 25 years between generations. 1.6 children per woman is a reduction to 6.9% of your initial population in the same way.
(Also, sustainability is a function of tech: the 1930s way of life was not long-term sustainable at any recorded population level).
> why would I worry if in centuries we are a billion less?
Indeed, this is my position too. Hyperbolic discounting of the future: we don't know what's coming, let the future sort itself out and worry about the next 5 years.
25 years, we might get AI good enough for robot workforce and we can all retire instantly with no need for more kids entering the workforce to replace the pensioners, might get anti-aging and an end to old-age pensions, might get both, might get neither.
(That said, the example I gave was a reduction to, not by, 6.9%; it would be a global population of 552 million).
'just' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Lead is still in certain common fuels, some paints, and foods to this day.
That said, if you know how to turn any lab-only solution into an economically viable solution, please do — the world has plenty of room for improvement! :D
I think you can make a good argument that collective action helped end slavery, I don't think you can make a good argument that anything other than market forces is bringing us the transition to renewable energy.
Where's lead in that? I don't know. I don't even know if it's the same answer for each of your three uses of lead.
Ozone was easy to get an international agreement to fix, because it already had economic alternatives.
* and if you want to argue semantics over "are economic forces anything other than the de-facto collective action of the agents in the economy?", which I'm sure someone has energy for, but I'm not that someone, so I'll acknowledge it and move on.
2.4 actually has been sustainable for a couple of millennia by now, mostly because our technology (primarily the food production) was able to keep up with the exponential growth of population. How long this can last is a question, but even if it doesn't last -- going from 2.4 to 2.1 is not hard.
With 1.6 you don't even need to wait for millennia or even aforementioned 300 years to get into trouble. After two generations you get into the situation where working people have to share their income with too many elderly AND elderly don't only consume resources but also directly compete for them with the youth (the other class of people who consume without producing) which makes the fertility economics even worse. You can plug some holes with immigration and foreign trade but on the macro-level it's a death spiral. Very easy to get from 1.6 to 1.0, but extremely hard to return to 2.1.
Maybe I'm missing something but countries like Italy or Spain look to me like trains rushing into concrete wall. And it seems that people are mostly concerned about whether the train is running on a carbon-neutral fuel.
If it had been 2.4 children per woman* over that time frame, the current world population would have been 200e6 * (2.4/2)^(1000/25) = about 300 billion in 1000 AD, and 200e6 * (2.4/2)^(2024/25) = 514 trillion today.
> elderly don't only consume resources but also directly compete for them with the youth (the other class of people who consume without producing) which makes the fertility economics even worse.
Only if the elderly continue to consume pensions. If the economy collapses, pensioners protesting or voting for the other party in a democracy stops being an interesting threat, for the same reason they weren't much of a threat in 1889 when people were first taking ideas like "state pension" (in their modern usage and not e.g. medieval almshouses, and universal not e.g. what the Romans did for the military) seriously.
* I know I didn't mention "surviving to reproductive age" before, but that distinction is more of relevance to historical comparisons than future ones. I have no reason to think infant mortality will go up, after all.
Agreed
> Only if the elderly continue to consume pensions.
Well no, unless you literally starve them to death. State pensions or money in general is just a redistribution mechanism which doesn't change average available resources. What really matters on a higher level is the fact that a big part of population (elderly and youth) consumes but doesn't produce. Whatever they consume is either directly produced by the working part of the population or comes from the foreign exchange of the same said produce.
So if the state pensions system collapses it just means that instead of feeding your parents through taxes you now do it directly, which on average is almost the same (difference coming from elderly who don't have kids to feed them). Which still means you have less resources to spend on your kids.
The way this is currently playing out in the UK, is that pension ages are increasing.
At the extreme case, there's no more state pension: if you don't have a private pension, you're working until just before you die.
I was thinking more of heating (and, increasingly, cooling) rather than starvation: Food specifically isn't the main concern here, unlike in the 1800s, because of how few farmers we need to feed the entire population.
(And this whole thing may be inverted at short notice in a whole bunch of different ways; UBI is basically a pension age of zero, but I'm only expecting that when AI gets good enough, and IMO that's "at least five years after self driving cars, whenever that is".
Claim 1: A “sustainable birth rate” is bounded by the efficiency of resource extraction and the repair rate of the environment for the damage the extraction does to it.
Claim 2: It would appear that technology has accelerated so far very closely at the same rate as global population growth.
Claim 3: Our efficiency of resource extraction has sky rocketed.
Claim 4: Our damage to the environment has exceeded its repair rate as this has increased.
Claim 5: A collapsed society would not immediately loose all of its population, and would likely be the most damaging to the environment in the shortest period of time. We won’t forget how to burn oil, but we won’t be using high efficiency well maintained engines when we do it.
With that. Seems like there are two options before humanity:
1. Burn it all down, reduce population growth rate (doesn’t matter if it’s controlled [Mao] or uncontrolled [The West Today]), eventually loose genetic entropy, and before that loose (or automate and replace) the labor force that allowed for the resource extraction.
The outcomes here are:
a) Society collapses (genetic entropy, climate change damage that has already been done, destabilization caused by population reduction measures, etc)
b) We automate labor and humans either are replaced entirely
c) or a small oligarchy of humans exist to rule that automation. That population must keep genetic entropy through gene editing (requires a lot of novel advancement which is harder with fewer people, unless we’re curating)
- or -
2. Address the reasons why people aren’t having kids in the west to maintain labor and genetic entropy, which mainly has to do with economic opportunity of young adults. And ensure that our resource extraction continues more efficient and that we either develop ways to limit damage or ways to accelerate the repair.
Outcomes are:
A) We fail to accelerate repair or reduce damage, and society collapses
B) We succeed and we’ve managed not to damage genetic entropy and don’t risk a conflict over population control.
The problem with option 1 is the implementation won’t be uniform, and population reduction globally cannot be achieved without some type of concerted effort. Consider for a moment how that is supposed to be implemented.
If things go wrong in that effort, that leads to conflict. It seems very likely that society collapses as well.
The other issue is considering the population number as the solution is it is a very short jump to the justification of genocide or some other form or population reduction. That also seems like it would accelerate conflict and therefore society collapse.
The problem with option 2 is there is only so much time before our damage exceeds allowable levels.
I struggle to understand why continuation of society in a particular way is important to someone hundreds or thousands of years after their death.
No, the pronatalist movement is premised on the belief that humans should not go extinct. If the entire world had the Korean birthrate (and it does seem to be moving that way), extinction would happen in 25 generations.
25 generations is over 600 years!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
I do think my original point still stands that we seem to be quite bad at making good decisions for more immediate generations. Considering our rather pressing current challenges (climate change, continued warfare, etc.) I'd settle for getting the next few generations in a better place before thinking about 25 generations from now.
For South Korea specifically, the population challenges are probably more immediate than other countries.
Not saying the trend will 100% continue, but looking how hard is life for a young person in an ageing society it appears to be self-perpetuating.
You'd need something to put all those old people holding all the votes and wealth out of the picture.
[0] Global population growth rate peaked in 1963 and is now at a level last seen before WW2.
Why would anyone assume that just because we enter a decline that we would remain on that same trajectory?
Surely when there is enough decline, resources become plentiful for those that remain, and people have more kids because of that? Just my naive thought.
I’m also not sure that population decline would lead to plentiful resources in a sense that matters. Do people in Detroit feel rich because houses are so plentiful after the 1950s population high?
But there is reason to expect the trajectory to change. Currently the expectation is that, even if most people died out, there are very fecund (and very religious) groups that would repopulate the world. So the pro-natalism movement isn't needed to save humanity, just to save the 'normal' people.
You can see how this would spiral. The society that makes it out of such a spiral is unfortunately the society that stops caring for it's elderly. The transition period would obviously be extremely unsavory and socially catastrophic. What winds up happening is people become incentivized to have kids so that they have someone to take care of them, and those who have more kids inherit the society a couple of generations down. That's what reversal of this trend looks like, it's not just about population numbers, median age is an even more consequential factor.
The birthrate will change dramatically after a few generations of low growth.
A species producing babies is not extinct, by definition.
Well, let's kind of obvious why Korea's birthrdate is low. It's because it's extremely expensive to have a child in a small country with limited resources and competition for them. Women are also getting more educated and emancipated and want more out of life than being somebody's wife, mother, and tons of unpaid labor: cleaning, cooking, etc. That was possible in the past, but capitalism has advanced so much that women are also expected to work in addition to their other chores, in order for the family to make ends meet. Hence, when Korean women have a choice nowadays, increasingly, their choice is to focus on themselves and not start a family.
The less people there are, the more free resources and less competition, hence more incentive and possibility to have a child. Korea is a hyper competitive capitalist society with huge incomes disparity, expensive childcare, soaring rents, and little living space. If you want high birth rates, make the country the opposite, make it more social: long parental leave, high job security, worker protection programs, social housing, low inequality, accessible healthcare, early retirement age, etc.
> No, the pronatalist movement is premised on the belief that humans should not go extinct
Yeah, but what are their real motives? How I see it, if you are a:
- pronatalist and a capitalist, you want more drones for your factories and offices
- pronatalist and religious, you want more souls for your deity of choice
- pronatalist and a nationalist, you want more people to fight your wars
- pronatalist and old, you want other people to take care of you and pay your pension
My point is, it's infuriating that we live in a system where paying rent working two jobs is near impossible, but at the same time people complaining that there are no children. Fix capitalism, and people'd start having children.
Probably feelings wise, yes. It's one thing to be dirt poor along with everyone else around you, and another thing to be dirt poor in 9m2 apartment, and seeing skyscraper lofts from your window where 1 month rent is equivalent to your yearly salary.
> Korea is perhaps the clearest disproof of the resources -> children argument,
Wrong. Korea is, in reality, a perfect example of resources -> children argument, a perfect example of how bad capitalism is for society.
Korea has a huge income inequality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality_in_South_K...
That means a huge portion of the population is considered poor. Hence, a large portion of their population feels like they don't have the resources to have children, afford daycare, rent, food, etc.
Absolutely! Or at least the perception of financial inequality.
In the 60s after the war, the country was industrializing which increased inequality.
Only in the 80s that temporarily stopped, known as the "Miracle on the Han River”. After the 80s, inequality has just been increasing, with increased number of the population KNOWING about it. It's the reason why you have movies like Parasite, shows like Squid Games, and the rising discontent for the chaebols.
In any case, people FEEL largely so downtrodden and without access to resources, that they don't want to have children. Solve that feeling of inequality (by investing in social welfare programs and taxing the s*it out the rich), and you solve the population crisis.
What stunned me about that was that they took the admonition seriously to begin with. That a statesperson telling you to have more children or have children at all “for Norway” was worth responding to.
> with the burdens falling most heavily on women
I mean, is this not true? My understanding is US provides relatively little child support, ensuring that burden has to fall on someone. Isn't that usually the mother?
Shouldn't we be giving parents (mothers AND fathers) more flexibility and freedom to choose to spend time with their children?
Progressives almost always emphasize support for care outside the home and pushing to keep more parents in the corporate work force, and very little about supporting parents caring for their children inside the home.
(And don't get me started on the Republicans. I am well aware they did not support extending the Child Tax Credit, while continuing to claim it was the Democrats who aren't supporting families with children.)
But luckily, you declared the argument closed before actually taking time to read the comment...
High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there.
Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion.
[1]https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili...
I dont have a philosophy background, so I would be really interested to hear arguments for what benefits an unconceived child receives from being conceived in todays world.
Even when assuming that not all outcomes are necessarily going to be bad, there is a real risk that they will experience a really troubled world. What justifies exposing someone intentionally without their consent to that (any?) risk of suffering?
The solution isn't to go back to oppressing women, the solution is to put downwards pressure on formal economy hours/week until people have time to raise their own kids again. This can be done in a gradual and non-sexist way with overtime policy.
Health care and education are important sidekicks in this drama. Our policies to individualize and increase the costs (and yes, that's policy: everyone knows what happens if you train too few doctors, everyone knows who loses if John Smith, BCBS North Dakota, and Canada are bargaining against each other for drug prices, and everyone knows what happens if you flood a competitive market with debt) also provide steep disincentives to raising children. Start fixing these problems, you start fixing the birth rate.
Of course, you should expect to be fought tooth and nail at every turn by those who profit from the problem, but what else is new?
-More immigrants
-More pension contributions
The former overlooks the fact that those are just someone else's children, so the suggestion appears to be to drain other countries off of their workforce - provided it even exists as fertility rates have been plummeting across the board.
The latter has been, in a way, tried in some places in Europe and net effect is birth rates plummeting and an increase in illegal employment.
In any case we're way past talking about going above replacement fertility - currently the conversation is focused on preventing a downward spiral that will negatively affect everyone's quality of life.
Many people in their old age will need a lot of assistance. No amount of savings and judicious planning will help of there’s a labor shortage. We’d have to pay $1500/hour for a day nurse.
As anyone with relatives who need care can attest, you can't really buy being treated like a human being when you're at your weakest.
Having children is of course no guarantee, but relationships overall are one's best bet to have at least one person giving a damn about you.
It's as if they assumed all else would remain equal, even though we know that's not the case.
It's like when Ben Shapiro said that if people were really anticipating warming oceans to engulf coastal cities, they would be selling their properties, to which one man rebutted with "To whom? To fucking Aquaman?".
I don't know if that rebuttal about oceanfront property really makes sense - even if you're concerned today about future destruction, you can generally find a buyer who won't be. I think the situation is more like people will happily continue enjoying what they have, and plan on being bailed out when something catastrophic does happen. There are also ways to get the equity out of the properties without having to sell them (eg reverse mortgage), and the carrying costs likely aren't that high having been mortgaged under ZIRP. So like the rest of the property bubble, the calculus is ongoing mortgage payment versus expected appreciation, not any type of core asset value.
That "everyone's quality of life" is dependent on an ever increasing population.
And, 8 billion people isn't enough? What about 10 billion? 12 billion?
Every argument in favor of this ever increasing population is based on an imaginary structure called finance. While completely ignoring a physically real structure called nature.
At what point does the imaginary structure acknowledge it's impact on the real structure? What is the capitalist plan in identifying when the population is large enough, and instituting a transition at that point? The simple answer is of course, never. That's what makes it a ponzi scheme.
Even looking at historical trends doesn't support the argument that increased population supports "everyone's quality of life". The US population has approx. doubled in the last 50 years, and yet the economic position/buying power of almost all people have diminished in that same time. Instead all economic growth in that period has gone to the equity class, with no mitigation of this trend in sight.
This really brings us to the questions of: Who is "everybody"? and What constitutes their "quality of life"? Does another billion really improve Elon's?
There's more than enough prosperity, but it's very unequally distributed.
Apaparently heating the atmoshpere, melting the poles, clear cutting the rain forrests, extincting many species, depleting fresh water supplies, depleting soil fertility is all on the table, but spreading the wealth around so retiring old people can live indoors is absolutely not an option.
Lmao, the entire western economy is built on this premise for decades. Pensions, social security, and even 401ks. It's all passing on the bagholding to someone else. It all depends on a newer/younger generation to pay in to allow the older ones to cash out. And it all implodes when the younger can't afford to buy in because of economic wealth hoarding by the older that wants to cash out.
I wonder how they expect it to work in large countries like China. At the moment they would need to take over half of Africa to make the numbers work. Insanity.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/868e20d0-90ec-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef67...
> Having said that, the reduction in the number of children per woman does not keep the population from continuing to rise in Africa because fertility rates remain high.
How quickly the fertility rate continues to decline in Africa is a function of how quickly the continent develops/urbanizes, and how robust women empowerment and education continues into the future.
[1] https://populationeducation.org/population-momentum-explaine...
[2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/international-progr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345894/
In a way it's best we continue to encourage socialist and other capital hostile policies in their territories to ensure our dominance and a continually screening of a fraction of their populace for immigration to man the levers.
1) Minimally support raising children through some token property tax etc to pretend you support the children
2) Praise children
3) Have none yourself
4) Offload most costs of raising and make childhood appropriate independence illegal so they won't be in your way, narc to CPS if they're in public without a parent and you find it a nuisance.
5) Wait for kid to be raised, tax shit out of the kid
6) Collect a full share of the social security revenue from the tax generators who's raising you mostly offloaded to everyone else.
The number one thing when modeling really anything interesting about a setting or story is (drum roll): Population
Pretty much everything is keyed to population [1], and I mean pretty much everything. The number of movie theaters, the tonnage of your aircraft carriers, the walking speed in your downtowns, it's all about population.
Generally, I've seen that as population rises, things get better. There are more patents per capita, better ratios of MDs to patients, more ranks in your Fire departments, etc. Yeah, there are exceptions here, but not all that many.
Most things get more efficient as you get more people [2]. Your gas stations have more customers per day, your sewer lines handle more people, your libraries have more patrons per day, etc.
So, when I see a lot of discourse that we somehow need to allow for less people to be alive, to encourage less births, well, that makes me a bit sad. Yes, yes, climate change, I agree, we need to desperately fix that. But from the data that I work with, all I see is that more people = good [3].
To me, the data suggests that we don't need to have less people, that would lead to a less vibrant and progressing world. What we need to figure out a way to grow our population without the effects on the rest of the world. And yeah, I know, impossible. But the data tells me that shrinking is not the way. Somehow, I feel that technology is really the best way forward.
[0] Honestly, I'm a weird nerd that really just likes to play with excel sheets, graphs, and wikipedia info boxes.
[1] the only thing that isn't, in my meanderings through BLS data sheets, wikipedia, etc is the number of stops on any particular subway/rail line. That's most closely correlated to population density. And, really, that's pretty much it. Just that one thing.
[2] again, not population density, it's easy enough to control for that, it's just raw numbers of people from what I have seen.
[3] again, generally. Not all cases, not all places, not all times.
The US's BLS data is quite comprehensive. You can drill down to individual zip codes, neighborhoods, etc, some of which have very low population densities and generally low populations. I know that the French also have such detailed lists, but as my French is very poor, I'm less familiar with that data. Commonwealth countries generally are lacking in comparison in the detail of the population data they freely provide. Something about francophone countries and those like the US with a long philosophical interchange with France seems to be more 'free data' centric.
Still, based on my work with such data, I don't see that a lack of data in more rural areas has much affect on the 'goodness' of things. From my work I see that it really mostly is just more people = more better.