No, it wont:
Population statistics are among the most robust & stable one and one with the most accurate data that we have across the globe.
Populatoin statistics are running reaaaallly slow - on that one day when you see the decrease in the graph, it is already too late.
Natural selection has been strongly optimizing for pro-natal genes and cultures since the introduction of the birth control pill. The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
> Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time.
They are "plummeting around the world at the same time," they just didn't start plummeting everywhere at the same time.
> The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?
Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit.
The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids. And in poorer countries, it's solar panels and TikTok exploding everywhere, giving way too many fun distractions to keep things lively. But the real root of it all? It's baked into the political systems and setups. Still, barely anyone wants to face the music and admit their "great" democracy and any other policical system is straight-up trash.
This article just flat-out refuses to face the real damn problem.
Either you're banking on robots to save the day, or you gotta crank up the birth rate. But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better. Thing is, none of those are any more doable than hoping robots magically fix everything.
> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better.
Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).
Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).
The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.
For a lot of woman in "somehow develoed countries" the labour market is today more attractive than the "marriage market" as women rights etc. give them much more freedom than it was in older days (e.g. in some EU countries the woman had to ask their spouse if they allow them to work up into the 70s).
If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).
Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.
your suggestion of "socialize childcare big-time" is tried in EU, countries like sweden offers the best support of families and yet are parley getting the numbers up without immigration, the root of the drop is the change of women role in society, finding a political sweet spot is required, if women get a salary from the government when they have more than 3 kids then it might encourage families to take the big step and the women to spend more time doing the real full time job of home care, also families needs help with bigger housing, logistics and home duties when they have more kids, normally that help came from the grandparents but it's not happening anymore because the average age of the grandparents is higher, and baby boomers and "older generations" are assholes by blocking the housing options for their kids, i can also suggest that a adults with no kids can get some money by hour from the government for helping families with many kids as it is also needed sometimes.
solve this:
- Housing issues.
- Income issues.
- Care and time issues.
It's really alarming when governments see their society collapsing and do nothing, if you have such government, remove it, it's a stupid government.
>Does that mean we are doomed to die out? Henry Gee thinks so, if only because all species die out in the end. The question is simply how long it takes.
Why isn’t this the default position?
The most firmly predictable position is that every biological species will go away eventually. Even humans are vastly different chimeral species from the proto-humans that made up modern anatomical human.
Most europeans have significant Neanderthal genetics, and yet all Neanderthal are existinct. Same with homo denisovian, habilis, etc…
As a species working on transitioning human level intelligence into something that can last longer than human species should be our only goal.
If we're going by "all species die out in the end" then anything we transition to will die too: entropy will get the whole universe in the end. Past that there's nothing that says any species can't expand out, settle whatever planets they want and stick around to the end. I'm also pretty cool with my millions-of-years-from-now descendants looking back at me and thinking about how different they are from me. I would consider it an incredible success to go that long without catastrophically destroying ourselves.
stage right enter homo paganicus, accompanied by those twins homo philosiphus and homo philobaccus
pass the wine around.
True story, I took a course in environmental microbiology, and at a certain point, the instructor had a slide titled, "Ideal Conditions for Reproduction" and below that the words, "A Swiss Chalet on a cold night, a bottle of wine, and a warm fireplace"
Pressure seems to be another factor why many women don't have kids. That and mixed messages about what constitutes a good person and not being told that your fertility starts tanking after 30
The one thing many people miss - or utterly fail to acknowledge - is how the entire edifice of capitalism is violently against any attempt to reverse fossil fuels, simply because it is far too profitable to turn away from. And when you realize that the only responsibility corporations have is to their shareholders, it makes perfect sense.
It’s why CO2e levels continue to accelerate, why heating has similarly accelerated such that we might see more heating in the next 10 than we have in the last 75, and why we are still on the absolute worst-case-path-possible, all because of “business as usual” being too profitable to ignore.
We’re fucked, not because we aren’t doing anything, but because those who can are the 1% who aren’t, and those who actually want to do something are the 99% who have absolutely no power to affect the former.
One statement in there grates: the idea that there never was a big population drop before.
We know it from genetic records that human population dropped to a very low number. The human population bottleneck around 70,000 years ago, ie Toba supervolcano eruption, with 1,000 to 10,000 breeding individuals. There may have been other humans around, their lines all died out.
I want to be proven wrong, but I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world today. In this regard, the US is actually doing better than East Asian countries and Europe, but the trend is unmistakable — modern, affluent states are committing voluntary suicide because their citizens are simply not willing to have children.
Generally, populations with higher birth rates come from poorer countries or communities with lower living standards. Israel is the only major exception, but once you analyze the social strata it becomes clear why: higher-income groups still have lower fertility than the religious ones (especially the ultra-Orthodox and Arab Muslims) by a wide margin, even though the higher-income groups still have higher birth rates than other OECD countries. This creates long-term strains on society.
Another interesting fact is that groups with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tend to have lower birth rates. If SES correlates with IQ, then there’s an uncomfortable but politically incorrect implication: the smarter groups are having fewer children, while the less advantaged groups are having more. A few generations later, it’s not hard to see where this leads — human intelligence may trend downward. That is simply evolution at work.
Climate change, wars, pandemics, and natural disasters won’t wipe out humanity; we’ve survived all of those and recovered. But demographic collapse driven by high living standards is new territory, and I am genuinely, deeply worried.
You can have a spiral of bad economic decisionmaking through demographic biases in natalism, but that's likely to be a product of cultural transmission, not of any biological property of intelligence, which is mean-reverting and only dubiously and marginally correlated with genetic variation.
Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorrect limb.
A good and thought provoking read. This is obviously navel-gazing, but looking at this from an individual or family perspective, I'm wondering about how you could prosper in a depopulating, aging, and warming world.
Traditional investments like real estate and property may not be solid bets if there are suddenly a lot of it to go around due to there being less of us around. Then again, city growth seems stable.
Another point is what happens to stock markets when there are less consumers and producers. Stagnating GDP and indices do not make attractive investments. Where do I invest my hard earned cash then? Private elderly care, drug companies, robotics companies?
We should probably look to the countries mentioned in the article, like South Korea or Japan for answers. But I'm not sure I'm able to pick out winning strategies looking at those, or even be sure they would work where I'm based.
I'm curious what your thoughts are - how do you invest and prepare for the next fifty years?
I realize this is a selfish comment to make, but shoring up oneself is at least actionable for us as individuals, in addition to trying to make the world a better place for everyone else.
25 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] threadI remember the freak-out of the 90s. The world was going to be at 10 billion humans and unsustainable, leading to world-wide famine.
Now we're at the other end. It will cycle, the human race will continue.
They are "plummeting around the world at the same time," they just didn't start plummeting everywhere at the same time.
> The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?
The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids. And in poorer countries, it's solar panels and TikTok exploding everywhere, giving way too many fun distractions to keep things lively. But the real root of it all? It's baked into the political systems and setups. Still, barely anyone wants to face the music and admit their "great" democracy and any other policical system is straight-up trash.
This article just flat-out refuses to face the real damn problem.
Either you're banking on robots to save the day, or you gotta crank up the birth rate. But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better. Thing is, none of those are any more doable than hoping robots magically fix everything.
Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).
Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).
The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.
If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).
Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.
solve this: - Housing issues. - Income issues. - Care and time issues.
It's really alarming when governments see their society collapsing and do nothing, if you have such government, remove it, it's a stupid government.
Or maybe, just maybe,having kids just isnt that great and people (and especially women) are finally realising it.
Why isn’t this the default position?
The most firmly predictable position is that every biological species will go away eventually. Even humans are vastly different chimeral species from the proto-humans that made up modern anatomical human.
Most europeans have significant Neanderthal genetics, and yet all Neanderthal are existinct. Same with homo denisovian, habilis, etc…
As a species working on transitioning human level intelligence into something that can last longer than human species should be our only goal.
stage right enter homo paganicus, accompanied by those twins homo philosiphus and homo philobaccus
pass the wine around.
True story, I took a course in environmental microbiology, and at a certain point, the instructor had a slide titled, "Ideal Conditions for Reproduction" and below that the words, "A Swiss Chalet on a cold night, a bottle of wine, and a warm fireplace"
Pressure seems to be another factor why many women don't have kids. That and mixed messages about what constitutes a good person and not being told that your fertility starts tanking after 30
It’s why CO2e levels continue to accelerate, why heating has similarly accelerated such that we might see more heating in the next 10 than we have in the last 75, and why we are still on the absolute worst-case-path-possible, all because of “business as usual” being too profitable to ignore.
We’re fucked, not because we aren’t doing anything, but because those who can are the 1% who aren’t, and those who actually want to do something are the 99% who have absolutely no power to affect the former.
Ban birth control pill
Ban Abortion
Largely limit social media
Subsidize recreational activities like bars and other such drugs
After people have accidental kids, they will figure out the food, housing and so on.
Generally, populations with higher birth rates come from poorer countries or communities with lower living standards. Israel is the only major exception, but once you analyze the social strata it becomes clear why: higher-income groups still have lower fertility than the religious ones (especially the ultra-Orthodox and Arab Muslims) by a wide margin, even though the higher-income groups still have higher birth rates than other OECD countries. This creates long-term strains on society.
Another interesting fact is that groups with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tend to have lower birth rates. If SES correlates with IQ, then there’s an uncomfortable but politically incorrect implication: the smarter groups are having fewer children, while the less advantaged groups are having more. A few generations later, it’s not hard to see where this leads — human intelligence may trend downward. That is simply evolution at work.
Climate change, wars, pandemics, and natural disasters won’t wipe out humanity; we’ve survived all of those and recovered. But demographic collapse driven by high living standards is new territory, and I am genuinely, deeply worried.
Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorrect limb.
https://vimeo.com/1039295733 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
Don't worry. Enjoy the ride...
Traditional investments like real estate and property may not be solid bets if there are suddenly a lot of it to go around due to there being less of us around. Then again, city growth seems stable.
Another point is what happens to stock markets when there are less consumers and producers. Stagnating GDP and indices do not make attractive investments. Where do I invest my hard earned cash then? Private elderly care, drug companies, robotics companies?
We should probably look to the countries mentioned in the article, like South Korea or Japan for answers. But I'm not sure I'm able to pick out winning strategies looking at those, or even be sure they would work where I'm based.
I'm curious what your thoughts are - how do you invest and prepare for the next fifty years?
I realize this is a selfish comment to make, but shoring up oneself is at least actionable for us as individuals, in addition to trying to make the world a better place for everyone else.