Exponentials, let alone super-exponentials, will tend to do that. As the article notes, the biggest issue is assuming that the system you're modelling doesn't have any negative feedback loops that would stabilise it.
The same is true of investment and retirement calculations. Little differences in the estimation of an exponent will compound to huge differences in the long run.
I think we're already at a doomsday for population. The inertia of such a large world running on capitalism means we can't do anything about our problems any more, so I feel the bullet has been effectively fired. We're just watching it in slow motion.
I'm not sure what you mean by "capitalism", but the only reason the world's population is so large is that critical technologies like steel, cement, and nitrogen-based fertilizers have been deployed widely. Free markets and the profit motive have been critical drivers of this wide deployment. There are problems with these industries being so strongly profit-motivated, but it seems difficult to figure out what to do about those problems while maintaining current populations levels and material prosperity.
Capitalism means we can only take actions that benefit individuals in the short term (so, arms race). And the large population means inertia in that incorrect direction.
Again, I don't know what you mean by "capitalism", but it's simply not that case that "we can only take actions that benefit individuals in the short term". In the US context, it's certainly true that many companies make many decisions that are driven by short-term profits, but they also make many decisions that are driven by longer timelines (e.g. capital expenditures). I think the same holds true for non-profit entities, including governments (it's a mix of short-term and long-term thinking).
I think a better line of attack is that externalities are poorly accounted for in our current economic system.
It's pretty clear you do understand what they mean by "capitalism", then.
At this point in many countries the institutions of power have been captured by the owners of capital and many of the issues facing modern society are a direct result of this.
People will always act in their best interest and along the interests of their class, and no class is more class conscious than the capital owning class. In the US, this informs policy, which is generally geared at making the capital owning class more money at the expense of everyone else.
I don't see any other reason for us to have such excess and have it all seemingly go to waste. We could solve world hunger right now with our advances in technology and [corporate] central planning but that would never happen under this economic system.
Well if what they meant was specifically this nuanced thing, they should have said that nuanced thing, and not said "capitalism". Many other people who also say "capitalism" could be more expressive by saying exactly what they mean, instead of using the word, which is little more than a grumbling noise.
> We could solve world hunger right now with our advances in technology and [corporate] central planning
Thera are not even a correlation, but straight cause‑and‑effect relation between practice of "our advances in technology and [corporate] central planning" and the hunger
You're making the mistake of not looking down the road far enough. "China's developing rapidly and has all these cool EVs, looks like smooth sailing til the end of time for them!" Their male/female imbalance and TFR < 1 are absolutely massive looming issues. Maybe they'll advance to the "robots do everything and no one ever has to work" end-game and then those things won't really matter, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I would. Why wouldn't you bet on it these days? It's also not as if any country can do better as basically every country has declining fertility rates.
Seriously? China is one of the top polluters and it's a horrible country to live in. No one is solving climate change. The problem is worse than ever. None of the serious problems are being solved. Only made worse.
The real "doomsday" is the fact that we no longer have the population growth to sustain the increases that markets demand while simultaneously not alienating the ever-loving hell out of the labor and customers that capital depend upon for those increases. It's already leading to socio-economic and political problems.
idk if I'm not naive enough or too naive but I fail to see how you can expect such a simplistic solution to just solve all the problems mentioned knowing the first, second, third, &co order effects
Politicians in the 70s were selling us the 3 days work week and retiring at 50 thanks to "automation", I fail to see how the "robots will solve all our problems" logic is any different.
I was being facetious. But now that you mention it, only half facetious. Of course there are multi order effects, any action will. I'm not naive enough to believe in what politicians say over actions done.
I’m as skeptical of underpopulation doomerism as I was about the previous overpopulation panic.
Both commit the fallacy of assuming present trends remain in place indefinitely and ignoring technology.
They also both tend to be racist. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
How is South Korea's very low birth rate about not having enough of the "right" people? Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture. The issue is happening everywhere, how is it racist?
> Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture. The issue is happening everywhere, how is it racist?
Well, there are people that think the idea of preserving cultures itself is racist (well, at least western ones), or that there is no detrimental effect to an existing culture by enabling mass migration.
I think the racist part is the pivot from demographic changes to the inference that they herald an extinction event for a particular culture, and especially tying that assumption to unwarranted extrapolations that misread the data, and especially when it's a fixation on populations that don't realistically face any such threat but nevertheless talking about the perceived threat in existential terms.
The racist part is extrapolating from mass-scale migration of different demographics and cultures that it will cause demographic and cultural change? You may disagree it is a problem, but I fail to see how it isn't true.
You think if, say tomorrow, all 1.4 billion citizens in China were teleported into the U.S., that there would now be 1.7 billion Americans, indistinguishable from the Americans that came before? Or, would it simply be 1.4 billion Chinese, alongside ~300 million Americans (if we're being generous...)?
Demographics and culture are obviously intrinsically tied, each individual migrant holds beliefs and values that have been forged and shaped over the span of the lives that they have lived in their country of origin. This is, and has always, been the case, its just more of a hot-button issue recently because:
A: We are currently getting an overwhelming amount of migration to stave off our own demographic issues, so the strain begins to have a more noticeable impact,
and B: Many of the migrants (from abroad) are coming from countries with cultures intrinsically incompatible with values Westerners have come to expect in their own countries (See: Sharia Law as contrasted with Women's Suffrage), so they stick out somewhat like a sore thumb when advocating to enact such policies and practicing such cultures.
Right, the racist part is equivocating between "demographic change" and "extinction event" and thinking in terms of hypotheticals and extrapolations that aren't supported by data.
And there's all kinds of value prejudging that is entirely external to the data about what cultural change means, what it implies, what effects it will have, all of which involve disputable and extremely politicized assumptions that are trying to borrow from the objectivity of population data for rhetorical momentum in favor of specific preferences of racial composition.
Sharia law is a boogeyman on the same level as the satanic panic and the witch trials. It's about someone who wants power over you making one of your neighbors the "other", which only he can save you from.
We saw the same kind of bullshit against the "papists" with Irish immigration, and the Chinese who came to work on building the railroads.
Immigrant children who grow up in the US, are just like any other children growing up in the US. They don't just follow whatever their parents believed in.
I'm not saying there's zero problems. I specifically called out doomerism.
South Korea's birth rate is indeed dangerously low and threatens their economy. If they cared they could do something about their extreme workaholism and cost of living.
As far as immigration destroying the culture: it depends on the rate. A healthy but limited rate of immigration revitalizes cultures, but it's pretty clear that sudden mass immigration is dangerous and causes a lot of problems and backlash.
Speaking of fixing problems... if our billionaire class who seem so worked up about birth rates wanted to do something about it they could also address the most frequently cited problems preventing young families from forming. Like housing prices.
If we really get into a situation where dangerously low birth rates are threatening the economy and social stability, the boring solution is to do what we do for other goods and services that the free market isn't adequately providing: directly subsidize it. Pay people to have kids. The easy way would be a payment or tax rebate to married couples with 0 children to have one child. But that's the boring solution that doesn't involve massive reactionary cultural transformations, so the right-wing "problemists" won't like it.
I don't think financial incentives will actually do that much, it's generally seen as something that works only marginally. People get more kids when they get stable/good jobs, have a support network, have a culture that incentivizes births.
South Korea is currently throwing money at the problem, upped parental leave even did some things to make it easier to retire if you got a lot of kids. I'm almost certain these things won't meaningfully change the situation (maybe go from 0.8 to 1.0) as all korean children are expected to get good jobs (white collar, certain professions) , they structure their society towards this and it's impossible to get a high birthrate like this.
I actually read about how something like presence of nuns in your town in italy was quite correlated with birthrates as it basically relieved all women but the nurses of some duties. In Korea you can see how the stability leads to a very significant effect on birthrates as Sejong is by far the highest birthrate region. Interesting since those really obsessed about birthrates also seem to hate the worker protections that make it difficult to fire people. I guess housing is another of those stability factors since renting really ups the risks of children.
The racist part is thinking that the confucianist misogynistic hyper capitalistic culture is worth protecting in the first place, as if Bangladeshi, Indonesian or Filipino people living in the same country as you will somehow be the thing that is the end of "Koreanness" and not all of the culture's inherent issues itself- the other kind of end of Koreanness (the implied preferred end) is when almost everyone who is Korean dies out. (Which, to be clear, is not limited to Korea- it's the same set of issues everywhere people complain about "immigrants")
> Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture.
This is the semi-racist part. The majority is always worried about how awful everything would be if they were to become the minority. Usually it's because they treat minorities like shit, and they'll worried that they'll suddenly be treated that way too.
Why would that possibly destroy their culture? Are the cultures of all minorities always destroyed? Why would that be? Is it because of racist assholes?
It's an incredibly weak argument when you think about it. The South Korean culture doesn't have to go anywhere: there will be the same number of Korean pop stars and artists and chefs as there was before, it's just that there will also be others coexisting with them in the same country. Somehow this is a huge threat? They're worried about their culture being "watered down" by lesser cultures? These are racism-adjacent fears, similar to their pure blood being mixed with the lesser races. If you're worried that the South Korean youth will get so much exposure to other cultures that they somehow drop or forget the Korean culture, that just feels like weird gatekeeping and more "mixed blood" concerns to me.
Is there a limit on how much culture can exist? If so, it's surely based on population. We're not talking about the South Korean population declining more due to immigration; it's already declining. If their culture is in danger, it's surely due to that, rather than some sneaky danger of all those dirty immigrants. How is it not based in racism? We're just talking about more culture overall.
Not to mention the fact that most culture spreads over communication channels, not physical bodies. Those terrifying 8 billion non-Koreans who are threatening to destroy Korea's culture are already influencing Korea's culture. Would it really make that big of a difference if they were physically within its borders?
i don't want Americans immigrating in large quantities to New Zealand, because they have cultural values that change the nature of the society, in ways that i don't want it to change.
And i don't consider American a 'race', but more an agglomeration pf people with some general preferences, shared experience and even material characteristics ($$$) that will have negative impacts.
Now, if i could filter, as a voter, to 'allow in Americans that share my values and that would minimize change on axes that matter to me', i would accept immigration of Americans.
but, as a voter, i cannot do that. So instead i vote to keep immigration restrictive. that does not mean I consider Americans inferior, not that i hold that they are meaningfully different from me in any way except culture.
it's not racism. but instead a generalization that we are forced to apply as individuals.
> [Americans] have cultural values that change the nature of the society
I can almost guarantee you are wrong about this, especially about Americans who would ever emigrate to New Zealand. You are voting based on xenophobia. The only reason it's not racist is because "American" is not generally considered a race. But it's xenophobic, nationalistic, and based on deep-rooted stubborn ignorance.
It 100% is. Even thought there are parts that feel like reading different molecules and formulations out of a chemistry books for pages at times, it is generally very good in giving you a sense of how different (and similar) the engineering job was back in the day. Also, the dark humor is the cherry on top (and a necessity for those working with those chemicals, I imagine)
It’s more that we constantly extrapolate what experts are doing to the real world without taking in account the actual details. A research team comes up with a model that has some specific biases, parameters, etc. it yields some results. The result is then taken completely out of context and applied to a messy dynamic real world situation we don’t even have reliable metrics for. Then it just becomes a fight over narratives
The population hysteria from the 60s was proven wrong a long time ago but it's still pretty influential. E.g. it's not uncommon for millenials to talk about not wanting children because of overpopulation.
It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.
Even if there's a lot of scientific evidence, statistical proof etc. it's sort of surprising to me that when chatting with people all over the world (in dense cities and also in non-dense areas) how often I hear the sentiment that "there are too many people" and get the sense that they do mean that there's too many people in the world (not just within the surrounding 5-10km which might actually be true).
This might also be one of those things that aligns with people's experience of the world, and the de-population thing is inherently counterintuitive unless you are, by definition, outside the norm- that is, you would only ever notice this if you live where people already don't live. (rural Japan, etc.)
I guess I don't understand what's supposedly been proven wrong?
There seem to be real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form, and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact.
I guess what's "surprising" is that birth rates are responding to the pressures I'm alluding to? Rather than just continuing runaway exponential expansion?
I think people are talking about two different things. The initial panic was that agriculture could not scale to population growth, and millions would starve. That part turned out to be quite seriously wrong, the reason people starve is that they have really crappy governments.
The idea that a growing population has quite serious effects on the natural environment hasn't been proven wrong. Trying to get the entirety of the third world up to first world living conditions is putting a serious strain on natural systems. Having a lower population would probably help with that problem.
The current panic around falling populations seems to have two drivers: economic systems that are built as essentially a ponzi scheme, like many retirement plans including social security, and a pretty racist idea that we need to have a lot more white babies to keep brown people from taking over.
> real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form
There are two different groups I think. One is not having kids because of environmental issues, but I think there's a larger group not having kids because of systemic societal issues that make it hard to have kids. (sometimes it's the same group but not always)
So part of what I was pointing out is that when people say "we need less people" they aren't implying "wow, I'm glad the population is shrinking" they're really saying, "less people need to be born in the future"- which probably isn't true.
> and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact
Also, it's not obvious, since, with the exception of China, no one actually meant to do this. It might actually lead to a lot of human misery, the same as climate change might do, so it's not clear that having less people in this specific way is a net good- for example countries like Japan completely collapsing in on themselves and going extinct. I think what you meant by smaller population was just have the same exact society but thinned out, but that's not what this next chapter of degrowth looks like. The boomers who insist on their full pensions at 60 are pretty much killing the youngest generation and leaving them with nothing, and to a certain extent everyone is being rational actors- there's no reasonable way out of the problem.
Predictions made in the 60s suggested that the planet couldn't support more than about a billion people, that continued population growth would lead to worldwide famines, and that extremely harsh policies of population control were essential to avoid the worst of mass death. The predictions were not "well, there is some point where this becomes a problem." The predictions were "mass starvation on the order of many hundreds of millions just around the corner."
The next 50 years will cause all industrial countries to face an irregular demographic profile, weighted toward the elderly. The median age in China is almost 41, while the US is reaching 39. In the US, the elderly (65+) will be almost 1 in 4 of the population ~2050. In contrast, boomers were 37% of the US population at their height (elderly were ~9.5%).
There is no underpopulation hysteria.
However, the math around demographics is settled.
It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.
The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There probably would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.
What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.
I mean insofar as the idea is about contemplating those mechanisms in the abstract, sure. But insofar as they were predictive or an attempt at a descriptive characterization of where populations would actually go, clearly it didn't hold. And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.
It's also not just that we accommodated explosive populations but that eventually birth rates really did simply start slowing down for discernible reasons that future models were capable of integrating. Even if we continue to have technology that would give us the capacity to accommodate future increases in population, those increases are no longer happening.
> And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.
That's a bit unfair to Malthus though; sure it was the enlightenment, but all he could rationally go on was to assume that the last 2000 or so years of civilization would be similar to the next, in terms of food and population growth.
What would be abstract would be to make the assumption that unprecedented technological advancement would be made in the next hundred years, bordering on ( to what Malthus would be) magic. You can assume any problem will be solved if you also assume a technology will be invented to fix it. But that's not a reasonable approach to make if you have no reason to believe it is possible.
I agree he wasn't able to anticipate technological changes or the impact they would have, but the response to that isn't to simply insist his theory is literally still true just because he tried his best. I'm not suggesting he could or should have done that, but I don't have to have that expectation to nevertheless note, correctly, that it's not a model of the population dynamics we actually see.
As long as I keep hearing about the need for reducing meat consumption and supply chain slack (food waste), I'm inclined to think Malthus was right despite the limit turning out to be soil capacity rather than labour capacity.
I mean, by proven wrong that's what I mean. I'm not talking about the theoretical mathematics but the real world application of theory in which case, yes, Malthus was proven wrong.
I wouldn't say proven or disproven, as much as it became no longer applicable.
The world he was modeling in the 18th century is a very different world than we ended up getting. IMO it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a reasonable observation that made sense for the time.
It's somewhat analogous to Y2K, in that there were obvious problems that were going to happen. We didn't experience those negative outcomes because immense engineering effort solved the underlying problem. That doesn't mean Y2K was "invalid" or "wrong," just that the problem itself got addressed before it could blow up. Same with Malthus, chemistry and mechanization allowed us to solve the underlying issue of food production scaling slower than population growth.
You also have to believe that population growth is fully exponential. But in practice it looks more like a logistic curve, and the factors that slow it down are a lot less dramatic than resource starvation or violence.
You do not have to believe population growth is fully exponential for it to be a valid conclusion. You just have to have human population grow faster than agricultural capacity, which it was.
Additionally, it is reasonable in the 1790s to assume exponential population growth. It would not be until the 1830s that Verhulst would even model it as a logistic curve. Moreover, human population growth really was on a roughly exponential trajectory until very recently.
Obviously we did not experience such catastrophe. But it's also a bit wrong to call it "invalid" when it was a completely logical conclusion to make. If we're going to allow him to invent a magical technology that addresses it in 1798, then all reason goes out the window.
And because of this, many will starve as a result of oil shocks from the disruption and chaos in the gulf region. We solved the trolley problem by throwing a magic lever that puts five descendants of the original person a ways down the tracks.
He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen. That's wrong enough to be called "wrong", no matter how reasonable his reasoning was at the time.
And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential. Agriculture wasn't linear. It wasn't even in his day. There was improvement in per-person output since, say, the 1400s, and more since, say, 2000 BC. There was a technological component even then.
So population wasn't exponential, agriculture wasn't linear, and what he said would happen didn't happen. How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
> He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen.
Not really. The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, therefore something bad happens when consumption outpaces production.
> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential
You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.
> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production leads to a negative number. The theory itself is pretty water tight from that perspective. Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant after technology changed. But it certainly did not become "wrong" unless math also changed to the point where one function growing faster than the other eventually intercepts and exceeds it.
It is a bit odd to get this worked up over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago.
Well I wouldn't both-sides this one. 2020s population forecasting is better than 1960s forcasting, the latter was repudiated and the former is correctly modeling basically everything. Demographic decline really is happening and has reasonably well understood mechanisms.
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
2020s population forecasting has less than a decade's worth of record to go by, trying to say anything substantial about it risks falling into the same trap the article discusses.
The main thrust of the article (as I understood it) is historical context and how human processes can change given circumstance. So basically: demographic decline will be happening and well-understood until these circumstances no longer persist.
Hard disagree, population forecasting is more rigorous now but the data stretches back to the origin of civilization, and it's more than a binary of having or not having data, it's having stronger and more predictive methodologies. The biggest risk is the false equivalence between predictions from 60 years ago and now.
It's like Isaac Asimov's essay the Relativity of Wrong, which, if boiled down to one sentence says (paraphrasing), "People who said the earth was flat were wrong. People who say the earth is round were wrong. But if you think believing the earth is round is just as wrong as believing the earth is flat, your view is wronger than both of those put together."
Same thing about equating 2020s and 1960s population forecasting.
I'm not suggesting that current data modelling is no better than it was 60 years ago (it surely is), what I'm saying is that we have 60+ years of predictive record for the latter and 6 for the former, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.
To use your analogy: let's rather not get too complacent about figuring out the world isn't flat and risk placing all future bets on it being round.
Fear mongering / doomsaying has been a popular human tendency for as long as we have been able to record our interactions.
If you’re vague enough about it, you can never be wrong! And if you’re overly specific and have a modest following of rubes with more money than sense, you can take some of it! A lot of it!!
I think a lot of the difference is due to different groups/lead figures/experts focusing on different concerns, e.g. people like Paul Ehrlich and environmental groups focused on ecological sustainability vs people like Elon Musk and governments focused on economic sustainability
> It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.
You say "complex systems" but are actually referring to human behavior.
Humans are unique in that they change their behavior in light of predictions. You can't make a prediction, and publicize that prediction, without changing the system.
From what I've heard, many people are declining to have children precisely because of the environmental effects of overpopulation. There are of course other factors, but that's one factor.
It is sad because this is how science is meant to work, but propagandists will use it as evidence to dismiss it as some sort of liberal conspiracy. This is what the commenter you're replying to means by "doubt".
Science uses models to make falsifiable explanations and predictions. That these predictions are falsifiable and can be rejected, superseded or require fixing is how it's supposed to work, not an indictment against them.
> It is sad because this is how science is meant to work
No, it is not meant to work that way.
The situation were formed by pretty predictable and easy to model factors, and if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
Yes, it is. Science builds models that try to make falsifiable predictions about the world. You observe, note the predictions failed (if they did) and either fix the model or ditch it, or some things in between.
> The situation were formed by pretty predictable and easy to model factors
If what you claim were true, "pretty predictable and easy to model factors", it would have been modeled easily in a way that worked accurately to predict the future. Just the fact that this didn't happen should tell you it wasn't all that easy.
> if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
What alternative to science and the scientific method do you propose?
That's the thing with exponentials, they are very hard to predict. We know that in general, exponential growth is unsustainable, and there has to be an inflection point, but where? It is usually difficult to know until the last moment, and even a small difference in time on where you predict the inflection point is can make a massive difference.
Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.
> Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.
Who could have thunk just two months after videos of people dropping dead in Wuhan and after the virus spread Worldwide? The reason people were avoiding Chinatown must have been racism.
It takes an uncommon breadth of perspective and depth of intellectual humility to contradict evidence it is your job to collect and interpret.
Sometimes the trends of tomorrow just aren't in the data of today.
What modeler in the late 19th century, when children were still economic assets on farms and in factories, could have predicted they would become extraordinary economic liabilities?
Doomsday scenarios specifically are a distinct mind trap for Christianity-affiliated cultures, which is very visible in US specifically from the media they produce. It's a very appealing narrative.
immigration slips the state controlled school system, which is less than ideal for keeping a cultural consensus. maybe better with more diversity, maybe not
Us "numbers" people consistently fail to take basic human nature into account. Evidence of that, is everywhere; most obviously, in industrial/UX design.
Human nature is raw chaos. I have friends in the fashion industry, and that is an industry where human nature can cost (or make) a company millions of dollars. People that are good at understanding human nature, do well.
It doesn't respond well to number-crunching, though.
Also, as animal populations sometimes demonstrate, fertility can be a function of crowding. Pack a lot of critters together, and they tend to produce fewer new critters. Maybe the same thing happens to us.
The article assumes the original 1960 paper by von Foerster was a serious prediction. It wasn't. It was a joking example showing that fitting hyperbolic growth models do data leads to an absurd singularity, an infinite population in finite time. A much better write-up on it is Scott Alexander's "1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled": https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
Great link, thanks. In a pretty remarkable coincidence, the post you linked, which itself is from seven years ago, considers a prediction from over 60 years ago of an anticipated doomsday, and that doomsday date just so happens to be a few weeks from today:
>In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
Shucks, you are correct, it's not a coincidence at all. I thought it was about the predicted population boom writ large but TFA's hook is about the specific predicted date.
With a top heavy population pyramid, more resources have to be diverted to caring for the elderly, therefore less for raising the young - a self reinforcing mechanism.
When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain.
Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.
It seems to me that with natural selection, women who still choose to have children today despite having an education, employment, and all of the other factors that seem to harm the birth rate, their children will likely have as many children as they did or more, even with the same gift of modernity their parents had, and this issue will stabilize or we’ll resume population growth in 50-100 years.
Not sure why you're being down voted. Maybe because it's distasteful? Doesn't make it false. We are in a period of adapting to the introduction of birth control and modern conveniences. People with higher reproductive drive will reproduce and pass on the trait. People with lower reproductive drive wont. This isn't a judgement, just reality.
This scares me to be honest. We have an exponentially decaying graph if we compare resources on y v/s consumption on x. I don't know what the next 50 years are going to bring considering the total resources to use on Earth are an "infinite constant".
I argue that the depopulation fears are the second coming of Malthus. And like Malthus, they will be equally spectacular wrong.
Malthus’s problem was that it was easier for him to imagine the end of the world, then the end of Mercantilism. That he simply could not imagine that the large cargo ships would be used to trade in a globalized economy instead of upholding government monopoly over colonies.
Similarly, today’s doomers have an easier time imagining the end of the world, then the end of capitalism. That society will rather let it self fail rather then socializing the vast wealth we have created and is currently hoarded by a handful of billionaires, and instead distribute it justly where it is needed, e.g. as retirement to our aging population or as as subsidies to shrinking school classrooms.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 8.9 ms ] threadI think a better line of attack is that externalities are poorly accounted for in our current economic system.
At this point in many countries the institutions of power have been captured by the owners of capital and many of the issues facing modern society are a direct result of this.
People will always act in their best interest and along the interests of their class, and no class is more class conscious than the capital owning class. In the US, this informs policy, which is generally geared at making the capital owning class more money at the expense of everyone else.
I don't see any other reason for us to have such excess and have it all seemingly go to waste. We could solve world hunger right now with our advances in technology and [corporate] central planning but that would never happen under this economic system.
Thera are not even a correlation, but straight cause‑and‑effect relation between practice of "our advances in technology and [corporate] central planning" and the hunger
Politicians in the 70s were selling us the 3 days work week and retiring at 50 thanks to "automation", I fail to see how the "robots will solve all our problems" logic is any different.
Both commit the fallacy of assuming present trends remain in place indefinitely and ignoring technology.
They also both tend to be racist. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
Well, there are people that think the idea of preserving cultures itself is racist (well, at least western ones), or that there is no detrimental effect to an existing culture by enabling mass migration.
You think if, say tomorrow, all 1.4 billion citizens in China were teleported into the U.S., that there would now be 1.7 billion Americans, indistinguishable from the Americans that came before? Or, would it simply be 1.4 billion Chinese, alongside ~300 million Americans (if we're being generous...)?
Demographics and culture are obviously intrinsically tied, each individual migrant holds beliefs and values that have been forged and shaped over the span of the lives that they have lived in their country of origin. This is, and has always, been the case, its just more of a hot-button issue recently because:
A: We are currently getting an overwhelming amount of migration to stave off our own demographic issues, so the strain begins to have a more noticeable impact,
and B: Many of the migrants (from abroad) are coming from countries with cultures intrinsically incompatible with values Westerners have come to expect in their own countries (See: Sharia Law as contrasted with Women's Suffrage), so they stick out somewhat like a sore thumb when advocating to enact such policies and practicing such cultures.
And there's all kinds of value prejudging that is entirely external to the data about what cultural change means, what it implies, what effects it will have, all of which involve disputable and extremely politicized assumptions that are trying to borrow from the objectivity of population data for rhetorical momentum in favor of specific preferences of racial composition.
We saw the same kind of bullshit against the "papists" with Irish immigration, and the Chinese who came to work on building the railroads.
Immigrant children who grow up in the US, are just like any other children growing up in the US. They don't just follow whatever their parents believed in.
South Korea's birth rate is indeed dangerously low and threatens their economy. If they cared they could do something about their extreme workaholism and cost of living.
As far as immigration destroying the culture: it depends on the rate. A healthy but limited rate of immigration revitalizes cultures, but it's pretty clear that sudden mass immigration is dangerous and causes a lot of problems and backlash.
Speaking of fixing problems... if our billionaire class who seem so worked up about birth rates wanted to do something about it they could also address the most frequently cited problems preventing young families from forming. Like housing prices.
If we really get into a situation where dangerously low birth rates are threatening the economy and social stability, the boring solution is to do what we do for other goods and services that the free market isn't adequately providing: directly subsidize it. Pay people to have kids. The easy way would be a payment or tax rebate to married couples with 0 children to have one child. But that's the boring solution that doesn't involve massive reactionary cultural transformations, so the right-wing "problemists" won't like it.
South Korea is currently throwing money at the problem, upped parental leave even did some things to make it easier to retire if you got a lot of kids. I'm almost certain these things won't meaningfully change the situation (maybe go from 0.8 to 1.0) as all korean children are expected to get good jobs (white collar, certain professions) , they structure their society towards this and it's impossible to get a high birthrate like this.
I actually read about how something like presence of nuns in your town in italy was quite correlated with birthrates as it basically relieved all women but the nurses of some duties. In Korea you can see how the stability leads to a very significant effect on birthrates as Sejong is by far the highest birthrate region. Interesting since those really obsessed about birthrates also seem to hate the worker protections that make it difficult to fire people. I guess housing is another of those stability factors since renting really ups the risks of children.
This is the semi-racist part. The majority is always worried about how awful everything would be if they were to become the minority. Usually it's because they treat minorities like shit, and they'll worried that they'll suddenly be treated that way too.
Why would that possibly destroy their culture? Are the cultures of all minorities always destroyed? Why would that be? Is it because of racist assholes?
It's an incredibly weak argument when you think about it. The South Korean culture doesn't have to go anywhere: there will be the same number of Korean pop stars and artists and chefs as there was before, it's just that there will also be others coexisting with them in the same country. Somehow this is a huge threat? They're worried about their culture being "watered down" by lesser cultures? These are racism-adjacent fears, similar to their pure blood being mixed with the lesser races. If you're worried that the South Korean youth will get so much exposure to other cultures that they somehow drop or forget the Korean culture, that just feels like weird gatekeeping and more "mixed blood" concerns to me.
Is there a limit on how much culture can exist? If so, it's surely based on population. We're not talking about the South Korean population declining more due to immigration; it's already declining. If their culture is in danger, it's surely due to that, rather than some sneaky danger of all those dirty immigrants. How is it not based in racism? We're just talking about more culture overall.
Not to mention the fact that most culture spreads over communication channels, not physical bodies. Those terrifying 8 billion non-Koreans who are threatening to destroy Korea's culture are already influencing Korea's culture. Would it really make that big of a difference if they were physically within its borders?
example: I'm a new Zealander.
i don't want Americans immigrating in large quantities to New Zealand, because they have cultural values that change the nature of the society, in ways that i don't want it to change.
And i don't consider American a 'race', but more an agglomeration pf people with some general preferences, shared experience and even material characteristics ($$$) that will have negative impacts.
Now, if i could filter, as a voter, to 'allow in Americans that share my values and that would minimize change on axes that matter to me', i would accept immigration of Americans.
but, as a voter, i cannot do that. So instead i vote to keep immigration restrictive. that does not mean I consider Americans inferior, not that i hold that they are meaningfully different from me in any way except culture.
it's not racism. but instead a generalization that we are forced to apply as individuals.
does that change your perspective on this?
I can almost guarantee you are wrong about this, especially about Americans who would ever emigrate to New Zealand. You are voting based on xenophobia. The only reason it's not racist is because "American" is not generally considered a race. But it's xenophobic, nationalistic, and based on deep-rooted stubborn ignorance.
It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.
It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.
This might also be one of those things that aligns with people's experience of the world, and the de-population thing is inherently counterintuitive unless you are, by definition, outside the norm- that is, you would only ever notice this if you live where people already don't live. (rural Japan, etc.)
There seem to be real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form, and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact.
I guess what's "surprising" is that birth rates are responding to the pressures I'm alluding to? Rather than just continuing runaway exponential expansion?
The idea that a growing population has quite serious effects on the natural environment hasn't been proven wrong. Trying to get the entirety of the third world up to first world living conditions is putting a serious strain on natural systems. Having a lower population would probably help with that problem.
The current panic around falling populations seems to have two drivers: economic systems that are built as essentially a ponzi scheme, like many retirement plans including social security, and a pretty racist idea that we need to have a lot more white babies to keep brown people from taking over.
There are two different groups I think. One is not having kids because of environmental issues, but I think there's a larger group not having kids because of systemic societal issues that make it hard to have kids. (sometimes it's the same group but not always)
So part of what I was pointing out is that when people say "we need less people" they aren't implying "wow, I'm glad the population is shrinking" they're really saying, "less people need to be born in the future"- which probably isn't true.
> and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact
Also, it's not obvious, since, with the exception of China, no one actually meant to do this. It might actually lead to a lot of human misery, the same as climate change might do, so it's not clear that having less people in this specific way is a net good- for example countries like Japan completely collapsing in on themselves and going extinct. I think what you meant by smaller population was just have the same exact society but thinned out, but that's not what this next chapter of degrowth looks like. The boomers who insist on their full pensions at 60 are pretty much killing the youngest generation and leaving them with nothing, and to a certain extent everyone is being rational actors- there's no reasonable way out of the problem.
I wonder if people in the 2080s will be saying that about the underpopulation hysteria from the 2020s.
There is no underpopulation hysteria. However, the math around demographics is settled.
It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.
The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There probably would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.
What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.
It's also not just that we accommodated explosive populations but that eventually birth rates really did simply start slowing down for discernible reasons that future models were capable of integrating. Even if we continue to have technology that would give us the capacity to accommodate future increases in population, those increases are no longer happening.
That's a bit unfair to Malthus though; sure it was the enlightenment, but all he could rationally go on was to assume that the last 2000 or so years of civilization would be similar to the next, in terms of food and population growth.
What would be abstract would be to make the assumption that unprecedented technological advancement would be made in the next hundred years, bordering on ( to what Malthus would be) magic. You can assume any problem will be solved if you also assume a technology will be invented to fix it. But that's not a reasonable approach to make if you have no reason to believe it is possible.
The world he was modeling in the 18th century is a very different world than we ended up getting. IMO it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a reasonable observation that made sense for the time.
It's somewhat analogous to Y2K, in that there were obvious problems that were going to happen. We didn't experience those negative outcomes because immense engineering effort solved the underlying problem. That doesn't mean Y2K was "invalid" or "wrong," just that the problem itself got addressed before it could blow up. Same with Malthus, chemistry and mechanization allowed us to solve the underlying issue of food production scaling slower than population growth.
Additionally, it is reasonable in the 1790s to assume exponential population growth. It would not be until the 1830s that Verhulst would even model it as a logistic curve. Moreover, human population growth really was on a roughly exponential trajectory until very recently.
Obviously we did not experience such catastrophe. But it's also a bit wrong to call it "invalid" when it was a completely logical conclusion to make. If we're going to allow him to invent a magical technology that addresses it in 1798, then all reason goes out the window.
And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential. Agriculture wasn't linear. It wasn't even in his day. There was improvement in per-person output since, say, the 1400s, and more since, say, 2000 BC. There was a technological component even then.
So population wasn't exponential, agriculture wasn't linear, and what he said would happen didn't happen. How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Not really. The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, therefore something bad happens when consumption outpaces production.
> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential
You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.
> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production leads to a negative number. The theory itself is pretty water tight from that perspective. Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant after technology changed. But it certainly did not become "wrong" unless math also changed to the point where one function growing faster than the other eventually intercepts and exceeds it.
It is a bit odd to get this worked up over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago.
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
The main thrust of the article (as I understood it) is historical context and how human processes can change given circumstance. So basically: demographic decline will be happening and well-understood until these circumstances no longer persist.
It's like Isaac Asimov's essay the Relativity of Wrong, which, if boiled down to one sentence says (paraphrasing), "People who said the earth was flat were wrong. People who say the earth is round were wrong. But if you think believing the earth is round is just as wrong as believing the earth is flat, your view is wronger than both of those put together."
Same thing about equating 2020s and 1960s population forecasting.
To use your analogy: let's rather not get too complacent about figuring out the world isn't flat and risk placing all future bets on it being round.
If you’re vague enough about it, you can never be wrong! And if you’re overly specific and have a modest following of rubes with more money than sense, you can take some of it! A lot of it!!
You say "complex systems" but are actually referring to human behavior.
Humans are unique in that they change their behavior in light of predictions. You can't make a prediction, and publicize that prediction, without changing the system.
From what I've heard, many people are declining to have children precisely because of the environmental effects of overpopulation. There are of course other factors, but that's one factor.
Now that I have a kid, there is doom over population shrinkage
Sadly this will be used by propagandaists to doubt scientists
Why is that sad? What other conclusion could you draw from the facts?
Science uses models to make falsifiable explanations and predictions. That these predictions are falsifiable and can be rejected, superseded or require fixing is how it's supposed to work, not an indictment against them.
No, it is not meant to work that way.
The situation were formed by pretty predictable and easy to model factors, and if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
Yes, it is. Science builds models that try to make falsifiable predictions about the world. You observe, note the predictions failed (if they did) and either fix the model or ditch it, or some things in between.
> The situation were formed by pretty predictable and easy to model factors
If what you claim were true, "pretty predictable and easy to model factors", it would have been modeled easily in a way that worked accurately to predict the future. Just the fact that this didn't happen should tell you it wasn't all that easy.
> if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
What alternative to science and the scientific method do you propose?
Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.
Who could have thunk just two months after videos of people dropping dead in Wuhan and after the virus spread Worldwide? The reason people were avoiding Chinatown must have been racism.
The Science(aka the Government) is always right.
Sometimes the trends of tomorrow just aren't in the data of today.
What modeler in the late 19th century, when children were still economic assets on farms and in factories, could have predicted they would become extraordinary economic liabilities?
I swear, half the problems in this world are humanities people doing linear progressions and advising somebody making a policy based on that.
My country GDP growth has been dependent on foreigners since time immemorial.
Think about it this way: the desired population is a sub-function of the desired society that someone is attempting to describe
If the total population configuration is growing faster than your desired population configuration then simultaneously:
1. There’s “too many” people not like me
2. Not enough people like me
Every argument about this is pure chauvinism
Us "numbers" people consistently fail to take basic human nature into account. Evidence of that, is everywhere; most obviously, in industrial/UX design.
Human nature is raw chaos. I have friends in the fashion industry, and that is an industry where human nature can cost (or make) a company millions of dollars. People that are good at understanding human nature, do well.
It doesn't respond well to number-crunching, though.
Also, as animal populations sometimes demonstrate, fertility can be a function of crowding. Pack a lot of critters together, and they tend to produce fewer new critters. Maybe the same thing happens to us.
By the way, here is the (short) original article: https://www.bioinfo.rpi.edu/bystrc/courses/biol4961/Doomsday...
>In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
Set your calendars!
But - we do have similar (and real) science like psychohistory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics
When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain.
Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.
Der letzte macht das Licht aus.
Malthus’s problem was that it was easier for him to imagine the end of the world, then the end of Mercantilism. That he simply could not imagine that the large cargo ships would be used to trade in a globalized economy instead of upholding government monopoly over colonies.
Similarly, today’s doomers have an easier time imagining the end of the world, then the end of capitalism. That society will rather let it self fail rather then socializing the vast wealth we have created and is currently hoarded by a handful of billionaires, and instead distribute it justly where it is needed, e.g. as retirement to our aging population or as as subsidies to shrinking school classrooms.