For the first time there's more people worldwide aged 65+ than aged 5 & younger
reason.com
reason.com
https://scholar.harvard.edu/msen/publications/identifying-ju...
I'll not be having children because I believe that we will be facing mass extinction events in ~2030's, so I think it's immoral to bring another person into that.
Just because there's something awful in the future doesn't mean you should throw away the present.
> What if you’re wrong? What does that cost you?
If he's wrong it costs him having raised a child. If on the other hand he's right but assumes he's wrong then it'll cost him having raised a child into a terrible world. It's a tough choice to make.
I doubt it is, but if so, and education just "exposes" natural talent, I wouldn't be worried. We already have a lot of natural talent in the developed world that's untapped. India alone should have 4x more geniuses than the USA.
> A smaller population leaves us poorer and less capable.
I'd like to discuss this with HN. Less capable to do what? We won. Nature won't kill us any more, we have no predators, we know how to produce more food than we need [1], transportation is so easy we get access to things from all over the world and communication so seamless we can stay in touch with anyone.
What do we need more people for?
Our largest existential enemy right now is unsustainability.
> There's no reason our current (or a larger) population isn't sustainable by changing how we generate energy or dispose of waste.
I don't think anyone really knows this to be true, and in fact I suspect it might apply to small communities, but not to the world at large.
Even if we could continue growing for now, eventually we'll reach a limit. But in any case, why do we want to keep growing?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
When has 'unsustainabilty' ever caused the destruction of a large portion of a human population? Seriously. Can you think of any?
The two existential threats -- the two things that can, have, and will -- wipe out millions are War and Disease.
Everything else -- asteroids, climate change, sustainability -- are speculative. But, evidence-based analysis clearly points to War and Disease.
I wouldn't be so sure about that ;) Everything seems to suggest that we're about to have a bad time.
you can have less people but everyone educated.
I'll believe that when I see it. Organizing disparate groups of people is quite difficult.
What methods are you using to know this is true?
If we keep the planet sustainable, we also have time on our side, and that beethoven will still be born, just later.
Yes, this seems counter to everything we're told about the population explosion. It's not the 1960s anymore, but our education hasn't caught up to that yet. Hans Rosling writes about this extensively in Factfulness.
The raising of such children in stable family units or non-dysfunctional academies would probably be a bigger challenge than the birthing program.
Without a growing population safety nets collapse because there aren’t enough young people to support the older people. Government debt spirals out of control as revenues can only decline in the future.
Capitalism itself, at least the way it functions today, starts to fall apart at the seems.
No modern western country has any system to deal with this. Stocks values, social security, government spending, staffing (military and private) all rely on more people with more productivity and more money on the bottom end.
Capitalism is the bootloader for a Star Trek society.
True, but the structures we have are mathematically unsustainable. Eventually, it has to become something else. When that shift happens, it's going to hurt.
I think it's better if that change is more gradual rather than a sudden collapse. A gradual reduction of population would be an excellent way to accomplish that.
We'll have to deal with it in some way. UBI, extending production, shifting focus from competition to cooperation can all be done gradually.
Population growth at this point is a result of extended lifespans, due to far fewer people dying of disease, infection, famine, and war. In all but a handful of nations (like Afghanistan and South Sudan), birth rates are down to replacement levels or below, or will be there within a generation.
And declines in birth rates are a consequence of poverty reduction. In the late 1990s, the global extreme poverty rate (less than $1.80/day in today's dollars) was 29%. Twenty years later, it's less than 9%. Astounding!
Get people out of poverty, and the birth rate problem fixes itself in a generation. Which is exactly what happened to the "first world" nations, if you think about it. In the 19th century, Sweden had a 90% illiteracy rate, and was so poor and hungry that fully 20% of the population emigrated to North America. Today, they're... Sweden. The gold standard of modern civilization. Why can't, say, Yemen accomplish the same thing?
I'm a big Musk/Bezos fan too and share their dreams of colonizing the solar system but let's be fair, our amoeba ancestors had billions of years in which to adapt to the planet. Homo-sapiens have barely been around for 400 000 years and there's little evidence our current societal structures will be sustainable for a fraction of that time.
Life may compete with the elements as it has for so long and so many times on Earth, or become completely obliterated as it may have been on a planet such as Mars.
Then again, without a long enough window of time for observance, we really have very little way to determine if life on Mars is already well on its way to a huge resurgence.
A lot of change happens in a little as 100,000 years...
I know I'm mostly focused on developed world, but baby boomers are now 65+, their children have exited the child-bearing/rearing age and many had only 1 or 2 offspring. Those children are yet to begin having children of their own and as people are having children later in life, there is a somewhat expected lull.
I have a sneaking suspicion as AI becomes prominent and if we are able to convert those capabilities to giving us more free time and a higher quality of life, this trend will reverse dangerously quickly.
I remember years ago reading a short Sci Fi story posted somewhere. I wish I had saved it. It was in the form of a letter from a father, who had transferred his consciousness to the cloud, to a son who was toiling to pay taxes so the people living in the machine could continue to relax in the afterlife.
Is it The Uploaded? ... perhaps not since you said short story
"In the near future, the elderly have moved online and now live within the computer network. But that doesn’t stop them interfering in the lives of the living, whose sole real purpose now is to maintain the vast servers which support digital Heaven. For one orphan that just isn't enough – he wants more for himself and his sister than a life slaving away for the dead. It turns out that he's not the only one who wants to reset the world..."
https://www.amazon.com/Uploaded-Ferrett-Steinmetz/dp/0857667...
Old people tend to have children, grandchildren, and beyond, and tend to be very concerned with what sort of world they'll be living in. That's a very strong investment.
The relatively abstract problems of the future tend to take a backseat to the more concrete problems of the here-and-now, disproportionately so in regards to risk
For example, if I give you the choice of $1 today or $1.20 next week, most people take the 'today' choice even though it's objectively worth less. There's a tipping point though when the value of future propositions become more favored.
More to the point of the discussion, how much quality of life today will people be willing to sacrifice for an abstract idea of quality of life (particularly for somebody else) in the future?
https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclope...
I think what you're referring to is more akin to uncertainty risk.
But that is itself a function of age. We are pre-wired to be in favor of the continuation of the species. Below a certain age, that means a short-term focus. Above a certain age, that means ensuring that the kids are OK.
There aren't a lot of old undergrads (and undergrads themselves are not terribly representative of the entire population within the same age group -- this has been a known problem with tons of university research for a long, long time).
This implies that the research you're referring to wouldn't necessarily speak to what drives older generations.
A bit of both. There is research that suggests, but does not prove, as far as I am aware, that this is a function of age (or, more accurately, a function of having children). And my personal observations are in accord with that.
The underlying hypothesis is that when you're young, the priority in terms of species preservation is personal preservation: you have to stay alive and healthy enough to reproduce. That encourages short-term thinking.
After you've had children, though, the priority in terms of species preservation becomes the preservation of the children: they need to stay alive and healthy enough to reproduce, not you. You've already done your reproduction bit.
I'm still not aware of research that speaks specifically to the present-bias though in terms of it changing as one ages. If you have research related to it, it would be something I would be interested in reading.
It is! IIRC, the thinking is that the usual reproductive strategy is to have as many babies as possible, so that enough will survive by chance to reproductive age. Humans veered away from that as a result of the need to give birth far earlier in the development process than other animals (because of our huge skulls).
This increased the cost (in terms of time and energy from the parents) of children significantly, making it impossible to have huge numbers of offspring. Thus a different species survival strategy was needed, involving increasing the chances that any single child will survive. This, the thinking goes, led to social structures such as the continued involvement of grandparents, etc.
If you look at other animals that have "expensive" children (such as, for example, elephants), you see similar effects.
The whole subject is really fascinating.
> If you have research related to it, it would be something I would be interested in reading.
Me too, actually. I came across this stuff a long while ago while working with a researcher in a closely related field, and haven't kept up with it much since. I may have a list of the related research papers in my archives somewhere. I'll see if I can dig it up.
In two words: climate change.
In three words: the housing crisis.
The old have a marked tendency to vote against the long-term interests of the young.
First, I don't know if there's a clear age divide on opinions on those things. Perhaps there is, but I haven't seen data on that either way. Subjectively, it doesn't appear to me that this is the case.
Second, it may very well be that the stances people are taking on those issues are because they see those stances as being positive in the long term. (I'm not considering "the housing crisis", because I'm not sure what you mean by that in this context).
You and I may (and it sounds like we do) disagree with other's assessments on these things, but that doesn't actually speak to motivation.
For the climate, I think the point is that the younger and future generations will have to live with it, while the oldest will be dead. Not that either generations tried to deny climate change or make it happen.
As for climate change that has been the result of half a century of increased consumerism kickstarted in the 50s and spearheaded by the Baby Boomer generation (which, for the most part of the ride, was young).
Don't worry, the near future "65+ plus" people will hardly be able to afford retirement, much less housing...
It's not uncommon that they fail to understand why their children can't afford to buy a flat, while they had theirs in their early twenties.
Well, they also have several decades of working, investing, and accumulating wealth on them, so why wouldn't they?
The question isn't whether "the median of tomorrows old will still have more than the median of tomorrow’s youth" but whether the median of tomorrows old will have more than the the median of tomorrows youth when said youth gets old itself.
Raising the age gets you there, I think raising taxes does the opposite.
That being said, I'm not in the US but I am pretty sure the US is not that different from here.
It's still unsustainable and it's expected to increase again to 47-49. The politicians are dragging their feet because nobody wants to be the guy announcing that, but it's going to happen, it's just a matter of time with the president rotating every few years until one will be painted in a corner.
I remember a comment from an estate planner. Old people don't care about their children. They care about their grandkids.
As an older person, I'd like to think that this isn't a forgone conclusion.
Generally, I see the possibility of a stabilisation or gradual population decline as excellent news.
Outside of the media articles (which seem to be mostly written by Gen Xers) regularly published painting both “Boomers” and “Millenials”, alternately, in disparaging lights, I don't actually see much of that from either side that goes beyond the usual “people a couple generations apart don't understand the conditions the others attitudes and actions are shaped by” that's been true of any similar pair of generations any time since, well, forever.
That said, there is a long tradition of the older generations thinking that the younger generations are in some way degenerate. This has been true for the entirety of recorded history and will probably be true for all future generations. All of the insults currently directed at millenials were equally directed, just as much, at the boomers when they were of that age. And, mark my words, millenials will be saying the same things about the generations that follow them.
In this respect, nothing has changed. Which essentially makes it meaningless.
ahem.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
Pushing lifespans past average 100 will be very difficult.
The way I view it is this will be good, because old people have lived long enough to be satisfied with life, and don't need short-term pleasures or have the ambition to build up huge amounts of wealth. They are also wiser. The old people I know live simple lives, tend to be open-minded and look out for the next generations.
Then again I'm from a place that puts more value on family and less in oneself or money than the USA, at least from what I can tell.
The world's largest economy going dramatically to shit isn't just a problem for the world's largest economy, it's a problem for the world.
Addendum: Putting focus on your family doesn't exclude you from creating problems for "others" who don't fit your view of virtuous people. Donald Trump comes from a wealthy family who seem to do very well at ensuring their dynasty will be preserved. They take care of their own.
Well to be fair young people screw us too. They just do it in a way. Young people have some really stupid ideas about how society and world works because their experience in tends to be quite limited. Old people's stupidity tends to be more along the lines of clinging to the cultural norms of the past.
The stupidity of the old: we should make the young people pay for their own college educations, and then retire on their student loans.
What I’m referring to just natural self interested voting. Namely protecting housing prices and expanding healthcare for the elderly.
For all countries, democratic or not, it’s going to suck simply because old people are expensive, and often have problems which simply require great deals of time. We will not be able to do a great job on this across the globe, so we’ll hit simultaneous humanitarian failings and economic struggles to try anyway. When the population pyramid flips, the economy doesn’t grow. When the economy doesn’t grow, its the young people who hurt the most.
https://www.thenationalherald.com/235942/greece-first-in-eu-...
Yeah, the Baby Boomers, for example, the most populous young generation, did so much good with their "vested interest in the long term outcome of the world"...
(Not to mention slavery, all kinds of bloodshed, WWII, Nuclear-backed Cold War, all the way to climate change, from earlier, but still booming generations).
Governments around the world have been saying to the boomers, don't worry when you retire, we will keep paying your pension no matter what...
Governments never plan long term and always use the best case scenarios.
They should probably have seen this coming a long time ago.
Take a simple example: my grandpa retired at 55 years old with full pension and benefits(In Europe) and passed away this year.
He has been getting his pension for more than 30 years paid into his account and adjusted every year to match inflation.
He was retired for longer than I have been living. There is no way this system is sustainable in the long term.