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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

The ageing and shrinking population is a temporary, one-off problem. There's no fundamental reason why a replacement or below-replacement birth rate is a problem - in many ways it's advantageous - but it's a really big problem over the next few decades because we didn't plan for it. We have a big cohort of baby boomers with long life expectancies, grossly inadequate pension savings and considerable political power. We built our economy on the back of a Ponzi scheme, with the assumption that we'd keep giving birth to more suckers to fund the social security system.

Immigration doesn't fix that problem completely, but it allows us to deflate the Ponzi scheme gently rather than waiting for it to collapse. We buy ourselves three or four decades to raise the retirement age, raise taxes and rebalance the economy to suit a stable population. It's not perfect, not everyone will be happy with it, but it's the only good option.

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>The ageing and shrinking population is a temporary, one-off problem. There's no fundamental reason why a replacement or below-replacement birth rate is a problem - in many ways it's advantageous - but it's a really big problem over the next few decades because we didn't plan for it.

Taking a perhaps unwarranted broad view, economies of scale allow for us to achieve certain productive activities that we would otherwise not be able to. Taken to an extreme, a tribe of 100 humans would never be able to develop a space program, for example.

Even aside from that, more people means more "black swan" thinkers/entrepreneurs that can have a population-wide impact. It took just one Einstein to develop General Relativity and now humanity will benefit forever.

Obviously humans are chewing through natural resources at an astounding and unsustainable rate, and we'll extinguish ourselves in a few hundred years if nothing changes. If your view is that humanity should co-exist in much smaller numbers in harmony with nature on Earth, your statements are reasonable. I take the optimistic view that we're meant to keep growing indefinitely beyond the Earth, and so a shrinking, aging population is indeed a concern.

UN forecasts suggest that the global population will plateau at between 9 and 11 billion by 2100 to 2150, followed by stasis or a very gradual decline. IMO, those are excellent numbers - more than large enough to launch an interplanetary civilisation, but manageable within the resource constraints of Earth.

I'd be worried if the population was forecast to shrink below a billion, but that's highly unlikely on any reasonable timescale. I'd be worried if the population rose much above 11 billion, because then resources start getting really tight. Anywhere in the middle is fine by me.

If we do start terraforming Mars, I might be inclined to incentivise population growth. Unless we're absolutely certain that we can make it work, further population growth is a huge risk - every extra billion increases the pressure on resources, which increases the risk of conflict, which increases the risk of an extinction-level event.

The UN forecasts are ridiculous at any long term timescale. They assume that desire for children is not heritable so everywhere will undergo the demographic transition and just somehow magically the world will reach replacement fertility and stay there. In reality the share of births to women who already have 4, 5, 6, 7, 8+ children has been increasing in the US for over a decade and the ultra orthodox have gone from politically marginal in Israel to over 1/4 of the population. They’ll probably be a majority in my lifetime. In the US Mormons, Amish, Hutterites and Hasidim all have high to very high fertility. Absent a deliberate state driven destruction of their culture, Soviet style, that’s likely to continue and the same dynamic of cultural and biological evolution for greater fertility will just keep on working somewhere.

There will be no stabilisation of population.

All population data for the last century disagrees, and no magic is needed to explain why: the cost of raising children in modern society is so high and the child mortality rate so low that there is strong societal pressure to have less children. Sure, some fringe groups can resist this in the same way that the Amish resist electricity, but this will not be mainstream. Even the Haredim are having less children than they used to:

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5439005,00.html

That assumes both the cost will remain the same (or a factor), and that children mortality rate will continue to be low, neither or which are a given.

Add a couple climate catastrophes and wars for resources, and we can see the landscape in 2100 or 2200...

But the US has been at or under replacement rate for births overall for a long time now.

I'm an exmormon, birth rates are higher for Mormons, certainly, but even they've been obviously dropping. I had three batchmates out of 9 in the missionary training center with 10+ kids in their family. That used to be relatively common, now it's almost unheard of for newer families.

The US has been under replacement fertility for less than 100 years, under four generations. On an evolutionary timescale this is nothing. It’s like dropping 100 thoroughbreds on a small island. Come back in 20 years and if there are still horses they’ll be maybe a hand shorter. Give it a hundred years and they’ll be ponies.

If Mormons have higher fertility than non-Mormons then they’ll grow as a share of the population, even if the modal difference is less than one child. If the average Mormon family has three children when others have two they’ll increase their population share by 50% a generation, neglecting immigration and apostasy.

> The US has been under replacement fertility for less than 100 years, under four generations. On an evolutionary timescale this is nothing.

So? Human society and culture can change absurdly fast. If the evolutionary impulse to reproduce was that strong, you wouldn't be seeing places like Singapore with comically low birth rates.

What evolution compels us to do is have sex. We've just disconnected that from reproduction.

Re:mormons, yes they have a higher fertility rate, but it's also been rapidly dropping. And without taking into account conversions/apostasy the numbers are kind of useless, and taking them into account is difficult because it's just inherently hard to predict. As an ex-mormon I'm aware that the internet has caused some major problems with retaining members for the church, because information has become so much more accessible (much of it contradicting church teachings, obviously).

> What evolution compels us to do is have sex. We've just disconnected that from reproduction.

It compels is to do everything we do in life. There isn't a single trait ever measured in which the heritability was zero.

The disconnect is a temporary issue. Evolution will quickly replace the desire for sex with a desire for children, or will give us traits that make successful use of birth control unlikely. There is no stronger selection pressure.

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