The global fertility rate is falling
bbc.com
bbc.com
When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation.
A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
The techno utopian solution of allocating everyone a 20 m^2 apartment, a vr headset, and 1500 calories of soylent per day is going to be a disaster unless you also allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated.
Think Maslow's wotsit of needs. And I think back on where I grew up, what my parents did; they got married early 20's, and were financially secure enough in blue-collar jobs to afford a house twice the size of the one I managed to finally buy at age 32. With that house and the luxury of being able to make ends meet on a single income, they were able to raise three kids.
Meanwhile nowadays a lot of people have to work their ass off just to keep afloat. You can't have a healthy relationship if you don't have the time or energy for it, you can't raise kids in a shitty shared apartment, you shouldn't have kids if you can't take care of them because you have to work.
But, more than that, I'm also not sure if I'll ever be secure enough to make sure they're secure in the future that seems inevitably coming, with regards to global warming, etc. I just feel it isn't responsible currently.
I'm not so sure about that.
Loads of wealth is consolidated at the top, both in terms of economic class and age. People who got their jobs and attained management positions after barely graduating high school are demanding bachelor's or master's degrees for jobs that will barely pay rent. Landowners bought up when it was cheap and refuse to lower prices or sell for below what they think it's worth, even going as far as evicting people during a pandemic, knowing full well those units might not be filled in months or years, if ever. Some young people will get to a point where they can buy stuff up and work their way up the ladder, but there will be plenty more people who have it all given to them by those who established themselves when it was easier. I don't expect the next generation to be any more compassionate.
There are already endless reports of there being insufficient workers for agricultural jobs, nursing, teachers, etc. Wages haven't risen to meet the demand. They've remained stagnant or dropped in the long term. Meanwhile, those at the top are richer than ever.
Wealth at the top is often created by rent seeking. Just extracting money without actually making anything. I'm pretty confident that if the number of workers dropped and demand for labor increased, they'd just squeeze harder. Shut out the ones who didn't make it and terrify the ones who've managed to hold a job about the possibilities of what'll happen should they quit.
People are already getting paid more being unemployed. Employers are trying to get people to work for them again while offering them less than unemployment pays. They're not even trying to compete because they know people are going to come desperately crawling back.
Why are the same jobs requiring higher levels of education now than they did in the past? If you've worked these jobs you know they don't require anything past a highschool education.
Why is housing seen as something that must constantly increase in value? It doesn't, we've been through housing bubbles but people still cling to this belief and continue to pump air into the bubbles with speculation based on it. If you've owned a home you know that it is a constant sink for money just to maintain its existing state let alone what it costs to upgrade it to modern standards as it ages.
What is driving people away from the sectors you mentioned? Is it only lack of pay? Why are we not funding these sectors when they are so essential to the functioning of our society? Where is the existing funding going, specifically whose pockets does it wind up in?
Why don't employers offer higher wages? Are they really being greedy or are their profits going to something else like rent or other business costs?
I don't think this is entirely to be laid at the feet of the richest members of society. Yes they protect their own interests but all of us are responsible for ensuring that our communities continue to function and improve. We've neglected that responsibility, we've all collectively failed. We all have to work together to fix this, blaming one group or the other will solve nothing.
Who do you think is responsible for those reports? It's employers who have enough labor for now, but foresee a more competitive labor market in the future & don't want to have to raise wages.
> People are already getting paid more being unemployed. Employers are trying to get people to work for them again while offering them less than unemployment pays. They're not even trying to compete because they know people are going to come desperately crawling back.
People don't eternally just walk around in blind terror of being unemployed, irrespective of the labor market. If the labor market gets tight, economics and history indicate that wages will adjust.
We have never seen economic conditions remotely close to what we would see if the population were actually shrinking.
Insufficient/shrinking supply of a good, but prices going down instead of up? What economics are in play here?
I don't know if you live in California, but I think that there's sort of a reality distortion field that comes with living in a big and expensive city.
Here in Georgia the rents are cheap and people seem to be moderately satisfied. A little money goes a long way. You can own acres of land dirt cheap and do with it whatever you want.
There is ZERO evidence that's the case. In fact all evidence points to the opposite. The more money people have the less likely they are to have children.
I'm not suggesting that we should therefore lower people's incomes. Only suggesting that the idea that his has anything do with lacking economic opportunity has zero basis in fact.
The richer a country gets, the less kids they have, period.
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follow up: According to this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
birth rates do rise at some level of income but not enough to cover deaths.
Here's some other charts to look at
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
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To put in another way, let's wonder if we lived in a post scarcity society and everyone had all they needed and more. Would the birth rate explode? Would it go up a bunch? Would it hit the replacement level? I suppose it's all speculation but my reading of the data it is would not hit the replacement level.
Basically, for whatever reason, people that are well educated and well off want children less than those that don't for whatever reason.
In places like America, the cost of childcare is commonly pointed to. However this phenomenon is common enough across multiple countries with different labor arrangements that I genuinely doubt its just the cost.
As a slight digression, mental health is particularly dire because culturally we have not learned how to advance it yet. Mental health is not given the same reverence as physical health.
It's common sense more or less that you need to drink water, eat healthy food, get good sleep, get exercise. Some people don't do it, but it's well known that you should.
What do you do for mental health? Take some time off occasionally? There is simply not an equivalent body of knowledge as what is needed for physical healthiness.
If the industrial revolution made food abundant and jobs sedentary such that obesity is a problem, the information revolution made similar problems for mental health- but we don't spread awareness because being depressed or anxious isn't as visible as being obese.
Good mental health comes from feeling loved and needed and having a purpose in life. Love can come from one person or a community but it's absolutely essential. Having a purpose and feeling needed are as important as having the time and energy to feel like you're living up to these obligations.
I feel like the idea of communities has all but been broken down. Similarly with purpose. Simply working to achieve more comfort doesn't seem to be a fulfilling purpose. Most people work just to get by without any sense of what they're doing is important. People are generally made to feel replaceable and powerless.
I have no idea how to solve these problems as I feel like they are fundamental problems of our society. How can you feel necessary when you compare yourself to billions of others instead of 100s? How do you feel connected to other people when you don't even know your neighbors?
I can tell you what I try to do for myself. First, I make sure I'm being healthy. I get enough sleep, exercise regularly, and cook a large portion of my meals. I try to prioritize my relationships with other people over work. Within my work, I left software to start a company that made me feel more connected with the people benefiting from my work. I still struggle with mental health a lot but when I look at where my life was 10 years ago to now, I feel a much deeper sense of fulfillment.
The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Yes, you can technically spend 100% of your income, or even >100% with debt. But if you choose to live like that, then when you get laid off, or get sick/disabled, or divorced, or forced to start caring for a relative, or have your house burn down, then all of a sudden what's already a major emergency is exacerbated by financial issues.
Decreasing our population now is like increasing our savings rate. We know difficult times are coming. Fewer people will only help us navigate the transition more humanely and equitably. Not only is this true from a macro/global scale, but also a micro/family scale where it's obvious that having more kids than you can afford or have time to raise is its own kind of cruelty.
Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt.
Not from an evolutionary standpoint, lol
An economy exists to fulfill human needs of various kinds-- making stuff, providing services, etc. Old people intensively consume (medical services, etc) and don't produce anymore. Getting too high of a ratio of old people therefore has some impacts beyond equilibrium labor prices.
Why do peasants in Africa have more children than Lawyers in New York? Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco?
Poor people in general have more kids than rich people. It doesn't fit the data.
Because below a certain agricultural productivity level having more kids is actually beneficial for your economic success. Once you get over a certain productivity level it makes sense to have fewer kids and invest in them moving up the economic ladder.
>Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco?
Because the cost of every warm body in a household in SF is completely asinine so people have fewer kids than they would like to.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/about-bill-gates/a-conversation-w...
The reason peasants in Africa have more children is manifold: from religion and lack of knowledge preventing contraception to outright necessity, because in these regions child labour is a thing.
A for developed countries: again, multiple reasons with religion still being right up there.
An ageing population likely consumes less. The demand for goods will go down and the demand for labor will likely remain constant for a shrinking workforce. Asset prices will crash if future demand does not keep up with current valuations. This is not just bad for the investor class, this is bad for anyone who relies on the modern banking and financial systems.
Fewer children increases unequality. Less children means, that inheritance does not spread across several people. To the contrary, it consolidates within an ever shrinking size of the population. And because as of today it's capital ownership and not work that makes you rich (with few exceptions), higher demand for work might not be enough to offset this development.
There is historical evidence of this, like consequences of the Black Death:
"Another notable consequence of the Black Death was the raising of the real wage of England (due to the shortage of labour as a result of the reduction in population), a trait shared across Western Europe, which in general led to a real wage in 1450 that was unmatched in most countries until the 19th or 20th century. The higher wages for workers combined with sinking prices on grain products led to a problematic economic situation for the gentry."
Growing populations can also reduce wealth inequality and lessen the importance of inherited wealth. These are complicated issues, to be sure.
As far as production, remember the automation issue as well as the fact that, well, more content is great perhaps in smaller communities, but think of the absolute firehose the Internet is and how many creatives would want to be able to sustain off of a consistent fanbase at at least an average salary. If more (or everyone) becomes a Youtuber, does that itself reduce who is watching the vids, reduces payouts because of the sheer amount of content, and lead to a scarcity? AND MORE IMPORTANTLY: Is too much of the same type of thing being created (e.g., people used to one Nicki Minaj probably think it's great to have Saweetie and Meg Thee Stallion, but what if they get their own copycats/spinoff artists? Too much of the same thing at once?) I'm assuming economically both our scenarios would adjust to views in an increase/decrease in population.
Also throwing more people at the science situation doesn't necessarily help if we aren't training quality people in the field and resort to degree factories. Think about the sheer number of papers being published nowadays. I assume it is hard for them to keep up and who knows how much more bad science (or disinformation in general) would occur then.
Please put my Malthusian fears to rest!
Except in terms of pure economics, labor won’t necessarily become more valuable, because with less population there will be less consumption and less demand for goods. So even though the dwindling supply of labor will have an upward effect on labor’s value, the dwindling demand for goods will have a counteracting downward effect. And this will only be exacerbated by increased automation.
Economic inequality and lack of economic opportunity is going to be a problem regardless of the population growth rate, and the solution will require something more substantial than simply have less/more children.
To balance out the automation question, it's just as likely that technical advances will improve the ability of older people to do economically useful work that they want to do. There's a lot of mental horsepower, life experience, and will there, if you can work around physical and metabolic limitations.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
To a large extent, that lack of economic opportunity is a political choice that was made by the selection of particular parameters for the economic system. Trying to engineer a shrinking population to force different parameters to be chosen is an indirect way of addressing the true problem.
What leads you to believe demand for labor will rise with a shrinking population? Furthermore, why wouldn't most companies simply continue automating? While Japan certainly isn't comparable to most western nations, it's certainly a good example of the potential downsides of a shrinking, aging population. A growing one isn't possible forever, either; it will eventually level out. We've just been innovating so quickly our population hasn't had time to reach a new equilibrium.
Maybe some people aren’t happy without having a yard? There are plenty of plants around here though and there’s an entire block that’s left as just trees and grass for people to walk around in. Maybe without that I’d feel the same way.
Aging societies spend more on healthcare, have a smaller working base, and typically don’t have the kind of growth that makes it easy to borrow money to invest in new things. The typical result is slow economic growth, high taxes, and low levels of services for workers.
In the short term, absolutely. But after a generation, the old working population has retired and the smaller new working population cannot support them.
I think this story lays out how that could look: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Facebook, Netflix, and Xbox don't count? (Or HN, for that matter ;)
As the traditional factory job disappears more and more, the aging population will provide a huge source of new caring/support jobs. We'll have to find a way to pay them a living wage, but then we had that problem with factory jobs in the early industrial revolution too.
The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once.
A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors.
But those productive sectors need to exist! In a world where many people are doing such low-productivity jobs, everyone will be much poorer.
and countries that cant keep up will be left behind with starving useless populations
bonus points: theres gonna be severe fresh water shortage
Same stuff
First of all, you'll be able to kiss your retirement bye bye.
Second of all, you would likely see decline of the economy in real terms. This will cause huge dysfunctions in capitalism, as there will not be an efficient way to invest.
We're quickly moving from the population explosion problem to the population implosion problem. No one planned it or made it happen. But, it looks like we're not actually going to overflow the planet with people standing shoulder to shoulder. Instead, the problem we're facing moving forward is a combination of longer lifespans and less children shifting the elderly support structure from a pyramid to a column.
A big driver of this is people moving up in job prospects around the world. Clearly in rich nations like the US, Japan and UK couples are working more and putting off having kids. But, also in the poorer nations people are moving to the cities because that's where the jobs are. Once there, the combination of high rent and great reductions in child mortality means it doesn't make sense any more to have lots of kids hoping that a few survive long enough to work at a young age. Instead of having babies rapidly, women around the world are going to work to bring in that second income needed to pay the bills in the city.
It's great news, really. It's just really scary really great news because we don't know how to set up a society where there aren't enough young people to support the elderly.
a) AI and machine learning will raise productivity so much that they will steal millions of jobs from people.
b) Global population will eventually go into decline, which will crash the economy by killing growth.
But, these two stories look far less scary when considered together. In fact they seem directly complementary, although the timing is not likely to work out perfectly, so it won't necessarily be smooth sailing along the way.
The net result is that a decreasing population is a good thing for the planet, but a bad thing for economics.
I was expecting to read about medical/health reasons why men and women are literally becoming less fertile, but it's not that. It sounds like it's a side effect of countries/societies advancing technologically and socially. It makes sense, but I just never visualized it like that in my head. Wow, what a great problem to have!
But as you say, it is a problem, just in other ways we might not have considered before. It will be interesting to see how we figure out how to restructure society as the demographics shift. But this seems like it could be a very good thing for the environment, climate change, resource management, etc. Overall, seems like positive new to me!
No one planned it or made it happen
What worries me is that long term this can be reversed just like current trend is reversing away from population growth. Current trend seems to be driven by job prospects, education and costs of raising kids. But what if in a future we all had basic income? No need to worry about food, shelter or education for your children. Won’t this lead to population growing again?
This means there are 100 million girls less today in these countries alone, finding a suitable partner becomes harder and there are lesser number of couples will be there in the first place who can have kids
The 2.1 replacement is perhaps not adequate at all. The models are outdated and largely considers IFMR and few other factors, it does not factor really in issues such as the gender imbalance, hikikomori, much later age pregnancies ( higher chances of miscarriages etc?) and slightly more controversially also same sex relationships / marriages .
I do not mean to imply same sex relationships are bad or anything like that, What I mean to say is that everyone needs to have more kids as it is harder for same sex couples to have biological children ( while adoption is great and purest expression of parenthood it does not increase the population)
The same with Hikkikomori, and gay people. As long as there is 2.1 children born for every woman, then the population will increase.
The only factor which you mention that is correct is that in a society that murders female babies, then yes, you will need more than a 2.1 birthrate. And as the article mentions, India is expected to grow over the next 80 years. So they clearly have a fertility rate that exceeds whatever number they need.
I think you are confusing the fertility rate, with how many children a family with children would have. The denominator is different, and that's a completely different issue, but perhaps one that is worth thinking about.
2.1 children per woman is the REPLACEMENT rate, meaning this is what it would take for the population size to remain roughly the same. One kid to replace her, one kid to replace a random dude (not necessarily the father!), and .1 kids to make up for the kids that die before they reach adulthood.
This does not mean that every woman needs to have children. it means that the total number of children divided by the total amount of women needs to be 2.1 for the population to remain stable
Now that fetal sex selection is a thing, the previously fixed relationship between TFR and RR is fixed no longer.
Actual numbers are way off the real numbers.
In my kids school you can see a very noticeably difference in the count of boys and girls in any standard and section. It's noticeable to a point, if you walk in to a classroom you can see at least visually boys outnumber girls by a good enough difference.
I also refuse to believe this due to infanticide or foeticide. The dirty little secret is at least in most urban centers, even tier 2 cities, these practices are dead today. You can't blame these practices for the difference anymore. How then is the difference arising?
Again on a pure anecdotal evidence basis, I see people who have boys tend to have more boys. That is male kids are born more to families with more male kids. Also having the first kid as a boy couples tend to go in for more kids. On the other hand these days if some one had a daughter as the first child they don't even bother to have another child. This way boys are born way ore than. This is a huge problem. Reason being this is not wrong by any means. This not illegal or unethical. Yet it creates a larger social problem.
These problems will never go away in India as long as there are big fat wedding expenses(Pretty much entirely paid by the girls side) and dowry. And girls not allowed to take care of their parents, both in presence help and financial help.
The other part is of course due to Thyroid illness become prevalent in India. Many couples aren't able to have kids.
I expect the gender ratio imbalance to not only continue but get way worse in India. Like really to a point, where an upper middle class man wouldn't be able to find a bride after decades of searching.
So - this may be out of place, but here goes.
When making decisions about whether or not to have children, we operate in a state of partial information. (This is of course true of all decisions.)
I would like to contribute a bit of information.
I'm 66, and have three children and four grandchildren. My adult children are the most wonderful people I know, and it is comforting to be aware that we will be part of each others' lives forever. I spent a lot of time in assisted living facilities with my mother as her health failed, and I saw a lot of old people in those facilities with no one to visit them. It is comforting to know that I will not spend my final years in loneliness and isolation.
Our grandchildren are an unalloyed joy. We have two 3-year-old identical twin grand-daughters, and they are working their way through the nuances and finer points of grammar. It is indescribably adorable to see their efforts at expressing their detailed and elaborate thoughts. My grandsons are seriously into aviation, and I've become the go-to aerodynamics consultant. Our four-year-old asked me with great seriousness, "Grand-dad, why is the horizontal stabilizer always shorter than the wings?" Another time, the family was at the beach. He, his dad, and I were looking out at the ocean. He asked, "What are waves?" Darn good questions!
No rose-colored glasses fantasy here: I've found that your children can break your heart and devastate you just as well as bring you unfathomable joy. My daughter (a black-belt IP lawyer now), when she was about four, wandered off in a crowded video game arcade, and we searched through the crowds for her for about ten minutes, with growing panic and horror. We found her and all was fine. Fact is, if you love someone as much as you end up loving your children and grandchildren, their decisions and choices will have profound effects on you. My therapist observes that you are only as happy as your least happy child.
So, the decision about whether to start trying to have a family is a BIG-ASS decision, with life-long consequences. I highly recommend it.
The decision to have kids is a lot like the decision to continue living. There is no logical basis for it. Or rather, any latticework of logic you erect to justify this choice is based on a foundation that has nothing to do with reason. It is an emotional and spiritual desire to live and love, and give more life and more love to the world.
That's why I when see people engage in complex rational calculations about the utility a child may or may not bring into their life, I feel like they are missing the point. Of course people ought to be thoughtful about the decision to have children. And there are very good reasons to abstain. But in a sense they are not grasping that having children is a profound act of hope.
This is a genuine problem, and one that maybe tech could actually partially solve by bring adults of different ages together in ways that build friendships rather than accepting the only way to not be lonely is to rely on your family.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” CS Lewis
There is also a second nuance where those who follow similar health patterns of the former had immediate family that were “functionally absent” for a large portion of their life (primarily mental health or result of psychosocial trauma).
There is also survivorship bias here too, in that I treat patients because they are sick and I don’t get to see the “lonely” individuals who function well in the community.
My decade of experience as a registered nurse made me fear in spending my twilight years only to be “beloved by my nieces and nephews”.
It especially has life-long consequences for the children! I wouldn't want to put children in this world. I don't think the future world is a nice place to grow up in, even the current world isn't. IMO it's selfish to make kids just to feel fulfilled and not be lonely.
It’s incredible how relevant and hard to answer some of the early questions are. What are waves? How do objects maintain flight? It’s not just that, but the nature of the questions. They know what waves and wings are, but they want to know things about them. That’s kind of the pinnacle of human intelligence right there. The ability to care to, and then to ask, such interesting and important questions. There would be no progress without wondering about things that matter, or things with significant answers anyway.
I’d have a lot less grey hair if it weren’t for my kids but things like this are what made my life matter. I love this about kids, and I enjoyed your comment.
I'd be happy with and without grandchildren, but it would be incredible to be able to give all of the love that I can when I am retired, when I have less going on in my life and the time to do so.
Speaking of this - "tends to be factual, rational, and logical." - do you worry much about what the world will look like when your grandchildren are middle aged? I spent probably too much time concerned with rising authoritarianism, climate breakdown, shortages of food and water resulting from same, and their resulting wars, and it brings a tinge of panic to my thoughts on their future. I certainly stress out about this far, far more than before I was a parent.
I don't really know how best to address it, aside from trying to live in a way resilient to those things, and am curious how you think about this things given the obvious joy in your post (and again, thank you for sharing this; it brought joy to my own day).
So do most parents. Why? Misery loves company.
The entitlement of parents knows no bounds.
Have kids to make yourself happy. Have kids to experience true joy. Have kids to take care of you when you’re old. Have kids to know real love.
What follows isn't as much of a direct reply just some thoughts motivated by your post.
My wife and I met when we were in our 30s, neither of us having ever been in a serious relationship, and both of us having given up ever being married, not to mention having kids.
We're both fairly clear-eyed and long-term environmentalist types, and we know how big an impact every person brought into the western world has. We decided to have a single birth child, and then adopt a second.
We had our son, who turns 18 in a couple of months, though various circumstances caused us to not adopt.
Our wonderful son is on the autistic spectrum; he's nearly six feet, two inches tall, with a beautiful, kind spirit, but his emotional and intellectual development is several years behind.
We never made the mistake of piling up expectations on or toward him. We're fine with the strong possibility that he will likely never materially achieve in ways similar to his parents.
He is loved and he loves us. My wife and I have, on average, another 30 years in this life. If our son is living with us for the next 30 years, that's fine. It would be our honor.
He continues to grow and mature; there's at least a good chance that he could end up moving out and going his own way in some number of years.
That would also make us very happy.
To a fault, perhaps. Humour is frowned upon, while overly pedantic comments are upvoted. Far too many comments uphold the stereotypes about engineers. I wouldn't expect a standard conversation about children to be possible here, both for good and bad.
I am not a parent (yet?), but this sounds very true based on what my parents always told me.
By the way, thanks for your comment. It might not be "in line" with other comments, but I found it genuine and heartfelt. And it enriched me.
But, I've met plenty of people who absolutely detests their parents and visa versa, their parents detest them and they are mean and rotten to each other. So YMMV as far as the entire topic goes.
In comparable circumstances, it took me half that time to grow panic :-)
Have we been reading the same version of Hacker News?
Keep in mind, most of the lonely old people you see have children. And I’m not sure it’s a good, caring thing to tell childless people that they will be lonely in old age, because it need not be true.
This presents an opportunity where technology can make (and is making) a difference. It is also the reason why we want Longevity biotech to make our healthspan equal to our lifespans. We are already seeing the need of this during the COVID shutdowns
lmfao
You can easily fit 100B humans on earth, with more of the earth dedicated to nature preserves. (Maybe a trillion people https://youtu.be/8lJJ_QqIVnc) Macau has over 21,000 people per square km. There are 510M sq km of landmass on earth. This means on 1% of the landmass you could fit 100B people.
You can fit quadrillions in ONeil cylinders just in our own solar system.
We shouldn't shrink into extinction, we should ride to the stars and populate the galaxy with consciousness.
Yes, because the earth's carrying capacity is about square footage and not the resources necessary to keep those people alive, healthy, and happy for 80+ years. How many square km of farmland do you think is necessary to feed Macau?
We will thus avoid shrinking into extinction and maximally populate all available 3-dimensional space.
Have you ever been to a densely populated area? You seem to think it will be more interesting. I speak to fewer people in cities than I do in the countryside. Nobody in a city cares about you. And if they do it's probably wishing you weren't there.
We can't even live as we are now without constantly being at war. What makes you think a higher population will make that better? You suggest colonising other planets. Do you understand exponential growth? Going to another planet is not a solution even if it was possible.
So I think there's an unstated assumption about the driving force behind human population. Asides from a couple of pretty extreme environmentalists, most humans want a world well suited to the life of humans. This means that fundamentally, humans don't care what happens to other life forms. And why not, if everything is doomed to entropy, why would we favour the outcomes of non sentients over us? The issue is, however, humans do not live in an isolated bubble. We are part of the environment, and the environment is a part of us. We need to realise we are symbiotic with the environment, even if specific aren't all that important.
As for high population density cities, as others have said, it's the support infrastructure which is killing us. Otherwise, urbanisation alone would have already brought us many gains in terms of pollution.
So how does this mesh with still growing? Short answer: policy. Technology alone will not save us. We need a lot of social and cultural changes to also increase the material efficiency of each human. If we want to continue to expand, we need every last drop of ideation, experimentation and ambition. We need an environment for people to thrive, without having a class of people who too busy patting each other on the back, and another too busy surviving to contribute to the greater cause.
Edit: I should probably also have mentioned that Technology is getting harder, and we can less and less wait for the magic bullet. We need to act now (on efficiency), so that we have space to invest in the future.
We're already using resources in an unsustainable manner. Human greed will keep it that way.
Now, once we have those O'Neill cylinders out there, sign me up! Just building a single one in space is going to require an incredible amount of resources, however.
> "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall T. Savage is a book (published in 1992 and reprinted in 1994 with an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke) in the field of exploratory engineering that gives a series of concrete stages the author believes will lead to interstellar colonization. Many specific scientific and engineering details are presented, as are numerous issues involved in space colonization.
I have no idea.
There are multiple factors that limit population density, most important of which is access to space and clean water. The fact that a professor from London, with a population density of over 10,000 people per square kilometer [1] is advocating for continued growth is odd.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_districts_by_p...
Maybe he meant every one will compete for migrants, but some of them will lose the game. (Probably the poor and climate change hit countries.)
My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up.
It worked kind of like this, you have kids, you want them to have as good or better life than you have. If you've defined "better" here as wealth and social status, then you want them to have more opportunities.
Getting them those opportunities (which you may have missed out on) costs money (wealth). Examples, good schools, good nutrition, good after school programs, Etc.
Also, the developing society is putting more social status points on "successful" people (at least outwardly so by their display of wealth) which incentivizes couples to both continue their careers and "success trajectories." That path costs still more because now you have to add day care and possibly a nanny or two to the mix.
Here in the U.S. there is actually an interesting empirical example that supports this, its called foster care fraud. When the state offers to pay money to someone as a foster parent, a small number of people will exploit this by becoming foster parents for many many children to accrue the state benefit for "caring" for them. As an example, it suggests to me that if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly, the result would be larger families.
I would not argue that this "proves" the supposition that child care costs drive down the size of families, but to me it argues that it is likely a large factor in the decision.
I think it is pretty clear that humans (like animals generally) are more likely to adopt K strategy (smaller numbers of offspring with higher investment in each) rather than r strategy (larger numbers of offspring with smaller investment in each) in a stable, secure environment, and that this is structurally favored by the environment.
I wouldn't put much weight on the suggestion that either the number or investment piece drives the other, though.
It's been tried, many times, without success.[1]
You could argue that those countries didn't try hard enough, but that's a fallacy the name of which escapes me for the moment.
[1] Demographers talk about a "low fertility trap": because young women grow up in a one-child environment, that is normal to them. They see their peers having one child, and they do too.
There are other factors besides re-norming: assortative mating is given a lot of weight; there are the effects of TV, social media, video games, shopping, and other distractions (measured as these things have diffused through countries and regions of countries). Check out a recent demography textbook.
(Fringe authors talk about the estrogen-like effects of obesity on sperm, and the 30% - 50% decline in micronutrients in food since the 1980s. They might be right, but they're fringe at present.)
I have a 1.5 year old and it's hard to explain the simple joys I get from just running around the house with him goofing off. It's nice to forget about the real world for a while and build a pillow fort. He's also brought much joy to other family members (grandparents, cousins), and my extended family is closer as a result.
This isn't something that you "figure out as you go", it's something that causes wars and societal breakdown. We're already in a democratic world where the key voting fault lines are young-vs-old.
Sure there will be a load of unplanned pregnancies, but a lot of people actively planning their family might choose to wait to see if they have a job/a place to live/are still alive after the pandemic is over.
Apparently there was a similar drop in birth-rate after the 2008 financial crash - people just held back waiting to see what happened before committing to having kids.
Then when that baby is ~2 years old, suddenly the pain of delivery, the sleepless nights and the baseless crying seem to be forgotten, and the cycle starts again.
Wife isn't having any more for medical and conscious decision reasons. We just feel that 2 for 2 is plenty a replacement rate for our middle class efforts.
Seems to be about the only thing, that can protect us from further overpopulating the planet with more humans. Even better, if it is caused by more education and more similar or equal opportunity for women. We should start celebrating women, who choose not to get children or at least not more than 1 child as climate saviors too.
A great resource on the subject is Countdown by Alan Weisman.
I did a few podcast episodes on my Leadership and the Environment podcast on population:
https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/alan-weisman
For those who think we can grow forever, Tom Murphy's Do The Math blog covers it in his post Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist
Its about time that "be fruitful and multiply" comes to an end.
In the past, having a family was status quo and basically required.
Now, it’s a choice.
Natural selection will heavily favor those with the “I want kids!” gene.
It's impossible for me not to think of Idiocracy while writing this - which was extremely exaggerated, but still...
- Who pays tax in a massively aged world?
- Who pays for healthcare for the elderly?
- Who looks after the elderly?
- Will people still be able to retire from work?
I welcome a declining population. Because the climate will benefit and the poor will be less so, and the threat of war would diminish. I would hope this, at least, because I'd like to believe that fewer lives would place more value on the lives of others.
Similar with war - tons of wars are fought for wealth and resources, which seems unrelated to population, and even with a small population, drone attacks, assassinations and proxy wars are still entirely possible.
Its an active and intentional decision not to do so. Unless society collapses and the knowledge of how modern mass production works to produce so much plenty evaporates it will continue to take a tiny percentage of the whole population to provide the resources needed to survive to the rest.
We should be expecting a technological singularity before 2100, not some dystopia where all wealth evaporates and the only people with money left are under 30s who get to work 80 hours a week farming rice for grandma.
Unless we have such a population implosion that we can no longer produce food or run our factories, then we don't need to "pay for" anything. We can simply decide to distribute the resources necessary for the care of the old.
The real cost of everything is the labor required to produce it, not the dollar value it receives in a market place. I don't think anyone is talking about a complete collapse in the labor pool.
Without the young, the house of cards collapses.
Advancements in existing technology just aren’t going to be enough at the timeline we’re looking at. Political change is another non-starter because it just won’t happen on a global scale. Then there’s the fact that for the vast majority of people alive today, the Earth’s condition in 50 or 100 years is rightly not even on their radar.
100 years ago there's NO statistic for child under 13yo death rate. Mostly because it was TOO high around 50-60% children are dying before they get ready for marriage.
My grand-grand-ma told me she had 8 brothers and sisters and only 2 survive: she and her brother. In that time it was reasonable to bake kids in enormous numbers in hope some of them are won't die. Then healthcare changed everything.
100 years ago was 1920. Many countries absolutely had infant mortality statistics by 1920.
See R.A. Meckel's "American public health reform and the prevention of infant mortality, 1850-1929" which (as the name implies) goes back was more than 100 years.
See also I. Loudon's "Death in childbirth: an international study of maternal care and maternal mortality, 1800-1950"
If anything it is a mercy that todays kids will go childless because any children they would have will just be even more thoroughly screwed by economic mandates placed upon them by long dead barons of industry.
How we can even think that putting more consumers on this planet is good for the environment is beyond me. The best way to stop polluting is to consume less. The max minimum of consumption is an absence of consumption.
We don't need more people, we need less of them. And if education and prosperity is making us recognize that, then I demand more education and more prosperity worldwide.
Extrapolated to society I'm not really afraid of an aging population of pensioners like Japan several years ago, because 10 years from now we'll be moving further from human controlled economic activity. But who knows if that is going to be a good thing.
I guess what I'm saying is we're going to hit Star Trek or the Matrix
I really feel like we don't have any effective model for how to integrate parenthood in our lives anymore, and so having kids has become almost an affectation or a hobby, rather than something that everyone bases their life around as a matter of course.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503981?seq=1
To me that seems like a natural feedback loop. Once population declines to a certain level people will want to have more kids.
>However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.
...
>As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.
...
>The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than three billion people by 2100.
We're still looking at a 2billion increase in population while simultaneously 9/10 billion people from least to less developed countries will be consuming more resources as they develop. Mostly through coal and oil.
Meantime the salaries are stale, salary deductions only increase, and corporations (ehem formally "charities") funnel out billions annually through tax havens and heavens.
In countries where social systems are not that mature and trustworthy (e.g. post-Communist countries) even the most qualified like doctors and engineers pick contracting as a form of the employment to skip contributing to the social systems or to contribute only the minimum required by law.
How long more is this sustainable?
It used to be possible to raise a family on a single income. However, once corporate interests (and the blind market itself) realized that having women in the workforce would both increase potential consumers and increase the workforce (thus depressing wages), the model of everyone should be a worker first and a father/mother/family member second won out over alternatives. Add to that an entertainment-and-consumption-focused value system, and you have the present day: young people either can't afford to start families or are culturally discouraged to; to be a mid-twenties married couple with kids is almost embarrassing or shameful in many social groups.
We need a new model of work, in which parents (both men and women) aren't punished for simultaneously pursuing individual career goals and wanting to build a family unit.
The X axis run at a nice pace, about 7 pixels a year, upto 2017
It then compresses the next 83 years in the space of about 10 years.
The neutral: day-to-day things are unlikely to be affected much. Fewer farmers, but fewer mouths to feed. This applies to most consumables.
The mildly negative: for knowledge intangibles, a lower total population means a lower number of scientists, entrepreneurs, etc. Perhaps substantially less. Apex projects that take a substantial proportion of the world's capital and labor (e.g. colonies on Mars) become a lot harder, with many becoming impossible. This is somewhat counteracted by most countries becoming richer and more educated.
The disastrous: older societies where each person working has to support multiple other people are sclerotic societies. A society where younger workers have to pay taxes 2x higher than they do today, to support a bunch of old people who already own all the housing and capital stocks? That's a society that I'd move away from in a hurry, regardless of if I'm old or young. I'm going to have to encourage any kids I have to study Yoruba.
This is one of those huge issues on par with climate change, but people mostly don't care or think about it. I'm not sure what governments can do about it. At some point I want to study Israeli demographics and fertility more, as it's the only country I know of that has maintained a high TFR (>2.1) even in its secular populations.
Most likely social welfare programs for the elderly will simply be allowed to collapse. Nothing will motivate the young to vote like having their paychecks eaten away.
I feel bad for young people graduating now; if they're not able to save the _entire_ cost of their own retirement over the course of their career, they are just plain screwed.
I don't hear any horror stories out of Japan about how grim life is there.
It seems to me that some parents have kids to help them deal with their existential angst and fulfill a need for meaning they couldn't find elsewhere, let's say providing and caring for people who are already alive and in dire need of help, lets say orphans in developing countries, homeless ppl etc. Or something entirely different. Having children have a very strong narrative for meaning associated with it, which might cause some who are lost in their life have children which will be equally lost.
I happen to hear things like "spread my genes" as example, probably not accounting for the 99.9% similarity with the next random guy and we all share the same ancestors. Even the homeless dude would help us spread our (common) dna if we could help him get his act together.
There are lots of good reasons for having children already mentioned and I agree with many of them, however, difficulty making friends and feelings of meaninglessness should probably be resolved before having children.
Focusing on having something meaningful to give is a lot better. My takeaway from the article is that people deal with more complexities today and might not reach a point where they feel enough "on top of things". Having children if already stressed out might not leave much left to give.
Unfortunately, I'm a photographer and COVID has destroyed the chances of that happening. Minnesota's wedding season is really short and runs from early June to late September. That means we may not have enough until the end of next summer. When you've been trying for as long as we have every month you wait is absolute torture. My wife cries regularly, and while I've held together better I've had a few absolute breakdowns.
Nothing has made me feel like more of a failure of a husband than this has. Our infertility is unexplained, so it could be my fault. Worse is the fact that I have a degree in computer science and I could have had a job that paid better in the best of times, and right now could be done remotely. It's agonizing that all of this stress and suffering could be over if we just had some more money.
The problem is for most people there's no definitive answer, and IVF success rates aren't absolutely amazing. It'll cost north of $30,000 for just one try after the actual procedure, testing, and medicine. That has less than a 50/50 chance of working. How many times should you try before giving up? I've already put two years worth of savings/retirement in to it. I honestly think insurance should be mandated to cover at least one round of IVF. Isn't making babies our entire biological reason for being?
'Do it better with less people' is what sustainable is all about.
Birth rate decline in many economies correlates strongly to rises in standards of living: kids are a hedge against economic bad times in poor, rural economies.
Cash will be king and assets will be sold for pennies on the dollar, so to speak - provided you can remain solvent in the whipsaws and gyrations of the desperate attempts to stave off deflation at any cost.
This is, overall, splendid news. Commendable this was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The care issue is real, not so much because we need people to look after them, which potentially could be automated, but rather the new generations are the ones paying into the system and funding their pensions.
The central theme is that modern children are "economically useless" and "emotionally priceless".
https://external-preview.redd.it/_mQKfLNs2BdBrdF5eF0GNxqPMlB...
China has been investing a lot on on designer babies, artificial womb, and cloning technologies.
It's going to be... interesting to see how it all develops.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)
The joy of children, the company, the pain of loneliness being childless etc are emotions that is like malicious code that hacks the human psyche in order to replicate some other lines of code on to the next generation.
So any extrapolation out 80 years is nothing more than sensationalism.
I truly don't understand this nonsense.
We can clearly see in the past 80 years, the really slow moving pre internet past, the global fertility rate has changed how it works significantly, but suddenly in this hyper-society we are wasting time looking at 2100?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/third-of...
If the fertility rate keeps being below the replacement rate, at some point humanity will disappear. While short/medium term negative population growth might be a good thing, at some point we will need to do something.
If humanity was facing extinction because people don’t want to give birth this is very solvable.
the latter seems fine to me but we still need to solve the problem of paying for the social security ponzi scheme and will have to deal with increased labor costs (which could be a good thing)
So if the US current attitude towards immigrants persists, this is a future in which it does not compete well?
It seems everything has already been said: Most of our problems are driven by population pressure. Leveling off is a good thing, despite potential expense of reconfiguring society and economies (but we have to do that anyway to address climate change!)
WTF?! The data says nothing like what the headline says!
Yes, the projection goes down sharply... but the best estimator of tomorrow is yesterday, and the last few years of data are saying nothing like what the projection is showing!
* People who defend the non-existent children * People who defend non-existent children can't be defended because they're non-existent
My opinion: do what your brain and heart tell you to do.
Case in point: This implies the professor has only one child.
Might see reduced populations by the end of the century?? We don’t even know if we’ll be immortal or off-planet by then.
Too bad this isn't an intentional march to Fukuyama take 2, but a sign of the Keynesian feedback loop being broken.
If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then
the size of the population starts to fall.I think it's perfectly reasonable that the numbers drop to 2 if more and more people in the world get stable lifes.
but on a serious note -- the global population has been falling. And it might be seen as a "negative" thing, but if you change your perspective: the global rate was at once higher only because women DIDN'T have access to education, opportunities, employment, or the rest.
A positive, vis-a-vis a negative, is a negative, right?
Looks like the projections contradict this in at least two ways:
1. The population of the United States is projected to grow slightly, so it's not "all nations"
2. The population of two of the most currently populous countries, China and India will drop so precipitously that I'm not sure where they expect the "migration" to come from.
https://www.hoover.org/research/africa-2050-demographic-trut...
Specifically graphs like this: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/goldstone_africa_...
And it's astounding that they somehow put an overall negative spin on it. The problems of an ageing population seem miniscule compared to the problems of resource scarcity and climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...
I don't want people to suffer unnecessarily. But the more people we add to the planet, the more we exacerbate problems with food, water, Co2 emissions, etc.
In the end, something will curtail human population growth. I really hope it's voluntary and painless.
You might enjoy Peter Russell's "The Global Brain" for another perspective on human population growth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1sr9x263LM .
> We are straining resources because of our bad policies and practices and politics.
It certainly seems that our carrying capacity could be much greater with sounder policies, practices, and politics.
Article points out that it is important to slow it down so decrease is not so rapid, otherwise it will be harsh.
It's easy to slow down the birthrate if country wants it. It's much harder to raise it.
The problem isn't the quantity of those resources, the problem is in distribution. The world is abundant enough to comfortably support twice as many humans, if human inefficiencies, waste, greed and selfishness are factored out.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt...
Enough food is already produced right now to feed every person on Earth [1]. Most estimates furthermore put the Earth's carrying capacity at around 2 billion more people than we already have [2].
The problems that people think of when they think of "overpopulation" are the result of insufficient distribution systems, corruption, unconstrained capitalism, faulty human psychology, and poor education. They are problems caused by human beings screwing over their fellow human beings. Some of these problems get easier to solve when you have more people, not fewer, and in any case, nobody's yet figured out how to make things much better in a shrinking economy.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241746569_We_Alread...
I suppose people don't plan that far anymore.
It'll convince more and more that healthful longevity is a viable future.
Really, this is an unprecedented phenomenon in recorded human history.
The entire social structure of basically every country on the planet is completely unprepared for the challenges that a rapidly aging popuation will bring. The effects won't be felt for decades after the change begins, and once it starts in earnest, it will prove very difficult to reverse in any short timescale.
It will become a sort of feedback loop - fewer people have children, so the capacity for children in the next generation is reduced. Because the retiree/worker ratio has now increased, the young people there are, are unable to afford having children, and so on.
Even with massive increases in productivity, you would see economies contracting. Ending up in a deflationary trap with increasing (and unsustainable) debt.
I see these kind of statements so often:
"AI will solve this problem" - really? The World Bank development report 2019 (https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2019) basically comes to the conclusion that "while automation displaces workers, technological innovation creates more new industries and jobs on balance". This has been the case for centuries now.
Automation causing mass unemployment always seems right around the corner, yet never comes. I'm confident that we're now in the "trough of disillusionment" when it comes to progress on AI. Things like self driving cars for example are much more complex than we had considered.
"This is good for the environment" - It might not be though; the economic issues caused by aging populations could lead countries to take exploitative short-term decisions; converting rainforests to farmland, using cheaper means of generating electricity (that also prove to be more damaging to the environment) for example.
It is generally more expensive to be green (in the environmental sense).
The competition for immigration (which seems like an inevetable outcome in this scenario) could also destabilise certain countries, with potentially dire outcomes.
"It will reduce inequality" - Japan is ahead of the curve on the whole aging population front, and the average wages there have basically stagnated for the past two decades: https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/wage-growth even as the number of employed people has stagnated/fallen: https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/employed-persons
I think the keys to this are: - Why are people having fewer children? If it's a genuine choice, then of course this is acceptable. But I think often the number of children people want to have is actually higher than the number they feel they are able to support due to economic (and other) reasons: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/08/27/the-empty-crib - If the retiree/worker ratio is going to increase, and life expectancy is going to increase, then how can we manage this in a way that puts minimal pressure on health and social care systems? - Are there any other ways we can prepare economically/socially for a society with an inverse population pyramid (I personally think this is a very, very difficult problem to solve, but would love to be proved wrong) - How do we manage depopulation of specific communities? This is a problem that Spain is currently experiencing (e.g. it is more economical to forcibly move people away from communities that are dying out and no longer economically viable)
1. Easy access to contraceptives (they are easily available throughout the developed world) 2. Positive view of abortion (the christian world used to see abortion as a crime, now with increased secularisation more is placed on the mother's preference than on the fetus). 3. Pressure on resources (when having children becomes a choice, it doesn't happen 'naturally', people are less likely to bring a child into the world if they cannot raise it properly). 4. Education and career orientation of women (Educated women make less children, they finish school around 24, start their career and if they don't secure a partner by 30-32 their fertility windows has closed - even if biologically they could bear children, they struggle finding a partner to raise children with). 5. The marriage institution has collapsed (Marriage is the bedrock of children rearing - high divorce rates, divorce courts, normalisation and acceptance of divorce has made people less likely to marry and thus having the environment in which to raise children). 6. Culture - it's not cool to have children. Now it's cool to travel the world and find yourself and experiment with as many partners as you can. This culture is not conducive to child rearing. Movies, books, music do not portrait happy families. Today, cool is to be 'different'. 7. Religion - christianity with its marriage and chastity laws is dying out. Is is being replaced by the secular world where monogamy and child rearing are not perceived as something desirable. 8. Lack of social support - as people travel to find jobs they do not live with their parents. Raising children without the support of grandparents is much more difficult. 9. Low wage growth due to women joining the work force. One man could maintain a family with children and his wife, 50-60 years ago. That is no longer possible unless you are in the top 0.1%. 10. Skewed dating market. Women are desirable by men until they reach 30-32. After that few men who want a family would try to know and marry a women because she is less likely to bear children and this is not a priority for her. Women are under much pressure to sort out their careers, know themselves and start of family by early thirties. The education and career 'system' is not optimised for mothers. 11. Global warming and reaching peak resources. We have reached the peak point in multiple natural resources and are destroying natural habitats at an alarming rate. This makes people less likely to see a hopeful future into which children have a place.
To summarise, we live in era of tremendous technological and cultural change where we reached the limits of our planet's resources in the way we currently use them and this has led to population shrinkage in the developed world.
In human population, we should be aiming for quality, not quantity. Quality also means diversity.
If higher quantity unavoidably brings a higher proportion of human suffering, then we have no other choice but to promote quality over quantity. I fear for the future of our species. Our evolutionary instinct to multiply combined with the tech we've created is now bringing this planet to the brink.
Everyone wants to exist. But I would rather exist in a positive way, than exist at all.
No really - trends are real, this is science, and we use them to actually estimate the future, in much the same way we try to do so with climate and other things.
"It will be positive for the environment"
Possibly not true. Low-birth Westerners are already the #1 emitters of Co2 by a margin, so it's not so linear.
" population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, "
Most GDP growth does not come from resource utilisation.
So there are definitly some upsides to less people, but it's also a tremendous risk. Never before in history has this happened naturally, and it's happening fast. This is a 'really big, kind of scary' issue that we have to contend with, and as your points illustrate, there are definitely many facets let alone the social one's.
Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing. Existing homeowners will do their damnedest to prop up prices by any means possible, but it can't last forever. Housing prices will crash sooner or later. It will probably happen in each country long before a its population has halved.
Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility in many countries. Who has time to raise kids when they have to work two jobs just to pay rent? But once it becomes more affordable to raise a family, fertility trends are likely to reverse until it a new balance is reached.
This is just one of the many factors that might come into play over the next 80 years that popular predictions about 2100 tend to glance over.
It certainly would improve our chances and reduce the rate at which conditions diverge from the baseline we've experienced for the last ~10,000 years, but it's important to recognize that we would not see meaningful total population reduction until at least 2100 even if the birth rate continued to drop dramatically and disasters claimed several billion lives[0]. There is too much inertia.
I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
>This stuff is being pushed from the top.
Is this some kind of Sparta thing? Like you all go up to the top of the mountain and someone pushes Dad off? Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
>It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family
When and where was this? As someone who grew up Catholic it feels like that cut both ways.
To be vaguely serious for longer than I want, my wife and I just had a long, unfun conversation about how hard it is to deal with her mom's dementia and I don't know that we could do anywhere near as well with dealing with it if we didn't have a kid of our own. It's a shitty Ponzi schema, but the alternative is being Shakers.
Pre-modern agricultural societies had huge families because there was so much work that you could always use an extra pair of hands. (Also, many of them died off anyway so you had to factor that in.) You are looking at the past with a seriously rose-tinted lens.
Starting a family used to be the first thing you did, but now it’s more of the capstone that one could easily not burden themselves with after all of life’s bullshit.
We are psychologically and financially exhausting a generation.
It was only in the recent history that it was the expectation that your child would live and go on to have greater than replacement number of children. That is evident by the fact that for most of our species history the total population was fairly static.
Pulling nitrogen out of the air and sprinkling it on domestic crops was real "unnatural" but it got us past ~3B
Especially if you are female. Children turn your very nice life into a completely different one and take up an enormous amount of resource.
I would even go a step further that in certain cultures simply getting married turns your life from a very nice thing into something destined for drudgery. Japan is a primary example as the woman is expected to take care of both sets of parents in their old age.
Do you love some man enough to take that on? Or are you better off having sex occasionally and skipping the marriage thing?
> I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
No need. People aren't stupid and can see the consequences of their actions.
Lack of elder care support is probably becoming more crucial than lack of child care support. Children start with their needs at infinity and get more independent on a strict time schedule--elderly get more dependent on an indefinite schedule and their needs go to infinity right before they pass.
Most people aren't thinking about the ROI of their kids, that ironically is a pretty modern twist.
Birth Control is way, overwhelmingly the #1 issue, so far ahead of anything else. Condoms and 'the pill' are a very new phenom. Imagine before them, when every sexual act had a pretty high change of pregnancy. And then it's easy to understand how sex<->marriage<->family are so deeply intertwined in pretty much everywhere. 'Sexually active' basically guarantees children, children need stability, so it's 'nuclear family' or bust for the most part, before the pill. An enormous amount of social conditioning is baked into this.
'Working for corporations' is better than 'working in a factory, mine, or on land you don't own' ie serfdom, which would have been the default for most of our ancestors in one way or another.
Undoubtedly, the 'thing we cannot say in public' is that double-working families has had a double effect on the family 1) less time and 2) more acerbically - the cost of living goes up, particularly for property, forcing everyone else into the same 'two workers or risk being be poor' trap.
Playing with the reproductive system (I mean social system, not so much physicality), is really, really dangerous, as I don't think our individual intentions are all that positive - but the silver lining is that the world does have quite a bit of people, and that in many places, we do need to have less kids.
Remember we're living a lot longer now as well.
So at least for the moment, if India and Nigeria can get a grip on fertility ... it has upsides.
The real challenge, and scary things is what this will mean longer term. Once Japan drops to a certain point, will they level out? Or expire?
Hopefully we can work it out.
If you view the purpose of your life through a purely hedonist lens, sure. If you view the purpose of your life as being a member of an unbroken chain going back to the very first living cell, with an incredible legacy to uphold and protect, the burden is really just a masked joy.