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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

This is a can of worms, for sure. But we must facilitate and celebrate childbearing as a society. We’ve been able to do it in previous generations. But recently our priorities lie elsewhere: careers, money, status. When the worth of an individual is measured by how much money they make, children take a back seat. Read into that what you will, but we are not headed the right direction.

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Given our demonstrated inability to act as responsible stewards for the limited resources available to us on this planet—not to mention one another in the face of this scarcity—perhaps we would stand a better chance of being a healthier and happier society as a population of 700 million rather than 7 billion?

To be clear, I understand that getting there will be undeniably painful given our economic systems’ expectations of and reliance upon indefinite and unlimited growth. But such an outcome may be unavoidable in any case and it’s one I’d rather see us plan for and soften the impact of than continue to rush blindly into.

I just don’t believe any more that the Earth can support the number of people we have at anything vaguely shaped like a modern Western lifestyle for much longer. We can and should continue to try to reduce our rate of consumption. But we’re too big at this point to have many good solutions left. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re running out of usable sand.

This would definity create some issues if the change would be fast but also there would be some possitive side effects where it would solve few problems, e.g. if population over time decreases by 50% suddenly current real estates problems would be much easier to solve.

Who's going to do the maintenance on the existing housing stock? Who's going to demolish the decrepit and abandoned buildings?

Real estate is not really a space problem; we have a lot of nice, uninhabited land all over the globe. The problem is that people want to live near denser areas for various reasons and reducing the world population will (probably) only reduce the number of dense areas, but not the housing problem within them.

The main problem with degrowth is that it's typically a losing strategy when there are competitors that choose growth.

I suspect these two problems are not as unrelated as they initially seem. My criticism is of modern western lifestyle where value is the unit dollar. I fully agree with your premise. But I’m not sure I feel good about the answer being “population regulation” (which has it’s own implementation issues). There has to be another way…

I’m not suggesting we cap the number of children. I’m saying that it’s maybe not a bad thing in the long run if more and more people choose not to have kids (or choose to have fewer).

Degrowth doesn't work. We take a huge hit in our standard of living if we decrease the number of people on the planet.

And you don’t anticipate the same thing happening anyway as we find fewer and fewer economically-viable resources each year?

We are blowing through the financial inheritance left to us and sooner or later that well will run dry (to wantonly mix metaphors).

This is flat out incorrect. Depopulation events (like plague) in over-populated areas historically led to higher standard of living for the remaining.

Depends how it happens.

To put it callously, old people can't work much and consume lots of resources, so a plague that kills them off (however sad) actually makes life easier for everyone else.

But lower fertility rates have the opposite effect, the ratio of old people to young people increases, which is why it makes things harder.

There's a good chance AI and robotics can replace a big portion of human workforce. If that happens, then the high ratio of old people to young is no longer a problem.

I decided to have children early, my first at 25 and I tapped out at 3. I would have been happy with less, God knows how much easier my life would be if I didn't have to deal with that part of life. Maybe I would have continued my postdoc longer, wouldn't have to worry about buying a house big enough, and being tied down.

Most people say kids are worth it, and it teaches you something about yourself, and that's certainly true. It's not a requirement though to have that appreciation, but I think there is actual utility to bringing healthy adjusted kids into the worth. Maybe we will reach some sort of grand equilibrium in the future with everyone having exactly 2 kids (more likely we go down a different path before then), but now is not that time. We have a lot of challenges, and unless people actually make the sacrifices and try and raise kids better than themselves, they're going to be better adapted to the future world than we are.

I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million? Maybe just one atomic family (though that would be biblically fucked up), maybe a small town of 2000 would make more sense, add in a few for redundancy, more than enough sand to go around, we'll just run the whole thing. Getting down to 700 million you realize would entail forced castration for almost everyone, are you imagining some dystopian society where we castrate and separate into breeders? I just don't see how your solution is at all plausible in the first place. I'm sure we have 700 million people alive no now under 20. So what's the plan, create a political party?

There is no need to specifically pursue this policy: it works out this way economically anyway. As it getting harder and less convenient to have children, populations growth slows down. If there will be time of prosperity ahead, it will pick up.

The wealthier the population, the fewer kids people need.

> I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million?

I’m not advocating for that number as a limit. I’m proposing we consider that a smaller population in general may be a good thing over the long run. A factor of ten was simply an easy value to reach for to jumpstart a discussion.

Pretty much any country that approaches development and has equal rights for women leads to a birth rate bellow replacement level. You don't need to castrate anyone, you give women education, birth control, require dual incomes to effectively survive as a family unit, equal rights and an (semi-)urban lifestyle and it pretty much shakes out to that automatically. Eventually the issue will be to have enough children, and an economic model that that can deal with shrinking old populations without horrific consequences.

There is only 77 countries that are above the replacement rate and it's going down everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

When the sand market reaches a certain point, enterprising people will discover new sources of sand.

Did previous generations truly facilitate and prioritize childbearing over other alternatives (careers, money, status, etc) or was it simply that women didn't really have those alternatives and so had children by default? Men have always had the opportunity to pursue both their careers and have children because women put children before a career. For a long time that was due to the very limited career options available to women, and the inertia and assumptions that led to have persisted until very recently.

So I don't think the solution is to look to previous generations, because they didn't facilitate childbearing so much as they restricted other paths for women to at least some degree. Traditionalists might argue women were fine with that arrangement, but it seems noteworthy that women jumped at the opportunity to pursue other paths. Which means if we want to increase fertility rates again, it probably means we need to do something new, that doesn't present having children and having a career as mutually exclusive.

The problem is that many progressives don’t see raising children and making a home as having a career. I’m not advocating that we delete progress and steal careers and opportunities from women. Rather, it should be a socially acceptable option to be a homemaker (regardless of your gender). But this intense push to have dual income households and 50:50 women:men STEM ratios seems absurdly unrealistic to me when you factor in biology and humanity. Furthermore, who’s going to perform childcare in a society where caring for children is not a respectable pursuit? Who’s going to care for power couples‘ kids without income inequality? Robots?

I think the way you spin history is somewhat unfair to men. A “career” is not an “opportunity” to most men I know. It’s a requirement. It’s long hard days of stress and labor. Some of us are lucky and rather enjoy our labor, but it’s labor nonetheless. Just like making a home. You say women were restricted, and certainly that was true for certain paths, but I also suspect previous generations enjoyed societies where women were happy in large part because they were not being told that they needed to be like the men to be happy/valuable. Personally, I would adore the opportunity to be a homemaker, but alas that opportunity is not available to me. It cuts both ways.

Anyway, my main point is, irrespective of gender, dual income households are not a positive status quo and it sucks trying to plan a family around two people needing to work. It’s not fair to children who deserve more attention than day care. And it’s not fair to all the homemakers out there who are honestly some of the most valuable people we have. And importantly, it doesn't achieve the replacement rate so it’s ultimately a losing strategy details be damned. We need to figure out how to affirmatively value homemaking so it can be regarded on the same level as a career. And I suspect if we can do that, birthrates will go up.

> But we must facilitate and celebrate childbearing as a society.

I know this is unpopular, but just an opinion without facts, and I strongly disagree. This agreed "it must be that way" is one of our main problems and turning this planet over, we should reconsider.

It's survivorship bias—where bias means skewed from the full distribution of choices people and societies made, not bias as in discrimination.

Most of the families and societies that didn't prioritize population growth (by reproduction or immigration) aren't around to advocate for that approach's merits, whereas those that did are.

Fun fact: for each human alive today there've been 15 deceased humans ever. As zombie apocalypses go, 15:1 doesn't sound too bad.

Kurzgesagt has some interesting videos on human population if that's your style: https://youtu.be/LEENEFaVUzU?t=206 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

Primer has an interesting video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sa_fWQB_4 "How many people might ever exist, calculated"

Women are increasingly uninterested in child-bearing as it comes with significant opportunity cost and decrease in the status quo quality of life. This is an unavoidable fact. Trying to make it more palatable is not going to work.

My argument is that we need to fix that mentality because it’s poisonous. We can’t both 1. exist, and 2. have a society where bearing children is seen as a huge opportunity cost and decrease in quality if life. We will all die.

As long as western society measures worth in pecuniary terms, this is unlikely to change.

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