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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

"I also happen to think that fertility matters, because people existing is good."

No need to worry, plenty of people exist. Every contrived "benefit" of fertility is actually a benefit of having a sufficiently large working population, not of rotely making new babies. Not mentioned in this thought exercise is the concept of immigration, the tried and true method of ensuring a sufficient working age population as famously exemplified by the greatest economy the world has ever known.

It's a particularly important distinction since those wealthy nations that manage to score well on this metric tend to skew towards theocracy. And those that do not tend to share the common characteristic of having large immigrant populations already, which fuel their higher birth rates.

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I'm pretty pro-immigration, but this just delays the issue. Global fertility is trending downwards, and while the nations where immigration comes from are a few generations behind, they will get to where the nations that immigrations goes to are eventually.

It's important not to catasrophize merely by extrapolating trends. Trends rarely hold true, _especially_ when holding true would lead to catastrophe. But one of the _reasons_ why they often don't hold true is people start thinking about and planning for the catastrophe.

Merely saying "well we will just have more immigration" isn't a good enough answer. Partly because A) you can't _just_ do that. Japan has very clearly chosen not to take the immigration that it very easily could get to solve its demographic issue. The US, which is topping this metric largely thanks to immigrants and recent immigrants, is also experiencing a pretty widespread backlash against immigration right now, and it's tough to say what immigration rates will look like in the medium-to-long term.

So A) a country has to _allow_ immigration and B) even if they did, if nothing else changes that's merely a stop gap solution. Real solutions that increase fertility in groups where it has declined need to be found. They might find themselves, but I think it's safer to assume they won't.

I'm so curious to know what the optimal number of human beings is. Recall that the earth is finite, so presumably we would hit this point eventually. But for some reason, you don't seem convinced that we should ever stop.

Thinking that falling birth rates and a declining population is a bad thing is very much not the same thing as thinking that we should never stop increasing the population.

This implies that the current number is the right number then, doesn't it? If so, why?

No, it implies that the current number isn't above the maximum.

how do you calculate what the maximum is, do you have a model for it?

I see three primary approaches:

1) Massive social support for child-rearing to essentially bride people to procreate.

2) Liberal immigration policies geared towards increasing the working age population and filling in skill gaps.

3) Already being a society that is primarily oriented towards religious orthodoxy.

We've seen many nations try #1, sometimes in ways that are extraordinarily extravagant (especially by US standards of social welfare) and the results have been mild at best, if not entirely insufficient.

We've seen nations such as the US and the UK go for #2 with amazing results. And although that may not be sustainable forever it is certainly sustainable for a few more generations at the very least based on global birth rate trends.

Personally, I want nothing to do with #3 and would never want to live in such a society. I imagine large majorities in developed nations generally agree.

Option #2 still seems like the best bet.

I'm not convinced those are the only options, at least if option 1 is purely economic. I could imagine a society that is more geared toward supporting children and parents, and encouraging parenthood, in other ways. ie. 'parenting as a village' or other things along those lines. Don't know how to transform the society we have into one that looks like that though.

1 is exactly what Denmark does on many levels. From early medical to care to infra to lifestyle. Children are accepted as part of whole life, not as some bothersome nuisance that most western countries treat children as such.

There’s also 4) some sort of Handmaid’s Tale hellscape where women are essentially forced to reproduce. How long until an authoritarian country decides to try it?

> Every contrived "benefit" of fertility is actually a benefit of having a sufficiently large working population, not of rotely making new babies.

I disagree. First, people are good in and of themselves. Second, while immigration is great, the health of a culture requires some endogenous replenishment.

How does a country skew toward theocracy? There are only a handful of theocracies and most don't have notably high birthrates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/theocracy?variant=zh-tw#Curren...

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