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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

It would take a TFR of 2.1, so depending where you live, a 40-250% increase in fertility.

There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid. Not even hunter gatherers could function like that

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You’re answering the wrong question. That’s the answer to “how do we maintain the status quo?” We can absolutely exist in a world where growth does not exist from ever increasing population, but profits will evaporate as inflation increases and labor supply contracts. As a sibling comment mentions, automation will be a component.

Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce. They’re not ready to make peace with this though (or unwilling to between now and death). One of the few things we do well as a species is kick the can into the future, or steal from it, depending on perspective.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

I'm pointing out that even in a profitless world, a dependency ratio of 2:1 is not workable. It literally does not matter how you distribute resources.

Sure, at a certain point, not replacing enough people means the species goes extinct over time.

That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.

The electrical grid collapses in a couple weeks if not for constant maintenance by thousands of individuals. Many parts of our technology society are like that, it will be interesting to see how the system decays.

Automation would need some breakthrough as profound as life itself to be useful without the millions of people behind the scenes making automation possible.

Based on unemployment rates, wages, and profits, we have a long way to go before labor for infrastructure maintenance is so scarce it cannot be maintained.

But the point is that you must begin poaching people from other parts of the economy to keep the essentials going, and therefore begin to chip away at our standard of living.

I think the more important point is that at a 2:1 dependency ratio everyone would be expected to take care of half another person, either directly or through payments, and be required do whatever labor is required to do that.

In other words, there is a point, quite likely less dramatic than 2:1 where "allowing" people to be unemployed becomes economically absurd.

My McDonalds order is already taken by a robot. Perhaps a significant part of my aged care will be as well.

Why? The metaphorical "You" won't pay for children, won't pay for doctors, won't pay for research ... are you going to pay for robotics? And by that "pay for" I mean two things. First: having one human shared by about 12 elderly costs 2700 euro per month where I am (including room and -basic- food, apparently better food is 300 extra per month, and I think you really want that. Oh and that includes management. Really it's one person per about 16 elderly). Let's say robotics halves the human part of that. That'll make it about 2200 euro per month (about 40% more than the normal pension, that's being reduced).

This is a low-ball guess, it assumes it'll stay the same price, with not even inflation and just price stability requires a LOT more children than we have, and a LOT more immigration than we have. In fact, you can easily calculate it requires a lot more immigration than is available. Birth rates are dropping everywhere. Immigration into Europe and US will dry up over the next 10 years or so. Plus the metaphorical "You" also don't want neither children nor immigration.

Second: it means paying for effective robotics research (a lot more than is happening atm) NOW. I can only observe funding is going down through deliberate government policy (seriously, the US military is effectively sponsoring robotics research more than our own government, through hand-me-downs). Other critical elder-age (and younger age) needs are also being defunded, like medical care. Both the care itself and educating new doctors, nurses, lab technicians, ... So medical care is reducing in quality, and can't stop reducing further at this point for at least 4-5 years, with no change in sight.

This will also make elder care more expensive. Unless you enjoy suffering for months when you simply hit your foot at 60 years or older.

Of course, all your current actions effectively mean private companies will solve these issues, and raise the price of robotic care significantly. "You" COULD pay a little now, and have this covered, but even paying for maintaining the currently insufficient level of medical care is too much to ask (and my Northwest-European country is far from the worst, in fact it's one of the best. But waiting lists have doubled in 3 years, and are at this point 100% certain to increase again next year. Still better than UK I guess)

> My McDonalds order is already taken by a robot. Perhaps a significant part of my aged care will be as well.

No. It can't. Not if "You" act like this now.

You'll be paying a lot to private robotics companies instead. Not rich? Tough. Plus, without kids, I hope you enjoy loneliness.

Robotics is an investment into the future, not a word that means everything's free. If it's "You" investing, you'll profit of it. But "you" won't do that. Even a basic investment to maintain medical care that "you" WILL need is too much to ask. Robotics and AI (and medical care) are therefore becoming a race to the bottom where the name of the game is to outcompete humans for jobs, lower quality for lower price. In THAT game, what happens to outcompeted humans? They lose. But it's the game "you" want to play: it's the cheapest one right now.

I think the capital class will attempt all the things you suggest as this shift occurs, yes. I think that system inevitably collapses, though. At a certain point, you get a French Revolution style mess when you push the working classes to the breaking point.

The system IS collapsing, because people refuse to do basic math and prevent it. And if the "capital class" succeeds in doing this, it MAY prevent a full collapse and, frankly, those members of the capital class deserve a nice wad of cash for it, as far as I'm concerned.

This is an opportunity to see how to make it work. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead eventually. I find the idea of creating new life to keep a poorly functioning pyramid scheme going grotesque, ymmv.

Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).

Things that old people need are going to get super expensive with a shrinking population because there are so few working age people providing those services compared to the number of retirees.

So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....

I’m absolutely telling people not to have kids into a macro that just wants economic slavery to pay back debt of all sorts incurred (sovereign, demographic).

Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.

Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.

You're screwed financially during child-bearing years if you have kids. You're screwed financially in retirement if you don't, because care is going to be super expensive if/when the population pyramid gets inverted.

The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.

Yeah, the people in the year 1000 really had it a lot better than us. You see when they had 10 kids and realized that they couldn’t split up their plot of land 10 times. They just went off to war and took some of their neighbour shit we should really just go back.

This is like going along with the crowd in China when they started killing off all their young girls leading to this current population imbalance. The right solution is to go where no one else is at the moment and have large families.

No one is stopping couples from having big families (except their economics perhaps), but no one should help them either. There are 8 billion people on Earth, headed to 10 billion. We are currently unwilling to spend what it takes and reconfigure socioeconomic systems to provide quality of life for the humans here now. Fix this and then an argument to have more kids is potentially palatable. But "spit more expensive [time and fiat] kids into the torment nexus?" Neither a rational nor empathetic argument imho.

> Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce.

I am increasingly tired of arguments for the elites to do something for the betterment of society. They have repeatedly shown that they don't care.

> There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid.

No form of civilization has ever had the access to automation we have today.

And in another 20 years, I suspect that'll be even more clear.

I also suspect that the value of automation will be captured by the top, leaving the majority with the same need to work.

We currently have about 800 times the population as we did during the time of hunter gatherers, so we can lose quite a large portion of our population while still greatly exceeding the previous levels. It could be that we are seeing the end game of logistic growth. A decline in population would mean that resources would become cheaper, which in turn could stimulate population growth again.

A population that declines through birth rate attrition gets old. The average age in hunter gather communities was about 15 years old. In the next 10-20 years, the average age in a number of countries is going to approach 60.

You can't just think about raw numbers, you have to think about demography.

To some extent. But hunter gatherers didn't have access to hip replacements and ibuprophen, either.

It's not really taken by a robot. You key in your order rather than asking an employee to. The same amount of human labor is being done.

I think you meant to post this to the other thread.

I'm not talking about self-service kiosks, I'm talking about "talk directly to the machine" sort of things they're already testing out.

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