Demographic "doomsday" misses the mark
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science.org
It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.
It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.
I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.
My peers who are skipping kids are mostly doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family, which I totally get. It's a huge trade off, I hope it'll be worth it.
Are your peers more ambitious than mine or are their ambitions to travel for cheap and watch as much netflix as possible?
(This is obviously not true of my coworkers/friends from work who can all afford kids and most choose to)
They often list overpopulation as a reason. But yes, it's not the only reason they give.
As an antidote to this kind of mindless negativity, just consider whether any individual human is happy to have been born. It seems very clear to me that most people enjoy being alive and so having children is moral on utilitarian grounds.
However, I wouldn't push the point. My view is that "life is good so having children is good" but not "you must have as many children as possible." There are various ways I might justify this philosophically, but I would just say that parents have a special obligation to their children and, if you have too many children, it's impossible to fulfill that obligation. So you should have as many children as you can effectively parent.
They do talk about whether the earth can sustain that population as a reason not to have children. They are correct to. Their children might be the generation who have to explain to their children what fish tasted like.
What I don't get from all of the demographic collapse hand-wringing: Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic? Why would stabilizing at a lower population be problematic? Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.
Because we've built an economic system based on the idea that you must, at all costs, grow. Stable success is insufficient and will be seen as failure.
And then we spent many decades programming people to believe this is the only thing that can possible work.
Nothing natural about this at all, it is just the result of the cult of capitalism.
Having declined, the population might increase again, and decline again, but with fewer issues the more practice we have. Stability sounds unlikely.
I think you're compressing a lot of hardship into "issues"... It's not about total number of people, it's about demographic distribution. If half of your population is at retirement age, who is going to take care of them? Who will be working to generate tax revenue to provide the social services that you expect?
Also populations don't just stabilize, they feed back off of themselves. If half of your population isn't procreating, you get fewer and fewer babies which is a vicious cycle. There aren't many policy levers to pull during demographic free fall.
The problems you are expecting from demographic free fall aren't going to happen for generations, and at any point during that time people could decide to start having more babies.
I'm not sure it's that easy. There are a lot of people who aren't able to work as they get older for medical reasons. And there's a lot of ageism that keeps older people out of the job market. Maybe that ageism lessens as the population ages, but we're not there yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_str...
The retirement age is now slowly being raised, and given time the system may level, but in the meantime "issues" will indeed present.
1. There are no incentives to stabilize at a lower population. It is not like population are decreasing because of overpopulation.
2. It is workers / welfare recipients ratio that will be the catastrophic problem.
with an easy answer.
Boomers will probably die off before that, but able workers aren't going to skip a meal for someone no one cares about.
This might also be one of those things that aligns with people's experience of the world, and the de-population thing is inherently counterintuitive unless you are, by definition, outside the norm- that is, you would only ever notice this if you live where people already don't live. (rural Japan, etc.)
There seem to be real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form, and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact.
I guess what's "surprising" is that birth rates are responding to the pressures I'm alluding to? Rather than just continuing runaway exponential expansion?
The idea that a growing population has quite serious effects on the natural environment hasn't been proven wrong. Trying to get the entirety of the third world up to first world living conditions is putting a serious strain on natural systems. Having a lower population would probably help with that problem.
The current panic around falling populations seems to have two drivers: economic systems that are built as essentially a ponzi scheme, like many retirement plans including social security, and a pretty racist idea that we need to have a lot more white babies to keep brown people from taking over.
There are two different groups I think. One is not having kids because of environmental issues, but I think there's a larger group not having kids because of systemic societal issues that make it hard to have kids. (sometimes it's the same group but not always)
So part of what I was pointing out is that when people say "we need less people" they aren't implying "wow, I'm glad the population is shrinking" they're really saying, "less people need to be born in the future"- which probably isn't true.
> and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact
Also, it's not obvious, since, with the exception of China, no one actually meant to do this. It might actually lead to a lot of human misery, the same as climate change might do, so it's not clear that having less people in this specific way is a net good- for example countries like Japan completely collapsing in on themselves and going extinct. I think what you meant by smaller population was just have the same exact society but thinned out, but that's not what this next chapter of degrowth looks like. The boomers who insist on their full pensions at 60 are pretty much killing the youngest generation and leaving them with nothing, and to a certain extent everyone is being rational actors- there's no reasonable way out of the problem.
I wonder if people in the 2080s will say that about the underpopulation hysteria from the 2020s.
There is no underpopulation hysteria. However, the math around demographics is settled.
There will be fewer taxpayers. That's not a problem.
"Anything we can do, we can afford".
Or not. Incentives are confronting it.
It is very likely that one day productive members of society just decide that it is not very advantageous for them to provide for more numerous old people, and that it is them, who holds the power and have ability to decide what to do. So f.ck democracy, f.ck elders, let them enjoy the world they have created. Sociopolitical environment probably will have way grater affect on an elder care than AI and Robotics.
> "Anything we can do, we can afford".
Exactly. And the elders can do nothing. I mean they can use their amount and vote, but it will only intensify the process
It is unlikely because productive people tend also to have some amount of foresight. Enough to know that they will also be old one day.
> I mean they can use their amount and vote, but it will only intensify the process
Process of what?
Guess what they will see with that foresight when there are several times more old people who take away most of their earned through sweat and blood resources?
> Process of what?
Social reorganization
But take away sounds unfair, and if you're talking about fairness, then fair enough. I can't argue with fairness, until you reveal what the idea is in detail.
Oh, but I'm not thinking this through: there are of course fewer young people, and if they started reproducing a lot then they'd get to neglect the elders now and be looked after when they're older. Perhaps that's the plan. I guess that explains "the world they have created" too: they didn't create enough young people, you mean.
You mean, young people hold the power? Or young people will decide that they hold the power? Well whoever holds the power, I hope they agree that we all have rights.
> f.ck elders
Specifically what form of f.cking? Do you just mean "don't subsidise their care through tax?"
> let them enjoy the world they have created
You mean the world with lots of elders? They created this how, by deliberately being born?
> the elders can do nothing. I mean they can use their amount and vote, but it will only intensify the process
Their "amount", their money? Or their population size, relevant to voting, I guess that's what you mean. Both sound quite influential unless you want to make them non-people for being old. Now admittedly old people are ugly and smelly and boringly slow, but that last shortcoming can be mitigated by exoskeletons and hard drugs, and then they're going to hunt you down and scrag you, that's my prediction. It's as good as any other prediction floating around in this subject area.
Young people will decide that they hold the power and take it.
> Well whoever holds the power, I hope they agree that we all have rights.
Yeah, rights to go f.ck yourself. Agreeability on other peoples rights strongly correlate with how much that rights would cost.
> Do you just mean "don't subsidise their care through tax?
Pretty much exactly that.
> Both sound quite influential unless you want to make them non-people for being old.
Unless it is your main problem and the biggest cost item.
It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.
The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.
What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.
But none of that invalidates his idea. If you believe that an exponential function and linear function sharing a point at (0,0) must cross each other (subject to other reasonable conditions like not having crossed yet, the linear having a positive finite slope, etc), then it is not logical to reject Malthus. It just no longer applies because we decoupled our food production capacity from the population size.
It's also not just that we accommodated explosive populations but that eventually birth rates really did simply start slowing down for discernible reasons that future models were capable of integrating. Even if we continue to have technology that would give us the capacity to accommodate future increases in population, those increases are no longer happening.
That's a bit unfair to Malthus though; sure it was the enlightenment, but all he could rationally go on was to assume that the last 2000 or so years of civilization would be similar to the next, in terms of food and population growth.
What would be abstract would be to make the assumption that unprecedented technological advancement would be made in the next hundred years, bordering on ( to what Malthus would be) magic. You can assume any problem will be solved if you also assume a technology will be invented to fix it. But that's not a reasonable approach to make if you have no reason to believe it is possible.
The world he was modeling in the 18th century is a very different world than we ended up getting. IMO it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a reasonable observation that made sense for the time.
It's somewhat analogous to Y2K, in that there were obvious problems that were going to happen. We didn't experience those negative outcomes because immense engineering effort solved the underlying problem. That doesn't mean Y2K was "invalid" or "wrong," just that the problem itself got addressed before it could blow up. Same with Malthus, chemistry and mechanization allowed us to solve the underlying issue of food production scaling slower than population growth.
Additionally, it is reasonable in the 1790s to assume exponential population growth. It would not be until the 1830s that Verhulst would even model it as a logistic curve. Moreover, human population growth really was on a roughly exponential trajectory until very recently.
Obviously we did not experience such catastrophe. But it's also a bit wrong to call it "invalid" when it was a completely logical conclusion to make. If we're going to allow him to invent a magical technology that addresses it in 1798, then all reason goes out the window.
And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential. Agriculture wasn't linear. It wasn't even in his day. There was improvement in per-person output since, say, the 1400s, and more since, say, 2000 BC. There was a technological component even then.
So population wasn't exponential, agriculture wasn't linear, and what he said would happen didn't happen. How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Not really my point. Malthus was wrong about a future food crisis, but that doesn't invalidate the tools he used to make that prediction. Re-read the first line of my original post, it's pretty clearly about the theory and not his predictions.
The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, and we know it is bad for food consumption exceed production.
> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential
You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.
> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production no longer leads to a negative number for me to consider him "wrong."
Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant to famine after technology changed, because it no longer was useful for that particular thing. But the core notion of "if demand grows faster than supply, you will eventually hit a crisis when they intercept" is a pretty clear-cut conclusion to draw.
It is a bit odd for a thread to get this heated over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago. Is there some political side to Malthus I am missing?
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
The main thrust of the article (as I understood it) is historical context and how human processes can change given circumstance. So basically: demographic decline will be happening and well-understood until these circumstances no longer persist.
It's like Isaac Asimov's essay the Relativity of Wrong, which, if boiled down to one sentence says (paraphrasing), "People who said the earth was flat were wrong. People who say the earth is round were wrong. But if you think believing the earth is round is just as wrong as believing the earth is flat, your view is wronger than both of those put together."
Same thing about equating 2020s and 1960s population forecasting.
If you’re vague enough about it, you can never be wrong! And if you’re overly specific and have a modest following of rubes with more money than sense, you can take some of it! A lot of it!!
You say "complex systems" but are actually referring to human behavior.
Humans are unique in that they change their behavior in light of predictions. You can't make a prediction, and publicize that prediction, without changing the system.
From what I've heard, many people are declining to have children precisely because of the environmental effects of overpopulation. There are of course other factors, but that's one factor.
Now that I have a kid, there is doom over population shrinkage
Sadly this will be used by propagandaists to doubt scientists
Why is that sad? What other conclusion could you draw from the facts?
Science uses models to make falsifiable explanations and predictions. That these predictions are falsifiable and can be rejected, superseded or require fixing is how it's supposed to work, not an indictment against them.
No, it is not meant to work that way.
The situation were formed by pretty predictable and easy to model factors, and if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
If what you claim were true, "pretty predictable and easy to model factors", it would have been modeled easily in a way that worked accurately to predict the future. Just the fact that this didn't happen should tell you it wasn't all that easy.
> if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
What alternative to science and the scientific method do you propose?
Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.
Who could have thunk just two months after videos of people dropping dead in Wuhan and after the virus spread Worldwide? The reason people were avoiding Chinatown must have been racism. The Science(aka the Government) is always right.
Sometimes the trends of tomorrow just aren't in the data of today.
What modeler in the late 19th century, when children were still economic assets on farms and in factories, could have predicted they would become extraordinary economic liabilities?
I swear, half the problems in this world are humanities people doing linear progressions and advising somebody making a policy based on that.
My country GDP growth has been dependent on foreigners since time immemorial.
Think about it this way: the desired population is a sub-function of the desired society that someone is attempting to describe
If the total population configuration is growing faster than your desired population configuration then simultaneously:
1. There’s “too many” people not like me
2. Not enough people like me
Every argument about this is pure chauvinism
Us "numbers" people consistently fail to take basic human nature into account. Evidence of that, is everywhere; most obviously, in industrial/UX design.
Human nature is raw chaos. I have friends in the fashion industry, and that is an industry where human nature can cost (or make) a company millions of dollars. People that are good at understanding human nature, do well.
It doesn't respond well to number-crunching, though.
Also, as animal populations sometimes demonstrate, fertility can be a function of crowding. Pack a lot of critters together, and they tend to produce fewer new critters. Maybe the same thing happens to us.
Der letzte macht das Licht aus.
and then replicated it with mice in 1968-1972
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-experimen...
When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain.
Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.
If a subgroup actually has children at above replacement, then as the other groups shrink, they will be a larger and larger fraction of the population.
Scott's conclusion (written in 2019, a year before GPT-3 was published) is perhaps more interesting today than it was then:
> In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more money = send more people to college, and screw all that.
> But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research.
> If this were true, then once AI comes around – even if it isn’t much smarter than humans – then as long as the computational power you can invest into researching a given field increases with the amount of money you have, hyperbolic growth is back on. Faster growth rates means more money means more AIs researching new technology means even faster growth rates, and so on to infinity.
> Presumably you would eventually hit some other bottleneck, but things could get very strange before that happens.
>In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
Set your calendars!
But - we do have similar (and real) science like psychohistory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics
Both commit the fallacy of assuming present trends remain in place indefinitely and ignoring technology.
They also both tend to be racist. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
Well, there are people that think the idea of preserving cultures itself is racist (well, at least western ones), or that there is no detrimental effect to an existing culture by enabling mass migration.
You think if, say tomorrow, all 1.4 billion citizens in China were teleported into the U.S., that there would now be 1.7 billion Americans, indistinguishable from the Americans that came before? Or, would it simply be 1.4 billion Chinese, alongside ~300 million Americans (if we're being generous...)?
Demographics and culture are obviously intrinsically tied, each individual migrant holds beliefs and values that have been forged and shaped over the span of the lives that they have lived in their country of origin. This is, and has always, been the case, its just more of a hot-button issue recently because:
A: We are currently getting an overwhelming amount of migration to stave off our own demographic issues, so the strain begins to have a more noticeable impact,
and B: Many of the migrants (from abroad) are coming from countries with cultures intrinsically incompatible with values Westerners have come to expect in their own countries (See: Sharia Law as contrasted with Women's Suffrage), so they stick out somewhat like a sore thumb when advocating to enact such policies and practicing such cultures.
And there's all kinds of value prejudging that is entirely external to the data about what cultural change means, what it implies, what effects it will have, all of which involve disputable and extremely politicized assumptions that are trying to borrow from the objectivity of population data for rhetorical momentum in favor of specific preferences of racial composition.
We saw the same kind of bullshit against the "papists" with Irish immigration, and the Chinese who came to work on building the railroads.
Immigrant children who grow up in the US, are just like any other children growing up in the US. They don't just follow whatever their parents believed in.
South Korea's birth rate is indeed dangerously low and threatens their economy. If they cared they could do something about their extreme workaholism and cost of living.
As far as immigration destroying the culture: it depends on the rate. A healthy but limited rate of immigration revitalizes cultures, but it's pretty clear that sudden mass immigration is dangerous and causes a lot of problems and backlash.
Speaking of fixing problems... if our billionaire class who seem so worked up about birth rates wanted to do something about it they could also address the most frequently cited problems preventing young families from forming. Like housing prices.
If we really get into a situation where dangerously low birth rates are threatening the economy and social stability, the boring solution is to do what we do for other goods and services that the free market isn't adequately providing: directly subsidize it. Pay people to have kids. The easy way would be a payment or tax rebate to married couples with 0 children to have one child. But that's the boring solution that doesn't involve massive reactionary cultural transformations, so the right-wing "problemists" won't like it.
Edit: by problemism I mean people who use a problem as a lead-in to push only one solution, and they're not actually interested in solving the problem unless it's their solution. An example from the left side of the spectrum would be Marxists for whom any solution to climate change that doesn't destroy capitalism is unacceptable, or anarcho-primitivists or anti-tech trads for whom any solution that doesn't involve shutting everything down is unacceptable. In reality the solution to climate change is to emit less carbon, and physics doesn't care how we do that or what political system we are using.
There's a lot of right-wing problemists for whom any solution to excessive population decline that doesn't involve taking rights from women and re-introducing reactionary theocratic or nationalist structures isn't acceptable.
South Korea is currently throwing money at the problem, upped parental leave even did some things to make it easier to retire if you got a lot of kids. I'm almost certain these things won't meaningfully change the situation (maybe go from 0.8 to 1.0) as all korean children are expected to get good jobs (white collar, certain professions) , they structure their society towards this and it's impossible to get a high birthrate like this.
I actually read about how something like presence of nuns in your town in italy was quite correlated with birthrates as it basically relieved all women but the nurses of some duties. In Korea you can see how the stability leads to a very significant effect on birthrates as Sejong is by far the highest birthrate region. Interesting since those really obsessed about birthrates also seem to hate the worker protections that make it difficult to fire people. I guess housing is another of those stability factors since renting really ups the risks of children.
This is the racist part. The majority is always worried about how awful everything would be if they were to become the minority. Usually it's because they treat minorities like shit, and they'll worried that they'll suddenly be treated that way too.
Why would that possibly destroy their culture? Are the cultures of all minorities always destroyed? Why would that be? Is it because of racist assholes?
It's an incredibly weak argument when you think about it. The South Korean culture doesn't have to go anywhere: there will be the same number of Korean pop stars and artists and chefs as there was before, it's just that there will also be others coexisting with them in the same country. Somehow this is a huge threat? They're worried about their culture being "watered down" by lesser cultures? These are racism-adjacent fears, similar to their pure blood being mixed with the lesser races. If you're worried that the South Korean youth will get so much exposure to other cultures that they somehow drop or forget the Korean culture, that just feels like weird gatekeeping and more "mixed blood" concerns to me.
Is there a limit on how much culture can exist? If so, it's surely based on population. We're not talking about the South Korean population declining more due to immigration; it's already declining. If their culture is in danger, it's surely due to that, rather than some sneaky danger of all those dirty immigrants. How is it not based in racism? We're just talking about more culture overall.
Not to mention the fact that most culture spreads over communication channels, not physical bodies. Those terrifying 8 billion non-Koreans who are threatening to destroy Korea's culture are already influencing Korea's culture. Would it really make that big of a difference if they were physically within its borders?
example: I'm a new Zealander.
i don't want Americans immigrating in large quantities to New Zealand, because they have cultural values that change the nature of the society, in ways that i don't want it to change.
And i don't consider American a 'race', but more an agglomeration pf people with some general preferences, shared experience and even material characteristics ($$$) that will have negative impacts.
Now, if i could filter, as a voter, to 'allow in Americans that share my values and that would minimize change on axes that matter to me', i would accept immigration of Americans.
but, as a voter, i cannot do that. So instead i vote to keep immigration restrictive. that does not mean I consider Americans inferior, not that i hold that they are meaningfully different from me in any way except culture.
it's not racism. but instead a generalization that we are forced to apply as individuals.
does that change your perspective on this?
I can almost guarantee you are wrong about this, especially about Americans who would ever emigrate to New Zealand. You are voting based on xenophobia. The only reason it's not racist is because "American" is not generally considered a race. But it's xenophobic, nationalistic, and based on deep-rooted stubborn ignorance.
Politicians in the 70s were selling us the 3 days work week and retiring at 50 thanks to "automation", I fail to see how the "robots will solve all our problems" logic is any different.
I mean, of course. I also worry about French Revolution and WWII less then people who had to live it.
What remains of humanity will be safely cocooned inside the biomechanical membrane between the chaotic outside world and whatever environment the compute prefers. The perspiration of its leviathan breaths and a circulatory system that pumps coolant will ensure the temperature differential.
Like how single cell organisms were engulfed into multicellular organisms, so shall our descendants be engulfed. Countless immobile interconnected bio-systems with humanity as its ancestor. They'll less adaptive than us but more optimally specialized. I wonder how recognizable humanity would be when we're tessellated into one large interconnected amalgamation. Furthermore, I wonder how many generations we have left where we'll still need a face and outward looking eyes. Skin cells don't need flagella after all.
Pretty sure that's the point of the comment you're replying to.
I think a better line of attack is that externalities are poorly accounted for in our current economic system.
At this point in many countries the institutions of power have been captured by the owners of capital and many of the issues facing modern society are a direct result of this.
People will always act in their best interest and along the interests of their class, and no class is more class conscious than the capital owning class. In the US, this informs policy, which is generally geared at making the capital owning class more money at the expense of everyone else.
I don't see any other reason for us to have such excess and have it all seemingly go to waste. We could solve world hunger right now with our advances in technology and [corporate] central planning but that would never happen under this economic system.
Thera are not even a correlation, but straight cause‑and‑effect relation between practice of "our advances in technology and [corporate] central planning" and the hunger
And either way I was specifically responding to the point the commenter above me made, that capitalism can't help fix the issues, and my point is that China is fairly capitalist yet they've found ways to fix at least some of their issues. Not sure why you took that to mean that all of their issues will be fixed, that's a straw man.
Malthus’ problem was that it was easier for him to imagine the end of the world, then the end of Mercantilism. That he simply could not imagine that the large cargo ships would be used to trade in a globalized economy instead of upholding government monopoly over colonies.
Similarly, today’s doomers have an easier time imagining the end of the world, then the end of capitalism. That society will rather let it self fail rather then socializing the vast wealth we have created and is currently hoarded by a handful of billionaires, and instead distribute it justly where it is needed, e.g. as retirement to our aging population or as as subsidies to shrinking school classrooms.