You got whiplash over the speed of...a few decades? Malthusian theory had been proven wrong and people have known this since last century.
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?