Take a current trend, extrapolate it out until the end of time, write a book about it. "Look at what happens with k^N when N is large and k is not 1" along with anecdotes and filler.
I don't think it's surprising. People do things for ROI and specifically quality of life ROI.
Once the retirement system is socialized or provided by insurance the role of kids for future retirement support immediately goes out of the window and so is the ROI. You privately spend 1 million dollars each to raise them, but society gets to reap the rewards collectively. It's a losing proposition and only a non-smart person would commit to such agreement.
If countries want to raise their birthrates they should immediately liquidate all their pension funds and insurance funds (both public and private) and transfer the stock/bonds owned by such entities to the holders of such rights.
Also countries should stop policing how people raise their kids. Many parents might want a slightly more ignorant kid in the realm of philosophy/English/math... but prioritizing values of family and most importantly the only value that matters to them: taking care of parents as they enter old age , when I say taking care I mean both financially and socially.
> You privately spend 1 million dollars each to raise them
Average kid costs $227k, not a million. Just wanted to clarify since that number was very off. The cost of raising a child is growing extremely quickly though, much faster than inflation.
That $250k or so number has been bandied about since the 90s. It’s an average and isn’t entirely useful (as education costs can be a huge portion of it depending on how you calculate it).
Kids are expensive but they can be as expensive as you want them to be, as evidenced by poor people having them.
$300,000 now, not including college or any major emergencies. Having a child with a birth defect or major disorder; it’s easy to see how the costs could easily reach the millions.
The average cost per kid also goes down with the number of kids you have. Economies of scale, hand-me-downs, kids sharing rooms, older kids providing free childcare etc…
Most people don't do things for ROI. My kids were definitely not "done" with ROI considered. They are costly and time-consuming, but I love them.
Western countries with their lack of intergenerational support and lack of affordable child care while we have stagnating wages are probably the major reason.
> They are costly and time-consuming, but I love them.
That's your ROI; you spend time and energy raising them, caring for them, cleaning for them, providing for them. In return, they give you affection, love, you enjoy playing with them, or having conversation with them.
If you are someone who does not enjoy spending time with children, or do not think you will enjoy seeing them grow, you usually... avoid having children since you do not see the return.
At some point, you made the decision to have children because you think you would be happier with some.
Seriously, this whole ROI thing does not work with kids, at least not in my case. In most cases they return vomit, poo, curses, anger, anxiety. Yet I would miss them dearly if they were gone. Can this really be rationally explained?
The first one was actually an accident. As is so often the case. Life cannot always be explained using an Homo oeconomicus.
My point is that of course once they are here you care for them, would miss them if they are gone, etc. etc. They are living beings, so of course ROI calculations no longer apply - you just want to do what's in your power for them to be happy, reduce their suffering etc.
However, before you are in that situation, ROI calculations absolutely do apply. To give you an example - most people on HN that have children probably have 1-3 of them - and that's about as many as they wanted to have. But if you somehow happened to already have 10 children, would you then be selling 7-9 of them (or indeed any) to the circus? Of course not. You would love them, care for them and do the best you can, and you would miss each of them dearly if they were gone.
And yet, given any degree of control over the situation, you would probably try not to have so many. Why not? Because of some calculation - let's call it the ROI calculation. It is precisely the same calculation that keeps you from having 10 children that keeps others from having any children at all.
Why were they "done"? How did you decide to have them?
Did you enjoy spending time with other toddlers so much, that you thought you would enjoy it more than all your other hobbies (which you may have to give up), that you wanted to be doing it during the majority of your downtime, have sleepless nights etc.?
I’m imagining sitting down with the kids and explaining how Bobby’s performance is adequate but Suzy needs to really up her income because the ROI is just not there, and if she doesn’t we’ll be forced to acquire a new kid.
People will not like this, but the reason populations are shrinking is because women don't want to have many kids. Ask any modern woman, the majority view child rearing as a huge burden, and most would think three kids is way too much.
For perspective, my grand grand mother had 16 kids. All her grand grand children who are my generation that I know of have either two or three, with no apparent plans to have any more.
Many women would like to have more children, but they don't because child rearing is a huge burden.
And if you ask any mother with >4 children she will tell you that 3 children is the maximal burden in terms of work. Once you have more than 4 children the job gets easier, not harder. Experience, older children pitching in, being forced to drop what's not important, et cetera. One father described it as "zone defense" rather than "man-on-man defense".
But the dollar cost does not go down. Time off work + $250K per child mean that only the rich can have more than 2 children.
The dollar cost does go down because the fixed costs are fixed. Very few families with 4+ kids will have a room for each kid, for example, but even so five bedroom+ houses level off in price. A fifteen passenger van is less than double the price of a minivan, but holds twice as many people, so that levels off, too.
Even things like private schooling levels off (many have a “all kids after three or four are free). The biggest one that doesn’t level off would be college.
Many health insurance plans charge for up to two or three kids and then stop increasing.
I know families with 8+ kids and none have made more than $150k a year and some are way below that.
I ask many women already since I'm looking and that's a question to ask. I did not make your impression at all. Many say they want 2 or 3, but some say they want a big family. But maybe I am pre-filtering anyone who would say they want none.
What I would say, though, is that many women want to have kids later in life, and then this probably has an effect on the number of kids they get to have.
I do like that in this piece they call that out specifically and highlight the magnitude of what it would take to really move the needle on that (spending a double-digit percentage of GDP to actually compensate these women for their opportunity costs).
Well this is obviously true. You can argue that its OK, or even good, but there is no questioning that women (and men even) are less inclined to want kids than before.
It's not the man's job to help with child rearing. It's the exact opposite: it's the woman's job to take care of the house so her man can go out there in the world and build up his business or career (or whatever it is), because that is how he fulfills his role in the family.
That's how it has always been done. This is common to all societies with high fertility.
[note: OP changed their comment while this was typed up.] Again, not the question.
If you went back in a time machine, and said “here’s some medicine, take it if you wanna stop at three kids” and changed nothing else societally, would everyone who had 16 kids still opt to have 16?
I think it’s unlikely every single woman would make the same choice given an alternative. Modern or otherwise.
Did she commit suicide after the 4th kid because it was too much on her?
That should answer the silly question.
She's not a character from a novel written by a modern day feminist about how hard and traumatic life is in a Middle Eastern country because she has to carry the burden of raising children.
Complete nonsense. People naturally do want to have kids. It is just very expensive to have them both in terms of time and energy. I do not know a single person my age (30) who thinks of kids as retirement insurance.
Frankly speaking, if I never get to have kids, I couldn't care less what happens to me when I'm an old fart, ideally I would never reach that age at all.
One can make such arguments, but that having kids that one cannot afford is immoral is much more immediately evident. I mean it here, primarily in the sense that it will harm the kids themselves, and not in the sense that it will burden the wider society.
> I do not know a single person my age (30) who thinks of kids as retirement insurance.
Well of course, because they don't need it due to the fact that it's already there in the form of socialized retirement.
Remove socialized retirement , pension funds etc. and people will start having more kids as they'd start seeing them as a retirement insurance yet again. As they were seen for the whole history of mankind (and still are in high fertility countries).
It's time we face the fact that people don't make kids out of love but out of need. If you remove the need and you'd remove the kids, which is what is happening.
There is still need for kids for socialized retirement. They are required to fund it. But now it's a social need instead of an individual need. Not having kids is the entire society's problem. Let's see what people have to say about you not having kids. Are they OK with it? Do they think you should be having kids? How many?
So is tax evasion, CO2 emissions etc. What are the odds of being audited by the IRS ? What are the odds of being punished for illegally burning weeds? What are the odds of being punished for modifying your semi diesel engine so that you can do the "rolling coal" thing?
When you move from the level of the individual up to the level of society at large, solving problems (or in this case situations that certain people deem as problems) becomes harder not easier.
Good luck trying to force people to have kids and police people's penises and vaginas. Besides it's not even necessary...Nigeria and sub-saharan Africa will take care of that "problem" much like China takes care of the iPhone production problem now.
That's why categories exist. The first world can't do the job of the third world and vice versa, each should do their own job.
You are talking complete nonsense. If you care so much about your retirement (I don't and don't know anyone my age who does, beyond putting some $ in savings), you would still need kids, because there is nothing more sad and lonesome than a poor old fart stuck in an old people's home who never gets visitors. I wouldn't wish that fate on my worst enemies.
> If countries want to raise their birthrates they should immediately liquidate all their pension funds and insurance funds (both public and private) and transfer the stock/bonds owned by such entities to the holders of such rights.
Who is we? Personal responsibility doesn't mean you'd have to take snake oil or travel at 200mph without seatbelt.
It simply means that you get to keep your own money and get to decide each on your own if you want to test your pills before popping them or if you want install safety systems in your car before hitting the road.
I think it's very peculiar that the US became so socialized given that every kid in the country dreams of hitting the walk-off Home run in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series
> It simply means that you get to keep your own money and get to decide each on your own if you want to test your pills before popping them or if you want install safety systems in your car before hitting the road.
Again, we tried that. We have concrete evidence of how that works.
"Test your own pills" is silly enough I don't think I need to address it.
Car manufacturers got pushed, kicking and screaming, into seatbelts, airbags, and a variety of other safety measures. Market pressure didn't do it, but thousands of people a year stay alive because of that regulation.
> I think it's very peculiar that the US became so socialized given that every kid in the country dreams of hitting the walk-off Home run in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series
These are two very odd things to attempt to tie together.
Socializing the retirement system would make us MORE dependent on the birthrate. Social security draws from the working force to pay for currently retired. Its already breaking at the seams. If the working force increases and the retirees increase we are in trouble.
It would be better if people saved up for their own retirement over time and did not depend on the government forcing the working force to give up their income.
The money is an abstraction. If you look at the actual production and consumption, it's clear that the issue persists regardless of whether the retirement system is government-provided or funded through private savings.
You can't actually save up the things that retirees need. They will mostly require services. No matter how much cash has been set aside up to pay for it, the supply of services is largely dependent on the labour force available. The production and consumption of services needs to balance instantaneously.
"It would be better if people saved up for their own retirement over time and did not depend on the government forcing the working force to give up their income."
The US had that exact system up until about 1935 - when Social Security was founded. It turns out that if we let people save for their own retirement, the vast majority will choose not to.
People are great. Each person has intrinsic dignity and worth. Economic studies on safety and medicine spending and the like show us the demonstrated value of the lived experience of a single person is worth millions. All else being equal — a major caveat, of course — more people is better.
Imagine walking up to an arbitrary random person and saying “the world would be better off if you don’t exist.” Or better, imagine someone doing that to you. Not out of malice, not because you’re a bad person, not because you waste resources, just out of the premise that fewer people is a better thing intrinsically. That’d be a load of crap, right? Quod eras demonstrandum.
Assume you're on an island with a finite amount of food, now run this experiment again.
The optimal number of humans depends on how finite resources are in an environment. Adding an extra person to an island with a shortage of resources would likely increase human suffering.
That is exactly the sort of assumption that caused Ehrlich to miss the target in The Population Bomb: there turned out not to be a finite amount of food. Or, if the amount is finite, we were "currently" (at the time) producing a tiny subset, as evidence by the vastly-higher quantity of food we're producing now.
As a fellow response comment illustrates, the arrogance of believing you know the "optimal number of humans" means missing out on the amazing and wonderful things future humans are going to make possible.
Assume you're on the island and all n people on the island with you are smashing coconuts all day long just to have enough sustenance.
But maybe person n+1 is able to start catching fish...
I think there's more variables and it's possible our finite resources are more than enough to sustain everyone. However, they may not be enough to sustain endless growth of capital.
Animals have been adjusting their numbers according to availability of resources since the start. Humans found a way out of this but I fear that we are going to fall back into it very soon.
All our economical and political systems are based on growth, and it's very hard to sustain growth if you don't have growing resources (energy, mineral, etc) input, innovation and population.
If the population goes down, the system will go through a phase of chaos before stabilising (E.G: retirement systems will default, factories will not have enought workers, companies not enought clients, loan will not get repaid...), and people are very afraid of that. Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently.
I would argue exponential growth being exponentially hard to maintain, the chances that the system collapse are the highest anyway. Better that it does with a decline in population than a decline in resources. We can stabilitise and recover more easily from the first, than from the other one.
There were several times in the history of humanity when we here just a few millions. If we plan, we can even control the fall instead of going full throttle.
But we won't plan, nobody wants to vote for the end of the good times. We will protest, fight to keep the growth, and we will crash. We always do.
>All our economic and political systems are based on growth
Hardly, you can find plenty of societies that operated at a steady state or even a decline. Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency. Companies don’t become more efficient than their competitors for all time, they become more or less efficient as new management and workers take over. Look at the biggest companies from 1920’s and most have failed or been taken over.
Shrinking populations don’t inherently destroy retirement systems they at most force people to work longer or receive fewer benefits. Social security for example hands people about a 10x benefit range based on contributions but if the minimum acceptable benefit is X, there isn’t an inherent need to hand out more than that.
> Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency
That's a beautiful theory that doesn't match what we have put in application during the last century.
In pratice, our systems assume growth, and in fact the planetary resource consumption has just gone up and up. Green energy don't replace fossil fuel, it adds to them. When you give faster transport to people, stats tell us they don't spend less time in transport, they just travel more distance. When we make something cheaper, we don't keep enjoying the difference, we give it to more people. Once everybody has one, we make it disposable so people buy them again. You put computers to use less energy? Nope, people use them to do things they didn't do before, and we use more energy as a whole.
So yes, on a paper, capitalism is tied to efficiency. Practically, that's not reflected in our growth, as capitalism distorts incentive toward growth. And so the periods of capitalism are the periods with the most growth ever in human history. Also, when growth stats go down, the stock market goes down as well.
And even better, if the energy input goes down, the production goes down, and the economic health goes down. Because you need calories for all those machines producing things.
Innovation can't beat physics. At some point, if you want more, you need more resources.
False. The US electricity consumption per person has fallen in the last decade. Yet, the grid has revived continuous investments from private companies. It’s the same trend as newspapers, revenue streams require continuous investments and that continues as long as those investments have a net positive result.
It’s easy to assume people want to use endless amounts of energy, but consider once your AC gets things to a comfortable temperature lowering below that isn’t a benefit. People don’t just drive endlessly when they buy cars that use less energy, they have specific places to go and that’s it.
Efficiency doesn’t drive consumption it changes the economic equation. Hauling mangos long distances isn’t an inherent advantage from the trip, it simply allows them to be grown in a more efficient location. But, again once you’re moving them from the perfect farming location there isn’t a reason to make a longer trip after that point.
It’s easy to see a trend like people buying larger homes and assume it can continue forever, but if you look at billionaires you find they eventually find ever larger homes impractical. Rather than simply consuming more resources endlessly wealthy people shift to artificial scarcity.
> It’s easy to assume people want to use endless amounts of energy, but consider once your AC gets things to a comfortable temperature lowering below that isn’t a benefit.
We invent new ways to consume power every day: video games, bitcoin, air sanitizer, food delivery...
> Hauling mangos long distances isn’t an inherent advantage from the trip, it simply allows them to be grown in a more efficient location
That's a good example: before, you just didn't eat mango if it didn't grow next to you, unless you had a lot of money.
> It’s easy to see a trend like people buying larger homes and assume it can continue forever, but if you look at billionaires you find they eventually find ever larger homes impractical
I consume more than my father, and he consumes more than my grandfather. The later didn't have a fridge when young, me, I can use a plane several times a year.
There is a huge margin between me and a billionnaire, and everybody wants to live like one.
> before, you just didn't eat mango if it didn't grow next to you, unless you had a lot of money.
But that already happened, so now once mangoes are already being shipped the energy consumption is effectively capped.
Which is my point you seem to be ignoring, you can’t extrapolate to endlessly increasing resources. Yes comparing a subsistence farmer with a billionaire you see a vast increase, but it’s a sub linear increase. What happens if everyone on earth has the lifestyle of a western billionaire, does resource consumption continue to increase or does it stall?
Imports where a larger share of GDP on 2008 than 2019 so that doesn’t explain away the decrease in energy consumption over the last decade.
US per capita oil consumption peaked in 1980 and recently total consumption has also fallen. Net fossil fuel use per capita is down significantly, which is why our CO2 emissions are dropping. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
> Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently
Musk will make every argument for stability because he won the lottery and wants no more draws, people who are unhappy on the other hand might use some instability because it means a bunch of new draws with high frequency.
It's also the reason why every Senator, Representative, President of every country prioritizes stability.
The population at large might have a different opinion on the matter .
Periods of stability are necessary, but constant stability is undesirable, and idealised. However, unstability means immediate (albeit necessary) pain, which nobody wants to opt in.
If you think things are as good as they can be then you don't need more people. If you want to improve things each person you add is a chance to come up with a solution.
In reality, most of the human population is not looking for solutions. Countries with more population are not necessarily better than countries with smaller populations.
IMO, the best strategy is not playing number games and improve your current population instead, that way you increase the likelihood of problem solvers without increasing the pressure on the environment and the average quality of life.
It is a matter of faith. Some people will believe that a rustic life is paradise. Most people who have experienced such life by necessity disagree. Some people may believe that they have it as good as it gets and would want no more. Three different doctrines.
For those in the "Progress church", there is always space for improvement. And under the assumption that we are the ruling intellect, then more people is needed to design more things that don't exist yet. Things: space-ships, space habitats, alternate biologies, video-games, new forms of VR, virtual worlds, new drugs, new lifestyles, new social orders, new ... Yes, we could and should get more working minds by simply improving standards of living all around the world, but there is a limit to that.
There is a material argument for not having more people and their creations: our tiny-winy planet and our ecosystems can't support them. But there is so much perfectly useless and boring dust out there...
Cities are nations are currently built to support X number of people. If the population drastically decreases, the infrastructure won't automatically scale down with the population, so a smaller number of people will need to fund the maintenance of the existing infrastructure. Imagine the what happened to Detroit, but at the scale of an entire country.
Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people. If people stop having a kids, the age demographics of a country will switch from a pyramid shape to obelisk shape, with a smaller number of young people funding the retirement of a larger slice of old people. Young people will be forced to pay significantly higher taxes or retired people will be forced to relinquish some or all of their retirement benefits. Neither solution will result in a happy society.
> Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people.
I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view.
1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced.
2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable.
> I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view.
Here's the definition of Ponzi scheme from Wikipedia:
"A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors."
Social security operates in the same way. It pays earlier investors (old people) with funds from more recent investors (young people). Like a Ponzi scheme, it can only maintain stability with ever larger numbers of new investors. If the demographics shift to a much older population due to a low birth rate, there won't be enough new investors to keep the scheme going.
> 1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced.
This is exactly the scenario that's predicted to play out in South Korea, which currently has a birth rate of 0.81.
"Workers between ages of 25-49, those who are in their prime working years, however, are expected to decline from 36.8 percent of the population to 23.1 percent by 2050."
"Based on current trends, Statistics Korea estimates that senior citizens will account for 30 percent of the population in 2036 and 40 percent by 2051."
The US isn't nearly as bad in terms of birth rates, but the decline in birth rates is a global trend that shows no signs of stopping.
> 2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable.
Social security IS inherently unstable, in that it will cease to be funded if there aren't enough young people.
I have no idea what you mean by your made up word, but the simple fact is that people produce things of value, on average at least, and that means that more humans are valuable.
Then there is the power-law concern: while the typical human is producing things of value, some people are producing things of extreme value, such as break-through scientific and engineering, which benefits humans immensely.
This means that more humans can make more valuable things, and that by having fewer people we also have a higher chance to miss those exceptional humans.
None of this really should be in dispute for people on these boards.
Also while some years sucked, if you picked the high point of any five year period you will find that in almost all things the current period is the best. I will except only privacy.
You can arrive at this from many systems of values. If you value human happiness then more people even if a little less happy margins means more human happiness. If you value more innovation and progress then more people give you more opportunities for some innovative genius to come along. If you value human life as intrinsically valuable then more is straightforwardly better.
Clearly I’m boiling down more complicated arguments to one sentence descriptions but I think the point is clear. Many human centered value systems can lead you to value more human life. If you have misanthropic values, then the opposite.
In theory, as technology becomes more and more advanced, you can have enough specialists to fill a very large number of very deep supply chains.
When you have a primitive society, you just need a "wood guy", a "stone guy" and a "plants guy".
If you want to have fancy computers, you need things like "high pressure silane pump control loop guy".
Though I'm pretty sure the number of people needed to maintain the current level of technology is substantially less than 7 billion, because a lot of those people are stuck in subsistence farming and basically don't contribute to industry.
More people indefinitely is a bad thing. But unless "less people" means "kill the old people", the transition period to less people is an inverted pyramid, with more old people than young. And given how many human resources old people need to stay comfortable that will be a horrible world.
Consumption. "Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption. I am not saying that we should stop economic growth, but we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world, at least not making this obligatory.
> "Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption
That cannot possibly be true. A single person can consume a huge amount of resources - far more than any of us currently does. For example, by setting a building on fire, you have consumed that building. We already have a near-infinite capacity for consumption.
Or did you mean something different? If so, could you please explain it better? How can economic growth rely on increasing consumption? Because I would love to consume a yacht - where do I sign up to help economic growth by consuming one?
Are you asserting more people is a good thing or a bad thing?
I'm looking for those who assert it is a good thing. You said "we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world" which to me suggests it is not a good thing.
If there are more people, it's fine, we should engineer the way to accomodating them without damaging the environment too much.
If there are less people being born, this is also fine, as human population is sort of self-regulating in this regard. Perhaps there is also some engineering needed to adjust for this scenario as well.
But neither growth nor decline are to be regulated in any way.
Smaller birth cohorts have less political power in a democracy. So regardless of the absolute scale of human civilization, shrinking birth rates means the children who do get born have less power relative to their parents until their parents die.
For context, the "Baby Boomers" were only overtaken in population by "Millenials" two years ago. That's a very long time for a group of people to enjoy political power owing purely due to when they were born. This means that political establishments become gerontocratic, as there are simply more old people to vote themselves into power.
The population-equals-power dynamic also plays out on smaller scales, too. Countries with shrinking populations are at risk of being invaded or having their economies collapse. I'm not going to argue in favor of infinite growth[0], but I will point out that certain things we are accustomed to require a minimum amount of people on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. We can see this in rural America, which has been sucked dry of its population. The only people who still live in small towns are the people who are unwilling or unable to leave, and many towns have collapsed purely due to lack of people living in them.
[0] Though I do want to point out that I haven't seen a good argument as to why degrowth won't come commensurate with a massive surge in ethnonationalism. The only society I can think of that was wholly devoid of economic growth was pre-Meiji-era Japan, and that was the result of literally sealing the country off for centuries, banning an entire religion, and enforcing a very rigid political hierarchy.
Each "mouth" has a chance of yielding infinitely scalable innovation. For example, the Haber-Bosch process supplies 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues.
Check out the book "Abundance" by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.
Innovation can't break the laws of thermodynamics.
If a resource is finite, you are basically betting the future of the specie on its ability to find a substitute before we run out, in the context of an exponentially growing chance of failure.
Right now we are betting we can find a substitute to fossil fuel before we run out of it, while exponentially consumming more energy. We haven't so far, since nothing comes close to the logistic practically, chemical flexibility and energy density of fossil fuel.
But even if we fail at that, we can recover. We have less performant alternatives that are enough so sustain humanity, albeit not at the current level of productivity (after all, we currently build nuclear plants and wind turbines using fossil fuel).
It's less true for soil we can live and growth food on, water we can drink, air we can breath, since those are complex systems.
It's very easy to bring out that it's not a zero sum game when you can type on a computer and order delivery food. But somebody in the desert will have a very different idea of the practicality of the claim.
There are many possible configurations where we end up with the equivalent of the desert of some sort for some very important resources given our population size.
Claiming we are sure to be able to innovate ourself out of those possibilities is naive, and frankly, arrogant. I'm sure somebody used that argument on the Easter Island.
Of course, there are diminishing returns, and hard caps set by physics. As the low-hanging fruit is picked, it will become harder to grow.
But we could expand outside our current planet, initially just for mining for precious resources, but eventually also for colonizing other planets.
The problem with fossil fuel is not that we will run out of it, but that we will make the planet uninhabitable before we can move out. What took millions of years of solar energy hitting the Earth to create, we are burning in centuries or decades. This led to climate change.
If the plan to prevent humanity from collapsing is to go to another (for now not life sustaining) planet instead of taking care of the one we are on right now that can sustain us, something is wrong.
Not saying we should not try, but that should plan Z, not plan B.
Not maxing out our current petri dish should not be controversial.
> Not maxing out our current petri dish should not be controversial.
It should be controversial if it means that the middle class of the developed world have to lower their standards of living, and the global poor will never get the chance to attain the next level of energy consumption per capita fueled by abundant and cheap energy sources like fossil fuels, all the while the elite advocating for such changes hold on to their jets and mansions.
Decreasing population and consumption is going to crash the economy no matter what, and poisining the land we live on is going to make our life terrible. We don't have a choice, billionaire or not, so not planning for it because they exist is like not doing exercice because you wife takes a big alimony: unfair, but unrelated to our survival. Unless you plan to kill the wife.
> Each "mouth" has a chance of yielding infinitely scalable innovation.
Except that in most cases the new "mouth" lives an horrendous experience in overpopulated and poor countries and does not even get a shot to bring his "scalable innovation". They usually just die shortly after.
So, no. More people does not equal infinite minds for a better future and a warm, fuzzy feeling. It usually just means suffering. What you want, is more people in first world countries.
You have to have more people in poor countries before they can even have a chance to develop into first-world standards of living. We can't declare poverty to be solved after all poor people have died off.
I'm taking that you haven't lived in those countries to say that. I lived in Mali for 2 years. They are never going to join us in the club of first-world standards living, they have no resources but sand in their country, not enough tree to make paper to write on. Their society was perfectly adapted to that before we told them they should have computers that they can't affort because they have nothing to contribute to a global economy.
Besides, you assume you need more people to be developped, while France is only 60 millions people, smaller than a lot of developping country.
This problem is not so hard to fix, neither so easy.
First, raising children shouldn't be an onerous business for two or just one; the current monogamous family is a construct from a few religions with outsize cultural influence (Paradoxically, in the absence of contraceptives monogamous families are good for population growth: you use the bare minimum of adults to raise more than a dozen kids. Ideal stuff if your goal is to go to war with the tribe on the other side of the Nile).
Second... well, second we should forsake heaven, and remain here. Let's keep working on life-extension and rejuvenation, and abolish death.
A return to co-parenting should absolutely happen. Back in the villages, kids were raised by a number of adults by proxy of kids staying overnight at each others houses, and this exists still in many societies.
The atomisation of the western world has forced parents to singlehandedly raise their kids and enact on them their specific faults and biases, whilst crippling everyone mentally and emotionally
Prof. Gary Becker (Nobel in economics) has linked the economics of fertility to economic growth since decades ago. His papers describe low fertility rates in many developed countries in the present pretty well.
"Becker, Murphy, and Tamura show that the economy exhibits two steady states, one in which income per capita stagnates and fertility is high, and one in which there is sustained growth in income per capita and fertility is low. Thus, the model provides a joint explanation for the demographic and economic differences between pre-industrial, Malthusian economies (characterized by stagnation, a low return to human capital, and high birth rates), and growing, industrial economies with low population growth."
I'm guessing a lot of commenters didn't actually read/listen to the entirety of this. Here's a summary:
- Globally, there's a drop in fertility rates
- The reasons for this are complicated, but the interview seems to conclude it's due to mindset among young people
- There's no reason this has to be disastrous
- However, in the US we're doing really poorly on most things that would make a shrinking native population workable (sensible immigration policy, stable social safety net, world-class education, etc.)
- Israel is an outlier in that it seems to be avoiding the fertility rate drop of industrialized nations
- The interviewers think American exceptionalism can win the day and either return us to higher fertility rates or figure out a way around it
Unfortunately, nowhere did I see them actually make a strong case that a significantly smaller population is a bad thing. The interview is two boomers.
Would they argue that America in the 1970s/1980s when they were having the time of their lives had too few people? They also gloss over any positive impacts of lower population, like housing and the environment. And finally, they seem kind of out of touch with the experience of young people - there's some reference to a few metrics at the end (they seem to think young people are
"afraid" or over-value autonomy), but I get the feeling these two people don't really understand why Millennials in particular are choosing fewer children.
When there are too many people, and food is expensive or hard to get, people make fewer kids, or invest in making it cheaper (agriculture innovations - nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process [1]).
When there are too few people, and a lot of states rely on taxing youth to fund pensions and healthcare for elders, anyone able and willing to work will be paid better, attracting migrants or older workers.
I think part of the instability in Russia right now is due to their population starting to decrease. Their leadership sees the writing on the wall that their demographic future looks bleak. The Ukraine war is their last chance to use their strength to get more resources. You can also see that they are moving Ukrainians to low population areas to increase their population.
The Ukraine War is literally a Russian de-population bomb. I wonder if we will see this trend in the future when China's population start to decline in the coming years.
I totally see the depopulation argument. But I also see the overpopulation argument, at least as it relates to our current standards of living/lifestyles, farming practices, and energy scarcity. We need innovation to keep pace with population increases, or else overpopulation is a real risk in my mind.
De-population is fine. Better reliance on automated manufacturing, better deal for the environment, less competition. I don't think we should do anything about it if it happens naturally, as the world is reaching its carrying capacity for humans.
This is just more scare mongering. First it was Temperance, then Communism, the The Population Bomb, then Silent Spring, then the drug war, fear of nuclear winter, Earth Day, Left Behind, the War on Terror, these things are endless.
