Immigration is being sold as a solution to aging and shrinking population. While opening to immigrants certainly helps solving the shrinking workfoce problem, it is nothing more than a duct tape over what is happening: people no longer want to have kids.
After it's been long enough that immigrants are not even called this anymore, if we discover that young workforce is still shrinking because people are still not having enough kids, what excuses we're going to use?
I can agree that immigration is nice and all—hell, immigrants helped to build my country, Japanese included. But, can we search for solutions to the real problem? What can we do, to help people doing things humans are supposed to do? To have children, to have a family, to be healthy, worldwide.
Immigration doesn't fix that problem completely, but it allows us to deflate the Ponzi scheme gently rather than waiting for it to collapse. We buy ourselves three or four decades to raise the retirement age, raise taxes and rebalance the economy to suit a stable population. It's not perfect, not everyone will be happy with it, but it's the only good option.
Taking a perhaps unwarranted broad view, economies of scale allow for us to achieve certain productive activities that we would otherwise not be able to. Taken to an extreme, a tribe of 100 humans would never be able to develop a space program, for example.
Even aside from that, more people means more "black swan" thinkers/entrepreneurs that can have a population-wide impact. It took just one Einstein to develop General Relativity and now humanity will benefit forever.
Obviously humans are chewing through natural resources at an astounding and unsustainable rate, and we'll extinguish ourselves in a few hundred years if nothing changes. If your view is that humanity should co-exist in much smaller numbers in harmony with nature on Earth, your statements are reasonable. I take the optimistic view that we're meant to keep growing indefinitely beyond the Earth, and so a shrinking, aging population is indeed a concern.
I'd be worried if the population was forecast to shrink below a billion, but that's highly unlikely on any reasonable timescale. I'd be worried if the population rose much above 11 billion, because then resources start getting really tight. Anywhere in the middle is fine by me.
If we do start terraforming Mars, I might be inclined to incentivise population growth. Unless we're absolutely certain that we can make it work, further population growth is a huge risk - every extra billion increases the pressure on resources, which increases the risk of conflict, which increases the risk of an extinction-level event.
There will be no stabilisation of population.
Add a couple climate catastrophes and wars for resources, and we can see the landscape in 2100 or 2200...
I'm an exmormon, birth rates are higher for Mormons, certainly, but even they've been obviously dropping. I had three batchmates out of 9 in the missionary training center with 10+ kids in their family. That used to be relatively common, now it's almost unheard of for newer families.
If Mormons have higher fertility than non-Mormons then they’ll grow as a share of the population, even if the modal difference is less than one child. If the average Mormon family has three children when others have two they’ll increase their population share by 50% a generation, neglecting immigration and apostasy.
So? Human society and culture can change absurdly fast. If the evolutionary impulse to reproduce was that strong, you wouldn't be seeing places like Singapore with comically low birth rates.
What evolution compels us to do is have sex. We've just disconnected that from reproduction.
Re:mormons, yes they have a higher fertility rate, but it's also been rapidly dropping. And without taking into account conversions/apostasy the numbers are kind of useless, and taking them into account is difficult because it's just inherently hard to predict. As an ex-mormon I'm aware that the internet has caused some major problems with retaining members for the church, because information has become so much more accessible (much of it contradicting church teachings, obviously).
It compels is to do everything we do in life. There isn't a single trait ever measured in which the heritability was zero.
It's often said that people used to have a lot of kids in order to insure against child mortality. I understand financial stress et al may be one reason for the lower reproduction rate but less kids can also be a sign of success.
Success correlates well with things like wealth, education level of your parents, early-age nutrition, and other things that can be considered "inherited" in a way, but children of poor and "unsuccessful" people can become financially and socially important as well, it just happens at a lower rate.
Suggesting that more poor children than wealthy children will impoverish society in more than just a statistical sense implies there's something immeasurably special about the people who become wealthy and famous, as if the mere act of breeding with them will produce superior humans.
Every trait we've managed to come up with an objective measure for is heritable, to a lesser or greater (but usually greater) extent. "Of course intelligence isn't heritable" - but somehow score on every test we can think of for it is. Same for creativity. Same for personality traits.
Children largely resemble their genetic parents; we don't have to like it but it's still reality. If the people who contribute the most to society, who help out their fellow humans the most (and I'm not saying that's the rich - but it is largely, as grandparent said, the successful), have fewer children than those who don't, we should be worried.
It's hard to imagine there being no negative side effects to the successful portion of the population shrinking at a faster rate.
But I agree, this is indeed what happened. Another similarly true explanation is, he used his imagination.
It's interesting to me how judging people based on heuristics is sometimes fine, even admirable, but other times it is Very Very Bad.
It's also funny how these types of ideas seem to offend people, judging by voting anyways. No looking behind the real curtain or something like that I suppose.
Are we perhaps referring to different comments? I was referring to: "This view is popular, even if in jest like "haha Idiocracy was right guise!!" but in real life it smacks of eugenics and the Divine Right Of The Rich."
>>> If [[successful] people are having fewer kids] than [unsuccessful] people then haven't we created a [dysgenic] system?
>> [This view] is popular, even if in jest like "haha Idiocracy was right guise!!" but [in real life] [it] [[smacks of] [eugenics]] and the Divine Right Of The Rich.
...
> Seems like that comment is judging a narrative or a meme, and not the person who made the comment itself.
To be extra safe, let's add some context, to make sure we're using the same definitions and "facts":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics
Dysgenics is the study of factors producing the accumulation and perpetuation of defective or disadvantageous genes and traits in offspring of a particular population or species. The adjective "dysgenic" is the antonym of "eugenic".
"smacks of": To be a sign or symbol of something: signify, stand for, symbolize
"eugenics": Eugenics is the science of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by “breeding out” disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
"The heritability of IQ for adults is between 57% and 73%[6] with some more-recent estimates as high as 80%[7] and 86%.[8] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics, for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with age and reaches an asymptote at 18–20 years of age and continues at that level well into adulthood. This phenomenon is known as the Wilson Effect.[9] Recent studies suggest that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores;[10] however, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease can have deleterious effects.[11][12]"
To me (my interpretation):
- OP seems to be asserting that "successful" people having fewer kids is detrimental to the overall well being of society.
- The person replying implies disagreement with this popular view (narrative/meme), but then goes on to assert (again, my interpretation) that those who hold this view (when it is put forth "in real life", which is what I interpret "it" to refer to) are in support (at least implicitly) of eugenics.
Do you perhaps think OP doesn't personally hold the stated view, or the replier doesn't believe OP personally holds the stated view? Personally, when I see no language to indicate either are talking in purely theoretical/philosophical (devil's advocate, etc) terms, by default I tend to take people's statements at face value (while keeping in mind the ever-present possibility that something important was lost in translation).
I'm genuinely very curious if this is significantly different than how you view (parse the language to derive the actually intended meaning) the exchange?
a) the mechanism used by CptFribble to produce specific details where none existed before (although I think we've settled this, and are not in disagreement?)
b) how you and I came to different conclusions on whether CptFribble's comment was (or was not) judgemental of slang800 (attributing a personal support of eugenics) - this I don't think is settled?
So it's really the ultimate in traditional family values. More traditional than Shakespeare, the scientific method, religion and apple pie all put together.
Yeah, and the idea is: "Let's replace them with other people, from other cultures".
At some point, especially at the pace the modern world is changing, we need to ask ourselves how much better off we'd be if we stopped putting so much meaning into an idea that's ultimately just a nice momentary illusion at best.
The world is us. It's not a separate entity that we have to learn to work with. We don't have to adapt to XYZ. We can act in one way or another and the world will look accordingly.
"We live in a global world now, homogeneity is futile."
And they wonder, after presenting their ideology as an unstoppable, all-consuming force of nature, why people take issue with it.
As humans we have the agency to control our nations and their respective cultures and genetic makeups. This only becomes impossible when you adopt a Western value system that makes never-ending economic growth your only goal.
In multiculturalism, immigrants form enclaves that are durable and do not readily assimilate. That's not generally what happens in the US -- even second generation immigrant children speak English as a first language and are largely Americanized.
I’ve spent some time in Michigan or Minnesota and haven’t taken away the same conclusions. Maybe we could agree or disagree on “generally”.
There are just too many benefits to assimilating. This isn't Quebec.
This is not a normative statement to say that this is bad, but in this region there are immigrant groups that aren't assimilating as quickly or thoroughly as groups in other areas. Some of that is enforced temporary-ness in the case of the Chinese community in Ann Arbor, but some of it is the sheer size of the community in Dearborn -- the largest Muslim population in the Western world, not even mentioning the huge Chaldean group. (Might no longer be true after the recent refugee movement into Europe, but was true very recently.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/21/milli...