If trends continue, there will be 10 billion Amish in 100 years.

It is not entirely without merit to say that religious folks that encourage large families like the Amish, Catholics and Mormons will dominate in the distant future. Hell, I have 45 first cousins (on one side) and they on average have 3+ kids so it might just be my extended family :)

That experiment has been running for 50 generations already, by now it should have reached steady-state.

Perhaps that's part of the reason that 84% of the world's population identifies with a religion.

I can't help but wonder if large families also beget religion just as religion begets large families.

Now I personally think every religion I've encountered is ridiculous fiction (no offence, just my opinion), but I will admit that there can be some pretty significant advantages in a community. Raising a ton of kids is probably just easier in a close community of similar minded families (a.k.a. the local church/temple/mosque). It's almost like it's intentionally engineered to be this way.

Religion is subject to natural selection just like anything else. Religions which produce more offspring that stay in the religion will always win out over the ones that don't.

Until it becomes outweighed by splitting resources amongst too many children. Everything has pros and cons.

So long as the children survive to give birth to more children it doesn't matter how poor they are. Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.

> So long as the children survive to give birth to more children

Big if. In a true famine, the poor usually die first.

> Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.

Evolution cares about sexual desireability and fitness. Rich people usually have more.

In nature we see these two strategies as well. Some species try and have as many babies as possible, where others have fewer but concentrate resources to make sure the few are more likely to survive. Neither strategy is optimal in all situations.

You're mixing up personal fitness with the fitness of a meme. Sure rich people have more surviving children in the long run, but why don't we ask the rich Pagan Roman Senators how well their money protected them from the hungry Christian mob?

Although I find the prospect disturbing, I think at some point (assuming we manage this dangerous transition) we will produce children in a technological way that is decoupled from human mothers.

I could also see a social movement developing that campaigned for this on the grounds of equity for women. It could be presented as both essential for the species and empowering for all genders…and that might be true.

Not an entirely unbelievable end game. Will it be done by families or the government?

Good question. Probably both, depending on the country you live in.

We aren't heading to extinction just on account of birthrates, it's the transition phase with a large number of elderly dependents and a small number of workers that is going to be the real problem.

Unless most work is intellectual/creative and most manual labor is automated or machine assisted 50 years from now. There are way more 70+ year olds still in the workforce currently than ever before and it isn't crazy to think retiring at 60 is a thing of the past.

Retirement for the masses is a relatively new, rich invention. It seems likely ar some point we will revert back to working until we become unable to work.

Yeh the whole concept of putting in 20-30 years on the police force and then retiring with a 70% pension for the rest of your life seems… nuts.

I think most places are lower than 70%. The military is similar with 50% base pay, although their pay is generally much lower, especially since police can work overtime.

> Retirement for the masses is a relatively new, rich invention.

Average life expectancy beyond 70 years is also fairly new.

Right now we are seeing the dawn of the automation of creative work. Or at least a change in its barriers to access that will decrease the ability of creative professions to make a living. It's still early days but the writing is on the wall.

We are also seeing a trend where technology is leading to additional surveillance and control for the population as opposed to a reduction in inequality and rising living standards.

Yeah, that will be a problem for sure. We will get a preview of it in Asia.

Despite all the fearmongering and wailing and gnashing of teeth, Japan is doing okay with a shrinking population.

They have a long fall ahead of them.

https://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/econ2.h...).

Going from 128m in 2010 to 87m in 2060.

And despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth, they'll probably continue do fine, as they have since their population leveled out 30 years ago.

The doomsday predictions haven't just started now, and they weren't only about events in 2060. They started decades ago about population growth slowing, population leveling, population dropping. They've been pretty consistently wrong.

I mean they have been in a state of continuous deflation for a long time. They certainly didn't live up to the 1980s predictions of world domination.

What do you mean, you mean that?

Predictions of world domination were equally the same kind of substance-free propaganda and fear mongering. No serious people actually thought a country of ~100 million would economically dominate the world.

Nor was not achieving world domination wasn't the anti-sustainable-population propaganda fearmongering of the 90s and 0s that I'm talking about, so I don't know what part of my comment you're trying to respond to.

>They've been pretty consistently wrong.

They haven't been wrong, they turned out to be right for everyone. People who didn't live through the boom of the 1950s can't imagine what it's like to live in a world where things improve for everyone every year.

Japan didn't start growing like it did before 1980 again, everyone else stopped too.

China has been basically the only driver of world economic growth for the last 40 years. Which is kind of astonishing considering they are communists.

> They haven't been wrong,

No, they have. I don't know who you're talking about, I'm talking about the sustainable population doomsayers.

Yes, because Japan has had decades of being the only country in the developed world with that distinction, while the rest of the global economy continued to grow. That gave it advantages and opportunities that won't exist for many countries once the developed world at large ages into mass retirement

> Yes, because Japan has had decades of being the only country in the developed world with that distinction, while the rest of the global economy continued to grow.

That's not what the propagandists claimed though.

> That gave it advantages and opportunities that won't exist for many countries once the developed world at large ages into mass retirement

What unique advantages and opportunities that won't exist for others? This sounds familiar.

For one, they could be a high-end export-driven economy, as there were lots of wealthy (by global standards) consumers. They've now built out the bureaucratic and practical infrastructure of building where they sell at scale. They also had time to test out various central bank/financial/strategic policies to figure out what worked.

With the rest of the developed world (outside of the US and a few others) moving into aging demographics more-or-less all at once, export-driven economies are going to be hard-pressed as global consumption decreases in the developed world. They also won't have time to experiment.

Now sure, theoretically governments could learn from Japan's successes and failures and, being forward looking, could initiate policy 5-10 years in advance to offset the worst of the impacts and... sorry I just laughed into my keyboard. It's going to be a show, people will wake up one morning, stuff will be expensive and broken, no one in power will understand why, problems will be denied for months until things break beyond the point of no return, and the solutions will be rushed, poorly directed and half-assed. See Germany's current energy woes.

I don't think any of this opportunity was enabled by Japan's population demographics at all. Germany, South Korea, Hong Kong, are notable exporters of secondary and tertiary products.

It wasn't enabled by Japan's demographics, it was enabled by the world's demographics relative to Japan. Japan has had to deal with a mass-aging demography in a relatively friendly global environment. They've had the latitude to experiment and develop various approaches.

Germany, South Korea, and others are going to hit the same problem in a much more hostile global economic environment, as most of the wealthy global consumers are going to simply disappear. At present they're woefully unprepared to deal with any of it.

I don't think so. As I said, those other countries didn't have the same relative demographics as Japan. This just sounds like a fringe theory that isn't really borne out by evidence.

There are SERIOUS problem expected to come, primary for working population, pension, and national insurance. Some are delayed thanks to huge national debt. Demographics is really good indicator for the future, but it's hard to improve.

30 years ago there were SERIOUS problems expected to come. The doomsayers were all just comprehensively wrong, there's just no fearmongering your way around that. Japan is a stable and prosperous society that's not significantly worse off than the best and richest countries in the world. On the contrary it's right up the top of many metrics.

It's funny, still today it has like 4x the GDP per capita of China and yet hearing it from these propagandists^Weconomists you'd think China is some kind of futuristic wonderland where everything turns to gold and Japan is a crumbling wasteland (or soon will be.... aaaany day now, for the past 30 years).

Japan's got issues, every country does. You think the US or Europe don't face serious economic problems in the next 40 years? As populations around the world peak and resource extraction and primary production peak, cheap fossil fuels are phased out, everybody's chickens will be coming home to roost. That's not a Japan problem, that's everyone's problem. Rich countries like Japan have a lot of room to cut expenditure and raise revenue. They don't because it's not popular, but they can and will (have to).

Refuting propaganda does not mean that the demographic trend ceases to exist. It's true that there is a cottage industry of doomsayers, and nation-based agendas that criticize Japan and praise China, but we still have the raw numbers indicating that Japan will be one of the first if not the first laboratory where we can see and understand the effects of rapid aging and worker imbalance. This will be relevant because the EU and China will have to deal with this too.

It does not mean that Japan is doomed, but rather that some policy will have to be implemented and some large change to the structure of the economy will have to happen in due time.

The thing with demographic problems is that they are background noise for a very long time and then suddenly become a much bigger problem. You can verify this yourself by playing around with some simple math such as having a cohort of 100 people at t0, set an average expectancy, and seeing the effects of different birthrates as time goes on.

2019: but the robots will take our jobs!

2022: we need more robots!

Any technology that enables us to do more things tends to be a good thing. But we are suspicious of it because we know it remains to be seen whether the tech will actually be used to improve our lives