To be clear, I understand that getting there will be undeniably painful given our economic systems’ expectations of and reliance upon indefinite and unlimited growth. But such an outcome may be unavoidable in any case and it’s one I’d rather see us plan for and soften the impact of than continue to rush blindly into.
I just don’t believe any more that the Earth can support the number of people we have at anything vaguely shaped like a modern Western lifestyle for much longer. We can and should continue to try to reduce our rate of consumption. But we’re too big at this point to have many good solutions left. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re running out of usable sand.
Most people say kids are worth it, and it teaches you something about yourself, and that's certainly true. It's not a requirement though to have that appreciation, but I think there is actual utility to bringing healthy adjusted kids into the worth. Maybe we will reach some sort of grand equilibrium in the future with everyone having exactly 2 kids (more likely we go down a different path before then), but now is not that time. We have a lot of challenges, and unless people actually make the sacrifices and try and raise kids better than themselves, they're going to be better adapted to the future world than we are.
I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million? Maybe just one atomic family (though that would be biblically fucked up), maybe a small town of 2000 would make more sense, add in a few for redundancy, more than enough sand to go around, we'll just run the whole thing. Getting down to 700 million you realize would entail forced castration for almost everyone, are you imagining some dystopian society where we castrate and separate into breeders? I just don't see how your solution is at all plausible in the first place. I'm sure we have 700 million people alive no now under 20. So what's the plan, create a political party?
I’m not advocating for that number as a limit. I’m proposing we consider that a smaller population in general may be a good thing over the long run. A factor of ten was simply an easy value to reach for to jumpstart a discussion.
There is only 77 countries that are above the replacement rate and it's going down everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
We are blowing through the financial inheritance left to us and sooner or later that well will run dry (to wantonly mix metaphors).
To put it callously, old people can't work much and consume lots of resources, so a plague that kills them off (however sad) actually makes life easier for everyone else.
But lower fertility rates have the opposite effect, the ratio of old people to young people increases, which is why it makes things harder.
I know this is unpopular, but just an opinion without facts, and I strongly disagree. This agreed "it must be that way" is one of our main problems and turning this planet over, we should reconsider.
Most of the families and societies that didn't prioritize population growth (by reproduction or immigration) aren't around to advocate for that approach's merits, whereas those that did are.
Fun fact: for each human alive today there've been 15 deceased humans ever. As zombie apocalypses go, 15:1 doesn't sound too bad.
Kurzgesagt has some interesting videos on human population if that's your style: https://youtu.be/LEENEFaVUzU?t=206 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
So I don't think the solution is to look to previous generations, because they didn't facilitate childbearing so much as they restricted other paths for women to at least some degree. Traditionalists might argue women were fine with that arrangement, but it seems noteworthy that women jumped at the opportunity to pursue other paths. Which means if we want to increase fertility rates again, it probably means we need to do something new, that doesn't present having children and having a career as mutually exclusive.
I think the way you spin history is somewhat unfair to men. A “career” is not an “opportunity” to most men I know. It’s a requirement. It’s long hard days of stress and labor. Some of us are lucky and rather enjoy our labor, but it’s labor nonetheless. Just like making a home. You say women were restricted, and certainly that was true for certain paths, but I also suspect previous generations enjoyed societies where women were happy in large part because they were not being told that they needed to be like the men to be happy/valuable. Personally, I would adore the opportunity to be a homemaker, but alas that opportunity is not available to me. It cuts both ways.
Anyway, my main point is, irrespective of gender, dual income households are not a positive status quo and it sucks trying to plan a family around two people needing to work. It’s not fair to children who deserve more attention than day care. And it’s not fair to all the homemakers out there who are honestly some of the most valuable people we have. And importantly, it doesn't achieve the replacement rate so it’s ultimately a losing strategy details be damned. We need to figure out how to affirmatively value homemaking so it can be regarded on the same level as a career. And I suspect if we can do that, birthrates will go up.
No.
The nazi party was not the only competitor for power and among those, it was only genocidal by ideology. Germany could end up as military dictatorship - there would be imperialism but it would not be the same. It could end up as actual democratic country too. But, the party that won were Nazi and there, Hitler was the one who made that party big.
On your specific points:
> you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause
Agreed.
> A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives.
That's right: each person that comes into existence has some chance of making the world worse for others, and some chance of making it better. I think that overall new people are a positive contribution, especially if you consider their own enjoyment of life, but if you think it's the other way then it's completely to reasonable count "more people will be born" as a negative feature of a policy.
> Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident?
When looking at moral questions you're generally concerned with decisions: do I try jump in to help with this accident in front of me? Do I give money to this person that seems to need it more than I do? Do I advocate for this policy? It's not clear to me what sort of moral question your hypothetical corresponds to, since at the time of the accident (or before that if we're considering the value of some sort of policy that might have affected the chance of her dying) no one knows that it's her child in particular that would end up causing such enormous harm.
That time could be a lot shorter than 150 years. Say a one-year-long time bomb kills someone's newborn infant, and only that infant. When the bomb was planted, that infant hadn't yet been conceived. Of course that bomber is going behind bars.
If we bite the hook then the thing we care about is something like expected value.
That only applies for non-actualized future events. We tally the accident of Hitler's mother's death according to the probabilistic expected value of her contribution, which was approximately the same as any other woman of her time and place.
As a pretty positive development. But kinda, none of us have predictive abilities like that.
Even worse is considering the cost per healthy life year. It's very rare to find any policy maker even willing to discuss this. One that have seen is Britain's NHS, who will spend £20,000 - £30,000 to give cancer patients 1 extra "Quality adjusted life year"[1]. But this is only used to compare drug prices and never mentioned even in the context of other UK government health interventions, which might have a much higher cost (e.g. COVID measures which might have cost 100x more per Qaly) or much lower (e.g. teen mental health might cost 100x less per Qaly). And that's just discussing health care inside a single country. The cost per Qaly of foreign aid to areas experiencing famine might be 10,000x lower than other policies.
How many? Nobody I know has done this with an actual spreadsheet of cost per child.
What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career. Then biology just makes is statistically much less likely to have lots of kids.
So it’s not really, “we didn’t have our 3rd because I didn’t get that promotion.” Instead it’s, “we didn’t have kids until we had advanced careers because society for the past 3 decades said anything else was irresponsible.”
The ones who have no kids and don't want any—I don't know any of those for whom it would have made a difference, though.
> What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career.
Some of them are doing this because having kids is so expensive. It doesn't seem possible to provide adequately for them without mid-career income (often two mid-career incomes).
The thing here is that people tend to be more comfortable expressing deeply private thoughts about kids only to those who they suspect have similar outlook.
I do think you're right, though, that a lot of people gesture at the cost as a reason not to have kids when even if you removed that barrier they still wouldn't.
(In thinking about the effects of policies like this you need to think at the marginal parents: people who are close to the border on whether to have another kid and could be most easily swayed one way or the other.)
Kids are a big commitment and a lot of work. I feel like having two gave us enough leeway to have the time and energy to devote to them as individuals when they needed it. In a larger family, that might not work out as well.
Everyone I know has done this with a spreadsheet of cost per child.
Around abouts where I live, the cost is 40k+ per year per child, not counting the obscene amount of $ you need to spend for a house that has room for more than 1 child, that is going to cost you well over a million, and if you want it in an area with good schools, you are looking at nearly 2 million.
So yeah, people here do the calculation, because not everyone can afford to dump 2 million on a house so they can have a second child.
Have a kid in California and you can look forward to paying $17000/year for infant care [1]. With California's median per-capita income of $41000/year [2] having two kids is an expensive business!
[1] https://tootris.com/edu/blog/parents/cost-of-child-care-in-c... [2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/INC110221
17,000 would be very, very, cheap.
Again, many, many people raise children quite well and responsibly without needing anywhere near $2 million to have a couple of them.
Of course not, 5 years ago houses were much more affordable.
10 years ago they were massively more affordable.
Now they are not.
> Again, many, many people raise children quite well and responsibly without needing anywhere near $2 million to have a couple of them.
You can get a 4 bedroom house in a not so great part of town for under 1 million, but even an 800k house in a crap area is hardly "affordable". Houses around good schools, aka ones with drinking water not contaminated with lead (which is an actual fucking problem in Seattle schools), cost a lot more. Houses in cheaper areas also have schools where, pulling from state test scores, less than 30% of children in local schools learn how to read. So if that matters to parents, they may want to look elsewhere for housing.
Prior to starting school, child care in Seattle for 2 kids is still going to run 44-60k a year. When they do start public school, count on expensive summer programs, and during the school year, expensive after school sports.
> Congratulations on having exceptionally high personal living standards while residing in the 7th most expensive U.S city.
When I was born here, this was a very affordable city. When I went to public schools here, they were good. Funding was still piss poor, and presumably we were all drinking leaded water without knowing about it (and again, everyone responsible for that still being a problem should be thrown in a jail cell for awhile), but the education outcomes were good. Heck I got to play with recombinant DNA in high school! We were still using 8086s in the year 2000 (same school as the genetics program!) but at least they had those sweet IBM keyboards.
I've voted for every single proposal that is supposed to help improve schools and fix infrastructure issues, but thanks to decades of NIMBYs, high housing prices have contributed to, of caused, nearly all of Seattle's woes.
> You represent a miniscule fraction of the world's population.
And a non-trivial % of HN readers who the topic "who runs spreadsheets to figure if they should have children" applies to.
My original point is that plenty of people I know indeed do the math on having a second or third child. Friends who bought a large house at 1/2 to 1/3rd the price houses go for now, not an issue! Everyone else is boned.
Those numbers are the yuppie calculations that you get when neither adult wants to stop living in one of the most expensive parts of town and neither wants to be a stay at home parent even part time.
The cost is not 40k per year per child. Re-run the numbers using public schools and having a stay at home parent with no more than a few hours a week of childcare.
Why stay at home parent, that is absurd now days.
> and neither wants to be a stay at home parent even part time.
People want a retirement plan, and that means working and contributing to a 401k. If my wife stopped working, well for one the childcare savings wouldn't be enough to make up for lost income, and two, our retirement plans would be shot to pieces.
Fwiw I'm in Seattle, if you want to go to good public schools, houses cost a lot more. House price here is highly correlated with the quality of the local schools. Want to go to the best schools in the area? Looking at moving outside Seattle to Bellevue, and an old house in the area with the best public schools will reach almost 2 million.
House prices around there have nearly doubled in the past 3 year.
I'm only in an area with slightly above average schools, so a 4 bedroom house here is 1.2-1.5 million. Although since Seattle schools just cancelled their gifted program, parents with smart kids now have to pay for private schools, so shove those costs on top of whatever is saved by moving to Seattle proper instead of one of the more expensive suburbs.
There are not fancy new houses, these are "whatever house is for sale that has the right number of bedrooms" and are often quite old.
And everyone in a cramped home knows whether they can afford a home with an extra bedroom. And so on.
And every couple knows whether they can afford for one of them to take a 5-year-plus career break while starting a big family.
I do sometimes wonder though if people who actually lived in such a world would truly perceive it as a dystopia, or if that's just our status quo bias.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-is-elon-mu...
It's never away or preoccupied with work, never loses its temper or fights with the other parent, never too tired to play or engage with questions, the list goes on.
I'm not even suggesting heated robotic caregivers. Humans could still be employed to carry out its instructions in the real world, from hugs to diapers.
As dystopian as it sounds to us today, it's possible that such a system could consistently raise more well-adjusted adults while also being cheaper and freeing most adults from the burdens (as well as most joys) of parenthood.
In the future, AI may be so much better than humans that raising a child by hand is borderline illegal, except for a few religiously exempt groups.
It can be argued that some countries are already at this point. Ie they have stagnant population numbers because they are already over-populated, and there is economic pressure to reduce population growth.
The drop in sperm count is of course concerning, though if we can't get our act together on birth control and family planning then it's probably one of the least tragic ways for our population to get knocked down to a more sustainable level. Humans generally fail at prisoner's dilemma ("if we have fewer babies, other nations will overtake us!"), so it seems necessary that some outside force eventually mitigate our continual failure there--and again, when compared to mass wars or starvation, lower fertility rates is actually a pretty peaceful course-correction.
UN projections indicate somewhere around the end of the century for a net reduction in people, but long before that we'll see developed countries starting to compete agressively for immigrants, combined with campaigns to push fertility up to try for a soft landing.
This is a logical fallacy that has been bounced around, in catastrophic terms, for centuries. (see Thomas Malthus [1], "The Population Bomb" by Ehrlich [2], etc.) Ehrlich went as far to say that in the 1970s, HUNDREDS of millions of people would starve. Did that happen? No. These ideas about some theoretical limit on food or resources of the Earth are alarmist and do not benefit the public discourse.
Sure, maybe the Earth has a limit to how much population it can support, but it could easily be 100 billion. Who knows? Do you know that the entire population of the Earth can fit in an area the size of the state of Texas, in single family homes? [3]
In contrast to the disproven "unsustainable growing population" idea, depopulation and the aging of the population will have severe consequences within the next few decades, and already has had negative consequences in places like Japan [4], Italy [5], and many others.
We definitely need to deploy policies to increase the number of births to address these issues.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Malthus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb [3] https://theblogmocracy.com/can-you-fit-the-entire-world-popu... [4] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-japan-economy-aging-... [5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-12/italy-is-...
The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.
Your assumption that technology may not be capable of helping us enormously down the road is much more of an assumption than the pro-technology argument. Because unlike the anti-growth malthusian argument, the reality so far for centuries has been that technology did indeed make life easier and better for people despite an ever growing population.
There's actual, consistent precedent contradicting all malthusian predictions across several centuries of human development, with entirely artificial political disasters mostly being responsible for any failures. On the other hand, we've not yet seen any concrete examples of human development failing in the face of hard natural limits to growth. Wherever it has failed has been because of mismanagement in some form or another, not lack of possible solutions.
In biology, balanced relationships, mutually symbiotic relationships take orders of magnitude longer to evolve than parasitic relationships. We do not have a balanced relationship with this planet, we have a parasitic one. We are speaking the same things when you say that whenever we have failed was because of mismanagement, in other words being to parasitic to our hosts. To not mismanage something would be to understand all the latent variables affecting the system before we act. We never do that, we act, then only react after the system is so obviously affected by our actions.
Population growth has overall largely been a function of increased energy availability, from the industrial revolution onward through the consumption of fossil fuels which are inherently unsustainable.[1]
Also, assuming the number is for example 100 billion, it seems like you still have the same issue of infinite population growth being inherently unsustainable but just on a different timescale.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-in...
You never account for potential people because it inevitably leads to so-called repugnant conclusions that causes involuntary suffering among some number of currently existing people in order to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people. People can voluntarily make such sacrifices, as parents do for their children, but this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy.
> Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people
But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value. What existing people want and value should always take precedence over hypothetical people, if only because their values may be entirely different than your own.
To extend the analogy I made in my reply to kazinator above [1], imagine that in 1900 someone invented a technology that had some kind of benefits to the users, but would make the earth uninhabitable in 2050. Kind of like an even more extreme version of climate change. I think you're saying it would have been wrong for governments to prohibit using this technology, because the only beneficiaries didn't yet exist?
Alternatively, would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet?
> But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value.
Yes, but it affects prioritization. For example, imagine that $10B could either avert 2M deaths from malaria or reduce the risk of us human extinction in the next 20 years by 0.1 percentage points (averting 8B * 0.1% = 0.8M deaths now). If you only care about currently living people then you'd likely prefer the former, where if you also put some weight on future people you might prefer the latter.
Anything on that short a timescale would have negative effects on the existing population or their immediate descendants, which still falls under looking after the wishes of those who exist.
Your thought experiment is asserting that we can separate future negative effects from present negative effects, but I mostly reject that assertion.
Take climate change. You might argue that continued fossil fuel use is useful for people now and only really impacts hypothetical future people. However, pollution clearly affects people's health now, not to mention the death toll of the endless wars over oil.
I think the closest possible exceptions I can think of are maybe existential threats to humanity that have lots of uncertainty, like an asteroid or maybe AI. But even here, an asteroid could literally, suddenly be a threat in the next few years, and a similar argument can be made that AI could easily become dangerous within our lifetime given the pace of development, so these still impact those who exist now. These are hypothetical threats to existing people, not threats to hypothetical people.
> would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet?
No, because the parents of those children exist now, and they don't want those outcomes.
I don't understand your pivot here to include anything that current people prefer. If you're comfortable with work to support the wishes of those who exist, what about the large number of people who want humanity to continue flourishing well after they're dead?
Trying to narrow down the hypothetical, I think your asteroid suggestion is a good one. If on 1950-01-01 we had discovered a huge asteroid on course to collide with Earth on 2100-01-01, "let's ignore this until the people who are going to be alive on that day have been born" would have been a (rightly!) unpopular decision.
Valuing descendants gets you to weird conclusions pretty quickly: preventing the death of someone in a culture where people typically have large numbers of children would seem much more important than saving the life of someone past childbearing age as you consider the exponential increase in descendents over time.
Similarly, there are likely a lot of ways that you could increase the number of children born other than by preventing the deaths of their would-be parents. Policies that made housing, childcare, and education cheaper could have a very large impact -- I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost.
Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people who won't get to exist in addition to all of the current people who would die.
I think Toby Ord's "The Precipice" has a pretty good treatment of these issues, and is very thorough.