Even if models predict the population growth will slow down and may turn to a decline after peaking 50 years from now, it feels quite rash to over-extrapolate and panic now about a potential eventual decline from the 15 billion peak to a genetic population bottleneck (1000-ish). The population would have to halve ~25 times which would take ~1000 years if it declined at a similar speed as it's been growing now.
And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
This means our current social structures need to change. We can’t have exponential growth forever. It’s literally not possible on a planet with finite resources.
> And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
Pension provisioning will suck yes. But it’s not an “existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change.” You are drastically overstating the drawbacks to population decline, as evidenced by your immediate moving of the goalposts when probed.
This is probably not as difficult as it seems. We talk a lot about the proportion of active / inactive, but we often forget that most population under 20 is inactive and also supported by the active population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect
Look at how easily supply chains collapsed due to lockdowns, complex systems are hard to sustain and the focus on efficiency above all else has resulted in reduced redundancy. With less people around it will be hard to even maintain things, let alone improve them
Say we're below replacement rate and the first "halving" has occurred. The replacement rate now no longer is 2.1 (as it currently is), it would be perhaps 3-4. Which won't happen, so then it becomes 5. Which won't happen so then it becomes 6. And so on.
Once the serious decline sets in, it cannot be stopped.
Most European countries already support this but their birth rates are as bad or worse than Japan when excluding migrants. The only groups reproducing above replacement level are traditional Christians and Muslims, groups with an ideology that is proven by 2000+ year Lindy effect.
only other alternative is a massive propaganda campaign to raise the social value of being a mother to how it used to be, where motherhood was socially seen as being far higher status than having a job for women. That's the current problem, years of women being told that "freedom" and having a job is way better than having kids. It's really not a money/stability issue, because the poorest people in Western countries have the most kids
Artificial wombs are straight out of Huxley's 'Brave New World' - scary how prescient that work is.
Not only are the financial and opportunity costs huge, but so are missed experiences – with the age of retirement skyrocketing, choosing to be a parent can mean essentially trading away the remainder of one’s finite lifetime.
If birthrates are to recover, society must restructure such that we do not live to work and families within a community support each other so parents don’t have to forfeit the people they were prior to parenthood and can have lives beyond their job and kids.
We had a system that optimized for male attachment to children and it was the societal expectation to marry and for marriage to really be til death do you part.
Source on this?
Even the brightest minds don’t seem to be able to extrapolate their beliefs out to the logical conclusion that they’re describing a Ponzi scheme that will collapse eventually by definition.
However such a balance might be hard, it is difficult to see that interest in having children in advanced economies would recover as populations crash. In fact likely as there are less people around (and a greater proportion being old), child rearing becomes more expensive to the individual.
Note that economic growth is not necessarily predicated on population growth, it can also measure better use of the people we do have (hopefully in an actualization, more than an extractive, sense). People should be understood as a (in fact the most) valuable resource, not as a costly burden.
For example, overturning Roe v Wade
I'm kind of curious what the Clarence Thomas has cooking next
If something cannot continue forever, then it won't. Population decrease may be inevitable and if so then handling it with less panic is smart.
But it makes landlords and housing business owners great profits.
Look at Germany, Italy, Balkans, etc. all have declining demographics ranging from slight to severe yet housing in their cities has gone up from slight to severe. Like everything in real estate, it's all about the location location location, so everything is localized not extrapolated to the whole country it's why demographics can be steeply declining but prices steeply going up in cities.
Unless you want to live in desolate villages with no infrastructure or jobs, urban housing prices isn't tracking demographics.
Edit: to downvoters, check the numbers please
Like another reply said, it's more likely that general movement from rural to urban is what's causing that, and that if their population growth was higher, those cities would've just gotten even more expensive than they're getting now.
Germany: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1150526/annual-house-pri... Italy: https://www.immobiliare.it/en/mercato-immobiliare/
Arguably it’s exactly the opposite of what you say: the sustainability of life on this planet depends on human population decreasing.
There’s nothing particularly scary about having an older population curve, it just means that society has to adjust by having higher savings rates for individuals and government retirement programs.
Considering that AI is projected to eliminate 300 million jobs globally it sounds like we don’t need to all procreate like rabbits.
Savings are meaningless if the saved money can't buy the work of young, able workers. Elderly people would just waste their savings outbidding each other for the services of the few younger people left. Numbers in your bank account can't do a hip replacement and change your saline solution. People do.
The most common profession in every state, truck driving, is probably going to be completely automated in the lifetime of the millennial.
The concern is that there is no obvious natural mechanism that would reverse the decrease. Our civilization would simply evaporate.
I'm serious. One thing I often see is complaints that the younger generation (typically millenials) are not pulling up their end of the bargain. However, neither are their parents. Typically, one would expect to become a grandparent that cares for their grandchildren. In return, your children take care of you. This is how humans have lived for generations. Yet, today, seniorhood is treated as a second adolescence. Grandparents neglect their grandchildren while parents are forced to do it all, so to speak. It's no wonder they have no time for kids.
Human childbearing is exceptionally hard. It's why human males take part in the child-raising typically (women with committed men have more children on average and shorter spacing between pregnancies). Moreover, it's why natural selection has typically brought about kin groups that care for children. Social security is an affront to this entire arrangement. There's a balance to be struct between guaranteeing no one is destitute and not shifting expectations of the elderly to the point where living purely for themselves is actually considered acceptable.
The grandparents barely being kept out of elderly poverty by Social Security aren't the same as the second-adolescence grandparents spending down their 401ks (based on wealth disparity, the former group outweighs the second group).
It's true that grandparents don't help raise grandkids anymore, but the rise of hyper-individualism in the 1950s with the death of multi-generational households is the most obvious root cause of this.
Back in the day a well off family could buy a duplex where a young family could live in one unit while the elderly parents live in the other (allowing both sides to keep their privacy), but the rise of suburbanization and the lack of sensible housing stock make this hard to pull off.
Also this is not 'fascist'. Fascists support these sorts of programs for the racially pure class. I don't support them for anyone. Fascism is not a libertarian ideology. It's a collectivist/socialist one.
This is a very interesting point. Arguably the last century was an anomaly with constant growth afforded by scientific progress and post-war reconstruction, so it's possible we don't know what modern steady state looks like yet. I really hope it doesn't look like the pre-renaissance steady state.
Explain why.
Old people go
Young people take job
No young people bad
No young people no job
The former are not breeding. Their governments are replacing them with the latter out of genocidal hatred or the misguided fantasy that all peoples are fungible.
The latter cannot maintain, nevermind advance, modern civilisations.
Can you give examples of this?
I'm not going to bother with the antisemitic conspiracy theory nonsense, but this part I couldn't resist replying to.
It's very ironic for you to say this considering the origin of Ashkenazi Jews came about when a large number of Jewish men from Judea were forcibly exiled to Southern Europe by the Romans, and subsequently married pagan women from that region who converted to Judaism.
In other words, at least 50% of the average Ashkenazi Jew's ethnic makeup is Southern European (a few centuries later, some eastern european slavic was also added), and these are the people who have an ancient and vicious hatred of Europeans?
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. In egregious cases (like this one) you're certainly welcome to email us at [email protected]. But for sure please flag the comment (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how to do that)
Be it NGOs ferrying Africans across to Europe, lobbyists pushing for laws against pro-White culture, producers of the transvestite-glorifying show featured on Netflix, etc. Take a moment to look into it.
I never used to believe these crazy conspiracy theories. It starts as a joke with a lot of us! But then, because you're conscious of it, you notice it. Everywhere. Every single time. It stops being funny. How many -bergs and -steins do I need to notice undermining White health and prosperity before it ceases being a conspiracy and starts being fact? Blatant, statistical truth?
Take a look, that's all I ask. Imagine an idyllic White nuclear family. The next time you observe something that would be harmful to them in any way, even a little fishy, take note of the surnames as the credits roll.
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. In egregious cases (like this one) you're certainly welcome to email us at [email protected]. But for sure please flag the comment (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how to do that)
Jesus H Christ! Is that really what you think? They're poor because they don't have access to the same resources. Not because they are genetically predisposed to squalor and born incapable of coping in "civilisations", a word many of them would have spelled correctly.
There's nothing wrong with my spelling fyi, that's a regional difference.
Still I generally am glad Japan is going though this process as population decline is inevitable and immigration only delays it.
We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing - for example changing how we work so that children are compatible with productive and fulfilling careers (and indeed lives as a whole).