Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn.
I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few:
- Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive.
- Wealth inequality will rise just from the fact that there are less productive people and people with wealth will live longer.
- Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up.
I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did.
> Already eastern europe are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate.
Oh dear I wish it was true, but it isn't. Eastern Europe is facing a dramatic brain drain and it isn't slowing down. For instance, Romania has lost 15% of its population in the past 30 years (3.5M people!), most of the loss coming after 2000 and the decline being pretty much constant between 2000 and today. Czech Republic and Slovakia are the only country in the region with a growing population (a few percent in 30 years, even the aging Germany looks dynamic by comparison), and Poland is stagnating. Evey other country is losing population every year.[1] This is an ongoing demographic catastrophe for these countries.
Not true in case of India either. A report[1] released just a few weeks ago mentions 0.85 million Indians who have surrendered their Indian citizenship in favour of US, Australia or other western countries in last 7 years.
It would be conservative to estimate that the number of migrants who have not yet surrendered their citizenship is 10x.
The brain drain is massive. I live and work in a tech hub and my social circle depletes every year. Every smart friend/colleague/acquaintance I have has either moved, is moving or hopes to move to the west in the next 5 years.
> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did.
I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility.
I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards larger families (increases bonuses as you have more children) and starting families earlier (rather than delaying to to their 30s.)
>you could say that global warming is one of its legacies
Considering that the majority of emissions came from a select few countries(over half from the EU & USA) that don't make up the majority of the population, and they majority of those emissions have happened while there's been smaller population growth, I don't think it's unfettered population growth that's the problem.
As countries get wealthier, their CO2 emissions have also trended upwards. The world is clearly trending toward catching up to the wealthy countries. If everyone trends toward similar emissions per-person, then the raw number of people will be what matters most.
It'd also be interesting to know what assumptions the climate change models themselves are constructed around. Do they assume by 2050 that less developed countries will continue at the same population trajectory there on today and then multiply that number by the annual carbon output of a person in a developed country today?
Where are you seeing this? San Francisco condos run $1077/sqft, more than the most expensive county for single family homes, San Mateo, at $1022/sqft.
Correspondingly the price per square foot in Manhattan is about $1300, while Queens and Staten Island run not even half that.
People may choose to put the savings from less desirable environments into larger homes. But there’s no reason condos shouldn’t be as large as houses. Urban environments are just so scarce that the only way even pretty rich people can get them is to compromise on space.
I recognize it's a filter bubble that talks about these things a lot on the internet, but $1000+/sqft for NY and SF condos aren't lying. People want these things, badly.
I suspect many of the people who want those $1k/sq ft condos in NYC and SF would not appreciate a fossil fuel tax sufficiently high to curb air travel such that even annual vacations to tropical destinations are not possible.
The point of a carbon tax isn't to ban things, but to redirect spending to more efficient uses, even people who like foreign holidays come out ahead as the greater efficiency is a net gain.
Carbon Tax money is not thrown out of the window. It will mostly stay in the same country, and it will create jobs and wealth for people who are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
I think it's the "Screw you, I got mine" race-to-the-bottom attitude will destroy us faster. Pointing out this ongoing problem is not resentment - no one wants to talk about per-capita carbon footprint, or have binding targets, because everyone is selfish.
The root cause of all current environmental issues is the massive population growth we've been experiencing.
Even topping out at 9-10 billion seems very challenging. Ideally, in order to protect the climate, environment at large, and quality of life we should aim to bring population down by a few billions...
Many European countries have extremely generous benefits for raising children, but it has been broadly ineffective at raising birth rates - with the possible exception of the Czech Republic. I agree though that governments are going to try, and they may find a way to do it.
There was a good episode of The Weeds podcast, "Baby making vibes," which talked about this. Some of it is focused on the American political lens of Liberal vs Conservative birth rates, but much is broadly applicable discussion of policy and the more "vibes focused" angle that conservatives tend to take with the issue.
European countries may have generous benefits for raising children, but they’re not even close to covering the costs of children. I doubt there are many people who will decide to have children based on these benefits.
I agree, I wouldn't talk of extremely generous before the benefits cover a larger apartment to house the kids, and other indirect expenses. Unlikely to happen!
Living in the countryside, isn't going to put food on the table for most. People are living the countryside to find jobs and a better life, not the other way around unfortunately.
Today we are at over 7 Billion. Suppose the population falls to say, 2 Billion or something like that. Is that a big problem? Like, what is the optimal number of people that this planet can support, without wreaking havoc on other species that also live here? 2 Billion is still a very large number...
This might sound cruel, but the less humans the better.
I would stay both: rate of change (up or down) and overall size of population - there has to be a ceiling somewhere - if you start filling your bucket with water even slowly at one point it will start overflowing.
There has to be some sort of ceiling, sure, but the point of focusing on a rate of change is that the ceiling is constantly moving too, no matter what you consider the "ceiling".
There are many ceilings. E.g. there's the carrying capacity of earth. But that carrying capacity changes with technological improvements. There's the carrying capacity of the solar system that changes as we get the technology to settle more and more other planets. There's the number of housing units currently available, and the amount of food currently produced, and so on.
But a lot of these current ceilings are highly malleable given time to address them, which is why what matters is the rate of change.
Even if one assumes there is a hard ceiling on capacity for earth that no technological advance can overcome, as long as the rate of change is low enough we can bypass that by building off-earth colonies fast enough .
So ultimately, while you're right there are ceilings, it's still the rate of change that matters: We can build or obtain more buckets to move water to, but we need enough time to do so.
The problem isn’t just absolute population, but relative population.
How many working people are there and how many dependents? What’s the ratio? And how many of the dependents will “graduate” to productivity (children v elderly)?
A geriatric society with a large number of elderly is very different from a society with a demographic dividend from fewer children.
>Suppose the population falls to say, 2 Billion or something like that. Is that a big problem?
There are problems with that, yes. That's fewer geniuses, who are in short supply.
I like humans. The more humans, the better, quality of life being equal.
In Hungary, if you do it four times you are exempt from paying taxes for the rest of your life:
"Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612
That's a pretty great incentive.
From your article:
"As part of the measures, young couples will be offered interest-free loans of 10m forint (£27,400; $36,000), to be cancelled once they have three children."
The average household income in Hungary appears to be $7,100. So essentially they can get a potential 5 years of income for having kids. Massive incentive.
Women with four children will most likely be full time moms for the majority of their productive lives so that's a pointless benefit, unless this policy manages to somehow reverse gender roles as well.
Even if said lady only rejoins the workforce for 20 years, the savings are fairly significant.
Also, knowing Hungary, this is probably intended as a subtle disincentive for the local Roma ghetto population. All the Central and Eastern European states fiddle with their welfare systems not to incentivize higher birthrates among the Roma ghetto population, even if they do not want to state this aloud. That is why the benefits target taxes, which you only pay if you actually work.
Recently (1940s-1950s) forcibly settled former nomads whose culture hasn't yet made the necessary switch. To be fair, it took our Neolithic ancestors much longer than a few generations to adapt, too.
Basically, not enough education and a lot of crime in the community. Combined with enormous brain drain, because whoever manages to succeed a bit, moves away and marries into the majority population, thus disappearing as a potential positive influence.
Basically, an awful lot of cliches and self-fulfilling prophecies (such as limiting the employment of Sinti and Roma because of a fear of them being criminal leading to the affected going the criminal route just to survive).
“Gypsies [is] pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity as well as its historical use as a racial slur.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people
> many other languages, regarding cognates of the word, such as French: Tzigane, Spanish: gitano, Italian: zingaro and Portuguese: cigano, this perception is either very small or non-existent.
Start a company, set yourself as COO, Board Chairman, majority shareholder, etc...but with a minimum wage salary. Set your wife as the CEO. Pop out 4 kids. Pay her an 8 figure salary.
Your wife can be a full-time mom and print money at the same time, with no practical change in gender roles.
What? This policy should incentivize stay-at-home mothers to re-enter the workforce after their children are grown, because no income tax is essentially a pay raise compared to people who aren't eligible.
An incentive that is completely offset by the professional and career consequences of leaving one's industry for nearly two decades. Many women struggle to resume their careers after just a year or two of absence -- are we supposed to seriously believe that Hungarian employers will shrug off an entire child's development worth of absence?
There is always an incentive to re-enter the workforce, in the sense that you (hopefully) get paid to work. But the existence of an incentive doesn't mean that incentive is sufficient. In the absence of other incentives and the presence of Orban's reactionary social politics, it's unlikely that this one is sufficient.
No, that isn't the alternative. The alternative is having an incentive for having a sufficient number of children to prevent population decline, combined with separate subsidies for child support (professional childcare, etc.). Even better, drop the emphasis on mothers: allow either parent to claim the tax deduction, or devise a structure in the deduction is graduated with a return to the workforce.
There are plenty of reasonable ways to incentivize people to have children, nearly all of which are applied elsewhere in Europe while also helping (if not outright avoiding) attrition in the workforce. Hungary's approach represents the significant deviation here.
This is a pretty ridiculous distortion: not only is childcare not "outsourcing" of one's child's development, but it's also one of the oldest and most traditional vocations. It predates our modern economic structures by thousands of years.
I don't get why mothers not being at home is seen as bad. As though it's a greater good for society that instead they're punching in numbers into a spreadsheet at a widget factory. Sounds to me like the only winner there is the widget factory. It didn't used to have to be this way and maybe we should figure out why it has to be that way now, then fix that.
It's not seen as bad. There's nothing wrong with mothers being at home, if they want to be. The observation is that women, like all beings with agency, don't always want to be at-home mothers and we (modern, liberal societies) broadly agree that people shouldn't be forced or economically coerced into doing things they don't want to do.
Financial freedom in their marriage? If you meant single moms then they have to be able to make money. That much is obvious. But then let's address broken homes. If we're going to tackle big problems that one seems like it would have the greatest impact. Not least of which for the kids, who seem to not be factored into this conversation at all.
Financial freedom, full stop. People stay in abusive, unhealthy, etc. relationships because of financial dependence all the time. "Broken homes" have nothing to do with it.
You're not wrong. People do stay in relationships due to financial dependence. Is that an outlier that can be addressed? Does the existence of an outlying circumstance require a shifting of society? Broken homes, as an aside to my questions here, have so much more to do with current day problems than almost any other issue. Can we find a way to tackle all of these issues? Right now it feels like scorched Earth.
I think you agree with me? It's an incentive that makes it easier for child-bearing women to escape traditional gender roles that they might otherwise be stuck in due to lack of career prospects.
> Many European countries have extremely generous benefits for raising children, but it has been broadly ineffective at raising birth rates
Yeah because even in Germany the Kindergeld of ~220€ per child per month isn't nearly enough to cover the extra cost in rent, much less the actual expenses that a child brings with it.
When most people below 30 struggle to make rent, even without children, and actual ownership of a decent sized home is even more unrealistic, they won't have children.
Isn't the simple explanation for child birth falling so rapidly being the participation of women in the workforce? I didn't do any research but I just always assumed that it is.
Wealth inequality is one of the drivers of reducing family size. As well-compensated, high-status professions require either high up-front costs in education and socialization or high risk early investment the rationale shifts from "needing a lot of hands to keep the family firm going" to "needing to dedicate a lot of resources to set the kids up for success."
In other words, the economic incentives today are to "go tall" rather than "go wide" with your kids if family wealth and status is the aim. If inequality is high this becomes more pronounced because the top of the heap will be more desirable and more competitive.
Really I think it'll depend on how good the robots end up being. If they're very good at replacing humans then labor won't be able to bid up its pay rates. If the robots are shitty, though, it might work out okay.
Not sure this makes sense. The biggest driver of family size seems to be lack of birth control or religious beliefs. Wealthy people avoid having children because they either expect too much for their kids or are enjoying their child free lifestyles. Meanwhile, in the US many children are born to the poorest portion of the population.
On the other side, unfettered population growth for the purposes of maintaining a sufficiently large proportion of young people (in a world where people are living longer as well) is basically a Ponzi scheme. We’ll have to eventually stabilize to a sustainable demographic distribution; the earlier the better.
The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi scheme is the lack of any real productive activity. The growth on paper is fake. We care about working-age population because working-age people are actually out there fighting entropy to provision the stuff we like, and there's more or less of it to go around depending on how much of that is happening. That's reflected on paper but it's also true in the world, in our standard of living.
Your statement "the earlier the better" makes no sense. Obviously at some point there are limits; we should do as well as we can within those limits. "We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." What?
>"We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible."
Very obviously not OPs point. What they're saying is that if you're living in a system that basically runs on a sort of 'lipstick on a pig' mentality being confronted with your problems directly and being forced to solve them is preferable to dragging it out, and there's a lot of truth to that.
You may be familiar with the old startup and systems design mantra 'fail fast', which is the same thing. If you want a long term sustainable system it is good to act in such a way as to bring systemic faults to the surface.
An entire generation will be demanding their golden years be subsidized by the young like they had to subsidize their parents’ generation, who had to subsidize their parents before them.
The world is not ready to be told “No” on this. That’s a time bomb.
There's certainly better opportunities for well-trained professionals in developing countries, but there's still a large pay differential. On top of that, immigrants to wealthier Western countries seek the low levels of day-to-day corruption, well-maintained infrastructure, good air quality, safety from violent crimes and theft, and access to leading universities and companies, where cutting-edge research and product development is done. In the US at least, there's plenty of gloom for our decline, some relative and some absolute, in many of these categories. But there's still a clear and stark difference for someone coming from India or Brazil.
The dark horse in this race will be climate changes. These predictions look natural, as extrapolation from the current situation with decreasing growth in population.
I hope we (the politicians) don't hold tight to a strict plan, because if and when climate changes start to have a big impact, millions of people might have to move to different countries. These two things combined, decreasing population and massive movements of people, are hard to predict and will require a new way of dealing with these issues.
Climate changes are way exaggerated. Almost all official predictions by IPCC etc, which aren’t addicted to clickbait, say that over the next few decades we will lose some GDP growth due to climate change. But world GDP will still grow. There won’t be starvation, or famine, etc.
This is not the world ending apocalyptic scenario that’s thrown around in the media.
Perhaps a few countries will become uninhabitable, but I find that unlikely too. The current cases of countries that because uninhabitable dealt with the issues (eg Netherlands) and are still thriving.
i seriously recommend anyone downvoting this to read the actual IPCC reports [1]. not denying that climate change is happening and causing harm, but the proximate effects due to climate change (i.e. extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity, decreased food/water safety) are worth understanding concretely. the biggest worries from climate change IMO are all the second-order effects, and somewhat socio-political in nature: catastrophe in one region tends to “spread” to other regions, e.g. when one country experiences famine the adjacent countries can be overloaded with migrants and now they also have not enough food, leading to a contagion of food insecurity. if the biggest problems really are socio-political (based on how unevenly climate change hits throughout the world), it hints at other options for deadening the blow to climate change that a typical reader might not be aware of. it also points to the risky idea that the most effective way of decreasing these sorts of localized-but-contagious catastrophe really is to lift every region out of poverty (giving them the same tools we have to easily relocate or react to shocks), which today usually means prioritizing energy security (even if unclean energy) and definitely not any of the “degrowth” ideas casually tossed around.
Two decades, sure, but two centuries? If sea level is about to rise 1 or 2 or 3 meters, things will surely change more than what we see now. I live in the Netherlands, I am not worried about myself. But the world for our children might look different in this regard than ours. And we should not fall into the trap that it only exists when it touches us, then it will be way too late.
I believe the sea level rise will indeed affect the Netherlands. I hope technology will progress so as to allow cheap relocation, or conversion of buildings to seasteads.
I'm pretty sure two centuries from now there will also be completely unforeseeable problems, but also solutions. If you look at old predictions, we feared lots of things that did not turn out to happen: alien invasions, meteor strikes, nuclear war, a disease killing most of the population (COVID-19 has only killed <0.07% so far).
"The sea defenses are continuously being strengthened and raised to meet the safety norm of a flood chance of once every 10,000 years for the west, which is the economic heart and most densely populated part of the Netherlands, and once every 4,000 years for less densely populated areas. [...]
The Second Delta Committee [...] expects a sea level rise of 65 to 130 cm by the year 2100."
There will absolutely be major climate-change-related droughts and famines in the next half-century. They might be limited to the third world, but they will still lead to geopolitical unrest and mass migrations.
Think about the fact that the result of a low birth-rate with better medical tech keeping older people from dying when they otherwise would have. The result will be a far higher percentage of voters in democracies will be beneficiaries of the work of people younger than them. They will increasingly vote to expand the benefits they receive, at the expense of the younger folks who have to pay higher taxes to fund them.
Perhaps one of the most distinct, and deliberately obfuscated, characteristics of COVID is its steep risk stratification by age. According to the US CDC data here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
Roughly 94% of all COVID deaths were in people age 50 and up.
28.2% of deaths were in people over the age of 85, 7 years past the average US life expectancy (for men).
If you look at the response to COVID in western nations, you can see that the cost/benefit analysis wasn't being evaluated in the context of the vast majority of people dying (and therefore benefiting) were past retirement age, and the vast majority of people bearing the cost of these policies were younger, lower risk people who were put out of work. The government programs that used debt-financed payments to alleviate these issues for the young generated debt that, again, will hurt the younger generations far more than the older.
Even before covid, the USA has universal health care for people over 65, but not for younger people or kids in working class families who aren't broke enough to qualify for Medicaid. I'm 40, so I'm no spring chicken, but western democracies routinely fuck over young people to help the old. It's going to get far worse until it hits an unsustainable level.
I've paid Social Security and Medicare taxes for 25 years, since my first paycheck, and it's not likely I'll ever receive anything from these programs based on current projections.
That won't end until young people actually show up to polls just as significantly. Politicians cater to their voting constituents and the elderly show up to vote stronger. Some of this is due to our suspect "you have this 1 Tuesday to do it" voting day. But what young people can do is make it socially unacceptable to not vote like the elderly do to each other.
Young people don't vote as much partly due to lack of habit, but also due to their jobs having less flexible scheduling and voter registration rolls being tied to where you live. Old people live in places longer, young people move more. It's simply a much bigger paperwork hurdle to get registered, find your polling place, etc. And that's assuming you can take time off and politicians have actually bothered trying to engage you where you're at rather than spending $50 Million on ad time in the evening news.
I know that when I was young, lack of interest is what kept me from voting, along with most everyone that I knew in the age range. I can't imagine things have changed all that much.
I think everyone needs to understand what they're voting for, which requires much more effort than habit, so I'm not sure that's a good goal (unless that understanding is part of the habit, of course, which isn't what I've seen).
Looking back, not only did I lack interest, but I was easily swayed by politicians, promising things that would never happen, and news, providing incomplete perspectives and half truths. I was young, living with my parents, and completely lacked perspective on the machine of the world. If I were to go back, I would stop myself from voting that young, because it was completely hollow. From what I've seen, younger people these days don't seem to be much different. Easiest proof being that they're shocked that they're not getting the campaign promises that they voted for.
It's ridiculously easy to vote and with early voting being extended for WEEKS and mail-in voting also an option, there is no excuse other than apathy, ignorance, or laziness. If you can submit a tax return, you can vote.
Where you live, perhaps. Not every state functions that way.
My state (NH) has no early voting, and absentee/mail-in voting is only allowed for a few specific reasons. (in 2020, COVID was an acceptable reason, but it is not expected to be in future elections).
>I've paid Social Security and Medicare taxes for 25 years, since my first paycheck, and it's not likely I'll ever receive anything from these programs based on current projections.
This is a purely political decision. When Paul Ryan made this assertion in Congress to justify privatizing the system Alan Greenspan shot him down[1]. The government chooses how many dollars to allocate to Social Security and Medicare. Whether those dollars come from taxes elsewhere is almost entirely irrelevant.
The only factor is whether seniors will get enough from the program to buy what they need to live. This has as much to do with the prices of goods as it does with the size of the benefit itself. We will need to ensure we have the production we need to meet the demand by investing in sustainable, productivity amplifying technologies. The reality is with population aging or stagnating we will need one worker to be able to produce what two or more was able to to keep prices stable.
I think the pressure to do this is already being felt by workers here in the US. It's one of the main reasons why there is so much apathy from the ruling classes when it comes to ensuring workers can earn a living wage from one job. The people in charge would rather we keep the conditions such that one worker must work three jobs to scrape by than make the costly investments to increase productivity.
I am hoping that machine will finally be the new slave so humans can really be free! Maybe western countries population problem won't be a real issue before developing countries can be wealthy.
> - Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up.
I'm not sure that high birth rates are driving emigration so much as corrupt and ineffective governments, and I'm not sure that corrupt and ineffective governments are consequences of high birth rates. And by corruption I'm not refer to the US variety (political donations) but instead low level bribery that is required as part of every day life.
When the cost of human labor goes up, the inequality will go down. One question is if cities will keep growing, or if we will see decentralization. The corona pandemic has proved that many jobs can be decentralized using modern communication technology.
While the average population gets older, we are also more healthy at higher ages, so we might not need as much care.
I feel you might be conflating decentralization with location dependency. I actually expect things to centralize and concentrate further in a fully location independent world.
In the US and some other developed countries we are not more healthy at higher ages. Life expectancy has flattened out of even declined. Obesity rates are rising.
A lot of these problems can go away if we can get automation right and done soon enough (though it comes with other problems itself). With automation Western nations need not rely on immigrants as much for labor as their own populations decline and age. Some services can also become a lot cheaper, like food delivery and even the food itself.
I often think we frame things poorly. Wealth inequality is a problem the same way coal is a problem. It's the effects. The problem with global warming is the amount of infrared sensitive gases in the air. A coal fired plant that had zero net emissions (ccs) wouldn't be an issue. Similarly the problem with wealth is that if it is pooled up capitalism doesn't work because it needs a flow and exchange of goods to operate efficiently. Personally I don't care about the wealth gap and the top earners, I care about the bottom. If we can make all the essentials cheap enough it makes money far less valuable in the first place (solving the same problem but with different framing).
In a world that already has Teslas running around the roads and solar farms being built for profit, but that doesn't already have economical carbon capture, it turns out that renewables are actually the conservative way out.
I mean to solve climate change we need a lot of things. More that solar and wind. Frankly we need to be carbon negative, which will require some ccs, reforestation, land management, fixing the reefs, and more. It's a complex problem that if you treat it as being simple you're taking steps backwards.
The simple part is that we need to stop gathering geologically sequestered hydrocarbons and putting them in the atmosphere.
I have made an effort to understand climate science. Personally, I think the deference to simulations and experts has been hugely detrimental. The important questions seem to not need either PhDs or simulations. Very rudimentary education for anyone who has a science background suffices. Know the sun's rough temperature and the Earth's rough temperature, plus black-body ration, and you know the mechanism of heating. Know a weather-channel level of humidity temperature dependence, and you can know the water vapor feedback.
So yes, cows, concrete, and steel are going to be problems if we solve fossil fuels. But this seems intentionally misleading. Oil comes from a mile underground and we put it in the atmosphere. We've got to stop doing that fast, before we're locked into future effects, like crop productivity declines.
I think to understand how to solve the problem has become harder over the years. It used to actually only be "stop emitting". That was the issue in the 80's and when we first saw scientists discussing with congress.
But now not only has the problem become more difficult (as we've let the problem snowball), but others have been creating new agendas. To be clear, this confusion and misunderstanding is on a continuous scale, not binary (misinformation in the green movements is better than the misinformation in the anti-climate movements). The problem is that if you aren't in the academic spaces it is often difficult to find the actions we need to take because there's this game of telephone going on (I do think it is "the media"'s job to distill this information by talking directly to experts, but they've been failing). What's worrying here is that we often note how climate is "the most complicated crisis that humanity has ever faced" but almost everyone acts like they have an expert opinion on it (I _do not_ but I have worked close to the space and am mostly appealing to authority here).
So I want to give an example of a common myth on the pro-climate side that actually takes us a step backwards but most people think it is an obvious path forward: reforestation. This is confusing because we all learn in school that trees "breathe" CO2 and exhale O2. But in reality young forests are actually carbon sources and old forests are carbon sinks[0]. This is about 20 years and so we have a lag. But that's only the beginning of the problem[1], and things get really complicated really fast because we need to consider the whole ecosystem involved, which is why land management is so important as well.
In this example, taking the "obvious" and simple answer actually is harmful to the goal even though it is "more correct" than the other answers.
Unless there are more pandemics and wars that intervene. This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. I think we are perhaps 80% of the way to an endemic with successive mutations becoming less and less lethal, so perhaps the true death toll is in the 15-20 million range. Any large scale war between nation-states can have a pretty high death toll if things escalate out of control. How much could that be? And how would that affect future population growth?
This is without taking into account decreasing sperm counts of men in developed countries and excess deaths due to air pollution in developing countries.
>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist.
Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated.
Can someone point me to a reference where this subject is rigorously treated, without skipping over the gore, but is still accessible to a non-expert (say, to someone who has undergrad-level understanding of health stats)? Could be a paper, a meta study, a blog post, whatever.
Like with this estimate, for example, I'd want to know if it's 10-12 million people who died within X days of a positive PCR test for COVID, or something less naive.
The easy way to get a rough answer here is simply to compare the death rate from the same time of year a couple of years back. Assuming no other events that would cause a large swing in death rate, most of the variance can likely be explained by COVID.
Assuming no other events that would cause a large swing in death rate
It's not obvious this is a tenable assumption, though. Depression and isolation can also increase mortality for things not directly related to depression and isolation, for example.
"I have Type 1 diabetes. I am healthy enough to run ultramarathons.
If I get attacked by a bear & the ICU has trouble managing my blood sugar while caring for my bear attack wounds...and I die... the bear is the cause of my death. "[1]
But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both logistical and political).
> But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both logistical and political).
Exactly, deciding the cause of a single death is a messy complex task that doesn't have correct answers. Deciding the number of deaths due to a cause is much simpler and can be done most of the times.
Excess mortality is a rough proxy of death from COVID. In the bear attack example, the proximal cause of death is the Bear attack, and diabetes is a comorbidity. The death of the diabetic arose out of complications stemming from the bear attack, so it's reasonable to categorize it as a bear attack death.
I'm assuming that you are arguing that from the excess deaths standpoint, death from x vs. death with x both count as death from x, to which I agree. I also think it's a reasonable characterization.
> This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist.
A more accurate way to state would be "This pandemic and the varying response to it by different nations has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist."
That's pedantic, and useless accuracy. Excess deaths stem primarily from the pandemic. It would be even more accurate to say that "The obfuscation of the true nature of what was a deadly pandemic by a corrupt totalitarian state killed 10-12 million people", but that's totally irrelevant and distracting in this context.
I will add that part of the problems created for the future is how newer generations have been trained to dismiss procreation using various arguments: it's expensive, it will take resources and time away from you, it's bad for the environment, the state will look after us not kids...
Everything just made it so easy for newer generations to fallback to default: naahhh I'll just won't bother.
> Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate.
i am not quite sure what the timeframe of this prediction but at the moment all my street in india will pack their bags and relocate without a second thought to USA if given a choice. And this is an upper middle class neighborhood.
All of these issues are functions of a growing population.
You know that our species has a problem when the solution to issues becomes "we need to shit out more babies." This modus operandi is no different than that of a replicating virus or locust swarm. When you are part of the swarm, it's easy to justify your actions as a means for survival, but from an outside perspective, one sees nothing but chaos, environmental devastation, and widespread suffering.
We need to stop the rampant breeding and plug the hole in this sinking ship known as planet Earth.
Over population of humans created the biggest problem already. Climate change, farming too much to feed that, 96% of all mammals are human and livestock, only 4% are wild that we can't exploit, 70% birds are poultry, other species are going extinct.
But people here are self centred like always, so those are not bigger problem to them but future economy is.
Religion can help? - I have a Mormon co-worker. They have 8 kids. Move whole family to Japan. Told me that every time they came home to US they took a row in the wide body Jet.
I’ve wondered about something like that. Lower population growth seems to be a direct consequence of modern liberal society, where women are allowed and encouraged to choose having a career over raising a family.
And despite glib sound bites from well-to-do upper class families who can afford a fortune for high-quality childcare, it may simply be that the average middle-class woman cannot “have it all”, and must make the choice between a fulfilling career or a large family.
If my assessment is correct, it seems to end up in a scenario where, tautologically, the fecund inherit the Earth. In this case, society naturally drifts back towards a more conservative view of family roles over the next century, since only people who live those values increase their numbers. Perhaps, long-term, we enter a regular cycle of populations rising and falling, with each demographic turnover lasting a full century or more.
The transition will be hard for the possible reasons toy give, but long term we should again return to a normal age/population pyramid. The tricky part is managing the shift.
Malthus wasn't completely wrong, but international trade mitigates the problem. This, of course, requires large surpluses in the exporting countries and fully operational supply chains, which we tended to take for granted until now.
An example: Egypt, a former granary of the Mediterranean, is now a net food importer and a sudden swing in world commodity prices could very well topple the ruling junta.
This wouldn't have happened if the Egyptian population growth leveled off at more reasonable numbers (say, only 30 million people crammed into the narrow Nile delta instead of 100 million).
Egypt's grain imports were caused by bad governance and theft, not by population. Mubarak instituted a bizarre form of reverse land reform in which he stole land from families who had farmed it for ten generations and gave it to cronies who attempted to grow fruit and flowers for Europe. The cronies were not farmers, their crops failed, the desert rolled in. Truly, the apex of capitalism.
All authoritarians confiscate property when it benefits them to do so. When communists have taken farm land, they have mostly left it as farm land, even if production has sometimes decreased due to incompetence. No one with a clue would consider Hosni Mubarak a communist, because he transformed land that had produced grain for millennia into "investment vehicles" for cronies, and then into desert. Not even communists are that incompetent, or venal.
> But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive.
Covid was fixing this, but then some renegade scientists came up with the vaccines and ruined everything. Again.
As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.
Or productivity goes up, since we don't need a massive population doing menial tasks. Just like every time someone has said this for the last 300 years.
Won't someone think of the people picking the seeds out of cotton?
This is a point I often make that people dismiss out of hand quite often. "People need jobs to have meaning, people need jobs to feed their families" and while thee are true, nobody really wants to screw toothpaste tube caps on toothpaste tubes for a living, and a world where nobody has to do that job is inarguably a better world for everyone.
> apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this
The media did not invent the worry about "population bombs". That was thanks to what environmentalism was at the time & trotting out the same tired Malthusianism
> But religion is a small factor in fertility today, Muttreja says. “Hindus in Uttar Pradesh, for example, have a much higher fertility than Muslims in Kerala. There is no Hindu fertility or Muslim fertility.”
This is really strange he could have compared fertility rate of Muslims vs Hindus in Utter Pradeep and the same in Kerala. Instead he compares Muslims in Kerala vs Hindus in Utter Pranesh. Kerala is the least poor and most educated state in India and Utter Pradesh is one among the poorest and least educated states.
If you reread the previous paragraph, the background is that some people focus on the difference in fertility across religions. The point being made is that socioeconomic conditions are more important.
I think this is the opposite of a "corrected for X factor" we usually see in studies - this is suggesting that economic situation is a bigger factor in fertility than religious practices.
That should be a "duh", but having more resources resulting in fewer kids is the opposite of the malthusian hypothesis that this is limited by resources/mortality & is driven by personal choice to have kids (and kids do better when parents explicitly choose to have them).
They're saying it is a small factor, not that it does not influence it, because if you correct for economic climate, there are definite differences that you can measure, because personal choice is definitely influenced by how many kids your social circle have.
I am of the opinion that high birthrates are almost entirely a function of women’s financial independence. Childbirth/breastfeeding is such a costly experience for most women that I doubt many would opt for it more than 2 or 3 times if they had an option by not being dependent on men and/or access to easy and effective birth control.
I don't actually think women mind those costs as much. Once you have your first, assuming no complications, many women aren't so spooked by it.
I think what really happens is women with careers, hobbies, etc. have more opportunities for self-actualization that the demands of motherhood, especially of small children, get in the way of. So if women have the education and resources to pursue vocations outside the home, the opportunity costs of spending more months of your life getting sleep in 2 hour chunks are much higher. If, on the other hand, motherhood and the rearing of children is the only sort of legacy they can pursue because the glass ceiling is so low, they'll be willing to put more into it.
According to the article, education (particularly for women) seems to be the biggest factor:
> The strikingly different fertility rates in different regions of India reflect the role of education, says EM Sreejit of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in South Asia. Kerala in the south, which has the country’s highest literacy rate, achieved replacement fertility back in 1988. Bihar in the east, with the lowest literacy rate, won’t get there until 2039
According to Vox: "In 1975, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the declaration of a national emergency. She seized dictatorial powers, imprisoned her political rivals, and embarked, with the help of her son Sanjay, on a mass, compulsory sterilization program that registers as one of the most disturbing and vast human rights violations in the country’s modern history." Source: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2019/6/5/186...
Of course, as the OP notes, America is partly to blame. The exact quote from Johnson was...a bit more direct:
> When an adviser asked the president if he wanted to promise [Indira] Gandhi more food aid during her visit, he exploded: “Are you out of your fucking mind? … I’m not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.”
If America can change the entire fertility of a country merely by the president getting frustrated, imagine what we could do when the entire legislature is upset!
Or the one comment is just used to defray blame, America does not have cosmic superpowers and India is in fact capable of making their own national decisions, seeing that they are a state.
Sanger like most historical characters is imperfect (so was LBJ) but it is a gross simplification of history to pitch them as the root cause.
Darkly hilarious in hindsight, but when I was in first grade, there was a rumor one day at school that there was going to be forced "nasbandi" at school that day.
We were kids and had no idea what the word (Hindi for vasectomy) meant but we were still freaked out for a while, because we knew it was bad. I still remember a Hindi protest song about it to this day, almost 50 years later.
This was during the Emergency (as that time is known in India).
The Gandhi family was all about total control and megalomania
Sikh genocide in 1984
Putting the opposition in jail and declaring an emergency
Ass kissing USSR and adopting "socialist" ideals - in the 60s you needed licenses to own things like radios and bicycles - till the 1990s there were only 3 to 4 brands of cars you could buy in India without being a millionaire
The Congress party was so hated for so many decades, which is why the nationalist right-wing party of Modi keeps winning even though he is also over the top.
Increasing political polarisation seems to be a worldwide problem at this point. Precious few regions seem (currently) exempt from this most dangerous path.
But it does mean India joins much of the rest of the world with sub-replacement fertility with just a few outliers.
The challenge now switches to how to move from sub-replacement to sustainable fertility.
Japan and South Korea are leaders in sub-replacement fertility with not that much success in finding a path towards sustainable population. Both I believe are still dropping.
This is the grand social engineering challenge of the next 20 to 40 years I figure.
There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations.
There is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations being alive.
Just by simple numbers – no, you don't need a sustainable population rate. We were perfectly fine as a species when the population was half or a tenth or hundredth of what it is now, and will still thrive if it gets to that again. The problem is the demographic breakdown. If the rate of growth is decreasing it means that when your current population ages and exits the labor pool there won't be enough young people to replace them. And with better medical care and increased life expectancy these old people will still hang around and need care.
This is a problem that every large, developed country faces today, and they generally solve it through immigration. But what happens when every country is in the same situation?
do we need that labor pool considering we are progressing in technology? 100 years ago there were no factories we see today etc. But day by day with technological advancement we are automating lot of things. So I really don't think we need that much labor we required yesterday.
Is population problem really a big deal considering we already have a big elephant in room already like climate change, scarcity of resources, poverty, water crisis?
While technology has definitely made things better over the last few decades, we are still very, very far from the post-scarcity society that we like to envision. The majority of people on the planet today are still doing back breaking labor in order to survive.
I always thought that when our western governments talk about this problem, they are not concerned with the back breaking work that needs doing, but the amount of tax being paid by younger generations not enough to cover pensions and all the expensive medical conditions old people have.
I think its mostly a financial problem, not a physical labor problem.
Most people over the age of ~65 are given $967.50 a fortnight. (its means tested - but the family home is not counted). They spend that on whatever they like. I shudder to think how much goes into the pokies.
Old people like to visit the GP, like every week, to chat about the weather and that weird pimple that's been growing in weird places. That's also paid for by the government.
We're automating a lot of things, but not healthcare. There we're inventing treatments that enable the dying to receive more and increasingly sophisticated care over longer periods of time.
This is the issue that became known as "death panels" in the Obama-era healthcare debate. We're pretty committed to not solving it.
But isnt all a self correcting system? If there isn't enough care for older folks then they'll just die off and life expectancy would go down. We see this in countries with civil wars and major catastrophes. At least that's what happened/happening in Syria.
> Is there a need to a sustainable population rate?
At some point yes we do.
> There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations.
For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society.
> here is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations being alive.
I think generational change is a major driver of innovation. Old people get stuck in their ways, more so then we are likely to ever admit -- but maybe we can solve brain plasticity as well? I think if we solve aging completely, we become a rigid oligarchic society.
We entered the 20c with ~1.5Bp, and didn't hit 3 until we were ready to land on the moon. We have a loooong way to go before we run out of people to run an advanced economy.
As for the grey-aristocracy: it's already here, just unevenly distributed. Bruce Sterling described it vividly in Holy Fire (1996).
If the entire world had south Korean levels of fertility it would take... 70 or 80 years to end up with a couple billion people again.
In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.
What’s wrong with what we’ve been doing? Emancipate and educate women, vaccinate and educate children, and suppress the worst of male-supremacy ideologues, and fertility comes down.
Rising economic outcomes have led to that, not some sort of push for women's rights or the death of male supremacist ideologies. Just look at India or China. Only in the most metropolitan areas are they even close to thinking like that on a large scale.
> [...] enough humans to run an advanced society. [...] I think generational change is a major driver of innovation [...]
That is a good point, and I would like to add that currently most young people on this planet are not part of innovation. They have to make sure they get food and shelter. If in the future we solved poverty and everyone has access to good education and a relative safe life, many more young people can be innovative. One can dream ;)
> For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society.
How can we acknowledge that we need a lot of people to run the sort of society we ended up with today without also reasoning that the more advanced society we might achieve in 100 years might need a lot more people?
There's nothing special about 10 billion people. People have been throwing out numbers as "overpopulation tipping points" for hundreds of years, and we've passed all of them. And now we acknowledge that it's important that we passed them, because we can't even keep our advanced version of "the lights on" without having done so.
Humans are resources in a general sense. More humans means more resources which you can throw at various challenges, problems. So you are right. More humans has benefits.
But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. So what we need is controlled growth or at least sustainable levels. Right now we are switching into a decrease which will be very jarring and not sustainable.
We've never truly has controlled population growth, we just had unfettered growth, which now has slowed down into a decrease. What is next is for us to increase it again and then have control over this. It is basically getting us to the next level of human development.
We just have to be careful about those that want to exercise differential growth/decrease rates based on people's memberships in ideological, religious or racial groups.
We've never had unfettered growth. People are limited in how many children they can have, and how many they want to have. We can trust parents to know how many children they want. We don't need a bureaucrat telling us when we can have sex and when we're required to have sex
> But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again.
This is vague, and assumes the conclusion. All we've ever known is unfettered growth, and it's been accompanied by people "proving" that it's "not sustainable" for a long time. So far we have not only sustained it, but thrived while sustaining it. More importantly, we have come to rely on it: We're pretty sure we couldn't have a society like this one without hundreds of millions of people.
Any given growth rate is not sustainable long term. For example, consider a growth rate of 1% per year (about what the world population growth rate currently is).
Right now, every human is on or near the Earth. Let's call this year 0.
In year 1, every human must be within one light-year of the Earth. In year 2, every human must be within two light-years of the Earth. In year N, every human must be within N light-years of Earth.
Take the volume of a sphere of radius N light-years and divide it by the population after N years of 1% growth, and you get the volume available per person if humans were spread out evenly among all possible space that humans could theoretically occupy.
At year 1, that is about 4.39 x 10^38 m^3 per person, so no problem. But at around year 11600 it is 4 m^2 per person. By 12101 it is down to 0.04 m^3 per person. The internet tells me that the average volume of a human is about 0.06 m^3 so 0.04 m^3 per person would be bad news.
What if we manage to invent Star Trek style warp engines right away, which let us go 1000x the speed of light. That makes everything a 10^9 times better. At 12101 we have 40000000 m^3 per person. But by 13524 we are down to 40 m^3 per person, and by 14000 below 0.39 m^3 per person. From there we have only got until 14192 before we are just below 0.06 m^3.
Remember, this is being ridiculous optimistic. Even with warp drive available starting tomorrow we would not be able to spread so fast that 14000 years from now we are uniformly occupying a 28000 light year diameter spherical volume around Earth. In reality we'll hit a space limit a lot earlier.
Hence, we can conclude that 1% is not sustainable for more than a few thousand years even under very optimistic assumptions.
Long term the growth rate must be one that on average declines over time, simply because a growth rate that does not do so leads to exponential growth, but we live in a universe were accessible space cannot grow faster than polynomially.
If more people are able to have healthier lives and be productive in their chosen niche (if they choose to), there might be other benefits, too. For example, many fields benefit from long expertise, like mathematics.
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
Only if humans in different places are fungible, which they are not, and only if young people are willing to shoulder increasingly high burdens to take care of old people, which is debatable.
And the “solution to aging” stuff is pretty optimistic. Modern medical technology has barely pushed the boundaries of healthy life at the top end. The first five American presidents died at 67, 83, 90, 85, and 73. The two that didn’t make it to their 80s died of a viral disease that still affects us today (influenza) and a bacterial disease that we do have a treatment for today (TB).
From the perspective of eudaemonia, yes, the surviving population needs goods and services to continue. With a sub-replacement birthrate, there are fewer 'new' people to provide the goods and services for the remaining. This creates inflationary pressure and deprivation.
From the perspective of 'will the world end?' no- the Earth will continue to exist even without any people at all.
> the Earth will continue to exist even without any people at all.
Nobody cares about that perspective; it's an obvious and not particularly interesting observation... yeah universe existed without humans and can obviously continue to exist without humans too. When people talk about "world end" they talk about the humanity, not the physical world around us.
I agree and that's why it was a footnote- that's the point I was making. But on much of the Internet you'll find people eager to misunderstand this very point, so some defensive writing is justified.
> Japan and South Korea are leaders in sub-replacement fertility with not that much success in finding a path towards sustainable population. Both I believe are still dropping.
Straight line extrapolations of demographic trends based on current rates aren't super reliable. The system is sort of self correcting. Once population gets low enough people will eventually start birthing more. The only place it gets to be an issue is geo-strategic, like small populations can just get overwhelmed by larger ones either culturally, economically, or militarily.
> I don't believe it is possible during the natural development of a free country to get back to having lots of children.
50 to 100 years ago we probably didn't think it was natural to have humans willingly limit their population growth - it was viewed as completely unnatural, but it has basically happened nearly everywhere.
I think you can do it via government rewards to those having larger families and starting them earlier. Housing discounts. Rebates. Tax credits.
I believe Israel does this in combination with being religiously conservative, discouraging/banning most abortions, combined with a lot of government incentives, discounts -- in fact many of the people moving into the occupied territories are people starting families as the government discounts the housing there.
why did my dental technician (low paid service job with minimal requirements) happily tell me she has five children? their father "lost his green card" and left.. she was happy, it was one of the first things she told me.. I did not ask about that..
meanwhile, people from my own similar background are not getting married, not having children, and even more extreme things like that.. yet the average education in my group is a Master degree from a good college
handwaving about "leaders in whatever" and "the answer is more education" are just wishful thinking and denial, in my direct experience
It's cultural. For a lot of people having children is happiness. My mother would say about as much-- "children are happiness in life". She came from the previous generation in India, incidentally. Compared to many from the current generation(in America where I live) where children are just seen as a choice some people make. A very difficult choice at that-- so many people pick the most "logical" decision and just run DINK households. We love our freedom, and children significantly diminish that for at least 18-25 years
When I was a child about 40 years ago there was a slogan "हम दो, हमारे दो" which translates to "We are a couple, we will have two children". Then in my teens it turned to "हम दो हमारे एक", ie, "We are a couple, we will have one child". It was on TV, in print ads, on the sides of buses, everywhere. There was also a huge move to make contraception easily available to every woman in the country. Then in the 90s TV was privatized and it all disappeared.
It wasn't privatization that caused the disappearance of these ads, but the fact that the government decided to take a step back from pushing family planing after the disastrous efforts of the Indira Gandhi government.
Resources/education/contraceptives/abortion are still easily available to people, just without the dystopian ads or forced sterilization campaigns.
The major states with higher fertility rates have a population of 330 million, roughly 1/4th of India's population. Uttar Pradesh: 200 million, Bihar: 100 million, Jharkhand: 30 million. Uttar Pradesh itself is roughly as populous as Nigeria or Bangladesh.
It's notable that most areas of the country are below replacement rates of fertility, which is around 2.2 children per woman.
Depends on what you mean by rich. India’s per capita income is more than 3 times what it was 30 years ago. So it can easily support significant social programs for the elderly, though not to western standards.
On top of this western productivity is linked to low birth rates enabling a larger percentage of the population to work. So low birth rates may be required for a wealthy country rather than being just the result of a wealthy country.
But what was the actual per capita income 30 years ago? 3 times not much is still not very much. So I don't see how is a given that they can institute suitable social programs. It's still a question whether or not that'll be the case even for first world western countries
India’s per capita PPP is ~6k$ USD per year, but it’s not equally distributed. Ignoring economic growth and assuming a population distribution that eventually looks like the US (16% of the population over 65) allocating say 8% of GDP to the elderly would provide a standard of living better than most of them had 20 years ago and in fact many would see an income bump at retirement.
Of course that doesn’t pay for significant medical care etc, but I also ignored economic growth. By the time India has US style age demographic breakdown things should look significantly better.
Many developing countries go through a phase when fertility/mortality rates start to decline, and for a while they'll get an economic boost while the working-age population grows at a faster rate than the non-working-age population. That's when East Asian countries laid the foundation for their economic growth.
I am very suspicious of that supposed relationship. There are tons of productivity gains to be had, and nothing like a tightening labor market to force them.
The cost of living in India is going to be pretty low compared to colder countries, so it shouldn't cost a lot to provide a decent lifestyle.
With accelerating automation, most people are going to have to depend on a much smaller set of people/industries. A shrinking population is not bad given we make plans for the future.
Cost of living in India is low because of the large population. A generation or two from now things will look very different when there's no more dirt cheap labor to go around.
There is A LOT of slack in a population of that size. Most women don't even work yet. Even if population declines, the labor force will continue to rise for a long time.
I was going to say this. We have this weird habit in the West of trivializing raising one's own children, as if that's not "real work". A lot folks would rather raise their children instead of outsourcing it to strangers just to work a job they hate.
Many of us (and by “us,” I mean “mothers”) see it as a balance: I am outsourcing part of my child’s upbringing in order to maintain a career I like well enough that’s capable of supporting us both should life throw some curveballs at us. Say “life insurance” all you like, and my response is “unpredictable inflation”.
I don't think anyone is trivializing it... but the government can't tax homemakers to pay for medicare, pensions, and other social services which is the relevant point of the discussion.
Raising children might not be what people are best at, and it's more efficient to work a job that can pay for this stranger, and to have money left over.
There aren't many qualities that disqualify a person from humanity, but being so bad at caring for one's own children that an employee would do a better job might be an example.
you can't pay someone to love your child. only you and your partner can love your child. love is nearly as important as food to them. and you have to show that love in the attention you give them - tucking them into bed at night isn't enough.
If the country does not get richer faster than it gets older, the increasingly older population will suffer, having to work till they're older and getting less financial support (healthcare, pensions etc) because there would be proportionally fewer healthy young people to pay in to the system.
I keep seeing this, but then I look at how rich countries treat their old people, and generally it's stuff them in retirement homes, which seem like awful places.
I agree, but that isn't much of a counter-point, if anything a population that is majority old people will only make that worse since the increased burden on the young would breed more resentment towards older people.
Would you rather old people be dying of starvation/due to lack of healthcare because the country isn't rich enough to support them fully than living in old age homes?
They're going to die regardless. Is it better to die younger from lack of health care than die older with dementia and bed sores? I've only witnessed the latter. Doesn't seem like something I'd like to go through.
I think that's a very defeatist/nihilistic point of view. Since we're all going to die eventually anyway, we should aim to improve our standards as much as possible so we or our kids get to enjoy a better old age than what old people get right now. Our ancestors have gone through much worse to build the better world we enjoy today.
Nah - that's more of a system of control. You can definitely have a poor country where people are not slaves to mortgages. It's called building your own house. Many countries allow that.
Consider healthcare, usually older people need it more than younger people. If you have a higher proportion of older people in a population compared to younger people, you have a larger proportion of the associated costs being carried by a smaller proportion of the population, this means decreasing healthcare quality, increasing the pool of people paying in by increasing retirement age or increasing taxes. None of which are particularly good.
Mortgages are the number one cost associated with "working til you are very old".
By far in poor countries healthcare is much more affordable than in rich countries. I think one of the main outcomes of rich countries is just increased costs for everything.
Look at how the poor in India live. "Getting rich" does not mean becoming multimillionaire, it just means reaching a developed country's standard of living.
For all the people down voting: I urge you to consider a different perspective where the hoarding of resources is a bad thing for humanity and life at large. The US, along with other countries, have done this for too long. We should have "having lots of money and resources" as a primary goal. Resources are tools to accomplish other things, not an end in itself. This is why I say its lame and shortsighted.
Technically, social mobility is just relative income position changes over time, which applies to zero sum games. It does not imply that you can significantly increase your income. Social mobility is also an indirect measure of income distribution, and by proxy geographic compactness -- you can double your income and still have low mobility if the distribution is wide.
A country can be "highly mobile" with flat GDP and limited income growth opportunity for the individual. That is just how the math works out. Social mobility is a term-of-art that does not mean what most people intuit it to mean.
I think it's more apt to consider mobility in absolute terms in this context as opposed to relative. Having a country with super high mobility but extremely low GDP is obviously not favorable.
There is no amount of wealth that will help. Increasing societal wealth leads to increasing power to the old, who will use it to transform the young into a slave class.
This is most visible in America’s response to COVID but also in Prop 13 etc.
Here is what I've heard argued from that ideological standpoint.
One off famines should be remedied with relief efforts which mandate the recipient country increase its food storage to be able to absorb the next one.
Chronic food shortages are a symptoms of overpopulation of the area, either because of lack of farming technology, terrain, etc. Supplying food aid only compounds the problem by increasing an unsustainable population. The remedy is to remove the mismanagement and relocate, and reducate the willing population and let nature take its course for those unwilling to adapt.
Sounds harsh but a famine of 1 million people being supplied with aid turns to 1.2 million the next time and 2 million the time after. A net increase in misery and suffering.
In reality faced with a starving person face to face, I believe most people would feed the hungry.
India’s food insecurity was caused due to bad policies of the British rulers that left the country in a bad shape when they left. India experienced terrible famines and deaths of millions of people under British Raj. It took a while but India is not only self sufficient but a net exporter of raw and processed foods with a population of 1.2B. So it wasn’t that the country was not capable of supporting its population or managing famines. Its natural wealth was plundered for over 150 years and the country was left in ruins. UK still needs to pay India and other colonies reparations.
India hit the latitudinal jackpot. Good soil..monsoons and temperate. Peninsula with water on three sides. China isn’t so lucky. India is much younger demographics and gender divide is more even. Luckier than China is many ways even though they are close to each other wrt total population currently. India is getting greener every year Altho that would be because of increase in co2. We haven’t understood climate change fully yet. India can halve it’s population in 80-100 something years and still be a formidable world power to reckon.
It is important tho that everyone procreate and have at least 1/2 surviving child. Large families by individuals shouldnt be incentivized. Human beings are wonderful and we must maintain genetic diversity as an insurance against extinction or genetic congenital vulnerabilities. Also important to preserve genetic material and work on longevity and medical breakthroughs. I wonder how long our generation can expect our lifespan to be and if we can eradicate diseases in our lifetimes.
India has traditional family structures like multi generational families or joint families. These are helpful tools to mitigate the (socio-economic-cultural)pitfalls of too many and too small nuclear families…if india can work on halving or even bring down population to 350-500 million in a balanced manner demographically(age wise and gender wise), the future is bright.
I hope nothing is coercive or manipulative ..punitive or incentivizing to have or not have children.. people should have children because they want the best for their progeny and in the best interests of their next generation.
Perhaps once stabilized, we can increase children per person but that could be 150-250 years from now. It’s key not to drop the ball now. It’s a balance between resource management and population is a numbers game.
Let’s not forget our automated future which might eliminate work. Or longevity/anti ageing breakthroughs. Who knows what the future holds but in my imagination it’s always an utopia.
Read Robert Caro's excellent volumes about LBJ. You wouldn't think so, but they are real page turners. And yes, they will leave you with the impression that LBJ was not a wonderful person.
Jimmy Carter did some bad stuff too. From his Wikipedia page:
> During Carter's presidency, the U.S. continued to support Indonesia as a cold war ally, in spite of human rights violations in East Timor. The violations followed Indonesia's December 1975 invasion and occupation of East Timor. It did so even though antithetical to Carter's stated policy "of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world."
He might have said as much publicly but the reality is that India was a lot closer to the USSR so LBJ thought it was despicable that they were coming to the US asking THEM for help
So sad to see this happen. Paul Ehrlich made a similar prognostication that never came to pass. There are many places in the world that did a similar thing and had to work to reverse it (S. Korea, Russia), by actually paying families to have children, and China recently reversed its draconian one child policy because they have seen first hand the problems it creates.
Hopefully India doesn't run into the same problem down the road, because one a population starts to decline, history has shown that it is not reversible.
You're sad that people won't overcrowd themselves to death? As developing nations transition grow to developed, population growth tends to fall toward an equilibrion that is also found in nature. It's a trend seen time and time again. Yet you don't see developed countries on the brink of extinction, so I think this fear mongering is unnecessary.
Exactly. But how much effort was and is being put to control the psyche of the masses to achieve the population control? How much of this effort was original and far-sighted with good intentions?
Even if lifespans don't increase the population will probably continue to expand for about 25 years since the cohorts already born are larger than they ones they are replacing. Population only plateaus once we've been at replacement rate for the same number of years as mean age of mothers at birth.
Average lifespan has increased because of changes on the low end. Fewer people are dying young. There has been very little movement on the upper end of lifespan. The current trend of improvement has a natural wall at about 100-110 average lifespan.
Having said that, I suspect that once we crack aging, we may blow past the current limit and see a relativly sudden jump in lifespan
Cancer therapies might result in significant gains. We already see CAR T to be very effective. Hopefully we’ll finally crack Alzheimer’s and the likes as well.
That’s not what I have read at all. Rural India seems to have less healthcare, more poverty and plenty of covid in the reports I have read. Limited testing has reduced its visibility, but there have been some really dark news reports on how rural India is faring.
I was just making a pedantic statistical observation. E.g. if people lived for 01000 years then even a tiny amount of births and population still increases. If people live forever, population grows forever.
For every increment in lifespan, population grows until death rate matches whatever birth rate has been achieved.
doesn't matter to be honest. We are already overpopulated and those who says it isn't just doesn't know how many people live under poverty and are simply privileged. I understand if we manage resources properly we have very high carrying capacity but it is not pragmatic to solve all those problems. Human greed, corruption has no bounds and will always hinder and there is no solution, is there? Rules, laws are generally made by elites even in democracy. Further, Nature makes us inherently greedy (selfish genes perhaps?) and many of us can't deny it, can we?
I think people like Elon always says declining fertility is huge problem but i simply don't see it as a problem. People like him will never suffer due to money problems and will live luxurious life. But only people working 996 realize how much exploited we are. And old age is not that big deal because of technology. One person can manage hundreds of people. We can scale a lot.
I disagree with just about everything you said.
"We are already overpopulated and those who says it isn't just doesn't know how many people live under poverty and are simply privileged." This makes no sense. As the global population has grown, less people live in extreme poverty [1].
Your entire comment is basically saying life is hard so people should not be born? This is absolutely the best time to ever be alive in history.
"One person can manage hundreds of people." Have you ever been to a nursing home? This seems insanely optimistic.
You source [1] doesn't disprove it to be honest. It is not because of population growth that less people live in extreme poverty. It is because of technological achievement and progress in society. Basically its the time (considering we progress) that is eradicating extreme poverty not the population growth. You are linking wrong data to prove me wrong. In fact, overpopulation means more pressure on resource which we already can't mine due to various reason.
You connected nursing home with wrong thing again. The problem with less fertility is that when there are lot of old people many people can't go to factory and old people can't work. But with technological advances one people can manage a lot of machines due to automation. Anyway, nursing home is easier to manage today than it was 100 years ago.
Your entire comment is basically saying life is hard so people should not be born? This is absolutely the best time to ever be alive in history.
Is it really? Your source clearly says "Most people in the world live in poverty. 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day, two-thirds live on less than $10 per day, and every tenth person lives on less than $1.90 per day"
Would you like to be that 85% who wants to live on less than $30 per day? So, you are trying to conceal the difficulty saying life is hard but in fact it is extremely hard for many people.
I wish the US had some of the options for male sterilization/contraception that are available in India. I've asked my doctor for years about some of the options available in other countries and am always given a blank stare of ignorance.
These can be difficult to get for younger, childless men. Even younger men (<40) with children receive push back from physicians in getting the procedure because it can be difficult to reverse.
Then you can assume alternatives would also be difficult to get approval for. I can't imagine some chemical option would be preferable to a physical disconnection anyway.
> “Women’s aspirations have changed,” Muttreja says. They look beyond the home for job opportunities and delay marriage and childbearing. “Education is the best contraceptive.”
I’m not sure I buy the story about job opportunities, as female participation in the labor force has been dropping in India, even as the country modernizes and slowly develops economically.
Also, this seems kind of self-contradictory:
> Some Indian politicians still talk of a population explosion and have proposed banning people with more than two children from government employment or, in Uttar Pradesh, even withholding welfare benefits. Critics say such rhetoric is often subtly aimed at the country’s Muslim minority. Muslim women on average had 0.5 more children than Hindus, according to the 2015–16 NFHS survey.
> But religion is a small factor in fertility today, Muttreja says. “Hindus in Uttar Pradesh, for example, have a much higher fertility than Muslims in Kerala. There is no Hindu fertility or Muslim fertility.”
If a state-level policy is aimed against those with more children, but Muslims in a given state don’t have more children than Hindus there, how can the policy be targeted at Muslims?
>>NFHS administered three types of questionnaires: the Household Questionnaire, the Woman’s Questionnaire and the Village Questionnaire. The Village Questionnaire was administered only in the rural areas. For each state and at national level three data files are associated with these questionnaires. Also available are data files with information on children born during the three years preceding the survey (last two children only) along with mother's basic characteristics.[1]
Basically, people are given questions, and the answers are used to obtain data. The accuracy of this whole thing depends on the accuracy of those answering the questions.
I would think a better way would be to compile this based on the citizens' data collected by the governments. How do other countries do this?
We struggle greatly to actually understand population numbers in many countries. Consider Afghanistan, where the numbers were in part made up until recently[0]. I really wish we could see more background on these numbers.
I’ve read that Nigerian census data is straight up made up since there’s a demographic war between the north and south and more population = more political power so there’s a strong incentive to “find” people
They didn’t mention the last two years as possibly contributing to less childbirth. There could be counteracting effects there, stuck together with nothing to do, vs nobody to meet and nothing to do - but it at least deserves a mention. This 2019-2021 drop could bounce right back up if people chose to delay childbirth.
I know more Indian couples who has only 1 child vs 3. In my family (my generation), not a single couple has more than 2 child. My family's replacement rate is below 2. From my dads side, we are 12 cousins. We only have 18 kids. My village in India has roughly 440 people. Not a single couple that got married in last 20 years has more than 2 kids.
Before Covid, we had a middle school reunion. Every single one of us had 1-2 kids.
I have 8 best friends (Married for 15+ years). Only one of my friend and I have 2 kids. Everyone else has only 1 kid.
Pretty much all states except a couple are below replacement rate of 2.1. And some are way below 2.1.
Great anecdotes but situation varies from state to state. Fertility rates vary from 1.1 to 2.4 and 3.0. Why did I mention 2.4 AND 3.0 because these 2 states account for a quarter if not more of the Indian population.
This is not to say your anecdotes are wrong but there exist different Indias and some of them have not seen the modern light.
Taking this as an opportunity to plug the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT). Pay no attention to the tongue-in-cheek name, it has nothing to do with mass suicide or genocide, and merely advocates for us to stop breeding.
> Phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.
Exactly. Would that be such a bad thing? Spend some time on /r/childfree. It's probably for the best that the people filling those comment sections don't multiply.
I agree it is happening globally, I'm from South America and there are statistics of birthrate fall as well in my country. As personal experience in my company ~90% are single childless and we are in ours 30s 40s.
What if we find out it's not actually urbanization/education, but a correlating exposure that happens when societies industrialize and there's no way out?
Education doesn't explain male sperm counts being down 50% in 50 years.
Yes, definitely industrialization is probably the deeper cause. Industrialization made possible the kind of urbanization and demand for education that we have today.
A cultural response is cultural, there are no laws of nature here. It’s entirely possible that the availability of cheap hormonal birth control changes everything.
Has anyone stepped back and critically considered the axioms a worldview that celebrates depopulation of a people? You would have to believe it's technically not genocide if you aren't pulling a physical lever, and because you have been party to "managing" it with incentives, you haven't terminated entire genetic lineages using what is essentially deception - which further implies those lives and lineages have no intrinsic value. One would also have to believe in the primacy of their own genes and themselves as the effect, which if someone said it out loud they would be laughed out of the room for their racism.
While I am personally inclined to misanthropy as a kind of social filter, the Malthusian horror of this article celebrating infertility in India strikes me as pretending that an active genocide is somehow more acceptable when you frame it as a kind of cultural euthenasia. Are they saying the quiet part out loud?
Yes I can. A child unborn is not a child killed so it doesn’t fit your classification of “genocide”. We need about a tenth of the humans we currently have on the planet unless we figure out interplanetary colonization. This is a way that is almost entirely painless and can be achieved with almost no coercion. It’s a panacea we desperately need.
There are some indiginous populations who would probably like a word about this reasoning.
It's like advocates of these policies don't think they're engaged in defacto genocide because of some abstract legalism around their imagined distance from it. I'd say so-called progressives should really examine whether they are the baddies, but it seems to come back to just being nihilists.
The only thing you seem to care about is that you think you aren't getting caught.
Contrary to what some may believe, this is not a good thing for India. We Indians have grown old before we became rich. https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/557446/a... (The story is about Sri Lanka, but the insights are applicable to South India in general. And now to parts of North India.)
It has little to do with birth rates and more to do with the Indian governments closeness to the USSR. LBJ thought it was ridiculous that India would vote against American interests in the UN and then turn around and beg for food
Not OP but I'm certainly leaning this way now after previously being concerned about it. Seemingly all/most of our advanced societies have negative population growth.
If economic prosperity results in 2 kids per woman, would evolution not favour genes that make it unlike a family is economically prosperous? Having 6 kids with different baby mamas and being an absent father is evolutionary success
Having children with multiple partners has always been and will always be the quickest way to spread genetic material. That is true regardless if women are having 2 kids or 5. Speculating that lower birth rates will somehow increase absentee fathers is baseless, that evolutionary pressure has been present since before we were human.
You are getting downvoted but in 2021 that’s precisely who is having the most children in developed countries. If you look up birth rates by income bracket the trend is clear: poor people and broken homes birth more children than wealthier professionals
"Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground" [1]
From the above portion of scripture, I wonder why we humans, are so concerned about population growth. Children are a blessing from God, have as many as you'd like.
It says "fill the earth"; so one could argue that once the earth is "filled" (meaning, has as many people living on it as it can reasonably support), then the "increase in number" directive will no longer be active; and that the mission will switch to maintaining a healthy population.
I'm not sure what else you could trust in. Even if a christian god exists, the bible was written by humans, copied over and over by humans, and translated by humans.
Adding to this that many of the scriptures were censored from the Christian Bible. Emperor Constantine and his council left out some notable scriptures such as the Book of Enoch. That is a fairly significant redaction in my opinion. I would suggest reading up on it if anyone has the time.
"We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy. I find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history whatever."
-Isaac Newton
"Almighty God, Who hast created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service"
-James Clerk Maxwell
Two, really great minds, on whose work we depend on daily
This isn’t really convincing. Newton and Maxwell were incredibly important, but they also lived quite a while ago. Religion has a different role in society these days.
I agree, although I don't look at Christianity as religion, from my understanding of the new testament..Christ was crucified basically because he didn't follow "the law of their fathers"..religion essentially.
The aim is not to convince though, but to raise the question, why does our generation think that anything scriptural cannot be treated as fact. Why are newtons laws fact, but not his convictions? Are we so taken up by being "scientific" in our own eyes, that we forget the very premise on which science is based, God?
There is an obvious answer to that: Newton's laws match our observations of reality, ignoring relativistic effects. Scripture is written by someone to reflect their opinions. They often have truths in them, but they're just a story. They don't reflect reality any more than Harry Potter does.
To answer your second question: science is not based on a god or gods. Scientific thinking often branched out of religion, but they're separate now and have been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And science branched off from many different religions, just not the Christian one you seem to believe in.
aa..cool. But then, very few people actually get to "prove" or consciously "observe" newtons laws, but a principle is a principle whether you believe it or not. In fact, at lower levels of education, you simply read and believe these, as fact, from those that have written about them, and proved them. Can't we say the same about Christianity?
PS: Note that I avoid the word religion, as it dilutes Christianity, The Gospel of the New Testament.
Newton's laws are not fact, but scientific theory that's been tested through experiment and observation over hundreds of years.
His convictions are just opinion.
For me, the problem is the double standard that is applied to historical writings; Mention Scripture, "Oh, those are just someone's words", Mention a scientific manuscript from the same time "Oh, my, what a genius"!
How many of us actually get to prove newtons laws for ourselves? How many of us consciously wake up and say, today I will test out gravity? But isn't the law of Gravity real, yes it is!
Thing is, most of what we know, we have read from what others have done or experienced, more in the scientific field. Why can't we apply the same standard to scripture? Maybe if we study deep we can prove the things written therein
Anyone can test it though, and if it's proven wrong, it will overturn the science. There's no double standard there, just because you choose not to test it doesn't mean others don't. They have tested newton's laws, a very large number of times, in a variety of different ways.
How do you prove scripture, especially when they contradict each other?
My "modest proposal" for humane population reduction is: every individual is born with the right to have one child. A couple then, can have two children, which is below the natural replacement rate of 2.1 leading to a gradual reduction in human population naturally. People who don't want to have kids or can't for whatever reason could sell their right to others who want to have more than their normal allotment while maintaining the lower-than-natural replacement rate. There are other complexities that would need to be considered and managed but it seems to me to be the most ethical way to reduce population, if that is desired.
I hope by "modest proposal" you mean "satirical take meant to show how awful people are being", which is the whole point of the original modest proposal.
The big issue isn't the number of people, but the amount of energy and resources they require. The carbon emissions per 1000 people in India is 0.922 metric tons a year. For the United States that number is 19.86 metric tons a year. That's a difference of over 21 times. To put it another way, preventing a single US birth is the equivalent of preventing 21 births in India.
Focusing on the raw population is, and always has been, a distraction that high consuming countries use to ignore their own role in our current environment. This isn't to say that populations should rise forever, but it's pretty common for countries that reach higher levels of developments to have their population growth level off. Reducing poverty is by far the best and most ethical way to combat booming population growth.
I don't see why I want to reduce human population.
The real problem isn't population but our insane demand and energy intensive process needed to support the lifestyle of the global wealthy.
Put it this way: Cars required insurance, road infrastructure, gasoline or battery, steel, electronics, etc to make car a viable transportation option both for logistics and to drive people around in general.
Whereas we could have invested in rails which required less of everything to do the same thing. Even better if we use bicycles more, which is the most efficient form of transportation.
A car is a luxury that we made into a requirement pretty much everywhere in north America, which in turn makes our lifestyle more expensive than it needed to be.
So, in short, we should reduce the demand of unnecessary products(like cars). Then we can think about to make stuff in a more efficient manner and more green manner, or find more efficient products, such as using heat pumps.
> A car is a luxury that we made into a requirement pretty much everywhere in north America, which in turn makes our lifestyle more expensive than it needed to be. So, in short, we should reduce the demand of unnecessary products(like cars).
This is a nice halfpinion, but the entire country can't essentially be some monolithic ecumenopolis like Mega-City One or Coruscant. I'd think most people here would love to see a few more efficient transportation options, more walkable suburbs, and other things you're describing, but there's certain infrastructure that can't really work in a suburban or rural setting. Cars, or something very much like them, are a necessity in areas where food is grown and everything is spread out.
Personally speaking, I'm not worried about the general theme of overpopulation/climate change because nuclear energy has already solved human needs.
> So, in short, we should reduce the demand of unnecessary products(like cars).
Yeah, good luck with that.
I live in city in India with relatively less population density than most metropolitan cities and my colleagues want to buy cars because "it'll be easier to drive".
The city of Bangalore is notorious for its insanely bad traffic and yet I've heard people living still wanting to purchase cars. The reason is that "it's better to be inside a car in traffic than outside".
If nothing else, people fall back to "what if there's a medical emergency?"
You think this is ethical? Clearly you have a very different ethics that I do. Also, this propsal is unnecessary and shows complete lack of demographic transition - we already know how to stop population growth in an ethical way and that is to improve healthcare, education (especially women), and general economic welfare. No other solutions necessary, nor have proven to be effective.
The enforcement of this ends up treating all the corner cases in really inhumane ways. And in order to even get there you need to go through the more progressive stage of actually making sure that contraception and abortion are available.
It was an equal system. But you've just missed out the bit on what options are available to those that are a bit more equal and what happens to those that violate the rule.
You lost me at "selling their right". It is important to understand that "selling" and "right" should not appear in the same sentence when the said right is being addressed as a basic right. It opens room for abuse even in well administered jurisdictions.
You don't need a modest proposal for human population reduction. As soon as having a lot of children stop being a necessity for survival in old age, population naturally seems to stop at an average of two children simply because for most it's not enjoyable to have more.
That's a really weird idea of 'ethics'. How would you enforce this policy? You can't ethically take away 'extra' kids, you can't reasonably fine them, nor can you prevent extra kids from being born.
Any system capable of enforcing any of the above methods would inevitably be a severe ethical violation of some form.
As we have seen in China, if you limit the number of children people become selective about them. In this case in regards to gender, which will develop into a large problem for the country in the future because they now have very unbalanced demographics. This will doom a lot of people to have no partner.
China’s birth rate is arguably declining because basic needs (housing) and child needs (education and child care) became expensive, applying back pressure on fertility (which is why the CCP and Xi is pushing “common prosperity” hard). People are selective on children already, which I don’t see a problem with; this is a natural result of a free society with healthcare where you can selectively terminate pregnancies you don’t want. During IVF, we were offered the option to sequence the genome of candidate embryos and pick which we wanted based on traits. The future is now.
If this creates cohorts without the ability to partner up, them the breaks of free will and socioeconomic forces. Population ballooned, and it will be painful as it contracts. Humanity ran up the credit card of population growth, and it will have to be paid back (socioeconomically speaking, with unrest and economic contraction) .
People did abort girls more than boys so that there now are about 30% more boys than girls. Aborting girls was mainly done due to cultural and financial issues. This is nothing short of a catastrophe for the younger generation.
“What is the future owed?” is a complex issue. It’s an intergenerational compact, and the scope boundary is going to be fuzzy. I would argue future generations are owed robust human rights, a reasonably clean and non polluted environment, and the opportunity to live a purposeful life with dignity. Ensuring someone has a partner would fall out of scope.
I admit we’ve sort of painted ourselves into a corner and the deleveraging is going to be a bit wild over the next few decades.
I think what was taken from these generations compares to humanities darkest chapters. Fact remains that government cannot really control how people conceive children and it should not. Education can support people making individual choices.
I actually don't think overpopulation is the problem. It's the way we're going about resource usage that's the problem. If people stayed home more, grow food and instead of focus on society feeding them, they feed themselves we wouldn't be inundated with non-stop scale issues. As insane as it sounds distributed technologies seem to be saving tech - it can save humanity too. We just don't train people to be like that. Instead we teach greed and outperforming the next guy.
Overpopulation is not a problem because the current population is under the limit of the amount of people the Earth can feed and most models think the current trend will reverse before we pass that point. For the rest, you have it backward. The only reason we can feed that many people is the green revolution. Subsistence farming is simply not productive enough. It would have led to famine as soon as sixty years ago.
I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few:
- Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive.
- Wealth inequality will rise just from the fact that there are less productive people and people with wealth will live longer.
- Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up.
I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did.