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
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.