It's hard to take any kind of wholesale prediction of population calamity seriously after The Population Bomb bombed in the early 1970s. But this article claims to be able to predict the future of civilization 100 years into the future. Assuming we even make it another 100 years, there is no way to know what our population will look like then, or whether we could pull another technological/logistical food revolution out of our asses, or whether global cultures would start to embrace a further explosion of population. WW2 resulted in unprecedented population growth in the USA. There's no way to know if a similar event, here or in other countries, might shake what we expect growth to be, or why. The biggest mistake we could make is to expect consistency.
> Assuming we even make it another 100 years, there is no way to know what our population will look like then, or whether we could not pull another technological/logistical revolution out of our asses, or whether global cultures would start to embrace a further explosion of population.
It seems like women in pretty much all cultures where women achieve financial independence and have control over how many children they have, choose to have 0, 1, 2, or rarely 3. Which makes sense given the risks and costliness of childbirth for them.
So I would guess that any culture that results in population explosion would have to either have medical advances that address the risks and costs of childbirth, or go backwards on women’s independence. Or really sweeten the deal in terms of financial and other incentives, but I don’t imagine that would fare very well.
Define “women’s independence?” Fertility rates in the US cratered after 2008, but before that even states without many Hispanics like Idaho, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming had above replacement total fertility rates. I know folks on HN think those states might as well be third world countries, but they’re not exactly Gilead.
I suspect “logistics” has more to do with it than “independence.” Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family. Raising kids without family around is much, much more difficult.
There is also the fact that the feminist revolution stalled in this weird place where women have freedom to pursue careers--but only if they can shoehorn themselves into existing roles designed for men. Want to grind through your 20s in Big Tech or Big Finance seeking promotions? Fine. Want to take time off to have kids at an age when it's the lowest risk and you have the most energy for it? Then you're off the career ladder forever! That's not some unavoidable consequence of "women's independence." Our retirement and pension systems are very much designed around the biological reality of men's bodies working strenuous industrial jobs. But our career ladders haven't changed one bit to accommodate the biological realities of motherhood.
> I suspect “logistics” has more to do with it than “independence.” Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family. Raising kids without family around is much, much more difficult.
I experienced this first hand. I moved to follow career with my wife, who also has an extraordinary career compared to median. We delayed and struggled to find the right time to start a family. The whole dynamic of planning the start of your family was self defeating. There's no good time to have kids while prioritizing career...
So we took the plunge, had kids, made it 6 months, and moved back to be near our family.
In retrospect it is obvious that the narrative of success being concentrated in gross salary was poisoning our lives and forcing us to make unhealthy decisions to live in awful situations. We're "richer" in our hometown by a long shot, when you calculate the slush money left over after cost of living, babysitters, day care, housing, even cars. Not to mention the joy of having a big family that the kiddos can play with all the time.
If we had realized this in our 20s, I'm sure we would happily have had 4 or more kids and accepted half the money overall for the same net takehome.
Most of my rich friends in tech who take CNN seriously, don't want kids.
Whether it's to save the environment or because having kids has been painted like the ultimate martyrdom and having casual sex until you're 50 as the best thing in the world.
I've been to a company event a couple years ago, for a big Scandinavian tech company, and the main speaker's point was this: The best thing you can do for the environment, better than recycling, cycling instead of driving a car, etc., is having one less child.
So it doesn't seem to be that fringe, unfortunately.
2.5%. That is nothing of nothing. It is a non-event, and dwarfed by “I just don’t want kids” or “financial reasons”. Now that’s not “why do you have 2 kids instead of 3” but yeah.
You're confusing the impact of the decision with the prevalence of belief in it. While that may objectively be the best way to combat climate change, it doesn't imply anything about how many people are making that decision for that reason.
Feminist made motherhood and home making unsexy so nowadays a lot of women just feel compelled to grind themselves in the jobs they do not want to do.
Men and women are fundamentally different on biological and emotional plane. They complement each other. But instead they are being forced to compete. It's time to recognise and change this.
I am speaking about gender roles with war as an historical example.
> Are you a man and should I assume you signed up for every war, as your Y chromosone dictated?
Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically? If this behaviour is uniformly distributed across men and women then why you don"t see equal number of crimes by either genders.
We were talking about how many men today want to be a househusband. I fail to see what that has to do with historical wars. The comparison would be men today and if they are signing up for wars. Are you? If not why bring up war?
Also we were talking about what men want.
Does the fact men fought in wars imply they wanted to fight in wars?
Did men in history during times of peace sit around saying to themself 'I hope someone starts a war so I have an excuse to stab a guy and get away from my wife and kids?'
"Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically?"
Assuming you are a man... unless you are Tony Soprano and you go around hitting people with a baseball bat you probably don't "solve your problems physically".
So why write a sentence like "Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically"
>> Throughout the history men have fought war and died in wars. How many wars were fought by women?
This makes it sound like the world would be better off if all the men stayed home raising the kids and away from things like international relations while having the women take care of all the larger societal functions
I agree. Women are much better at organizing societies and solving problem non voilently. India have seen many such queens all through the history[0]. Queens like Ahilyabai Holkar, Naiki Devi, Rani Durgavati are from recent history. Indian society appreciated motherhood. But it also accepted women freely in the roles traditionally reserved for men. This is the society I want with additional reforms.
Issue with recent activism is two folds. Tendency to demean the motherhood and also make men feel guilty for being their natural self. This is I do not want.
There are plenty of examples of matriarchal societies, both in the past and current. The problem with people like you is that you feel entitled to tell others where their place is in the world, and thank god the world is slowly turning against that kind of nonsense.
Do you think women have always been the secondary “submissive” gentile gender? There’s a lot of cultures and a lot of history.
This is similar to people saying trans people have never existed. Instead of seeing the western world as abnormally sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. IE the way the British treated hijras (men identifying with feminine traits) when they took over India in the late 1800s. Before and since then (though this is affected by how awful the British were), hijras weren’t treated equally, but much better than the abusive and bigoted Europeans.
Women having equal or higher status doesn't require them to take masculine roles. Feminity is neither submissive nor inferior.
I am aware of status of women in my own country India before invaders came.I won't go into the ancient history. But women like Ahilyabai Holkar, Laxmibai existed not too long ago.Both of them rose to the occassion. But my point stands that women generally do not enjoy these types of roles. Love, affection, child rearing, and home making comes more naturally to them then going out and picking fights.
That's very true but only because males are behaving more and more like females.
Being a house husband doesn't bode well with psychological traits where the extremes sit in the male population (which are responsible for things like men doing all the dangerous jobs, men being most of the inmates in prisons, men being the ones most likely to die in war).
I certainly hated my paternity leave and, anecdotally, I've heard from many peers who would have preferred to just work over taking care of their children. It's fine for a limited amount of time, but I can't tolerate that full time.
Are you intentionally ignoring the large Native American population in some of those states?
[edit: at this point I just assume that folks on HN don't have any concept of the demographics of reservations and how many children are being born. If you mention lack of Hispanic population but don't mention the Native American population then you are skewing the point.]
> Fertility rates in the US cratered after 2008...These women would probably have more kids if it was easier to have a single income household...Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family.
You might as well talk about how women might raise their children on Mars. Outside the Amazon jungle, for the past 10000 years women have been raising children under class-based society under class-based relations of production. The ruling class makes decisions about production, that's the point of a class-based society. Thus the world is turning into a place where the purpose of women's fertility is reproduction of labor, not an increase of it. The ruling class prefers two educated, productive children to three or four less educated, less productive children.
It doesn't matter what working class women want in terms of children, because this is a class-based society, and the ruling class has things aligned to what is good for them, not her.
Beyond childbirth, raising children is also a serious challenge, and that’s with school/similar taking care of them for hours of each weekday. Maybe not in developing countries, but I think rearing might be as much a factor as birthing in the developed world when it comes to moderating family size.
I’m not convinced that how we do things now is the best balance of the interests of children and parents. As one example, on weekdays, a parent’s morning time with children is dominated preparing them for school while getting ready to work, and the evening time sees tired post-work parents doing the school run, sorting homework, preparing dinner, extra-curricular, etc.
“I spent the last 15 years raising a happy family and have good relationships with my children” is probably worth a lot more than career advancement and would likely reduce the divorce rate quite a bit. That’s not even considering the broader societal impacts of increased wages for everyone due to restricting labour supply, the creation and maintenance of strong family networks and communities and the improvement of QOL and reduction in expenses you get when you don’t have to outsource food, care, and attention to boxed meals, day care and screens. We only have ourselves to blame for the current mess we’re in.
The "problem" with kids is not so much childbirth as the following 20-odd years. Childcare is hugely expensive in terms of money and opportunity cost, and we can't just outsource it to grandparents or set the tykes to work hoeing potatoes at eight any more.
Or there are technological advances in artificial wombs and children are grown in incubators so that women are no longer as involved in pregnancy/child-bearing.
We have research papers with animal fetuses being grown in artificial wombs. Never know, could be some technology developed for humans during the next 100 years.
Humans make abysmally bad batteries or power generators. That was always the dumbest part of The Matrix. The original idea for that was that we were the computers for the Matrix simulation instead, which made at least marginally more sense.
The original idea was never anything other than batteries.
That rumor of producers changing it to batteries started because Neil Gaiman thought the battery thing was dumb so when he was hired to do a promotional wrote Matrix short story he changed it to the humans being used for computer processing.
I don't see why you're linking artificial wombs with the matrix. In a matrix like scenario, I see no reason why the machines would even bother with artificial wombs, when the real ones already work right now (no R&D required) and are already pretty efficient.
We’d be better utilized as CPU and memory storage. Maybe generate brain structure, biology state with (re)generative biology like Michael Levin is up to at Tufts[0].
There’s tons of alternative research paths going untouched that leverage information theory to hack “reality” directly rather than hack on synthetic computers and software within an enclosed time-space vacuum constrained by known hardware limitations.
Metaverses running on synthetic machines seems way more prosaic than a metaverse in my own head I might be able to switch on off with a pill.
Once the machines take over they'd probably prefer to work with yeast as their bio battery of choice. No need to spend compute on a simulation, the yeast would be happy as clams living in a big vat with all nutrient needs met.
Well, that's not terrifying in the least bit. Imagine knowing that you were born to a machine and not to a woman who you can call mother. On second thought, its not just terrifying, it is immeasurable sadness for most, and probably psychosis for some.
The biggest downside which appears to be cited by people who discover later that their birth parents weren't the people who brought them up is an uncertainty about why they exist - but for a person who can be told (once they're old enough to understand) the exact circumstances which brought them about that is resolved.
We already have surrogacy, which is when one human volunteers use of their womb to carry somebody else's child (that is, egg comes from person A, sperm from person B, A+B = new human life => fertilised egg is implanted in person C, the surrogate). I know two kids who were born this way, they have loving parents, the eldest will be aware that something is a bit unusual - any other mummies she knows who had a second kid the baby was obviously inside them, whereas her baby sister was inside this other nice lady who just showed up for a few weeks and she's been told that's how it worked for her too - but obviously the tricky details aren't going to be worth explaining to a pre-schooler once they're satisfied with any immediate questions (e.g. is this new baby my sister? Yes. Does the nice lady mean I get extra birthday presents? No)
An artificial womb potentially makes surrogacy an option for larger numbers of people. Some people find pregnancy pretty good really, and their main reason to stop after one or two is economics or practicalities, so this innovation changes nothing for them - but others don't want to risk a second pregnancy after discovering how badly their body reacted the first time, so such technology (if cheap enough) would mean they could have a second or third child.
This also changes the calculus for government intervention. Hiring women to be impregnated is a much more difficult proposition than hiring nursery or orphanage staff. An artificial womb would mean only the second is needed.
It would certainly be a shock to some but most kids have no idea where they came from until they learn about the reproductive system. Their first instinct is that a bird dropped them out of the sky. So closing the gap between X and Y wouldnt be too crazy.
Now the social pressures of being a “machine baby” vs “natural womb baby” would be a different thing.
Not even talking about lack of hormones during natural pregnacy we have zero idea about because this was not researched in humqns and how it would impact a human child post mortem.
There is an inverse relationship between income and fertility[1]. If costs were the reason people were having fewer children then why would the poorest people be having more children than the highest earners? It's either we have a very backwards welfare incentive that actually reduces poor women's "independence" or something else is going on. In reality, if you, as a woman, focus on your career until you are 35, implying a higher salary, and then find your fertility has dropped to < 10% of what it was when you were 20 I am sure you start having fewer children.
These aren't even the beginning of the factors involved in child birth rates. Population is controlled by religion, government policy, cultural practice, wealth, quality of life, social equality, education, trade, war, climate, and a host of other factors. Any one of them could change and affect the population; multiple could change and shift it radically. And we cannot predict any of them with certainty even in 50 years, much less 100, for the entire planet.
If you don't believe me, look at history. Plenty of times in history there have been great civilizations that grew and grew until they collapsed, or periods of great societal progress followed by periods of great strife, or periods of great feast followed by famine. Some of these periods lasted hundreds of years. Even today there are nations that forcibly control population whereas others do not. Some developing nations starve due to international trade policy while others grow to provide most of their needs. Some become more radically conservative while others grow more liberal. Some countries collapse economically while others become burgeoning super-powers. And all this in the face of global climate change on a scale not seen in millennia.
>religion, government policy, cultural practice, wealth, quality of life, social equality, education, trade, war, climate, and a host of other factors.
Which all are taken into account, by the financially independent woman choosing to get pregnant (because they have access to very effective birth control and are not being forced to have sex, and have abortion as an option).
>And all this in the face of global climate change on a scale not seen in millennia.
I think the biggest thing that has not been seen regarding population dynamics is women having complete control over if, when, and how many children they have.
How can all that be taken into account when we are currently living under only one specific configuration?
Women under our current configuration do not choose to get pregnant simply because the current society doesn’t value repopulation. When we as a society value a birthing mother more than a successful business person we will have more babies. It’s that simple.
>When we as a society value a birthing mother more than a successful business person we will have more babies. It’s that simple.
This is what I mean. Not that each woman is explicitly evaluating all of those factors, but implicitly, they all culminate in an environment where a woman may or may not choose to have x number of children.
A financially independent woman in some developed countries today still doesn't necessarily get to choose when she will get pregnant, or by whom. Financial independence does not trump social convention (especially since social convention dictates financial independence).
Hell, just look at the USA. A woman still can't choose when she can or can't have a baby, regardless of her wealth. This being one of the supposed "civilized nations"; other nations are far less subtle with their societal controls.
>A financially independent woman in some developed countries today still doesn't necessarily get to choose when she will get pregnant, or by whom.
Then I would say she is not financially independent, since she cannot afford to hire sufficient security to protect her from rape.
>Hell, just look at the USA. A woman still can't choose when she will or won't have a baby, regardless of her wealth.
Unless one is being held captive, one’s wealth should allow access to IUDs and travel to jurisdictions where abortion is legal. At the least, there is sufficient rule of law where the societal norm is that rape is completely unacceptable.
You're about to be downvoted to hell, so allow me to quickly comment that you lack a certain amount of knowledge about the reality of women's reproductive rights in the USA. I'm not talking about rape at all. There are a variety of challenges to women just legally obtaining birth control in the USA, abortion is effectively illegal and unavailable to nearly all women in the USA (once again), and women need abortions for a whole lot more reasons than 'just' being raped.
Although even on that front, it is, well, just completely insane to insinuate that a woman needs to be rich enough to hire a body guard to prevent her from being raped. I can't believe I had to type that sentence.
You will have to provide some sources for your claims, because I have read that quite a few US states have explicitly made abortion legal in recent months. And the Affordable Care Act made birth control free for many, many people:
Also, I am using the term financially free to mean a person who not only has civil rights that would prevent them from ever becoming pregnant without their permission, but also someone who cannot be coerced, such as a woman with sufficient assets or income to sustain (and protect) herself.
>just completely insane to insinuate that a woman needs to be rich enough to hire a body guard to prevent her from being raped.
Yes, unfortunately, some women are born in societies where the concept of rape is not completely rejected.
A number of children equal to either the entire population of either Fort Worth, TX or Baltimore, MD (depending on whether or not you believe Guttmacher or the CDC) is killed every year [2].
But those women who do have three pass it on to more next generation women than those who have zero. Pretty much every culture will slowly transform itself into a variation where three isn't quite as rare as it used to be, unless bounded by external factors like resource exhaustion.
There were reasons for having kids and also lot more kids in the past; death or chronic illness of some of them, needing kids to take care of the elderly and work the lands and, the one many forget; religion nonsense as in not being allowed sex if not for reproduction.
In the village where I was raised, all families had kids until the wife cannot have them anymore or dies because of that. And because of the rapid decline of religion over there, it was pretty much inbreeding as there are not many candidates that want a life like that outside these families, so always some of them have massive defects (my neighbour had a son born without a left arm, a blind daughter, a son with a disabling low iq, and more like that).
>But this article claims to be able to predict the future of civilization 100 years into the future
If you read the article (I know, I know...) it's extremely honest about the accuracy of population modeling as it reaches into the future, and fully admits that projections past 70 years aren't good. It even does so relatively close to the beginning.
“Demographic projections are highly accurate, and it has to do with the fact that most of the people who will be alive in 30 years have already been born,” the UN’s population division director, John Willmoth, says.
“But when you start getting 70, 80 years down the road, there’s much more uncertainty.”
Which prediction are you viewing as a calamity, that we'll hit 10 billion in a few decades, or that the population might start to go back down after that?
"The authors" are a dude and his wife who have been obsessed with the idea for 50 years. Most of what they predicted did not come to pass (of which Erlich later says "we clearly stated that they were not predictions", which sounds weird when you read the first sentence of the book). He has been debunked in multiple ways, and nobody takes him seriously, even if overpopulation is a major problem. Frankly he's just biased and has been trying really hard for a long time to find a narrative to fit his views. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich
As I get older the number of these long term predictions that never come that I have personally live through increases. I never believe anyone of them now.
I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
Climate change is one of the long term predictions that has been consistently confirmed with each passing year.
I do understand what you’re saying about old people being tired of apocalyptic predictions that come to pass. Even I remember being taught about Peak Oil and how the world would grind to a halt as we ran out of oil in the very near future. I remember being very worried about it as a child and wondering why none of the adults were equally concerned.
I wish there was a better way to convey the difference between widely corroborated, slow-moving concerns like climate change with the overly sensationalized short-term apocalyptic concerns that crop up every few years.
> Climate change is one of the long term predictions that has been consistently confirmed with each passing year.
While this is true, you're dismissing that the claims around climate change have been wildly wrong. The world should have ended a dozen times by now if we look at past predictions by "experts".
I'm not denying climate change at all, and we definitely need to take actions to curb it. But I understand where the skepticism is coming from.
> The world should have ended a dozen times by now if we look at past predictions by "experts".
Can you give some references where international panels of scientists have predicted the end of the world? We can't put entities such as IPCC at the same level as some random doomsayers.
A lot of such "predictions" tend to have come from non-experts, either misunderstanding experts or working on their own (and some deliberately misrepresenting experts in an attempt to discredite them). Usually when you look into them they were not expert consensus at the time. (That said, we are doing better than some of the 'worst case' predictions made previously, as those predictions assumed a rate of growth of emissions which did not happen).
There's also the fact that many of those predictions were made with, in mind, the world as it was at the time. The truth is we have made great advances in reducing our CO² emissions, among other things, and have thus set back Doomsday. There's still a lot of work to do, but it just means that there's hope, and that we should not end our efforts just because "we are doomed anyway". Just as we shall all die one day, there's no reason to not try to take care of our bodies and lives.
We haven't made any advances in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Total global CO2 emissions have to be going down for that to be the case. We'll be hitting a new record this year.
I vaguely remember a report from, I think it was the 90s? Where it predicted what would happen if CO2 emissions grew exponentially (no reduction in growth), linearly (reduction in growth), or stopped (complete cessation of growth). And because of CO2 reduction agreements we got to linear instead of exponential growth. I'll find the exact report and outcome I'm thinking of, but we can be hitting a new record this year and also it's not as bad as it could have been.
I think that after a certain age what will happen in the next 5-10 years is vastly more inportant than what will happen in 50-100 years for obvious reasons.
Dont quote me on that but it feels like we will have a war in Iran or somewhere else to bring the world economically back from recession.
Europe is silently happy about UA war because it will in the end stimulate economy. Qnd if few mil more ppl leave UA for Germany perm, they will be happiest than ever…
World is ugly and how elites treat normal ppl is ugly.
War is not good for the economy. This should be completely obvious based on common sense, but if you want more evidence, consider the widespread hunger in Europe after World Wars I and II, even in the countries on the winning side.
Sure, if you're away from the areas of destruction, you can perhaps make money selling weapons to the belligerents, but I think today one would be foolish to think that a major war can't possibly affect you, where ever you may be.
> Climate change is one of the long term predictions that has been consistently confirmed with each passing year.
Has it though? What was even the prediction? It seems to me that at some point people just gave up at pinpointing the specifics of the problem and basically decided that the fact that the climate is changing (never really stopped since the ice age) is the problem that needs fixing.
I really fail to see real consistent confirmation that isn't some indirect measurement using unproven models, or stuff like "we found some random farmers journal, compared temperature and crop harvesting dates and it's totes different from now"
Were there any real predictions from the past that came true on this topic?
Sure, Svante Arrhenius predicted that burning coal would increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and lead to warming. Both of those things have happened in the 120 years since he made that prediction.
A comic may not be the best source out there. But I tend to trust Randall Munroe on his research work and claims. Here's his graph: https://xkcd.com/1732/
In the 1970s, everybody was freaked about "global cooling". Anybody who lived through that era will be skeptical about current predictions saying precisely the opposite.
> Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
That entire article makes it very clear that at the time the only little pushing it were charlatan media orgs, and one guy who very obviously made a career of opposing every single scientific consensus[1]
If you lived through the 1970s, you saw "charlatan media orgs" pushing global cooling, and now you see the same orgs pushing global warming. Hence the skepticism, despite the science behind warming being far more established than cooling ever was.
Others have already pointed out that it was only a small fraction of experts.
But even if it had been a majority (or even "everybody") your point still completely fails because you are not taking into account why they predicted global cooling.
The predictions were not "we will have global cooling no matter what". They were "we will have global cooling if the amount of particulate pollution in the atmosphere gets too high, which if current trends continue will happen". Particulate pollution has a cooling effect.
But we undertook a massive effort to reign in particulate pollution. We not only stopped their rise but actually greatly reduced their level.
> I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
Responding to climate change in a meaningful way generally means making lifestyle choices that are responsible.
This would include driving a small car (instead of a SUV) and driving it at a fuel-efficient speed (not the maxiumum). This would include limiting reproduction. This would include not buying a new phone every n years. This would include buying more expensive, locally grown food. This would include voting for a party that is not about "jobs'n'growth" and "the economy" and "tax cuts for the rich" and one that is more about responding to the existential challenge.
Nobody wants that. They want their cars and phones and their lifestyle and their overseas holidays and their 20 grandkids. We are taught to want that.
From The Matrix (1999):
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
"The idea of a personal carbon footprint was popularized by a large advertising campaign of the fossil fuel company BP in 2005, designed by Ogilvy.[10][15] It instructed people to calculate their personal footprints and provided ways for people to "go on a low-carbon diet". This strategy, also employed by other major fossil fuel companies borrowed heavily from previous campaigns by the tobacco industry and plastics industry to shift the blame for negative consequences of those industries (under-age smoking, cigarette butt pollution, and plastic pollution) onto individual choices."
I'm not saying that one shouldn't try to live more harmoniously if they can, but we shouldn't blame individuals for failing so solve problems caused by huge corporations, because it takes eyes away from where they really should be.
At least in the USA, neither of the two big political parties are interested in solving the climate issue. It's way too good for getting votes to ever be solved.
Same reason Congress never passed a law explicitly legalizing abortion. It was too good a wedge issue.
> At least in the USA, neither of the two big political parties are interested in solving the climate issue. It's way to good for getting votes to ever be solved.
The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate change. Imperfectly, but orders of magnitude more than Republicans.
>The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate chang
No, no they are not. They are interested in passing laws that increase their power, and make people more dependent on government
Massively redistributed policies, that are anti-business, anti-market in the name of "social" and "climate" "justice" most of which will do little to nothing to impact actual CO2 emissions
Because they propose policies that are pretty mild compromises. If you think what they're proposing now is "anti-business", then I can only guess you haven't seen any policies that are aggressive in decreasing CO2 emissions. The very democrat who torpedoed recent climate legislation did so undoubtably in part because his family business that he founded is a coal company.
The free market does not address externalized costs, by definition. If you don't price those costs in artificially via legislation, they will end up systematically exploited. The business that can externalize more of their costs will always win -- they will have a better product for a better price.
This is why things like river fires are no longer common.
I will agree that congress is bad at picking winners. They should focus on prohibiting damaging practices.
Although, congress didn't pick ethanol because they thought it was a winner. They picked it because it propped up farmers.
>This is why things like river fires are no longer common.
And this is because of US Congress or because of State Governments?
Most regulation around rivers, and other such things are State Government controlled, not federal
I fully support federalism, I fully support State governments doing regulations that are sensible to the people, and conditions of states.
I reject the idea it needs to be a national policy or that such a policy is even possible with out being completely corrupted and authoritarian. Nor do I believe such a regulation is envisioned by the powers granted to the US Congress in our Constitution
River fires stopped happening in the US right around the founding of the EPA. State and local governments were in lock-step with industrialists throughout the 20th century... if they weren't industrialists themselves. State governments rarely legislate against dominant local industries, even today, but to an even greater degree last century.
If you grant some problems require policies at the state government level, which may have a wide range of geographic sizes and demographic compositions, how can you not grant there are problems that can only be addressed at a national level?
If you are worried about corruption and authoritarian tendencies, why do you tolerate them at the state level?
Please lay out your tradeoffs in a way that might make your position consistent.
Government spending has in many cases an excellent track record of shaping investment. If you look at some of the brightest innovations, they got their
start from government money. Funding on long time scales rarely comes from companies reporting profits every quarter.
History has shown that there aren't that many Bell Labs that survive very long. How long will Open AI or DeepMind continue to contribute to public innovation? I'm not going to make a bet on that.
Decades of spending on math and science, embedded into federal spending (though inefficient and wasteful in many ways) has generated many tremendous innovations. It is foolish to rely on one mechanism to generate innovation. I'm not suggesting that government is the only or best way. We need innovations across many timescales.
P.S. The amount of close mindedness among "highly intelligent" people in the tech world is staggering. Step back and look at yourself. Ask if your ego is getting in the way of clear and creative thinking.
P.P.S. For what it's worth, among the people I consider most inspiring in the tech world, very few have their head planted only in computer science. We need more historians, sociologists, lawyers, musicians, and so on. The libertarian faction of tech is indictive of a certain brain tendency -- a desire to simplify down to core principles -- and not one that we need more of.
The drive for simplicity can lead us to interesting theories. It can lead to simpler systems. It can also lead to overlooking the true nature of humanity: what is good? what is fair? what is just?
So "Is simplicity best? Or simply the easiest?" [1]
Please question the value of simple philosophies when you make moral arguments. Human concepts are rarely simple. Neither is language. Or justice. Or fairness. Or innovation.
This is one of the most abused phrases in politics.
Let's back up and talk about some fundamental values. I think most people can agree that we work to live, not the other way around. Businesses exist to serve an economic function. Businesses are not an embodiment of the ultimate good, any more than the barter system was, or indentured servitude. These things are ways of structuring economic activity.
My point is simple: Businesses operate according to the context they are in. The businesses do not define right and wrong. Businesses exploit the conditions they are in if they want to thrive.
Banning dog fighting is bad for the existing businesses AND the right thing to do.
Banninge CFCs was bad for industry at the time, according to some time frames.
Let's recognize the shared foundational moral factors here before we assume that we're on vastly different pages.
I think all clear eyed people will recognize that almost all legislation is both flawed and a compromise. Sure, some environmental programs and regulation do not have as much affect as we would like: recycling plastic, under current technology at least, would probably be a good example.
But I would rather see policy coming out that is in the right ballpark. We can learn from that.
Vague, simplistic overreliance on "the market" is foolhardy and readily dismissed by any serious student of economics.
The Inflation Reduction Act addresses climate crisis. As much as good be accomplished, considering the opposition's intransigence. So there's much more left to do, of course.
Well it certainly does not reduce inflation. However do you have a WRITTEN explanation as to you you think that debt fueled hundreds of billion dollar corporate wellfare transfer from future unborn workers to today's very profitable mega corporations somehow addresses "the climate crisis"
> debt fueled hundreds of billion dollar corporate wellfare
I get it. However...
I'm totally on board with government investment and industrial policy. Like The New Deal, race to the moon, highways, waterworks, etc. IRA, by any other name, is industrial policy and massive investment.
IRA is about 1/3rd the scope of Build Back Better. Pretty much cut & paste. All the programs they could sneak thru reconciliation, because of stupid Senate budget rules.
There's always objectionable specifics. Like the carve out for Manchin's new pipelines. But that's politics. And they're a tiny fraction of the whole.
Here I'd agree with Gates that shifting the blame to the small guy won't do anything. If you want to fix ecology, aim at the big guy - manufacturers. Demand that every item on sale - from cars to plastic bottles - must be marked with the manufacturer id, and when the item ends up in a pile of trash, charge the manufacturer with a disposal fee. This will destroy mindless consumerism, and with it all our economy.
I'd compare this situation to a bus with broken brakes, packed with tourists, that's rapidly approaching a cliff. Everyone knows what to do, but is too afraid of the pain that would follow. So everyone is waiting and discussing solutions, such as rocking the bus to increase pressure on brakes, or opening windows to increase the drag. Some are blaming the driver, some are blaming the fat passengers who should've eaten more responsibly, but that's just a form of group therapy session.
> This would include not buying a new x every y years
I'd love to, but it seems that approximately all manufacturers are no longer producing consumer goods that last forever, and we're in the last miles of a race to the bottom in terms of both product quality and reliable information about product quality.
Your actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, so you might as well enjoy your life.
Most of the actions you list at a societal scale are completely pointless, literally the only action we need as a civilisation (collectively, not individually) is building nuclear.
With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.
> With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.
You're thinking only of energy, but the world we live in is more way, way complex than that. Keep that up and we're living on Trantor, or Coruscant, not the Earth.
Anecdotally, and I have no reason to doubt this, 200 species go extinct every day.
Most people only know about 200 people. Imagine if one day you woke up and suddenly everyone you knew -- family, friends, colleauges, aquaintences, the people you see behind the checkout -- was gone. Just gone.
Imagine that happening every day.
Or maybe you have 1,000 followers on Twitter. Imagine every day you lost 200 of them. After 5 days, you don't have any followers.
So: 1,000 species gone every 5 days. Less than a week. You do the math for a year.
And that's just one angle on the problem. Another is that we are poisoning ourselves: plastics are endocrine disrupters. Microplastics are a serious environmental problem. We are using materials in our day-to-day life that haven't been proven safe to actually use. Nobody did studies to see if the things you are using are safe: they just wait until they're proven problematic and then "phase them out" over 5 years ... if you're in a country that does that (some countries still use DDT which is persistant and fucking toxic).
And you're right that our actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, or most other environmental problems. That needs to happen at a government and corporate level. But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions.
And you can make changes locally that affect your sphere of life. We live on a farm and have planted the landscape back, in places, with thousands of trees. These support birds, insects and small animals. It reclaims a little of what was lost. It doesn't make a huge difference in the broader sense, but it makes a big difference in the lives of other creatures.
Choose a lever: Their jobs. Getting re-elected. Align the goal with their fidicuary duty to increase shareholder value. Historical imperative. Whatever.
There is some degree of agreement that nuclear fuel cycles exist for fissionable fuel. In other words, the waste from one reactor can simply be used as fuel for the next. There are already some niche uses for reactor waste, up until recently the decommissioned reactor in Chernobyl was actually still in use for some stuff like this.
How many steps there are in this cycle and if actually is a net positive in energy production has not been born out by any research I am aware of. So your skepticism is warranted.
One other note is that reprocessing is distinct from breeding.
Reprocessing doesn't create new fissile material. You're stuck with the small fraction of Pu239 in the waste (which is about a 7th of the original U235). It buys you very little extra energy at huge financial cost and in the current form releases more radiation than the rest of the nuclear industry combined if you exclude weapons tests and chernobyl -- it even rivals coal in terms of radiation released per joule. Plus there is a hidden amount of CFCs and other extremely potent greenhouse gases involved in the process.
Breeding to close the fuel cycle would be great (if it could be done economically and safely), but there is a laundry list of reasons why it may never happen, and every tonne of fissile material used before it happens is 200GW that can't be produced until a decade is spent breeding it back.
Easy for you to say but how many human lives have been improved over the last 70 years do to economic growth which is highly dependent on fossil fuels?
Billions?
Many people wouldn’t mind being frozen in 1950’s USA (except those with cancer), but probably not 1950’s China or India.
Original? In the early 20th century global cooling and an end to the interglacial period of the ice age we’re still in was a prominent concern.
By the way if we reset to the atmospheric conditions of a few hundred years ago this would be a certainty within a period of thousands of years at most. Much of the world’s population centers, agriculture, etc covered in hundreds of feet of ice.
>The original climate change predictions were pretty much on the mark even though they weren't complex models.
No? It's 2022 and our cities should be sunk in the ocean and we should be boiling or frozen and there should be no drinkable water left and blah blah blah.
They predicted 1C in 2005, and 2.5C in 2038. We are right on schedule.
They also predict global economic growth to halt in 2025 due to climate change impacts.
That’s plausible, given recent years’ industrial and agricultural climate disasters. However, on that metric, we’re probably a bit behind schedule. Five years, maybe?
People "resist climate change" because most climate change rhetoric is transparently trying to get them to vote a different way or buy some different thing. If it was stated just in terms of a causal relationship, like rising CO2 raises global temperature, fewer people would object.
Put another way, one group conflates the fact of CO2 increases + greenhouse effect with suggested political acrions. Another group counters by conflating not agreeing with political actions with disputing the underlying physics.
The most meaningful step (that every politician manages to avoid) is to get rid of coal in energy production.
Putting money into solving Renewable intermitency (either through large scale storage projects or nuclear) and decommisioning every single coal plant on earth (followed closely by gas plants) would be the single largest step change in emissions that has fuck all to do with 'consumer' behaviour.
If you either you don't believe it's serious enough to take drastic action (dispute the phsyics) or you don't think it's worth the inconvenience (selfish) neither of those are defensible political positions.
> People "resist climate change" because most climate change rhetoric is transparently trying to get them to vote a different way or buy some different thing. If it was stated just in terms of a causal relationship, like rising CO2 raises global temperature, fewer people would object.
"resist climate change" could mean different things. It's true that something like "rising CO2 raises global temperature" is uncontroversial, but agreeing to that doesn't get you anywhere close to implementing climate policy, or to even acknowledge that humans are the leading cause. For instance, you can agree that "rising CO2 raises global temperature", but still think that the warming is totally natural (ie. not primarily caused by humans) and/or that it's impossible for humans to stop. Polling suggests a good chunk of republicans believe in the former[1]. I suspect that most people would characterize those people as "resisting climate change" even if they believe that co2 leads to atmospheric warming.
One side has been running a coordinated disinformation campaign since the 1980’s in order to protect oil interests. Part of that strategy involved tying climate change to identity politics.
The other side has been stating it as a causal relationship for over 40 years. Their projections have proven correct over that timespan.
Also, your argument about rhetoric justifies voting immorally whenever one side is universally in the wrong. (Examples from history include women’s suffrage, slavery, locking ethnic groups in camps, etc.) I don’t find it to be a useful way of thinking about political issues.
I Think the reason older folks resist climate change is 3-fold:
- It’s scary
- It requires a substantial change in lifestyle
- It has become attached to politics, (particularly liberal, progressive politics) which makes it a representation of the “other”.
That aside, there is something to be said about seeing the predictions of your youth fizzle out. On the other hand, we have a tendency to romanticize the party and reframe ourselves relative to it. We remember things differently than they were.
I don’t know about other predictions, but at the end of 2022, if someone denies climate change, it is just dumb.
My guess is that these older people probably think they’ll be gone soon anyway, so why give up air travel, gas guzzling cars etc? It is a problem for younger generations to deal with
> I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
It's because older people are used to the idea that they should be able to spend their money any way they like, and in order to combat climate change they are being told that they should consume less. Plus they probably don't care that much that their actions will cause suffering of future generations.
Not all predictions are equal. It's one thing to doubt predictions from random pundits, it's another thing to doubt the current scientific consensus. A lot of smart people from many countries have been working on climate change. They may be wrong in their conclusions but what they're telling us is the best prediction at our disposal.
> I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
Probably for the same reason there was resistance to vaccines. A lot of people aren't rationale at all and believe whatever suits their view of the world, even though it's in direct contradiction with all evidences.
The one I remember for my country was that by year 2000 (prediction made in 1980s) half of the forest will be gone because of acid rain. I remember as a kid magazines with illustrations showing large dead forest everywhere.
Lack of ozone layer was also supposed to kill most of the planet.
Fortunately when the danger is identified people start to act, this make long term predictions very difficult.
>half of the forest will be gone because of acid rain.
The wide scale introduction of systems, required by laws and regulations, that drastically reduced the amount of sulfur byproducts released had a lot to do with that same thing regarding CFCs and the ozone layer.
I'm guessing there's a fancy name for this phenomenon that I'm not aware of, but a lot of these kinds of advocacy-news pieces fall victim to it: The assumption that a problem that will occur in X number of years, where X is anything greater than, say, 20 will be met only with the exact technology available to us, today.
If tomorrow, most of the non-elderly population died off leaving only the less-capable-of-working-and-therefore-feeding-the-world-elderly to fend for themselves, we'd have a crisis on our hands. This will happen gradually, over time. Over time, nearly every thing we produce -- food included -- is done more efficiently when the market requires it.
I should temper this a little -- I'm not saying "let's just start pouring sewage into the rivers because robots will come by and clean it up some day"[0], ignore climate change (or deny it or anything else). I am suggesting those who believe this is a problem that requires awareness (and not dismissal) might be better served by being less sensational. And it would be intelligent of us to remember that when we try to make predictions about the future that the future happens all around the thing you're predicting, too ... and might even make it irrelevant.
[0] If anything it's over-reacting pieces like this that cause people to think that way ... especially when they end up being the opposite of previous hauntingly similar sounding over-reactions (see The Population Bomb)
“We’re getting older and older, which means there are fewer people able to work to support more people who can’t.”
Well, if we’re getting older and older, isn’t that because we’re getting healthier and healthier? Wouldn’t the number of years we’re “able to work to support more people” increase as well?
> isn’t that because we’re getting healthier and healthier?
Not necessarily, just look at the obesity epidemic. 40% of Americans are now obese. Not overweight, obese. Our society has tackled large scale public health issues that used to kill lots of people (cholera, polio, etc.) But living longer is no way an indicator that we are healthier than we used to be. There's not as much out there to kill us when we're young.
I’d say being alive and obese is healthier than dying earlier from diseases we’ve been successful at tackling. Obese doesn’t mean anything close to being unable to work and be productive for society. A 6ft tall man is obese at 220. Hardly debilitating.
I'm 30 now and having the first minor issues of my body not working as great as before, I can't imagine how it is at 70. The simple fact is that almost no full-time career job (except for politician apparently) can be fully filled by the average 70 year old.
Either the vast majority of our productivity gains will to to pensions in the future (as they already do in Europe), or retired people will have to live with severe cuts to living standards.
It seems to me that pretty much any job not involving physical labor could be filled by a 70-year old. Why would someone 60+ not be able to be a banker, a civil servant or even a lathe worker? There's a vast amount of jobs these days that don't involve much or any physical labor at all.
I think the real challenge, at least in the western world, will be getting people to work when retirement at a "normal" age is not on the table. A lot of people work boring jobs with the knowledge that they're done at 60 or 65 and if health permits can have 10-20 years of nice retirement. It's going to be a tough sell for a lot of jobs to convince people to want to just do them until they die. For interesting jobs, I think many do this anyway, but if you're some pointless cog in a bureaucracy, you're probably just counting down days to get your pension. Losing that would make people rethink the whole thing (and hopefully enjoy themselves more)
This attitude of many people makes me sad. Working and thus wasting your whole life in a miserable job and just waiting for retirement. Feels like a recipe for disaster.
As a society, we are quite good at keeping people alive for a long time but not so good at addressing chronic illness. With the massive increase in autoimmune disease, obesity and other chronic illnesses, I would contend that overall we are less healthy on average than just a few decades ago and this trend will continue indefinitely until massive changes occur in the medical and food industries.
No, we're burning our youth to keep our old alive by taxing the shit out of the young and productive to feed it into the endless maw of the old.
Famous American aphorism: A society grows great when old men buy land and charge rent for the young to plant trees on which the old will then sit in the shade of
> Around the Balkans, the nations of Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Serbia are all at least 1 per cent smaller this year than they were last year, according to the UN’s figures.
So, did they mix up and then also group the Baltics and the Balkans?
Otherwise this is a rather bizarre description.
Predictions this far out are pretty silly given how much technological and change we've had in the past century and how much we can see on the horizon. Still, even if you held our technological state constant a permanent gradual decline is very unlikely given biological and cultural evolution: the children of people who have more kids than average will likely do the same, undoing the demographic transition.
The article is only considering the social majority and ignoring the existing of minority groups – for example, ultra-Orthodox Jews – who appear to be consistently maintaining high birth rates and avoiding any demographic transition. While they are only a tiny minority in most countries (Israel being the exception), if they continue on their current trajectory for a few centuries, they (and similar groups) will come to make up the majority of the population.
Demographics are actually pretty stable and accurate long term predictors of lots of other things.
Now, birthrates might be something harder to predict, although they too are subject to demographic forces. (Less people have fewer babies even with higher fertility.) The problem will be slow to correct.
> Homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for roughly 300,000 years, give or take (no one left a diary back then). [...]
There were perhaps 230 million of us on Earth at around the time of Cleopatra’s death, as the ancient Egyptian civilisation came to an end.
I think those numbers on their own are already interesting. They give us a picture just how unusual the present time really is - or even most of recorded history.
Cleopatra was living in the first century BC, so very roughly 2000 years ago. So for the ~298.000 years before (or ~99.3% of human history), there were less humans on earth than are living in the US today.
Only in the last 0.7% have we ever gotten close to a billion, then surpassed it and reached 8 billion today.
So explosive population growth has absolutely been real, it just used to happen at timescales that are not easy for us to access.
Cities expanding is generally a good thing for arable land availability.
Not that there's no problems with cities and agriculture, just the big picture seems the opposite of what is suggested here.
Also "peak child" means peak baby. We need to support people in old age and in infancy (even supporting mothers pre-birth) so the correct comparison of workers to non-workers is those who have left school upwards to retirement.
Again, not suggesting there are no demographic issues, but even on that scale it's not "all downhill from here" even before you get into robots and longer, healthier lives and other details.
The article switches between grounded projections and sweeping “never” statements in a way that seems misleading. It’s certainly possible that the early 20th century ends up being a historical outlier in terms of the level of technology and wealth distribution and we never see a baby boom like that again. But we don’t know. Certainly saying we’ll never reverse the population decline is total speculation. I wouldn’t expect the same conditions to persist forever and at some point, people might be motivated by the decline itself.
The truth is that our current population level can only be supported by fossil fuels, which are becoming increasingly harder to exploit. As society collapses, technology required for extraction may be lost. Fossil fuels will take millions of year to regenerate.
Surely other energy sources can be a replacement, but for a lot of things, fossil fuel is still the only solution today (agriculture, mining, air travel).
Can we manage the energy transition? Perhaps. I was always a pessimist, so my guess is no. The technology for it has yet to be invented. In overshoot territory, we're already living on borrowed time. The world's ecological footprint widely exceeds the Earth biocapacity has long been exceeded, now imagine 8 billion people who want to live the lifestyle of Americans. Demand in energy just keeps growing. Renewables don't even displace fossil fuels, they only increase the total energy output.
That might turn out to be the case, but we just don't know. Notably, there are some industrial processes that use fossil fuels directly and can't be trivially swapped out for grid power. Those processes might not be possible after a certain point. However, we've had fossil fuels for the entire history of industrial production, so there hasn't been pressure to invent other techniques.
In Babylon V the TV series, in the season 4 we casually find out that Centauri Prime, the home planet of one of strongest races who decide fate of universe, host less actual people than some irrelevant humanoid species' home planet (was it 4B vs. 8B?)
There are also some ancient races who are very powerful individually but only have a few hundred individuals left (sometimes, one).
It seems that individual power tends to rise but overall numbers tend to dwindle as a race develops, and quality * quantity would eventually peak.
Well the Minbari were losing souls to humans. I don't recall if that was fully explained in implication. The Vorlon are an example of what you said, individually powerful and long lived so no need to breed.
These predictions don't even take into account factors like sea level rising by meters. Think about the demographic impact of coastal infrastructure going underwater and having to be rebuilt and reconnected to different roads and railways, farmland going underwater and permanently lost, many million of people becoming homeless also in first world countries, lack of food and clean water. Help yourselves to add more to the list. If enough of this happens fertility rates are the least of the problems.
Many cities grow by adding more suburban areas. It's a very land-intensive way to grow, but popular among families as they don't have to live in apartments.
They certainly did in the baby-boom years. Is that still the case? The cost of extending utilities and services to ever increasing areas is a growing concern. Traffic and the time and expense of commuting is a growing concern. Where I live, most growth is in the the form of increasing density closer to the city center. Smaller apartments are more workable for families if they have one or two (or zero) kids as opposed to three or more.
thats why most of US towns are bankrupt or near bankrupt and need federal funds to function, literally a ponzi scheme[0]. Strongtowns is an organization that study better urban policies[1]
Toronto just added 14 new suburbs. Until a month ago, these thousands of acres were considered the "green belt" necessary for the functioning of a large metropolis. Now they'll be paved over.
I wonder how countries will attempt to deal with declining populations. Immigration isn't really a solution, as the countries with positive fertility rates (falling fast) are not producing enough children to balance the decline. I find the geopolitical implications fascinating to think about. If a country is declining and cannot tempt migrants, does it perhaps become a tax haven? Is it absorbed by a larger country (either willingly or by force)? Does it join a union of other countries to form the start of a global government?
Economically, could the deflationary pressures of a declining population lead to low/negative interest rates and hyper QE?
More importantly, the countries with high birth rates do not have enough human capital to replace aging Westerners.
Their kids aren't equipped to take the millions of vacant Western jobs, because they won't have the necessary education, especially when it comes to language.
Israel has a higher than replacement birth-rate and has western-ish ideals. If the US cared to increase births it could simply issue free daycare, or increase the child tax deduction.
That needs to be disaggregated. Israel has a huge religious contingent, and a substantial segment of it is supported by wholesale welfare - not just child care and rebates. If subsidized early years child care were enough, you'd expect the Nordic countries with their amazing social safety net to have a population boom. They don't. There's something more subtle going on with the cultural attitudes about women as homemakers.
Many countries in Africa have English or French as their official languages. In South Africa, the number of native English speakers has increased at a faster rate than would be expected given the country's ethnic breakdown. We're likely to see the same thing happen in the rest of Africa: People will speak English or French to their children because being a native speaker of those languages would be an easy way to give your child an advantage.
Immigration may be a solution for richer countries but only if the people there accept it (currently there seems to be a trend against immigration in many developed countries). Other ideas may be reducing the need for people (e.g. more automation, but then what do you do about various welfare-for-the-old programs like state pensions, Medicare, social security?) or policies to improve fertility (random ideas I’ve seen: required paternity leave so that women won’t suffer an unequal career disadvantage from maternity which can discourage having children; relaxing booster seat requirements because they require a larger car for more than two kids which can be unaffordable and offer rules don’t seem to be based on when they are beneficial; reducing other regulations that make larger families more difficult, e.g. rules about leaving children unsupervised; reducing the cost of housing as this can be a large burden preventing people from having families; reducing the cost of college as parents may consider it when choosing to have children; somehow having people being better paid so they can have a parent stay at home with children; reducing the cost of childcare so that parents can afford more kids; forcing employers to give reasonable consideration to requests for flexible working conditions (part time, etc) for parents). Currently in rich countries when people are polled on how many children they would like, they often would like more than they end up having, so if immigration is not to be an option, reducing demographic problems may be doable by removing some of the barriers to people having children. A policy I didn’t mention is paying people for having children as many governments already do it one way or another. One issue is that the payment is often meagre and not worth it for wealthier parents (where the payments won’t come close to the opportunity cost from the career hit of taking leave from work). The kind of policies that seem particularly effective to me are ones that make marginally larger families easier — that is, it seems easier to get more children by causing some families of 2 children to become families of 3 rather than families of 0 to families of 1 — and housing/school affordability matters there as well as silly things like the booster seat thing.
Feels like they're really overlooking technological progress's role in shaping long term population changes. Fertility rates tend to be lower in more developed nations due to higher cost of raising children and people being occupied by careers, but with 50 years worth of improvements in automation that can change significantly.
Similarly, while many countries are offsetting their aging populations with immigration, if that ceases to be sufficient they currently can still afford to create incentives for people to have children.
Just to complement your comment, robots will not only help with costs of raising children but will also replace a lot of working people so should offset declining population, which we need to do if we want to keep social contract in our current economical model based on growth.
So despite Musk and similar claims about depopulation, maybe we shouldn't devalue having children so much as a society. It becomes progressively hard to afford time and money for more children based on current economics and corporations controlling society via governments so that all the money flows up and we dont have extra money for kids/child care/etc.
This has been a theory about an impending population decline because the earth just _can’t_ support that many people, for over 200 years but it’s never come to pass. This article is a convincing as a Robert Malthus piece from 1800.
I hope the Earth's population does keep declining. Be good for the Earth to have fewer humans. But I also hope the total human population increases to hundreds of billions, trillions even.
within a century more than 8 billion people will live in space habitats
if 99% or 99.9% of the population voluntarily practices a below-replacement fertility rate, either every generation or on average over multiple generations, it might instead take 500 years
whatever eccentric 1% or 0.1% chooses otherwise will double every 50 years, as world population just did
then it's just a question of the technical feasibility of building appealing offworld habitats, and the political freedom to do so
So who's amazed, anyway. We've seen population growth and decay curves and noted that our species has more characteristics in common with the short lived species that only go for a few million years than it has with the long surviving genus of cockroaches for example.
We're a species which must die out. We must make our peace with that fact, just as we face our personal deaths.
It's possible we'll be back down to 7B people by the end of 2025 thanks to the food and fertilizer disruption that has already happened due to the war Ukraine.
We're approaching the downside slope of the carbon pulse that has been fueling mankind for the past 200 years. Things don't look good for the next decade for anyone.
I've watched too much Peter Zeihan and Nate Hagens to see anything other than that coming.
I don't think that's the case. If you look at the poorest countries in Africa where people are dying of starvation they still have the highest population increase.
Yep. I don't think people realize how much damage hyperbole like this does. Each time one of these predictions don't pan out (which, come one, we'll all be able to laugh about this one in 2025) people take them less and less seriously.
If by "we" you mean Americans with in-demand technical skills and 6-figure salaries, then yes, we'll be okay. North America has a great setup for internal good security.
However, the rest of the world has to deal with losing 25% of cereals (from Russia and Ukraine) as well as the curtailment of rice imports from China, India, and Parisian. Similarly, the loss of Russia's and China's nitrogen, potassium, and potash exports cuts out ~20-30% of those resources, each of which is necessary to sustain post-industrial agricultural yields. This can easily cascade, for example, with Brazil and Latin American food exports drying up due to insufficient fertilizer input, or Saudi fertilizer output drying up due to regional insecurity or state collapse driven in part by high food prices.
So yes, "we" will be fine. North Africa and the Middle East... not so much.
Not to mention the flooding of coastal cities and other land made uninhabitable and unproductive for farming as we have already hit some tipping points. Buckle up for some societal collapse.
The GP mentioned 2025. Do you think we're going to see flooding of coastal cities by 2025? Land made uninhabitable by 2025? I for one am not buying that.
Or are you just adding to the GP's list of woes, but not buying the time frame?
That is the first significant rise of ocean level after hitting some tipping points that cause massive glacier break aways and ice melt. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted it in New York 2140 which describes life there after many of these pulses.
This has nothing to do with the article, which is about the natural decline in the number of children per woman, slated to fall below replacement levels in the next 100 years.
Birth rates are already below replacement levels worldwide, and well below it in all but Africa. "Peak baby" worldwide was in 2013. Japan's population peaked in 2017. Outside of Osaka and Tokyo, the country is emptying out. Look to Japan first to see how this plays out.
China's population is peaking now. So is the US native-born population.[1]
Almost all the population growth worldwide is in sub-Saharan Africa. That region may not survive global warming.
Dumb question: climate change is inevitable, right? If it is not inevitable, please correct me. My intuition comes from the Ice Age. The planet warms up and then cool down cyclically, right? If it is inevitabile, sooner or later the planet will warm up where life as we know will be unsustainable, right? We might have accelerated the warming phase, but it would have happened anyway?
So, my question is why are we panicking about it? I'm not even sure that we as human are completely responsible for the warming up (what big ego we have?). There are other species which are in trillions and don't even bat an eye about being overpopulated? Why this burden only on us? Why the burden of protecting a species is on us? Why we have such a big ego to think that we are running the solar system and the earth?
> So, my question is why are we panicking about it?
Speed of change basically. If it typically takes tens of thousands of years to make these changes, species can adapt and survive. If you do 10,000 years worth of heating in like 300 years it’s not enough time for that to occur.
I don't know what ego has to do with this to be honest. If you regognize that human behavior has an impact on climate change (and the science is clear that it does), don't you have a moral obligation to do something about it, regardless of your ego and intuition?
