By 2030, 56 countries will have more people aged 65+ than children under 15
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For those who don't know, Calhoun's research was around the impact of population growth. He found that mice in a closed environment, among other behaviors, became anti-social, violent, strangely obsessed with grooming and stopped breeding once the population reached a certain size, even disregarding the wellbeing of the young that are born.
Obviously we're not in a situation as bad as all that, but it's an interesting light to view today's world in.
Interesting thought.
Intelligence has surely risen in our population, obesity is becoming a real problem in successful populations. The "selfie" self absorbed cultural shift we're seeing at the moment is another parallel.
Whilst we're not cannibalising each other or becoming any more aggressive than we have been in the past (although we are still plenty aggressive), I think we are starting to see some of symptoms for lack of a better term that are highlighted above to some degree or another.
Edit - perhaps there are also similarities between the hikikomori NEET lifestyle that's arisen in Japan as well.
This is purely an opinion without any statistics to back it up though, I'd be interested to hear counter arguments.
The mice thing is not a utopia, it's an extremely artificial situation that only fits a very banal and shallow definition of "utopia". And that is not and probably never will be a situation humans will find themselves in since it requires a third party to engineer. None of us right now are in a closed environment, and we're definitely not in a no scarcity situation, since people are still worried about holding a job. The NEET thing is, too, related to the whole job thing.
In what way are these situations at all related?
It also was not a utopia because the rats clearly where not happy.
I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.
As an aside I was more referencing the hikikomori phenomenon when I mentioned NEET's - whilst they are NEET, they are extreme cases of social withdrawl and other mental problems.
> I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.
I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to. Obesity is much higher in the US, by a wide margin, than, say, India, and India is definitely much more populated. I don't know if I really need to provide numbers for that.
The NEET issue could easily have been caused by bleak job prospects.
My point is, the rat experiment and the current situation don't seem to be even remotely related. Our population growth is not the same, and our population growth is very uneven. We have external forces acting to limit how people live still. There are just so many variables not accounted for that trying to find any connections is more dangerous than it is helpful.
By no means do I think the situation we are in are comparable - nature does play a role for us unlike in the experiment and there are hardships for some.
But I think examining extreme overpopulation and it's effects on individuals is important - and is relative to a lesser degree to problems we have the potential to face, and may be facing in diluted forms in certain areas. Maybe not as much today, but who knows where we could be tomorrow.
The other glaring difference is the difference in behaviour between people and rodents - you can't draw conclusions and act upon them, but you can at least study the connections.
I wouldn't call that dangerous at all, I'd say it was dangerous to ignore.
What scope and scale are you looking at though? Because within first world countries such as the USA, psychological problems doesn't correlate much and obesity correlates negatively with population density. The problems you mention correlate much more with social and economic opportunities (or lack thereof) than population density itself.
We don't know what the "natural" human population is. By that, I mean the human population that would exist if every human had free choice of whether or not to have kids.
What we have now (globally) is still largely the "accidental" human population--the population we got because the pleasure of sex leads unexpectedly to reproduction.
I wish we had a "reverse-able sterilization at birth" method. It would be reversed at no cost to the individual, but if we could somehow set the default to "no kids", and give individuals the choice to turn it on, I think we would see a lot less of a population issue.
Alternatives to contraception, form a pop growth perspective are delayed reproduction (say at 35) or more same sex pairing.
So, yes, while it would significantly decrease the population, you'd be dramatically increasing the number of people, mostly women, who simply aren't able to have children at all.
They also have a table there, outlining the theoretical "percent of women who will fail to have a live birth" if they start trying to conceive at a certain age. Not the same thing as infertility -- they may be fertile, just unlucky up until the point that they're actually infertile. The numbers are a little all over the place, but for 35 year old women, it's somewhere between 13 and 22%
People have a right to make their own reproductive choices, but there's a huge human, social, and economic cost when people have children at ill-advised points in their life (either too young, when sick, when poor), and it seems that relying on others to enable your reproductive rights is a hazard where the government or medical profession can remove that right from people.
I don't really consider this strictly eugenics, as it's not done with the same intention of improving the global genepool, but instead it attacks it from a more shortsighted and "pragmatic" (economic/social) point of view, but in any case it would be a horrible future.
Why force them to partake, and open up the easiest route for a government to screw with probably our most basic right.
> Why force them to partake, and open up the easiest route for a government to screw with probably our most basic right.
If you read my above comments: That's why, even though I wish we could implement it, I probably wouldn't support it if it was an available option. I don't trust any government to do it correctly.
You sterilize at birth, and then once a child reaches the age of majority they are allowed to get it reversed at zero cost simply be requesting it be done.
This removes the moral hazard, and requires a positive action and conscious choice to have a child. At that point you can start making moral judgements and holding people accountable.
I would also like to emphasize the importance of accurate, timely sex education so kids learn how their bodies work and what their options are. The combination of contraceptives + education has had a dramatic effect in Colorado on teen pregnancies.
And although it's less of an issue in the U.S. and Europe, legal equality for women (right to own property, conduct a business, drive cars, hold political office, etc.) frees them from dependency on a husband.
Even the basics help: marital rape is not yet a crime in every country today. In fact it wasn't a crime in all 50 states until 1993!
My point here is that we don't need to imagine some sort of draconian program like universal reversible sterilization at birth. All we need to do is promote and make progress with the tools we already have. That can be just as effective, AND more moral as well.
You haven't mentioned the very important fact that the experiment was designed to be a mice "utopia" with everything mice could desire provided to them for free. (meaning: no effort needed)
In an environment where no effort is needed to survive and procreate it makes sense to me that the offspring will be less intelligent and less social over time as they do not need any of these social traits to survive.
We haven't reached human utopia yet but I believe the welfare state goes into that direction and will eventually produce similar results. (it already does in some respects - see birth rates in Western countries)
The next decades will be very interesting times (and possibly frightening) as we might see our civilisation first being dominated economically by others and likely also militarily after that. (and this wont be pretty for us, because hatred towards our culture is mainstream in most other cultures - and sadly also internally)
Or alternatively we will see chaotic internal revolutions that will undo this development.
But I doubt that we will see these changes happen in an ordered democratic way as the establishment will fight changes by all means imaginable. (it is obvious when seeing the medias bias)
There seems to be whole businesses building around milking elderly people's retirement money. I'm thinking about highly polluting cruise ships etc.
Interesting times ahead.
And if that happens organically, without special policies, the better still.
My thoughts on the matter was always that nature itself will eventually take care of the numbers if we keep going the way we are without some form of measure to keep control - every population explosion has had it's eventual decline - sharp or smooth. We seem to believe that we're different but we're not.
If we self regulate by choice - whether it's the lack of income, lifestyle or a lack of want to have children that has brought us here it's always going to be preferable. As unsavoury as it may be in some regards.
I don't think most people would disagree. It's just that nature isn't very merciful, and the way it enacts it's policies could lead to a lot of suffering. It'd be much more pleasant if we self-regulated so that nature didn't have to.
In itself, having a more reasonably distributed age distribution is neutral (in my view). But it is a consequence of two good things: the population boom is leveling off, and healthcare has improved tremendously around the globe.
Could you explain? Recent policy seems to have been about pushing everyone possible into the workforce, even the not-able-bodied. By every means short of actually putting up wages.
[1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/americans-not-...
It can also be pushed into meaning that young people are mostly barred from effectively investing and creating successful business.
Of course, the other side of that coin is that there needs to be enough jobs available to employ everyone, and forcing retirement is one way to reduce a labour surplus...
See the age breakdown of the recent Brexit vote for one example. I also remember with the Irish referendum on gay marriage in 2015, there was much worry that the older generations would swing the overall vote to "No", despite the legislation having no impact on them.
Worth thinking about: How many Brexit "Leave" voters have simply died of old age in the two months between then and now?
Only a downside if you (a) disagree with them; (b) for whatever reason, feel they are not entitled to their beliefs
> and can end up drowning out the voices of the young.
Funny how when your opinions are the majority it's democracy, and when they're not it's "voices being drowned out."
> Worth thinking about: How many Brexit "Leave" voters have simply died of old age in the two months between then and now?
It's not.
You don't even have to do that, I'd make July 4th election day in the states for example.
There is really no compelling argument I can think of for why there shouldn't be a federal holiday to vote, unless you are arguing about lost productivity as a business owner or policy changes from more people of different demographics voting. Neither are compelling arguments.
When there's polarization in a society where a majority of population out-vote a minority on every proposal, said minority has all motivation to withdraw from public politics and secede.
Imagine a country with 60% big-endians and 40% little-endians. Big-endians own every president, every senate and every vote they care to win. Little-endians have no sensible choice but to split into their own country where they'll be a majority, perhaps with civil war and ethnic cleansings in the process.
The first past the post system strongly encourages this sort of manipulation. If electorates were made larger and multiple candidates elected for each then this problem would disappear, but established parties would never allow that to occur.
Edit: it has become evident recently that the HN downvote system cannot cope with political discussions, as evidenced by your post being killed. I would suggest that posts with political content have up and down votes shown, rather than the sum being applied to modify visibility. As it is, the downvotes are just "I don't want you to be able to express your ideas."
I think I am fairly liberal, but in being objective I know I could very well be wrong.
Just to put the counter point. If conservative ideals are correct, then older people voting more would be a huge UPSIDE.
I agree that the older voting bloc causes a problem, but it's not because they are conservative, it's because they're retired and will continue to try to vote more benefits for themselves while removing benefits from others.
But to say it's a problem because they are conservative? You're just saying people that agree with you are right and people who disagree are wrong. It's closeminded.
This is actually not true [0]
[0]http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/getting-more-li...
" At any given time older people are likely to be more conservative than contemporaneous young people. But relative to themselves as young people, today’s older folks have generally become more liberal than they once were."
It seems your thinking of the latter half of that quote, but the claim was regarding the first half.
Less resources are needed if you have less people. Ultimately everyone will benefit from it.
Elon Musk may be having success changing those huge incentives, but relying on revolutionaries like that isn't ideal and might not work.
Population growth has been slowing due to increases in quality of living, and is set to peak around 2050. Then we'll experience population deflation, which may be even more problematic than inflation.
Which BTW makes no sense when you look closer at demographics, since most depopulating areas are rural, but immigrants usually live compactly in countries' largest cities (where also existing youth flocks to), increasing population imbalance in fact.
Yes they get total head count stable but at cost of getting everything else wrong.
1: First people argue there's no problem with low birth rate, and then people tell that they're solving the problem. Pick one.
This is a myth.
In fact birth rates are decelerating at an alarming rate and actually starting to decrease in some parts of the world. In a couple of decades, population is projected to begin decreasing worldwide. Many governments are creating programs to encourage procreation to try to hold off the inevitable death spiral most countries will experience.
The only question is, how to transition to a "steady state economy"[2][3] or "non growth economies", when population really reaches some kind of equilibrium. As growth is the only concept humans for the last tens of thousands of years knew, this transition, while absolutely necessary, will be hard and hurt lots of people I believe.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_of_money
Now you could argue for a steady state population. Or at least for a period of time where we have a steady state population (before starships are prevalent) and I could start to see that happening, but as long as there is intelligence and peace the economy will continue to grow.
I don't know what you mean by "true" GDP growth. It feels like you're making some non-standard distinction but not explaining it.
While I can imagine that it's not easy to redesign pension funds, but keeping the current systems at all costs is probably ideological by definition.
AI has hit a boom and is producing a lot of potentially useful achievements (that it hadn't before). It wouldn't surprise me if they become more prevelant.
Of course, we still need the resources to build them...
Of course driverless cars are s massive feat and I see more robots entering the house soon in less subtle ways.
I think the detection algorithm will look past accent and probably do some deep-learning based technique. Google are probably smart enough to tailor the voice recognition algorithms geographically - if you spend time in Scotland it will probably use the Scottish trained net to detect what you want.
Obviously current pension and retirement policy defines "old" at various ages in the 50s or 60s, and 65 is a reasonable cut-off in light of current laws. But the trend is generally longer lives and later retirements.
I would be willing to bet that the 65-year-olds of the 2030s will be much less of a "burden" on society than, say, the 65-year-olds of the 1930s were.
That said, 65 isn't a hard number. Many exit regular employment permanently at 50, for example.
A century ago and now are incomparable for a variety of reasons, one of them being a burgeoning middle class. The birth of a middle class brings incalculable improvements but many nations haven't ever adapted to that massive middle class approaching old age, but thankfully this will be staggered so we can respond to it gradually.
Could you elaborate on this? My impression is the exact opposite - that people are generally healthier and/or living longer than they have previously. Obviously things vary tremendously from country to country - and obesity in the US complicates the picture - but is general health and life expectancy around the world going down?
Not true.
In EU the retirement age is moving as population gets older. By 2040 retirement age could be around 75 years.
Work almost all your life.
No more grandparents taking care of children while parents work, decreasing the number of families that might have children.
Less open positions for young people.
Edit: An informative graph for the bleak jobs picture for young people this shift is creating in the US: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...
One thing that would probably help would be much shorter work weeks.
3 of my 4 grandparents are now passed, and there is absolutely no way they would have been able to be a net asset in any actual profit driven and competitive enterprise while that age these days.
Sure they might have been able to do something 'helpful' like read to young children or some other volunteer-like job, but these types of pseudo employment require more time and energy from actual workers for coordination than the worth of the labor itself.
By mid 70's none of my grandparents had the technical abilities to perform adequately in a non-physical office position, nor the physical tenacity to work a more demanding service job. Very few 75 year olds I've met would be any different.
Of course this all is a moot point since we now have competition between millenials and 45 year olds in some industries. what makes anyone think there are jobs available for the very old, even if they could be productful?
>the political choices are unsavory — increase taxes or cut benefits
Those are not solutions, those would both exacerbate the problems. A shrinking workforce, which has seen wages stagnating for decades while cost of living continues to increase, and which is increasingly being automated out resulting in high unemployment, cannot pay more taxes. That would result in even more working people needing benefits (or dropping out of the workforce because it's a net loss to work) and lower tax revenues. Cutting benefits would, of course, directly increase the problems that occur when there already aren't enough benefits to go around. And both of those 'solutions' would cause things to get increasingly worse as the population ages and automation continues.
A possible solution would be increasing wages so that the workers, though fewer in number, could pay more taxes and support more retirees and benefits. Another would be decreasing the workweek, so that more people would have to be hired, resulting in lower unemployment and more people paying taxes instead of living on benefits. Both of those are also scalable, as the population ages and automation increases, wages can be increased and hours decreased to compensate. As a side benefit, workers with higher wages and more free time, in addition to paying more taxes, could buy more, stimulating the economy, resulting in even more tax revenues.
He underestimates the power of automation and the inevitable rise of a basic universal income.
I'm not sure where anyone said otherwise. I'm just saying that automation doesn't solve all of the problems here.
You get what you pay for.