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Comment by iiiggglll | Hacker News Reader

> The one aspect of the film that doesn’t seem to be coming true is its central premise. The idea is that no human beings have been born in the last 18 years, so when Theo meets Kee, an African woman who is miraculously pregnant, he has to protect her from the various groups who want to exploit her condition. Obviously, we know that this infertility pandemic hasn’t happened: in Children of Men, the youngest person on the planet was born in 2009. But even as a concept, this particular one doesn’t resonate with our current anxieties, because overpopulation is more worrying than population decline.

It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.

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It's not about population, and not quite about having no 'future' (though you could say that) - it's about social nihilism and a crises of faith (in the book, literally, in the film, a little more existentially).

The fact is overpopulation isn't an issue, it's a myth.

World population is decellerating at a rapid pace and will begin decreasing within decades. It's painfully obvious to anybody who looks at the numbers. But science fiction has convinced everyone otherwise.

Just look at all the countries with programs trying to entice their citizens to start families and make babies. Governments know its going to be a catastrophe.

Our governments spend money at a rate that only a larger population in the future can afford to pay for. If families aren't producing above the replacement rate, we're doomed.

It's not painfully obvious to UN or anyone else noteworthy.

Was it also painfully obvious that USSR was going to break up and Russia would have stalled with population growth? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Populati...

None of the current trends made sense 30 yrs ago. And in 30 yrs there could be major geopolitical changes that would make current projections useless.

But the worry about overpopulation has been damn near constant.

Rebuked again and again and again each time we reached the previous "unsustainable" threshold.

"Overpopulation"-hysteria is a short-sighted, semi-genocidal ideology (see: People's Republic of China). The same people that a decade ago were worrying about overpopulation in Germany are now clamoring for more migrants from the Global South countries to keep up population growth ("these are our future engineers and doctors"). Proof of how unworkable it is.

European economies would simply collapse without population growth to feed social security. And aging populations are a ridiculously undesirable outcome for any country

Current projections aren't useless. The higher your socioeconomic status, the lower your fertility rate, period. The correlation couldn't be clearer. Geopolitical events could cause temporary changes but obviously wouldn't change the underlying trend. Bringing up the existence of Black Swans to disprove trends is logically flawed.

So there's a clear downwards pressure on fertility rates, in the West, which includes propaganda about "overpopulation" that obviously quite a few people believe in, and that guides their decisions; it also includes socioeconomic improvements. What possible trend could act as an upward pressure?

Is there anything more pathological (psychologically-speaking) than the belief that humans are themselves a pathology

"The higher your socioeconomic status, the lower your fertility rate, period."

Only in a portion of Western culture that has very similar cultural and religious values and also incidentally responsible for a relatively rich middle class.

Counter examples:

Haredi Jews

Hong Kong

Macao

So your predictions are contingent on the assumption that the culture won't change or that specific religions wouldn't be more prevalent.

"The fact is overpopulation isn't an issue, it's a myth."

Global population isn't evenly distributed. Some countries and areas are definitely overpopulated.

What constitutes overpopulation can vary according to climate and economic changes. Just look at Syria, where unprecedented drought caused 75% of the country's farms to fail, led to mass migration from rural areas to cities, and ultimately to civil war and significant depopulation.

"Our governments spend money at a rate that only a larger population in the future can afford to pay for. If families aren't producing above the replacement rate, we're doomed."

No, it's a myth that populations need to be perpetually growing in order to maintain economic growth. Growth can also be achieved through technological development.

Developments in Robotics, AI, etc will improve labour productivity, meaning we can continue to raise living standards without necessarily increasing population in perpetuity.

>Global population isn't evenly distributed. Some countries and areas are definitely overpopulated.

Do you mean the West, or for example Africa? The West is often brought up, but it's below replacement level. Africa will definitely have problems, and we need to a) bring them safe, effective birth control, so they can make their own choices, and b) solve infant mortality.

The goal should be 2.0 fertility rates everywhere. "Overpopulation" isn't even remotely a problem anywhere in the West, the opposite is.

>What constitutes overpopulation can vary according to climate and economic changes. Just look at Syria, where unprecedented drought caused 75% of the country's farms to fail, led to mass migration from rural areas to cities, and ultimately to civil war and significant depopulation.

1) You haven't established that the Syrian population was "too high for its natural carrying capacity", which is a normative and not positive statement. A drought doesn't necessarily signify that. This is a social and political problem (did they not receive pensions?), not an overpopulation problem.

2) Are you arguing that, because many died as a result of the drought, many shouldn't have been born in the first place? Seems circular.

>No, it's a myth that populations need to be perpetually growing in order to maintain economic growth. Growth can also be achieved through technological development.

Many countries in the West are below replacement levels. That carries its own problems. The people campaigning against overpopulation seem to also be targeting the West, which I find absurd.

> The goal should be 2.0 fertility rates everywhere.

It should technically be slightly above that to replace the portion of the population that dies before baring two kids.

"Overpopulation" isn't even remotely a problem anywhere in the West, the opposite is."

I guess it depends how we define overpopulation.

I'd argue that overpopulation is a problem in, for example, England. Not in the sense that there isn't enough food, of course, but in the sense that high population density negatively affects quality of life, harms the natural environment, and results in poor, overcrowded, and unhealthy living conditions for many people.

Much of Africa, on the other hand, is not densely populated at all compared to Western Europe or East Asia.

"Many countries in the West are below replacement levels. That carries its own problems."

It does if we end up with a significantly top-heavy population chart, with not enough economically active young people to support the elderly. But slowing or stopping population growth does not mean an end to economic growth.

A steady population is a good goal to aim for, but that doesn't mean we should be afraid of falling populations in some areas. If we can return some areas to nature, reducing the environmental footprint of our species while maintaining and improving our quality of life, then that's a good thing.

Yeah I really don't understand why people have this notion that population growth is necessary for economic growth. It doesn't even follow that aggregate (i.e. non per-capita) economic growth results in a higher average standard of living. I wish I could say this nonsense is only perpetuated by politicians, who do whatever they can to juice GDP so they can boast to the electorate about how much 'economic growth' they achieved. But this would be untrue. Even certain national economic policy institutions fall in to this trap when they really ought to know better.

The other thing worth noting is that economic growth, socially liberal (historically speaking) attitudes towards sex and gender equality, and sustainable population all go hand in hand. On the economic side of things, there's a fairly well established 'demographic transition' model that suggests that when a society reaches (roughly) a 'first-world' level of development, population growth tends towards 0: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/De...

Put simply, one of the best things we can do if we're concerned about overpopulation is to aid economic development in the 'third-world'.

No argument with any of that, but I think that the theme of the movie in question was merely using a population crash as a proxy to explore what happens to society when it has lost all hope for the future. I don't believe it was actually trying make any statements in particular regarding risks around population growth (or decline).

> It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.

One thing the movie (unintentionally) got right was how absurd this is. It really ruined the movie to me, TBH, because it was laughably implausible. Reproduction is what life does best.

I'll obviously have to watch again for the world building....

And yet fertility rates are declining in many nations. Science fiction often takes current events to their extreme outcome for the sake of social commentary (Black Mirror being the latest example).

Human fertility itself isn't in decline. Fertility and human births are conflated in the US government definition, implying that we are somehow losing the physical ability to reproduce. What's actually happening is that our society is getting so complex that our agency of reproduction is impaired. It's entirely social; it's all in our heads.

Jury is still out, but there's accumulating evidence that male fertility isn't doing well across the developing world:

http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/121-a46/

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873233945045786076...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-158463/Why-male-fe...

http://jezebel.com/finally-an-answer-to-declining-male-ferti...

Your first article debates the efficacy of current attempts to investigate infertility:

Recent years have seen many similar reports of falling human sperm counts, but there has been much debate over whether the problem is real. “The principal trouble has been selection bias,” says Joëlle Le Moal, an environmental health epidemiologist at the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in Saint Maurice, France, and joint first author of the new article with colleague Matthieu Rolland. She explains that few studies have involved sperm samples collected from randomly selected members of the general population; for the few that did, only a small percentage of men agreed to be included, and the studies were run in restricted areas. So most studies have had to rely on sperm donors or couples coming to fertility clinics, which do not represent the general population.

That article focuses on France, which is rarely counted among developing worlds. The second article is paywalled. The third two could easily be considered Submarine Articles[0] for male supplements and stimulants.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

If the premise of the film actually happened and the birth rate were to reach zero, I doubt the fact it was psychological rather than physical would be much comfort.

Sometimes the technical reason is less important than the outcome.

It's really just a plot device. Suspend your belief for that one part of the movie, and enjoy the rest of the social and political commentary.

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