America just had its lowest number of births in 32 years, report finds
cnn.com
cnn.com
To have more people is to have more opportunities for those who can contribute to the progress of the world.
We have shown an amazing ability to increase crop yield and, technologically, can feed the world population. That’s a feat carried out by generations of growing societies who were driven to innovate because they needed to. As long as there’s opportunities for people’s creativity there’s no such thing as the “carrying capacity” of the planet.
Yes we need to take better care of each other and the earth. But “less people = good” is not the solution to that.
We need to raise up our future with a commitment to people being able to address the problems around them, and not tell each other “it’d be better if you weren’t born”.
There is such a thing as "carrying capacity" of the planet if only in terms of quality of life.
I'm sure people prefer spacious homes, space, parks, nature, wilderness, rather than being cramped in a crowd 24/7.
Less people is a real solution to the main problems of today.
This does not mean less opportunity. Quite the opposite this means more opportunities and better quality of life.
Having an additional billion people in extreme poverty is not going to make the world a more innovative, wonderful and cultural place. If we instead focus on providing more opportunity for the people who are here, that seems much better than creating more people who will only ever have extremely limited opportunity.
Most people have the innate capability to contribute at a high level, but lack the opportunity. A very small number of people, given the right resources and incentives can create massive innovations. It does not take billions.
It looks like as the population is growing, we are becoming less poor, not more, which dismantles the rest of your argument.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... (Our World In Data: What explains the change in the number of children women have?)
TLDR Major contributing factors are a woman's education (educated woman have fewer children, and delay having children until later in life), access to contraceptives, a reduction in infant mortality, with social norms and increases in income and quality of life to a lesser extent.
Sidenote: Thanks to Our World In Data (YC 19 NP) for performing and hosting top notch datasets and the analysis of such.
While the eco side effects of reduced population pressure are beneficial, they are unintentional, while still letting all sorts of other industrial & financial processes continue to put pressure on problems like climate change. Reduced fertility can be bad from a social reproduction standpoint if poor financial and social conditions are what's driving down the rate. It drives all sorts of other economic and social problems (see Japan for a foreshadowing of this).
Still, reduced population is something we have to work through anyway if we want to make it easier to live at a sustainable level of human civilization on the Earth.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
[1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
I think this is really more about women having lives outside the home and couples having things they'd rather do than bang.
I'm sure this is part of it, but a lot of men also don't want kids. I've broken up with two LTR's in the past 5 years because they were ready for marriage and kids, but I have already seen several male peers go through messy divorces where they were treated very unfairly by the family court system: losing custody, large spousal and child support payments that left them as basically indentured servants for the next decade or two, etc.
I always assumed I'd have kids, but I've changed my mind, at least if I stay in the US. While it's great that women have gained so much equality in the last 50 years, the family court system is still heavily biased against men, remnants from a time when women could not support themselves.
The US is a terrible place to have kids. It's not just the family court system; this is a country where you can be arrested for letting your child run around outside without supervision, where you have to worry about your kid being killed in a school shooting, where you can't let your kid walk to school, where college costs are astronomical, where the teen suicide rate is very high and rising, I could go on and on. It's just not a healthy place to raise children. If you want kids, you should move to a better country for it, like any place in western Europe.
In a few other states, they’ve also banned terminating pregnancies because the kid definitely has a debilitating genetic defect, so there’s that.
Also, even in cases of minors involving rape and incest, some states will soon force the kid to come to term.
We’ll see if the Supreme Court upholds these laws or not, but it’s currently stacked with justices appointed specifically to ban abortions.
It’s definitely a bad time to be a female of child bearing age in this country.
this (Federal) administration
For that matter, Trump has been pro choice for essentially his entire public life.
Then why don't you explain why he's appointing SCOTUS justices who absolutely aren't?
So I am not sure that it is the cost, just rather a re-orientation of values that has been slowly taking place with the advent of birth control, plentiful food, etc. Human beings were all about the next generation for survival reasons by genetic design even if they didn't want to be.
Before the "nuclear family" became a thing, people lived with their extended relatives, and raising children wasn't as much work.
https://www.care.com/c/stories/2423/how-much-does-child-care...
Financially, this means providing for them into their mid-20s, often at least through (and including) college. The costs of everything along the way -- housing, clothing, food, education -- continues to grow and outpace income growth.
The other big resource is time. You're expected now to enroll your children in a variety of activities and shuttle them around, rather than give them unstructured time to roam. Families now are more disconnected from their extended families and their communities, so it's harder to get help here. It's up to the two parents (if they're still together) who only have so much time to give.
Basically, the marginal cost of each kid continues to increase, so people have fewer children.
I think another effect is the extension of many of life's milestones. Establishing a career, getting married, etc continue to fall later and later, leaving people less time to build and raise a family.
Therefore, we will reduce the number of human lives to combat climate change.
That’s not at all the same thing as reducing birth rates - which is voluntary and does not cause death and suffering.
However, it only seems different from a moralist perspective. Naturally, the result is the same: a species reaches its carrying capacity and the population declines.
Fascinating.
Maybe it won't be that bad, I've never ran the numbers, but intuition tells me population reduction has never been good for human civilisation.
By not giving birth to more humans we're not killing people off. Alternative, as we see in many places, is war. War is definitely not the same thing as avoiding pregnancies.
No, climate change us bad because it can increase SUFFERING. To say that reduction of human lives is bad is to say we should be reproducing as much as possible. Have you maximized the number of people you have had sex with today?
Climate change is bad because it can end human lives. The lives which it doesn't end may experience significant hardship and unhappiness.
Decreasing the rate of population growth does reduce the number of existing humans, but it doesn't induce that reduction by ending lives. It also doesn't increase the amount of hardship imposed on most humans.
Do you see why climate change and population reduction are not comparable?
Is your argument that there are no downsides to a shrinking population? I'm not so sure the evidence would support such a stance.
To quote the dude, "Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion, man."
Also, we won’t need nearly as much new construction, which frees up a ton of workers.
I don’t think an aging population is likely to lead to labor shortages any time soon, at least in the US.
Aging population with a shrinking population means less people to buy goods. Automation means less people employed. This is bad for growth. Economic expansion requires increases in production and consumption.
The idea that we should not birth new generations fosters an armageddon attitude, where it is now popular on at least parts of the left to believe the world will end in 12 years. So why think of what will birth generations if the world will end in 12 years?
The max population of the earth is debatable, but the fact that there is a limit is not. A static population society will have to be generated. As far as fewer inventions, why focus on giving everyone a good education? Then we would have more than enough people to give us the technology needed to survive.
The problem in the west is not a growing population, but a decreasing one.
> The max population of the earth is debatable, but the fact that there is a limit is not.
Yes, but here we are talking about the US population of $327 million decreasing. The population on earth is 7.53 billion and it is growing elsewhere. Are you arguing that a reduction of the US population serves some larger purpose so we should not be concerned about our culture?
> As far as fewer inventions, why focus on giving everyone a good education? Then we would have more than enough people to give us the technology needed to survive.
I'll focus on higher education since in the US other levels are both free and mandatory.
Access to personal growth opportunities is very important. However, data indicate universities are often not the answer to that and it is also questionable if universities makes someone more creative [1]. Regardless 60% and increasing of the US population has taken some college.
In addition to this it is worthwhile considering what the less creative people are taught to follow in universities. Universities seem to be the center of our cultural decay and an anti-intellectual attitude of not teaching core ideas have taken hold in many schools.
Why do you think higher education would help create more innovation?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
A lot of this seems driven by economics and culture (two incomes are necessary for modern lifestyle; rewards of employment vs home are high (in financial and psychological terms); career, particularly earlier career in the more competitive tracks, is very difficult to juggle with being a parent, particularly for women). Some of this might be addressable (better childcare and child-friendly policies at top employers, especially for junior employees), but a lot of it isn't.
I think there's something worse about differential population growth rates across countries/cultures than a simple across-the-board reduction, but I don't think this is the best environment for that discussion.
Richest and most educated =/= "smartest" and "fittest."
Even your estimation of "fittest" is totally subjective. From a natural selection perspective, the ones with more reproductive success are the fitter ones. And it's not at all established that people with high socio-economic status are genetically smarter or better on any level than low SES individuals. It's more likely to be nurture and access to resources and parenting styles that set them up for success.
Such economies typically have strong public education, fair hiring practices, low barriers to entrepreneurship, and a strong social safety net.
The US had such an economy in the post WWII years, but economic mobility has dropped in recent years. (Probably because we gutted the educational system, and bankrupt people that get sick. Also, WWII trained an unprecedented number of mechanics and engineers in the US.)
Even then you're just assessing how well people fit into a routinized public education system or in a traditional office environment. It privileges a very specific type of skill set at the expense of many others.
The unfortunate aspect of some smart people is that we lack the wisdom to understand that the theories we fall in love with are just shadows of the reality. Even when ideas at their extreme fail we stick to them as if they are an appendix; e.g. capitalism in the extreme even after it has robbed us of meaning, communism even after it caused large-scale hunger and suffering wherever it was implemented.
The problem with the anti-human "environmental" attitude is that it misses the forest for the trees by viewing people as foreign elements in the biosphere. It is as such a theory that anyone but some smart people can spot as unadaptive to reality.
I've noticed a strange phenomenon of people making statements like this and yet still have their own kids. I guess convincing potential competitors to stop having offspring would be a great way to ensure the success of your own genetic line.
Also, in a world of 10 billion peoople, it's not like any given individual has much precious DNA to pass on.
I have one daughter and I'd love her to have a sibling, but for various reasons I don't think it's going to happen, which kind of makes me sad, but not because I won't pass down my "line".
Actually I'd argue that you can see this in action in birth rates right now in the USA and across most of the developed world. Having children is expensive. The standards for care and education keep getting higher. The available time for childcare is decreasing. It takes more and more education to be a fully participating adult member of society. That's a clear market signal to have less children and people are responding. The birthrate continues to fall and is below replacement in many countries, including the USA.
As a species, we appear to be regulating ourselves to prevent a catastrophic overshoot.
Because we also care about our communities and countries (and local cultures, etc), not just the world or humanity in abstract.
That's not to say that everyone should have children, some people cannot have children for a variety of reasons. But if you have a partner and you both are willing, helping the next generation be equipped for the struggles ahead should be an inspiring challenge to step up to, not to cower away from.
So what?
I say that in all sincerity. You have internalized your worldview to the point that it's a religion you don't realize you believe.
Why is reducing my carbon footprint a fundamental good? Ultimately, any explanation will come down to the meaning of life, and it is very likely that you and I might understand our purposes here differently.
No, it's not. Because, to start with, it's reducing someone else’s carbon footprint.
And for most people, it's not even the biggest thing they can do Tor educe someone else's carbon footprint, as, for most, reducing their own potential children's carbon footprints to zero is a much smaller reduction than could be obtained by murdering someone richer (especially someone richer and less environmentally conscious.)
Noone said child is an economical decision. It is the worst economical decision in fact.
In no kids scenario is much better to rent, adapt your place of live to your current situation/market/plans, when retiring just move someplace dirt cheap and awesome.
If you have kids, its a huge value that you can pass to them, if done smartly (if not, it will probably destroy offspring's relationships between them for life).
There are many factors that determine if buying or renting is better for your scenario. Below is a calculator the NY Times publishes which lets you adjust variables to provide an answer based on inputs.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calc... (NY Times: Is It Better to Rent or Buy?)
I suspect you're not much different than most people: they may want/desire children but due to the ongoing economic climate, are forgoing children. That trend would be a bit more evident if most those in the higher socioeconomic were comparatively either increasing fertility rates or remaining relatively constant over time to those at the lower end of the spectrum. There are of course many other factors to look at but that would be a good start.
If fertility rates across the entire socioeconomic spectrum is at a reasonable decline, then overall (assuming there isn't some huge epidemic we're unaware of), it's probably a good thing. Population saturation points should not be artificially set by our current economic system since it's pretty flawed across the board in most aspects, I can't imagine its a useful constraint for determining genetic diversity and growth for humanity.
Other reasons, as far as I can see are:
The destruction of the concept of (nuclear) family. The abject sexual promiscuity and the normalization of it.
The decadence of the Western civilization and the disregard of the values congruent with Christianity resulted in the state that we are in now.
We see the moral values (or worse, the 10 commandments) as something that's archaic, that has no place in a "modern" society and we absolutely tolerate everything and we are afraid of shaming things that should be shamed (based on the effects they produce).
I ask myself, is there some behavior or value that we are allowed to judge people on?
Who do we think we are that we normalize every single demented thing, and additionally we think we have progressed our civilization because of it?
Don't we study history?
(edited - removed a quote that I mistakenly attributed to Aristotle)
Anyways, the point stands - should we tolerate everything, at all cases, always? Doesn't sound right to me
On the topic of Christianity in relation to the posted article honestly my first thought was that we were commanded to "Go forth and multiply."
>>I ask myself, is there some behavior or value that we are allowed to judge people on?
... of course, you will be judged by a lot of readers for your religion beliefs and traditional moral framework
The truth is maintaining healthy family relationships is difficult enough, let alone having and raising children. It's much easier to get a dog and then have the free time to go to Coachella on the weekend. No parents in sight, a generation of hedonistic babies that discover "adulting" when they hit 34.
And this doesn't even need to be a God argument, Darwin alone would say what we're doing is self-destructive from a biological point of view.
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/05/falling-fert...
I see someone mentioned population growth is the safety net for once people get older the younger generation pays into the older population retirement. There's an issue with that thought, won't it be unsustainable after the population reaches a certain threshold?
I mean wouldn't it be better if the changes were more gradual?
Yeah, in the long term, we’re all dead. The path is all that matters, not the steady end state.
As to your question about the snap... 3.5 billion would be an economic disaster and because people have fewer children it would take forever to rebuild that wealth.
Perhaps, but the hard limits set by physics are probably ludicrously high, and the soft limit set by physical and social technology can, in theory, improve alongaide population until they hit the hard limits.
Capitalism requires an expansion of consumption to grow. Even in a recession/depression the old natural birth rate guaranteed that there would be a larger body of workers and consumers to grow the economy when you came out of it.
Secondly, the elderly require more care (Social Security, Medicare) while also paying lower taxes mostly because of lower earnings. Our social support systems are funded primarily on the assumption that there will always be more young people than old paying into the system to support it.
Once countries stop growing in population the weight of the old really takes its toll on growth.
Export oriented countries can get away with it for a little longer because the populations growing in other countries will support their economies for a while. Japan would otherwise have collapsed by now under the weight of a shrinking population.
Aside from a small core of anti-immigration extremists in the US, most people on the right and left, including our very Orange President, are for legal immigration, which is the best way to stave off population decline.
This is a fallacy. The ratio of elderly is fixed; even if it grows somewhat it can't grow indefinitely. Meanwhile productivity usually grows exponentially. Therefore the elderly population cannot be a drag on growth.
The demographic transition is the result of development, which usually brings with it increasing mobility for women and depresses birth rates. Another, independent, effect of development is low growth rates, because a developed economy has less room for productivity growth (i.e., when you give an uneducated person an education and some technology, you can increase their productivity - it's hard to do the same with an educated, tech-savvy person).
To sum up: development causes demographic transition causes aging. Development also causes low growth rates. Aging does not cause low growth rates.
Isn't this primarily a problem of poor planning? Making the young pay their fair share to ensure stability of that individual for the future seems like the proper course of action.
To think of it differently.. I know when I'm old life is going to get expensive. I'm trying hard to make sure I don't end life broke and in a terrible care facility. Why is the government not also thinking like this with regards to how they handle finances? Is it surprising that people get old?
Of course this does not help the situation we're in current. Where the old did not properly pay for their own support.
The labor market is increasingly becoming machine-based, rather than human-based. As the number of humans drops, the number of machines grows.
We need fewer humans to maintain growth, so dropping birth rates could be a good thing, since machines require less maintenance than humans.
At that point we would probably start looking at other economic systems anyway.
Not necessarily.
Per capita metrics are more important that national metrics. I.e. I don't care what the size of the national economy is as long as people as individually getting better off.
But aggregate growth isn't important, per capita growth is, and that only requires per capita increases in consumption.
Which is actually easier, with fixed resources, with a shrinking population.
OTOH, support of an aging population is an issue.
On the third hand, for the near term, immigration can handle that for most countries facing that problem.
> Aside from a small core of anti-immigration extremists in the US, most people on the right and left, including our very Orange President, are for legal immigration, which is the best way to stave off population decline.
That's not true; there is a very large group, including “our very Orange President”, that are opposed to immigration in general, and are actively working to reduce the level of legal immigration, and especially targeting the legal immigrants that do the most to contribute to the viability of social support strucutures by paying heavily into payroll tax funded trust funds.
Historically, per capita consumption is more difficult to increase than growing the overall size of the population (and US consumers already lead the world in consumption so I don't see that being a solution for us). It works well for export oriented countries with protectionist policies that promote the growth of a middle class.
I am not in favor of population growth, it is just basic capitalism/economics. At some point flat or declining global population will force us to find a better system than the one we have.