The Population Bust
foreignaffairs.com
foreignaffairs.com
To summarize, he views the world economy as entirely enabled by the US Navy. The protection and projection of this naval forced has allowed an unparalleled level of relatively free global trade.
With the population bust, he predicts the US will turn inwards. The world economy will fragment. Less rigid economies will collapse. Global investment will all but dry up. His argumentation style is compelling whether or not you want to accept or debate his conclusions.
Very few militaries have modernized, until recently, if the Falklands War occurred again, the British and the Argentines would be largely using the same weapons and equipment (partly from deliveries of the F-35), the greatest pressure on tyrants is access to their Swiss bank accounts, or whatever many apartments they own through shell companies in New York or London.
Shipping fragmentation also seems likely without a strong global navy. As you mention, the Petrodollar is dependent on the US Navy. The collapse or hampering of energy trade alone would launch the world into a great depression.
I'm not sure how you're trying to relate the modernization of militaries. From my understanding, the USA exports old versions of our military technology to many allies.
The US did more to hamper oil prices by invading Iraq than anything else.
As for oil prices, the Iraqi war did disrupt Iraqi oil production for about a year. In 2004, oil production reached pre-war levels and has been growing steadily since.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/iraq/crude-oil-product...
Only thing I can think of from the 80s, is some of the minesweepers, and those were commissioned after the Falklands.
- Widely separated, highly-beneficial, feeding grounds.
- Exceedingly efficient onboarding systems.
- No credible predators.
This enables long hull shapes, high speeds, few resources devoted to defence, and exceptionally efficient metabolisms.
A blue whale eats 8,000 - 16,000 kg/day of krill, or 7-15 million calories. That's a continuous energy output of 350 - 700 kW, or about 500 - 1,000 horsepower.
Cargo ships, whether liquid, bulk ore, or container, load and unload tremendous amounts of cargo quickly (the Iranian tanker in the news today carries 2.1 million barrels of oil, a $115 million cargo, which it can load or unload in a matter of hours).
In a world where ships cannot simply sail direct routes to destinations, must detect and evade, or defend against assaults, or risk capture or loss, transport logistics will become vastly more complex, and costs far greater.
The SS Great Eastern, the first large steamship, launched in 1859, still carried cannon on her decks:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deck_of_the_%27Great_Ea...
-- Norman Borlaug, "Father of the Green Revolution", Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture. December 11, 1970
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/lecture...
- Governmental fiscal debt
- Global climate change
- Societal debt. By this I mean, the previous generation left an unstable society at risk of collapse for the next generation. I would imagine a person born in 1920 would feel this way. As a programmer, I would frame this as "tech" debt for our social institutions.
The thing is, efficiency unveils new possibilities, and possibilities induce demand, consumption. We are much more efficient than 10 years ago, but also consume at a much faster pace.
Plus, it isn't obvious that all the important stuff can be automated.
No. People who don't exist don't experience anything.
And there are plenty of people who are born and who as adults wish they had never been, and a lot of us who are still ok with it but not very excited are still biased since we do exist. This is not a problem for those who are never born. They don't become people who can feel pain and suffering.
There are plenty of people. I really doubt that an increase in people is in itself a reason for increased happiness. Noone is arguing for exterminating parts of the not needed population because of automation.
If a person's body is unhealthy, we don't encourage them towards greater unhealthiness, but rather health. The same with mental health. We should encourage mentally healthy perspectives, which includes self value.
As it turns out, often the opex for the people is still cheaper than the capex plus opex for the robot.
> If the world ahead has fewer people, will there be any real economic growth?
Of course there will. As long as per capita usage of energy and stuff increases faster than population decreases. Basically this will continue the concentration of wealth ~indefinitely.
I mean, consider Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime. Even the poorest people consume as much as many nations do now.
People keep talking about how the next generation needs to support all the debt and extravagances of the past generations but this unethical. the next generation was born without first being asked whether they want to take care of so many existing people. finding a sustainable solution would be both more practical and ethical
A sticking point also seems to be: Are people who are having lots of children the same people who are consuming middle-income+ levels of resources?
So we'll hit a replacement problem long before natural selection has time to catch up. The replacement issue has already real implications, this will become much more obvious in the course of the next 30 years.
Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest.
No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals?
> Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest.
Five generations is only 100-150 years. And anyway, we have a precedent for what happens when there is significant population reduction: the Black Death. Life got way better for the vast majority of people who survived that event. So much so that it ended feudalism in most of Europe. The only problem is finding pensions. Oh well. It’s incredibly immoral to yoke our descendants with the responsibility of funding an extended retirement for us.
As for the Black Death, the personal and societal restrictions that result from not wanting to die from casual contact were probably quite a relief to escape and reverse. I don't know enough about history, but I could imagine that kicking off a positive chain reaction. After a cold season, people love to play in the sun.
This part is just speculation on my part, though; you're welcome to continue siding with Thanos.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
The Black Death is pretty well accepted as a contributor to the end of feudalism. I guess you’re positing that somehow that would be the result of survivors feeling elated at having gotten past the catastrophe (which is a temporary emotion), versus their facing an easier life as a result of 50% of the population dying (an effect which lasts a lifetime). Seems implausible to me.
But also, that the reduction in labor supply lead to vastly improved outcomes for laborers is pretty well attested. Lords of the manor started competing for labor because it was scarce. As a result, laborers were able to transition into owning their own property. It was a big deal. And it has to do with permanently reducing the population to well below the Malthusian limit (the plague periodically re-occurred for centuries, culling the population each time).
Is this entirely a genetic thing or are there also cultural components? I’ve long entertained a crackpot theory that North America will be almost entirely Mormon or Roman Catholic in 200 years, partially for this reason. The only reservation being that secular-humanist culture seems to convert people from more traditional cultures even faster than they reproduce....
Or Muslim, although that's more likely in Europe at this point.
> The only reservation being that secular-humanist culture seems to convert people from more traditional cultures even faster than they reproduce....
Perhaps in a few hundred years secular humanism will be seen a memetic Black Death.
It may not be the case that this is how it will work, but it's not a foregone conclusion that "on average" most people will continue to not want to have kids even in the "first world."
(Don't Mormons for instance have a fertility rate well above replacement despite also having higher than average incomes?)
There is pretty strong evidence that the variance in the number of offspring is about 50% genetic.
The difference between the Black Death and a population decline driven by lower fertility rates is that the Black Death disproportionately claimed the lives of the old and the frail. The result of that (at terrible cost) was an increase in average productivity by removing the people who would otherwise have required assistance, along with a reduction in competition for scarce resources (like food).
A population decline driven by a reduction in the fertility rate effectively does the opposite -- you end up with more elderly people compared to the number of young working people. And we haven't had a meaningful scarcity of food in centuries, so the things that are scarce now are certain types of skilled labor (e.g. doctors), which you can only really source from young people because there aren't a lot of medical school applicants from the population of people 55 and older.
they will in combination with economic incentives. In a world where skilled labour is rewarded and the cost of raising a child is higher and higher, whose going to pay for your large family? When people in developed economies today date, do you think they favour high social status and intelligence or sperm count?
Fertility and some other biological traits have always been positively selected for. Is the world overrun by virile, promiscuous musclemen and women with wide hips?
Fertility is a multifaceted trait; the degree to which a woman is fertile is dependent on a multitude of other traits and characteristics. It seems pretty clear that a desire to have children was not really necessary in the past in order to end up with lots of children. Having children was just something you did, so most couples had children and, consequently, fertility was driven by other traits. Perhaps desire to have sex, ability to earn income, etc. But things have changed. Now it seems pretty clear that the most important factors in fertility are A) whether or not the woman pursues college and a white collar career path, and B) whether or not both parents have an innate drive to have children (those two traits are probably related).
So yes, fertility has always been positively selected for. But the traits that drive fertility have changed as a result of our changing environment. So evolution is selecting for different traits at the moment.
Back in the 1970s your typical sci-fi dystopia was an overcrowded world. Personally I'm more afraid of a world with ghost cities inhabited by a handful of elderly people
There may come a time when we don't NEED a larger population to support increasing specialization, but until then a broader population base is needed to foster growth in technology.
Not to mention that those 'one in a billion' history changing genius happen in larger numbers when we have more billions...
It was doubling every 47 years then. That's slowed down to about every 63 years currently, so the times to reach those levels would now be longer, but his original numbers are still instructive for how fast exponential growth can get away from you. Here they are.
• Suppose we populated the entire Earth to the density of Manhattan at noon on a typical working day, when it is at its highest density. By "entire Earth" that means covering every square meter of the surface, including the oceans, with people.
That would take 585 years.
• Suppose that every single star in our galaxy had 10 habitable planets with the same area as Earth, and that we could trivially expand to them. And suppose that there are another hundred billion galaxies with the same number of habitable planets as ours, that we can also expand to. Surely now we are set for billions of years, right?
Nope. That just takes 4200 years at the growth rate he used (doubling every 47 years).
• OK, suppose we don't limit ourselves to planets. We find some way to tap into hyperspace or something for energy, freeing us to use all the mass in the universe for human bodies. All the stars in all the galaxies converted to humans. Let's multiply the available mass by 100 to account for dust and debris and other interstellar and intergalactic matter.
It takes 6700 years to reach that level.
• He also looks at how long, given a population that consists just of humans and plants for the humans to eat, limited only by the amount of solar energy and the efficiency of photosynthesis, until we are at the limit. That's 624 years.
I've also seen a similar calculation that uses the volume of an average human and the speed of light. I had thought it was in that Asimov essay, but it isn't. That one asks when, if you were to take every human and pack them into the smallest sphere that could them all, would the radius of that sphere have to be increasing faster than the speed of light to accommodate population growth. I don't remember the answer, but I think it was somewhere in the several thousand years range.
There's no amount of even remotely plausible technological hand waving one can do to make a case that we could ever actually achieve any of the above, except maybe the "cover the Earth" one.
To convert the numbers above to other doubling intervals, just multiply by the doubling interval you want to use, and divide by the one Asimov used (47 years).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Their-Courses-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0...
If we can build enough to handle 1000 times that population, one quadrillion people, that can handle 1000 years of growth.
An upper limit on the number of people we can have without leaving the solar system is about 28 octillion (2.8 x 10^28), obtained by dividing the mass of the sum (1.9891 x 10^30 kg) by the mass of an average human (70 kg).
At the current growth rate, that's 3900 years away.
Indefinite exponential growth can overwhelm pretty much anything.
The global fertility rate is 2.426, which is barely above the replacement rate. The population continues to grow primarily because the people who have already been born have good life expectancies. The UN forecasts that the population will reach a maximum of 10-12 billion by 2100, driven mainly by increasing life expectancy in the developed world. Key quote:
Two-thirds of the projected growth of the global population through 2050 will be driven by current age structures. It would occur even if childbearing in high-fertility countries today were to fall immediately to around two births per woman over a lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum
https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Hig...
http://www.triumf.info/wiki/pwalden/index.php/Issac_Asimov's...
Also, Al Bartlett's thesis:
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
The transcript:
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
That is only true if there is a monopoly on automation, which there generally isn't. In which case the productivity increases go into lower prices, which result in greater demand for whatever is still scarce.
That can be capital owners (e.g. land), but it can also be skilled labor or literally anything else which is in demand and people choose to spend the money on that they had saved from the lower prices driven by automation.
This is especially true for things somewhere between niche and commodity: it's not worth automating something if you're not producing enough of them to justify the capital cost of the automation equipment. It's not worth reusing your rockets if you're only launching like 3 satellites per year (still have to keep the factory open and practiced). This is why Moore's Law has slowed: tech has tapped basically the entire world's population (more than 5 billion people have mobile devices now); there aren't vast new groups of consumers to sell to any more, so the investment in the next step is not worth it like it was before.
In short, more humans actually increases the per-person productivity.
* data mining or AI can analyze data sets better than all the humans you could possibly muster, data sets that can illuminate low volume but high impact decision making (new product need, safety critical alerts, incoming asteroids) * robot surgical devices can perform more consistently (possibly higher efficacy) which is highly valuable even for low volume surgeries * automated cars will be demonstrably safer even if overall demand for transportation declines * demand for more specialized and lifelong education will increase even if the number of students decreases (career changes, working retirements, self-improvement, etc) * automated solutions to climate change remediation (carbon sequestration, planting trees, etc) will likely scale well beyond manual labor options in an aging shrinking population and will be needed generations after the damage levels off * space exploration requires automation even for just a single mission, and even a smaller population will likely continue to explore the solar system
I think imagination and adaptation will manage ok. In fact I would rather see capital deployed to less consumption by volume and more high value consumption. Would you rather eat a farm-to-table organic microgreens salad for dinner, or a bag of Wonder Bread?
So, with a constant population we still achieve economic growth.
The article talks about "growth" as though it has to be absolute growth, but it doesn't; it only needs to be per capita growth. If the population is shrinking, absolute growth can be negative but per capita growth can still be positive (all that's necessary is that the rate of absolute decline of the economy is less than the rate of decline of population). In other words, per capita productivity just needs to increase. Which it has been at least since the industrial revolution.
Only if the 1 person can continue to increase their productivity with nobody else to trade with, which is absurd. Increasing productivity comes from specialization and trade.
Well said.
Let's face it. Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of our rapid technological advances comes with industrial revolution.
If we think out of box, this might be as well an outlier of our history. Productivity rarely increases this much and drastically through human history, and guess what, the world is fine.
We might as well approaching the ultimate limit that we are testing the Earth's very capacity under the name of growth.
Maybe acknowledging that technology advances later will slow down (it probably already does), the easy to grab resources are fully utilized, and we might not further optimize our energy efficiency, isn't an abnormal thing in the future.
Capitalism is a tool we devised, now it has probably fulfilled its destiny, at least for that time being. And the focus of global governance should shift from being the economical winner to co-exist peacefully and sustainably in a controlled way.
...Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is
the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of
our rapid technological advances comes with industrial
revolution.
Capitalism is a tool we devised, now it has probably
fulfilled its destiny, at least for that time being. And
the focus of global governance should shift from being the
economical winner to co-exist peacefully and sustainably
in a controlled way.
Keep in mind they are just entering the phase when they can expect to greatly benefit from their favorable demographics while those in the West are facing decline.
Do you expect them to willingly come on board this new economic deal, that the West proposes? Do you see no conflict of interests?
I guess most folks have always assumed that humans were somehow exempt from the natural laws, maybe because of the much greater degree to which we are able to reshape our environment to suit our needs (sometimes to our long-term detriment).
But so many growth-related things seem to follow a Gompertz function that I think it's likely we just don't yet understand all of the factors when figuring out our own carrying capacity.
I'm really curious whether our asymptotic population limit only applies to our population on one world, or if, were we to eventually become multiplanetary, we'd discover that a whole other planet wouldn't really increase our overall population that much.
I wish I could be around to see the answer to that question.
But birth rates have been declining in first-world countries for a long time in the absence of this kind of constraint, and the Foreign Affairs article specifically notes that both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" doomsday resource-shortage scenarios didn't come to pass.
The Earth certainly does have some kind of carrying capacity for humans, but that's not the limit that's being it, it's something else.
Thus the constraint may just be "time to make babies".
Most parents want to provide a standard of living to their kids that is better than what they grew up in, which costs significantly more to provide.
Kids didn't always have their own bedrooms or cellphones, and in an agrarian society kids were useful as extra "free" labor. The shift to cities has rewritten the economic calculations potential parents do.
Affluence means you have the means to take care of yourself, so therefore don't need to spend the effort of raising kids for this reason.
What society has ever done that?
From the article: "At the festival, Romulus gave a signal, at which the Romans grabbed the Sabine women and fought off the Sabine men. The indignant abductees were soon implored by Romulus to accept Roman husbands".
That the second phase may have employed carrots as well as sticks does not detract from the fact that the Romans have thereby managed to expand their reproductive capacities while simultaneously contracting that of the rival Sabines.
I fear that was a misunderstanding, good sir. I didn't mean that women were ever press ganged into the army, but into producing the next generation of recruits. Frankly, I actually lold when I got that just now! =)
This is simply not true. Not even close.
I recommend watching:
https://www.gapminder.org/videos/will-saving-poor-children-l...
or, if you can spend more time,
https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-...
or any of Hans Rosling's TED talks. And you'll find that your statement I quoted above is simply wrong.
Play the following graph from 1800 to today:
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$marker$axis_x$which=...
It's very clear where we're headed and we're actually closer to the stable point, given China and India are already near the birthrate of 2.
> ... are still happily multiplying in an unsustainable way.
See the graph above. This is already not true.
> Unless we manage to export this kind of progress
This has already happened mostly. Africa is the laggard currently but is already rapidly catching up, and it's crystal clear that we'll get there.
I recommend taking the gapminder.org test. I think you'll be surprised how wrong you are.
- Will we become pets?
- Will we become extinct?
- Will we absorb into the AGI?
Maybe the AGI will just disappear and leave human affairs to humans and with some residual presence to ensure we never create a second.
I think much more likely than real AGI, we create an "intelligent" computer virus that locks up all networked computing power.
There will be some left behind, but humanity will continue on as an partially artificial GMO much like our own creations
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6331330/
Post-AGI, I'm not sure if life as we know it makes sense from a practical perspective. My post AGI assumptions:
- You can fully emulate a brain digitally
- The AGI will do this emulation with less power than our bodies naturally consume
- Any physical interaction with the world will be carried out better with 100% robotics or networked bodies genetically modified to the point we can no longer consider them independent or human.
I really don't think the AGI will have any inherent practical use of keeping humans around in any form. The real question is what will the AGI want to do? It will literally be a god with no limits we are capable of understanding. What will this god want to do?
The other one is predicated in equity but if we talk about it a bunch of suck holes go full Ayn Rand on things.
In terms of "killing" the Earth. It's not really possible for us to do (yet). We could surely kill humanity but we cannot possibly eliminate complex life from Earth.
More interestingly, I think we have a burden placed upon us by our own development. It's quite likely that any complex society of our state required easily exploitable energy in the form of gas and coal. Now the reserves accessible by primitive technology are all but gone. These reserves take tens if not hundreds of millions of years to form. If humanity dies out, another intelligent species may not even have the potential to rise for a long time if ever again.
Why do you think nuclear war can't do that?
The currently nuclear stockpile is about 1000x short, with some very friendly assumptions about our capabilities.
A few sources:
- https://www.msn.com/en-in/health/medical/20-life-forms-that-...
As my former boss often says, we don't have problems only challenges.
Seems like it’s a threat for countries that depend on a growing work force to pay pensions for retirees. But a benefit for a strained planet.
Space is not going to save us any time soon, people suck at restraining themself and given our current situation we can approximate our planet to a close system with finite resources.
So yeah, I'd go with less babies. Or more deaths, but one is more pleasant.
If the whole world reaches Mumbai's density (75k/sq mile), we would host 15 trillion people. Now, no matter what projections you hear from anyone, you never hear a peak population of more than 50 billion, so you are off by a factor of 300.
Here's for example the latest UN prediction up to 2100. You'll notice a 95% estimate that we'll be below 13 billion.
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
What's more, the vast majority of indian population consumme much less than the average american.
Democracy, health care, education, respect of the individual, peace... All that are affected, at various degree of overpopulation. There is not need to mirror your stats.
We cooperate as well as compete. A world with too few people would have its own struggles.
There are other possible explanations: birth control becoming available, women having to work full time, children are no longer exploitable cheap labor.
The big picture is that capitalism will only invest in something if the investor is able to also claim the gains. But the profits of having children go to society in general, not to a specific investor, therefore our children are under supported. The solution is probably going to either be socialism, or some sort of investment scheme where capitalists will pay people to have children but then they’ll be indentured servants or something.
Go ahead and call me crazy then come back and look at this post in 50 years.
Edit: actually it would probably work something like: we, babycorp, will pay you 250,000 dollars to pop out a baby, she will go to the finest schools, she will want for nothing, but at the age of 30 she will have to pay back the debt, with interest. (Which she can do by having kids of her own). This is basically how capitalism thinks, admit it, it’s not that far fetched.
Are you hoping that it will allow certain aspects of the culture to spread / persist?
If the latter, would it be as good to cultivate those things at home and allow them to spread on their own merit?
Or do you prefer for more people to exist under the national banner for its own sake?
There's blame on both sides. Denmark doesn't do a stellar job of integrating outsiders despite ample funding. Likewise there are cultural incompatibilities, such as the handshake-citizenship debacle in a country that has arguably the closest gender equality in the world.
My personal lesson is that immigration is really complicated. I truly believe people should be free to move wherever to realise their maximum potential. But in holding this standpoint you must acknowledge the very real costs incurred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate,_195...
How can it be bad for immigrants to get more than they put in, but not citizens?
The “immigrants will get more out of welfare than they put in” is exactly how welfare is supposed to work!
It's not a zero sum game.
Why? Why not improve their local environment to better help them "realise their maximum potential"? (I put your words in quotes because it's not a phrasing I like very much).
Why create a world where people have to move to have better opportunities rather than creating a world where there are better opportunities in increasingly more places?
How do the people who immigrate here affect the behavior of people in the countries they left behind? Why would they not continue having too many children?
Do you not see the historical irony? Your (presumably European) ancestors had their own countries too. So did the inhabitants of the Americas before white people arrived there from 'their own countries'.
Every country has a starting point, the USA's is just more recent.
Which implies American levels of consumption and environmental damage.
The example of Sweden is indicative of what I tried to convey as it has made the "salad bowl" concept part of its constitution which states that the country should "actively promote the distinctive collective identities of national minorities and immigrants" ([1] gives some insight in how things came to be like the way they are in Sweden). In the space of a few decades the country went from being one of the most homogeneous on earth to a boiling kettle of contrasting and often clashing cultures to which the term "mutt" - a mixed breed which has characteristics of all its predecessors - is not applicable as the constituent cultures mostly hold to their own. It is at the interfaces between those cultures tensions arise, sometimes between native Swedes and immigrants but more so between different groups of immigrants.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt20q22fw.13 ("The Political Dynamics of Multiculturalism in Sweden")
I don't see how it figures that more people packed into the same territory competing for a dwindling pool of resources is good for my country, even if the hundreds of millions of newcomers are eventually "Americans". I support controlled immigration when it benefits our country, but immigration for the sake of growing our population seems monumentally foolish. Housing, education, and healthcare are already scarce resources - let's focus on how to build our country into a better place to live for the people who are already vested in the system. In before "they'll pay for our pensions!" - debunked, more like "we're already paying for their food, housing, clothing, education, healthcare, and children", at least when it comes to illegal immigrants.
Also, for the environmentally-conscious - people moving here, a high per-capita carbon emissions country, from low per-capita carbon emissions country, is contributing to climate change. It's very frustrating to see publications from Wapo, to Time, to NatGeo encouraging Americans to stop having children to fight climate change, while simultaneously supporting high levels of immigration that contribute very significantly to increasing our population.
Problem 2: it is unethical for rich people to depend on the fertility and then parental obligations of poor people in order to produce new people who will then be taxed to pay for the sterile old rich person. That is asking someone else to do all your hard work for you for free.
Um do you live here? That is basically how the economy works.