The Global Fertility Crash
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
On the other hand he didn't disprove such a theory either -- we might have been just moving up a curve towards a critical point, where hysteresis then screws us.
But in general I'm pretty neutral: if people want more kids, great; if they don't, that's great too. So this sentence right at the front of the article really disturbs me:
> Population growth is vital for the world economy.
Most people seem to agree with this statement, which is the very definition of a pyramid scheme (see my point about hysteresis above). We've defined the goalposts such that this statement is in some sense tautologically true, but it leaves me with a profound sense of "so what?"
If fewer people are born, ultimately fewer houses will be needed, but why should that presume that less house construction will happen (perhaps there will be lots of renovations, or removal and new construction, or house builders will simply move to new fields as horsecart makers did).
We already know our growth metrics are crude and wrong, though we don't know really how much and in what ways. But there are plenty of potential scenarios where economic growth and human wellbeing does not require massive, or perhaps any population increase.
In the short term I think slightly below replacement level is ideal. Once we get past fossil fuel dependence at or slightly above replacement might be best. As long as we run on fossil fuel we are basically putting our children on a credit card with an unknown interest rate.
If we deploy it by the time today's unborn children become a significant fraction of the global carbon footprint, it isn't going to matter how many of them there are. And if we don't deploy it by the time today's unborn children become a significant fraction of the global carbon footprint, it isn't going to matter how many of them there are.
> which is the very definition of a pyramid scheme
AFAIU, population growth being beneficial is predicated on the notion that not only does every additional human contribute a pro rata factor of N=(contribution/cost) wealth to society, where N is greater than 1, but more importantly that for every additional human N increases.
Maybe some professional economists can cite to the particular theories and research (I'm too distant from my academic days), or alternatively disabuse me of this notion. But that's my understanding, and in that light population growth is definitely not a pyramid scheme.
It doesn't mean that population growth is the only way to increase N. There may be ways to increase N fast enough to compensate for the loss of the population growth dynamic, but those ways seem to be fairly elusive.[1] It also doesn't mean that there aren't pyramid scheme-like dynamics elsewhere (e.g. land use, housing prices, etc); they're just not intrinsic to the overarching dynamic.
[1] And that's because rate of innovation is partly a function of population size. The more people there are, the more risk takers exist, the more opportunities available, the more possible social arrangements, etc.
An analogy: To a first approximation, the more neurons you have (population), and the more interconnected they are ("free market"), the more capable and potentially intelligent the network.
> An analogy: To a first approximation, the more neurons you have (population), and the more interconnected they are ("free market"), the more capable and potentially intelligent the network.
A good analogy but every system has a "sweet spot" regime; outside that zone various advantages stop being (evolutionary, in this case) advantageous, else our brains would be eve larger.
I don't have the citation handy, and I'm sure the proof was tied to a particular topology, but the take home for me was that it was possible for mesh network advocates and skeptics to both be correct; that mesh networks can be a way to continually increase network capacity cooperatively without centralized authority, but that doesn't mean such capacity increases would be meaningful.
The same might apply here: yes, the rate of increase in N may approach 0 such that at some point it becomes an irrelevant factor to economic growth. OTOH, in the absence of alternative drivers even a tiny rate of increase is something, and removing it could lead to accelerating reductions in global wealth.
But we just don't know. The relevant questions and answers are more empirical than theoretical. My point was just that the growth narrative isn't predicated on a pyramid scheme, it's just the safest and possibly only known reliable strategy we understand. But an end to population growth seems inevitable in the next couple of generations (barring space colonization), so I suppose we'll find some answers rather soon.
Complex systems need a large number of people. We will have to create some version of the missing billions. Perhaps robots or AI personalities or mash ups.
As a casual example..a personal story: I recently had this revelation when I met someone from a small western country with a population of about 5 million. This person was incredibly smart, highly accomplished, well travelled and older than me.
But I still found that he was somewhat oblivious to what I call ‘nuances of human nature’. I have never considered myself a particularly perceptive person or highly tuned into human personality, but because of the accident of birth in a country that has over 1.3 billion people now, I was exposed to a wide circle of different people..and even though this other person was far ahead of me in every way, his exposure was limited to a smaller cocktail of human natures.
Did it make me smarter? I don’t know. But I sure was exposed to so much variety that I could at least detect differences and variabilities..even minute ones. I think my view of life is richer, more colorful and interesting.
To bring up another example: a larger population is like being a native speaker of Cantonese with its eight tones vs being someone who can speak a language with exactly 100 words. Entirely different worlds and one is vastly richer than the other.
So to combat this, we just have to create artificial people and virtual world when we finally achieve the carrying capacity of about one billion people(the population of the planet in 1600)
The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. Given we have most of the world in need of developing to reach the levels we enjoy, I suspect we are far past that capacity already -- though I am unlikely to live to see the consequences of that. We've used the world's most fertile land already. We've had the fossil fuel fertiliser dividend. Do we continue to grow and pretend growth is normal and necessary until we absolutely need another agriculture miracle? Or do we try and construct a future where everyone has a chance of abundance?
Even claiming innovation is partly a function of population size is far too simplistic - we've had periods where small countries were punching orders of magnitude above their population weight. There'll be little innovation if the food supply breaks.
This argument has been made for hundreds of years, and for hundreds of years it's failed to pan out. Perhaps this time is different though.
"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." - Thomas Malthus (1798)
~10% of Earth’s land is occupied by humans. Not all of that is arable, but humans have successfully terraformed throughout history and conceivably will become more capable with technological advances.
Malthus is not unique in his prognostications. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) was more recent and predicted mass famine by the 1970s. Instead, we produce a massive surplus of food each year, although it’s not distributed adequately at present. This happened well after the Haber process (presumably the fossil fuel dividend you refer to) and occurred as a result of improved farming techniques, equipment, and crops.
Thanks to technological developments in the fossil fuels sector (fracking, horizontal drilling, etc.), fears about running out of oil have largely subsided. Simultaneously, advances in renewable energy sources are rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Already, some electric grids are struggling with capacity — not because of a shortage of energy, rather due to an excess of electricity produced by renewable sources.
Although none of this points to an Earth beyond its carrying capacity, it also does not factor in further efficiency gains resulting from future technological progress. At the same time, we are attempting to develop the technology necessary to access extraterrestrial resources. Given that, even the finite resources available on Earth are not necessarily a limiting factor to growth.
Of total land area circa 10% is developed, 10% arable and a shade over 25% permanent pasture for livestock[1], and a few other minor agricultural uses. Of the rest we have forests, permafrost, deserts, mountains, marsh, scrub and other marginal land. The best crop and pasture land is long gone. What's left with potential appear to be the places we need to not lose - rainforests and such. God help everyone if we are able or need to start farming former permafrost.
Changing farming through mechanisation, artificial fertiliser and de-population of agriculture has been a steady march since WW2 (mostly). All leveraged on fossil fuel, and mostly a one-time dividend.
Past capacity as the rest close the development gap (you can't just miss that out), based on all resource use, and associated pollution - environmental overshoot - not mere calories. Not just a baseless assertion as we are assessed to be 70% beyond the ecosystem's capacity to absorb[2] right now. We've been beyond it for years. We're on borrowed time even without more development. Overshoot day[3] has gained a fair bit of publicity in recent years, but there's plenty of different measures all pointing to the same trends and issues.
With that level of accelerating overshoot, the planet can barely cope - the list of global scale and population related issues is huge. Yet coming en masse as a "surprise" is mostly to be expected given the growth curve. So there seems precious little headroom left, even if we do miraculously work to achieve zero carbon by 2050. Not expecting us to get anywhere near it any more though. Pretending population is just fine, or "growth is vital" as TFA claims is, whilst the globe does almost naff all to become sustainable is, frankly, nuts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Ecological_f...
And we are nowhere near reaching it. Increase in economic output with population increase is what matters.
If you have people who can't earn a living and die from hunger, it's bad. If you have people who can cook porridge out of an axe, that's good.
Loonie idle intellectuals from places like Club of Rome are first to point "let's sterilise Asians," like as if they don't see that Western material consumption was bigger than that of all "dreaded Chindonesia" combined.
Remember, those loonie first dreamed of those Malthusian horrors long before even agriculture in the West was doing well, and their prime imperative was to plainly get more resources for themselves.
I do not doubt that when we will hit the feared "Malthusian runaway" at 40B-50B people, planet's economic output would be so great that people would have hard time imagining how nutrient scarcity ever been a thing, and we will be able to "simply throw more petawatt-hours" at the problem.
Evidence for that? There's a fair selection of serious planetary scale human impacts right now - food chains, species loss, plastics, and I haven't even mentioned climate yet. I haven't heard of any of the Club of Rome calling for sterilisation of Asians either - neither have the search engines. So that seems baseless hyperbole.
The idea climate change wouldn't be an issue with "less people" is absurd. "less people" don't suddenly create viable electric cars and fusion power.
Any rate of active fossil fuel burning above the tiniest of baselines is going to be a net CO2 contributor.
But perhaps more importantly: why would fewer people, with the same amount of resources to share, not simply use more of them? Most efficiency improvements have been driven by rising prices due to rising demand, not awareness of climate change.
EDIT: Worth noting, this is also materially different to the extraction of fossil fuels for other purposes - like plastic.
Humans have always mismanaged resources. More humans means more mismanaged resources. Not all of the planet's issues are resource management though - a selection are simply down to sheer space used - forest clearcut, development such as roads and cities built and land farmed, etc.
Electric cars are 19th century invention. It is just a matter of deciding to no longer subsidize damage caused by CO2 emissions.
Fusion is also known to be limited by the lack of funding. I've read stories about 13 year old teenagers building their own fusion reactors. The bigger challenge was getting the financial support from parents.
Climate change mitigation has never been about feasibility, it has always been about finding a solution that is immune to politics.
Wrong. Fusion reactors you can build at home are just novelties, and don't produce more power than they consume. No one has yet figured out how to actually do that, and until you can do that, fusion isn't useful as a power source. The only place we've ever seen fusion produce usable power is in a star. There's lots of research into building complex reactors to try to replicate this without needing something the size of a star, but no one's actually done it yet. It might be doable with enough funding, or it may never actually work; there's no way to say for sure.
The real problem is that too many people on this planet consume too many resources, and Americans are the worst. If most people lived in cities as dense as Tokyo and got around on trains and bicycles instead of cars, we wouldn't be having most of these problems. The amount of energy consumed per capita in America is simply unsustainable, and too many other people want to emulate this, but there's simply no way for that to possibly work on this planet: there isn't enough land or enough energy.
Sure, if we could overnight make all cars and trucks into battery EVs, replace all fossil fuel power plants with solar PV arrays (and wind farms too, since those are basically driven by solar energy too, though indirectly), and come up with some kind of storage technology to handle nighttime, high latitudes, clouds, still air, etc., then the energy aspect wouldn't be such a big deal. (Even better if we can make battery-EV airplanes.) But we're not there yet, and it's not likely we'll be there for quite a while unfortunately.
And even if we did accomplish that, that still doesn't solve the space problem. There just isn't enough room for everyone to have a big suburban house in a nice place with mild weather, and drive a personal vehicle everywhere. But if we tore down our car-based cities and rebuilt some just like Tokyo with that kind of density (and honestly, it really isn't as dense even as Manhattan; there's a lot more tall skyscrapers in NYC), then we actually could, while simultaneously having far, far fewer car-related deaths, and also having a much healthier population.
Earth overshoot day is already in August [0] which basically means we are consuming it 1.75 times more bio resources than the carrying capacity of the Earth.
[0] https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/past-earth-overshoot-d...
It's a hard jump, but there's not just the one.
Have you heard the puzzle about the bacteria colony that doubles its area in the agar tray every night? On day 10, it occupies half the area. How long before it occupies the whole tray? One more day. You can add another agar tray or ten or a thousand, but it doesn't buy you that much time.
At a constant growth rate, if the solution eventually involves spreading to multiple planets, it's just a few more centuries before we're running low on planets, almost regardless of the size of the galaxy.
For countries with any kind of social / welfare programs, there is no option available but to grow population. Even here in the USA programs like social security are only solvent to 2037[1]. Many state programs (such as public pensions) are in way worse positions...
self driving cars may be limited but they will be a great solution for the elderly
Specifically, if there are socialized "assisted living" facilities, or even in-the-community caregiver visitation, then the amount of caregiving work-hours per day per elderly person is X. If the only possible arrangement is getting a live-in personal care-giver, then that figures is 2X or 3X (or some factor, I don't have the figures); and most people probably just don't get care.
I don't see any reason why the US couldn't maintain social welfare programs in a decreasing population scenario provided the decrease is gradual, productivity rises as fast as the population goes down, and we actually taxed people appropriately and got our expenditure priorities under control.
So I guess I agree with you, but I don't think those conditions can be replicated here.
Homogenous populace = low conflict.
The difference, as I’m sure you already know, is state oil revenue, and that can’t last forever even with sovereign wealth funds.
Sovereign wealth funds also aren't all that different economically from taxation, in the sense that the profits from what the fund is invested in go to funding government programs rather than being reinvested in private enterprise. If the fund was large enough to be relevant, that would become an issue for the economy.
(Norway also uses very little of its oil revenue, saving most of it)
No. That's obviously the case for countries whose welfare system has been designed as a pyramid system.
But saying that any kind of welfare is necessarily unsustainable is as absurd as saying that spending on video games or Ethernet cables is necessarily unsustainable.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/38877-infertility-rates-drop-uni...
The thing is we know world population boomed for the last few centuries. We don't know what will happen if that stops, there's simply no observations yet. Hysteresis is indeed the major question mark. We can certainly imagine some terrible problems.
Probably the biggest problem that comes out of this imagining is a reverse specialization effect. Think of the economy as a tapestry of different specializations, some of which support a very few people on a global scale. For instance, any particular thing that people get phds in like particular materials research. Or industries that are highly concentrated, which you'll find quite a lot of if you look closely. They might stop being viable on their own, requiring consolidation into wider industries or they'll get dropped entirely.
The hysteresis comes in where we go back to a previous population but we unfortunately cannot support the same economy. You see things like that article about the Japanese trainline that stopped once that girl finished school. I mean that town might well have had a train when it was a similarly sized town getting bigger, I don't know. But that kind of thing might happen in many places.
As you say, so what? Is the world economy some kind of deity, that we are here to serve its needs rather than our own? If each of us are the same (1 + B) better off, why do we care whether the global economy grew more or less?
As Edward Abbey said, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." If the growth actually leaves people better off, that's a positive. But if it just makes bigger numbers on a page, what's the point?
There is obviously a surplus from combining labor with capital, and an inevitable struggle over allocating it, but I don't understand at all why people ostensibly think it's obviously all rightfully belonging to one or the other.
If I earn a dollar, and then I collect interest on it, then the interest is really a part of my wages that was withheld. It's not extra. Whether anyone is being cheated of the amount of the interest depends on whether I got the dollar honestly, or cheated or stole to get it, but that has nothing to do with the essential nature of labor or capital.
Imagine if we manage to find a way to create small long term ecosystems... then the cancer will spread to the stars and these birther catastrophists will be relieved: we'll go back to 10 birth a woman with 2 babies making it to 40 :D
I believe it was Paul Romer who was asked at the time to survey the extant literature on growth. His report: there was none.
One aspect seldom considered is the value of life itself.
> If each of us
Therein lies the consideration. Who is important? Who is "us"?
Are the people living important? Are the people not living important?
I.e. would it be a "bad thing" if you did not exist? I presume you think so. Should we think so?
Would it be a bad thing for another person to not exist? What about a future person?
---
The value, source, and identity of human life gets very religious/philosophical.
My beliefs include human life having intrinsic value, and I therefore would like there to be as many human lives as possible and for those lives to be good as possible.
You'll notice that my conclusion winds up equivalent to the economics notion of "collective utility" (1 + A) * (1 + B). That is true, but I prefer to think of it not as adding more pennies to a global piggy bank, but in a real altruistic sense of maximizing human experience.
Welcome to current society. Bob is the richest few.
A very tiny fraction of the population is capable of understanding it, and to keep it a thriving discipline, we need people actively studying it. Statistically speaking, if only one in a million people is capable of understanding it, then you're in trouble if you don't have that many millions, and if the people with the capabilities are required in other equally important fields.
Transmitting this information purely through written works is extremely difficult if there are no living mentors. And the resources necessary for something like CERN are vast, and only possible to fund in an enormous economy.
Same story with semiconductors, rockets, MRI machines, and most other important technologies.
Well, Quantum Physics was created by a population that was approximately 1/6 of ours.
And there are more mundane costs. The more specialized you are, the higher the odds your tiny niche will go away due to market or technological changes. That means losing income retraining and finding new work.
Beliefs get perpetuated because they serve a purpose not because they’re actually true.
(Its the kJ/$GDP, with all the errors that implies, but IMHO the trends are pretty clear)
1) Energy does not matter.
2) The link is being masked by import/export shenanigans.
or
3) GDP is no longer a useful measure.
But I think we will go a little Upton Sinclair. As I understand it, early development is dictated by the diameter of the birth canal. Artificial wombs would allow a far longer gestation period. Even a couple more months would rapidly advance brain development.
All of this would be easier on the parents, which may mean more kids.
It does not mean that there is an infinity of a specific resource.
1000 years is not that long. Better we get fusion running positive or find something even better than that, which is not impossible in a thousand years.
(But perhaps people would have some laugh on how we handled specifics, say on economy, resources. Similarly like we have fun at medical medicine or astrology. They will definitely use or finally be things we have not envisioned or guessed.)
Mind you, many things would be quite familiar to a person from 10th century in today's world, barring culture - or translatable and potentially possible to educate them about. Maybe future will have it even easier, instead of telling, experiencing.
Our society is different than the one thousand years ago, but not too different.
Not quite true. For example, there may be finite amounts of, say, wood (at a given point...), but there may be infinitely things of increasing value possible to be made out of wood as tech and knowledge increases.
So finite inputs does not imply finite outputs. As long as value can be added, even to recycled things, then the overall value can increase without (necessary) bound.
We've seen over history ample evidence of increasing value possible from the same inputs. If/when some resources become scarce, making recycling of those resources important, we may conceivably reach the ability to recycle and increase value each round.
At least until the end of the universe :)
At any rate, no matter how you slice it, there is still vast room for economies to grow for the long term foreseeable future.
Which is the kicker. Whether it is Divine Judgement, Ragnarok, or Heat Death, there will be The End.
We shouldn't get there prematurely, but I'd rather focus on making the journey worthwhile.
Yep, given that physicists estimate the universe at 10^10 years old, and most end of universe scenarios like the heat death occur at ages like 10^100 years, I don't think we should worry about that limiting current economics.
There are in general 2 ways we can use technology to extend our viable resource consumption:
1. make our consumption of a resource more efficient
2. Use technology to find new uses for previously non-useful materials
Furthermore, the Earth is not a closed system. The Sun's energy is continually pouring onto our planet, staving off our descent into entropy.
We can also mine asteroids or the moon to get more building materials.
Are you sure about that? Without question, the Earth has a finite mass. But 'resource' in the sense you are using the term pertains to the various ways humans can utilize the various finite components comprising the Earth. And that may well indeed be infinite.
Have you ever been to those places? There's a severe limit to the amount of freshwater available in those places, and the weather is pretty lousy in many parts. Not many people want to live in a place where the summer temperatures are over 110F, or where the winter temperatures are around -40.
There's lots of unused space on this planet, sure. Antarctica is the prime example of this: an entire continent with almost no humans living there. Would you like to live there?
And finally, and time humans build and live on land that's in a nice, temperate location, that means there's that much land that's now unavailable for agriculture. We can't grow food in Antarctica.
Economist Russ Roberts of Staford recently interviewed Andrew McAfee of MIT on Econtalk [0] and they discussed McAfee's thesis that we're getting radically better at doing more with less via miniaturization etc.
I think it's very reasonable to imagine that a pessimistic view about resource management is overstated.
[0] https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
Remember, "infinite" does not mean "a really big finite amount that's just too big for me to imagine".
The material on the Earth might be finite, but as long as the sun shines, we can rearrange it.
Ultimately, that is what the economy is. It can go on forever as long as we get energy.
Granted, we are not doing a fantastic job of making best use of our star, but we are improving.
Not to mention energy distribution network will be a problem.
You would also have to make actually truly positive energy input rockets, which has not happened. (Price is not materials or work.)
It's still a relatively high bar until we mine out Earth, but water might be a more pressing problem soon. (Desalination at mass scale is very expensive.)
Elon Musk's goal for SpaceX is for humans to live on Mars, but Jeff Bezos's goal for Blue Origin may ultimately be more practical: to make it unnecessary for humans to move off of Earth by moving industry to space instead. With industry in space, Earth can remain a nice place for humans to live even as economic activity continues to grow for millennia. By which time we'll probably have found new Earths to colonize in other star systems.
Our environment now includes birth control. Most people in the current population do not feature traits to overcome birth control. There is a subset of the population which does have the needed traits. This well-adapted subpopulation will grow rapidly because birth control is a very strong selection factor. From an evolutionary perspective, the correct use of birth control is equivalent to the death of offspring.
Remember that evolution is not inherently slow. It is usually slow because the existing population is typically well-adapted. A simple thought experiment demonstrates that evolution can be fast: we would all have blue eyes if the others were executed.
Given the severe selection caused by loss of offspring, evolution will rapidly overcome birth control. Just a few generations might mostly do the job. Within 500 years, birth control will simply not be a factor in human population.
There probably will be some reproductive organ changes to sometimes defeat some forms of birth control, but mostly this will be brain changes. If people actually want birth control they can invent things faster than we can evolve past them, but if people just want kids then it doesn't matter how effective birth control might be.
Non-voluntary measures are possible, but again the evolutionary winners will be the ones who evade that. If the desire for kids is strong enough, people will bribe their way out of mandatory birth control.
I'm an example: I wanted a large amount of children, and taught my children the joys of a larger family. So far, they think along the same lines.
I don't think one can determine if the trait is or isn't cultural by guessing. How could you possibly know the origin of your own mental preferences? Even political affiliation, which sure looks cultural at first glance, has been shown to be under genetic influence.
There is evidence that there are certain genes which promote religiosity. They don't guarantee it – somewhere out there, there is probably an atheist with lots of religiosity promoting genes, and a devout believer with none of them – but they do make religious belief more likely.
People who have large families for religious reasons will pass on both their religious beliefs to their children, and also in many cases their genetic predispositions to greater religiosity. Of course, there is no guarantee that the child will stay in the parent's religion, but so long as the retention rate is decent (say >= 70%) the religious belief (and the genetic predisposition to adopt it) will be spread widely through the population.
Even though organised religion isn't looking very healthy at the moment (at least in developed countries), this is reason to believe that its long-term prospects are actually quite bright.
It's well accepted that many childless women in their 30s will start to crave having children. Someone with a mutation that causes this craving to happen in their 20s as well will have more kids on average.
Admittedly, for some of those traits the mutation required might be too complicated to be on a relevant time scale. But things like poor impulse control could easily be caused by a mutation (brain injuries can cause poor impulse control, so a mutation that damages those same circuits also could), which would be transmitted and potentially selected for.
Edit: if so, it seems we can get rid of plastics and pollutants like PFOA's in 500 year cycles by constructing condoms of the biggest pollutants...
A smart person with a burning desire to produce offspring will have the greatest advantage. A smart person who dislikes children will have the greatest disadvantage. In between those people are the people who screw up birth control.
If the human population contains a million people with the trait for wanting lots of kids and a billion people who are just dumb about birth control, both will be selected by evolution. Once those traits are the norm, it would likely turn out that wanting kids is the more successful strategy. We could thus see intelligence go both directions, first dropping and then rising.
Since then the useful selective function for individual survival has been the ability to operate in a tribe and make the tribe successful.
Who's to say what that has really been selecting for? Intelligence may very well have almost no correlation with individual genes, and simply be an emergent phenomenon optimized for by pro-social behaviors, or activated by being in the presence of people who are already fulfilling that role. Maybe what we regard as individual intellect is repressed pathways only chemically triggered in childhood after the development cycle casts around to try and figure out the status of the tribe and specialize into the optimum addition?
50% of what? (which is to say, you picked that number because 50% genetics 50% environment feels like a good split, and how do you even measure that?)
It means that if you plotted a graph of orphaned children IQs on the X axis and their biological parents IQs on the Y axis you'll get a messy and very bulgy line going up and to the right.
And this kind of thing is discovered by noticing that the IQs of identical twins are much more similar than those of non-identical twins.
Wikipedia has a fairly good overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Huh, guess I missed the news that we'd discovered human level problem solving abilities in sheep.
People with lower intelligence may be just as likely to adopt a short term hedonic lifestyle and use contraception more. Totally depends on cultural trends.
What we are selecting for is any heritable trait that might durably make people more likely to intentionally reproduce. That could be a lot of things: a stronger biological clock, later menopause for women, changes in cognitive patterns to the degree that they are heritable, maybe even longevity or longer healthspan. Its complex and hard to predict.
The point of my example is to crush the mistaken notion that evolution is inherently slow.
The desire to have kids is a social / cultural trait. We have plenty of evidence that it is fluid over time and changes with economic opportunities and whatever. It is very hard to maintain cultural cohesion in groups as they get larger. Even the Mormons would break ranks past some critical mass. The drop in fertility rate is due to changing culture and economic incentives. We have tons of data to support this and more of the world is headed in this direction economically and culturally.
This seems like quite a stretch: humans aren’t fruit flies, and something as complicated as reproduction is not a simple trait which overrides socialization and intelligence.
This is especially true when you look at why people aren’t having as many kids as previous generations: the quality of life impacts are significant and people are willing to go to considerable lengths to reduce them. If you have genes which make you extra horny or foil certain birth control techniques, you can switch strategies and if you don’t, your children will have a stronger incentive to do so after growing up with a cautionary example.
You can’t meaningfully reason about that complicated situation as if it were something like moth coloration.
Some people just won't care very much. People like this exist in the world today.
We've found genetic influences for lots of behavioral traits, including ones related to politics and religion. (and more commonly known things like: depression, autism, intelligence, etc.)
> While the world is expected to add more than 3 billion people by 2100, according to the United Nations, that’ll likely be the high point. Falling fertility rates and aging populations will mean serious challenges that will be felt more acutely in some places than others.
Right now, it is well beyond any sustainable level (CO2, habitat, pollution). More people, and more living at higher standards (and it would be inhumane). Sure, we can eat vegan, and have solar panels, but it is not enough (there is a huge baseline consumption and waste generation).
How? Higher education for women and easy (free, educated, socially approved) access to education, especially in poor countries.
Often I hear "oh, but in 1970s people were afraid that the current population would be too much, and you see - they were wrong!". Sadly, in the last 50 years, we wiped most animals. And brought the plastic mayhem.
Vide: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...
I actually have the impression that we're with quite a few too many people, and while we can't really help that (you can hardly murder, like, everyone in both Americas to get population down by ~15%), I expect that a decreased growth would be super beneficial for everything from available resources to waste management.
Sure, fewer working people on an aging population reduces growth in the short term, but I can't see anything but benefits in the long term if we would have a few generations with an average number of children just below 2. (For those who are on the fence, like me, this reason can be a part of the decision not to have kids.)
The article doesn't mention a single country below 1, so while being close to 1 is on the edge, every regional average you can make seems high enough. In fact, the global average of 2.4 is still too high (but it will come down, as per UN predictions, until it's only just above the replacement rate around the year 2100).
There is a huge commitment either way, and that commitment/choice is irreversible. One commits to new life or for voids of life, both are not without consequence.
One other interesting thing to this is to watch the shifting median ages of populations.
> China's median age was 22 in 1980. By 2018, it was 40. That will rise to 46 in 2030 and 56 in 2050. In the US, the median age was 30 in 1980 and 38 in 2018. In 2030, it will be 40, and 44 in 2050. India, by comparison, had a median age of 20 in 1980 and 28 in 2018. https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/asia/article/21...
That's always been fascinating to me to think of an entire graying population and of all those civilizations of past eras who are no more. You can get a distinct taste of that gravity by thinking of an entire genetic pool shrinking in our lifetimes.
(emphasis mine)
> Population growth is vital for the world economy.
Fuck the world economy, then. We're not going back to '60s.
You like your pension? Because pensions need an ever-growing population.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/06/japan-robots-w...
Also, prison as elderly care: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-47033704
OTOH if the population isn't growing and economy is contracting as a result, you could find yourself paying a lot more than you do now. Like, potentially, several times the amount.
Pensions, like infinite population growth, aren't sustainable. Most people no longer spend their entire career at a single company, so the concept doesn't even make much sense anymore.
If you're referring to a government pension like social security rather than a company sponsored pension, that can and should be made sustainable, unlike the borrow-from-the-future mess that we have today.
But if there are no working age people in 2049 then there's nobody to take care of you so your 2019 dollars are worthless.
In other words if demand for caregivers greatly exceeds supply inflation is going to destroy your savings.
I expect to have to pay for things in 2049 just like everybody else. I anticipate that dollars saved today won't go as far in 2049, and so I save more than I think I'll need. If higher than expected inflation or lack of caregiver supply is a problem, then we'll have to find a way to deal with it. If my dollars won't go as far as I think they will, well that's tough cookies for me, but that's not any different from how the world works today too. You can't anticipate everything.
But suggesting that the root cause of this problem is women not having enough babies, and insinuating that things would be oh so much easier if we could just go back to how things were in the '60s where half the population was disenfranchised (as this article does) -- is utter lunacy. That's not happening. That shouldn't happen. And even if it did happen, it wouldn't actually fix the problem.
What's an average mutual fund's annual return? For mine, it's around 4-6%, I think, which agrees with the average here: "The 20-year return on mutual funds averages 4.67%."[1]
So, as long as you safely invest what you're saving, aren't you statistically covered and then some?
0: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-i...
1: https://www.creditdonkey.com/average-mutual-fund-return.html
People reading this a century from now: hey you should've colonized the Solar System with orbital habitats neck deep in asteroid belt platinum, kids those days smh.
In the future, the demand for eldercare is going to skyrocket, with a lot less supply. Working folks will be fine because they'll be spending their money on stuff produced by robots: food, durable goods, et cetera. The elderly are going to be @#$%ed because I doubt that robots are going to be very good at providing eldercare.
Why? If a group of people paid into a retirement fund enough to sustain them all, and called it a pension, then there is no need for growth.
The problem is not pensions; it's underfunded pensions. There's no reason they cannot work.
As the article directly states, global population projections are set to grow by another 3 billion. I would call that a fertility explosion, not a crash, but most of that population growth will be happening in the undeveloped and developing world rather than the developed world.
The "lol seven billion is enough" comments completely miss the point. Fertility will recover once inherited fecundity spreads through the population. One way or another, we're going to hit the Earth's (or solar system's) carrying capacity soon, probably in a few centuries at the longest. Do you want that future era to be full of people like you? If so, you need to figure out why people like you aren't reproducing now.
To imagine that fertility isn't heritable is to deny all of evolution. The drive to reproduce is the oldest and strongest urge of all. It's ubiquitous in the tree of life. It's really bizarre to me that people don't see this dynamic. Of course evolution applies to people: have you ever met a parent and a child?
as soon as genetic engineering becomes widespread, everyone will want a Dane for child. But not ten or twenty of them - humans are not r-selective
I don't think evolutionary arguments are even valid at this stage. Very likely human evolution has given its place to human engineering
There are large uncertainties over the planet's carrying capacity, but the numbers I find most believable say we're over it, which can work until we exhaust non-renewables and perhaps destroy some renewables.
I find the most compelling understanding still comes from the book Limits to Growth and this 2014 research showing us tracking their business-as-usual model pretty well, 40 years later https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/00....
Steady state economics has worked. "Population growth is vital for the world economy" is a statement about a system approaching collapse.
Reading the book Affluence Without Abundance I found of human societies enduring hundreds of thousands of years without growth. I've since learned of more. We don't know their level of happiness, but recent versions showed happiness and health greater than ours. In any case, they didn't collapse the entire planet's systems in a few hundreds years, so our systems don't stack very well -- a few generations of wealthy few and destitute many followed by collapse.
Thailand lowered its birth rate voluntarily and successfully https://www.context.org/iclib/ic31/frazer.
Lower birth rate is our best hope.
Prehistoric man may well have been happier than people today... while things were good. When food was plentiful, the weather nice and the living' was easy, it was all roses. Until your mate busted a leg ... and died. Until your kid gets a toothache ... and then dies. Until the rains don't fall, the herds go away... and your entire clan dies. They probably weren't so happy then.
This rose colored glasses view of the deep past ignores the extreme misery people endured to get to the good times. It is, IMO, just absurd.
Finally, the idea that prehistoric folk lived in harmony with nature is just silly. They routinely set huge wildfires to drive prey, they would chase entire herds off cliffs and then harvest a handful of animals. Yes they laughed, loved and wept tears of joy. But they also murdered, raped and wept tears of sorrow. And experienced the latter far more often than anyone today. (For example, almost everyone who survived to adulthood wee half or more of their children die. And I would be very very surprised if each child's death was not felt as keenly as people do today).
Did all prehistoric folk do all the bad things you enumerate? Or did you cherry pick things from a multitude of regions and time periods which you personally believe to have been engaged in unethical and outrageous behavior based on your acceptance of the veracity of treatises written by western academics who have no reliable source of data about what prehistoric people were really doing or thinking?
Honestly I'm surprised and give you credit for not bringing up the old straws of cannibalism and human sacrifice by the alleged primitive savages. So, thanks.
But... on the topic of outrageous behavior, how do you feel about Mai Lai? Treblinka? The Donner Party? Obama's Predator Drone policy in Yemen?
You can get old timers to care for themselves the most they can, you win in efficiency. The big one is mental decline. We can do little about it for now. Yes, the exosuit can talk to you and override if you do something dangerous. Maybe call for help.
Yes, I know people prefer to interact with people. Which is probably not easy to fake without a robot.
Finally, just remember that getting old people socialized would still likely be a job.
--
By the way, the image of old people looking like astronauts is beyond funny.
Less population could lead to a lower GDP or it might not. If worker productivity and automation rise as population falls the GDP decline could be offset. This is something we need to consider especially when considering the initial statements of this article.
Sure, more people typically means global GDP will go up, but no one cares. What we ultimately want is for per-capita measures, like income or poverty rates, to improve.
The only way to deal with climate crisis is to lower the population of the planet down to one billion. Possibly without wars and famines.
Because it conflicts with the internal human desire to reproduce. You effectively are saying "Hey raise your hand if you want your group of people to die out." I'm not shocked that people aren't wild about that.
1) From the article seems like people are loosing their desire to reproduce anyway.
2) I am no expert in anthropology but the need for having children is very complex and is regulated by the multiple factors (economical, social, political, environmental).
As one Bali taxi driver put it to me - "Nowadays you don't need 14 children to tend to a ricefield".
It's pretty clear throughout recorded history that this is not a universal desire. Huge numbers of people have not only chosen not to have kids, many of whom have consciously traded off the opportunity to reproduce in exchange for other opportunities.
I can't say strongly that you're wrong, but I can say your thesis is most definitely unproven, and there is good counterveiling evidence.
Clearly there has and remains enough historical reproduction that humans are pretty much ubiquitous and have affected pretty much the entire surface of the planet. No question. But the why is unknown.
Yes there are of course people who feel a need to duplicate their genes (though to my knowledge I've literally only met one person in my 50+ years who said that this was their desire). However different people have many different reasons to intentionally reproduce and demonstrably, when given the ability, a dominant number opt to limit it (this fact is the launching point of the original article).
The clearest example is economic: birth rate and income are pretty highly negatively correlated (the US is an outlier but when you double click and look at the income data at higher resolution than national, you see the same thing). I could go into examples of why this might be the case but that could lead to an unnecessary flame war.
If one or both of them were likely to die before reaching maturity, and my retirement plans assumed they would pay for my dotage... then maybe I'd have more? But that's not the case; as it is I'm happy with my choice to just have two.
You didn't answer the question. If you can't control your basic instinct it doesn't mean that general population reduction will be a "bad" thing.
Population control doesn't mean anything "inhumane" at all. As one above said, countries with higher levels of education have better control over population growth naturally. That's one of the solutions to explosive overpopulation: EDUCATION!
Overpopulation is a real problem. For the environment, for the climate, and for the future.
Population control is both a completely infeasible and an ineffective solution to the climate crisis.
Both are population control.
You could easily reduce the resource intensity in the West with some cultural shifts. And the next generation may insist. Without disposable income you want things that last.
Who decides who gets depopulated? And how? What if those chosen to be depopulated don't want their population lower? Historically, not many peoples willingly sign up for their own genocide, there is usually significant war.
Consider: when Cartwright invented the power loom, he undoubtedly created economic growth (more output) without the need for more humans. Ditto for millions of inventions happening every day from software automation to robotics.
Even more: another million uneducated humans doesn't provide anywhere near as much growth as 1000 highly educated humans. As simple proof, you need education to operate and maintain machines, let alone invent and improve them.
If anything, a fertility crash seems like a good thing because there's always resources that are limited and fewer people helps allocate them - from fresh water to brand new medicines/devices/techniques that haven't been commoditized yet.
At most you could argue that population growth is useful for some of the world's economy.
But taking a larger view - ending population growth is vital for the world economy. Probably for human civilization.
Now, I'm not saying that the Earth's carrying capacity is 7.7 Billion people (or less). But in many respects we (= humans) are scratching the edges of that capacity with wasteful use of natural resources, pollution, and skewed distribution of products and services (e.g. of food - hundreds of Millions are hungry but the food produced could feed everyone several times over). So, we should work on that, and in the mean time, keep the population in check. When we've "fixed" human society enough, growth may or may not become relevant again.
> desperation is creeping into the search for ways to reverse the current trends
It is the desperation of large capitalists who want to avoid the necessary transition into from permanent/exponential growth economies into other, sustainable economic models. It's like they want to extend a pier further out into the ocean because they're not willing to stop driving their car out onto it and consider going someplace else. And of course - a political class which lives on these people's donations.
One final point: It seems to me like the actual problem spots are countries with massive growth (e.g. Nigeria in the story) which may need to bring it down sooner than they would have, had they had it in the 19th century; and countries with significant sub-replacement numbers. In the rest of the world needs to adjust while the age pyramid changes.
Is the world economy just a pyramid scheme?
This is silly. As long as income per capita is good and people are happy does it matter if there are few less?
There are 60 billions people total, floating around and waiting for their turn to "manifest" and live. Such a life is very tiring, so humans need a lot of time to recharge: usually, 700-1200 years. Humans aren't created out of thin air or of proteins: bodies can be replicated quickly, but "creating" an actual human takes longer than the lifespan of an average solar system. With an average lifetime of 70 years, we can't have more than 10 billion "participants" living at the same time. We also can't just fix aging because even with a perfect body, life is very tiring.
Elon isn’t going to have enough settlers.
Perhaps another Great Filter candidate.
If colonists are needed, they're available, it's just a mater of incentives.
Perhaps if reproduction levels really fall off and there is a real lack of families there will eventually be some kind of public, private, or religious industry centered around creating new babies in vivo or in vitro, along with a paid surrogate and child-raising infrastructure.
If economics is the problem, fix the damn econs, not the planet.
I'm not naive. I understand that the young will have to produce more per capita to support the masses of elderly. But the solution to this is not producing more kids. The solution is somewhere along the line of better economic distribution
Plus population is expected to plateau around 9 billion so we’re not actually being threatened by overpopulation anytime soon.
I can’t help but be reminded of the movie Children of Men.
And as the logical conclusion of that ethical value system, I do sincerely hope we get a Children of Men scenario where we put an end to procreation entirely. (I'm aware that that viewpoint is fringe)
Earth will have to produce a lot of people to send to Mars in order to have the genetic diversity for self-sustaining populations on Mars.
The people on Mars will then have to produce a lot of people to live and work there to generate growth and produce generations of humans who maintain The Light of Consciousness on Mars past any sort of otherwise human-extinction cataclysm back on Earth.
This is also the only hope of eventually repopulating the Earth in this scenario.