The New Population Bomb | Hacker News Reader

The New Population Bomb

asia.nikkei.com

45 pointsrustoo56 comments

> "This also means that humanity will eventually disappear in the next hundreds of years,"

Huh? Has this person not heard of a logistic curve? Or any other number of steady states besides "welp, we'll just die out!"

"nature abhors vacuums and exponentials, but she sure does love a good sigmoid!"

Nature actually loves a decreasing exponential too. But it's clearly not the case here.

how is it not the case here?

Its like saying that titanic is unsinkable.

Our current civilization is optimizing everything, and with each optimization more people fill in the gaps.

If that machinery grinds to halt, the optimised mechanism stop. They dont slow down, just stop. And then things quickly collapse.

Thats how every previous civilisation failed, due to extreme pressure fundamentals broke and people panic.

'Oh but you are exaggerating, we survived a lot and lot longer since X civilization collapsed'.

We had global panic over toilet paper.

Not the person you are responding to, but I agree with you. Collapse is definitely on the table, at least in some form. But not an exponential decrease to zero.

More likely the secular people with no ideological drive to have kids will disappear, while the Amish (and similar groups with ideologically driven high fertility) will inherit the earth.

yeah, the sources they cite are Thomas Malthus and the Club of Rome. how did this even get on the front page? this is on the same level of credibility as curing COVID with ivermectin.

Seriously. I stopped reading right there. Why would people choosing to have fewer children contribute to extinction?

What would drive the change? Remember, we're dealing with humans not rabbits.

Yeah I came to say the same. Either he's being misquoted or is just wrong.

Seriously. I stopped reading right there. Why would people choosing to have fewer children result in extinction?

The population is on track within a few years to double since I was born, regardless of what happens in Asia and the West. For example, fertility rates in just Africa are up to 6.8 in some countries, with just them producing more new humans than the entire world did, say, 70 or so years ago. Within a couple decades or so, just Nigeria will have more humans in it than the entire US at current rates. So no, I'm not worried about overall population decline.

I do wish it were true though. I've lived out in the countryside most of my life, and have seen it get utterly destroyed for more houses, strip malls, warehouses, and other sprawl. The natural world has really taken one for the team to make room for all the people we already have.

Support women’s financial independence and taxpayer subsidized vasectomies/IUD/birth control pills/condoms/sex education.

Of course, it would need to happen all over the world. Women’s financial independence is probably the most important piece.

Education plays a really big part of women's financial independence so helping out charities that specifically target schools for girls can be immensely impactful.

This article uses the false assumption that Africa and the Islamic World fertility rates would follow the ones of Europe, America and Asia. This assumption which was ludicrous since the beginning has proved false overtime with - incompetent in my opinion - demographers forced to increase their estimates of the peak number of humans earth will host every five years.

There may be two P-Bombs: America, East Asia and Europe which spirals toward demographic collapse on one hand and Africa and - a bit less - the Islamic World which spirals toward overpopulation on the other hand.

E.g. Egypt which is already overpopulated fails to succeed to drive its fertility rate under 3. Maghreb countries such as Algeria and Morocco actually saw their fertility rates increase again after decreasing for the past decades. And that does even include demographic nightmares like Niger where half the population is systematically under 15

> Africa and - a bit less - the Islamic World which spirals towards overpopulation on the other hand.

I don't think this is true. Every single country is on the decline. They may sill grow in this century, but it's very likely that it would stop in 50 years.

Northern African countries curves seems to be impervious to the final part of the phenomenon, their fertility rates seemingly unable to going under the 2.1 bar and even going the other way.

And in the case of Niger, Mali, Nigeria etc, when their TFR would eventually cross the 2.1 limit of demographic transition according to the standard model nearly half the global population would live there at the end of this century. It is insane and completely unsustainable even when not taking climate change and ressources depletion into account

That's why it's never gonna happen, they don't have resources to support this population growth.

Which resources specifically? We are now exceedingly good at growing food, and water is just an energy problem (can use desalination or purification). Solar alone might be sufficient given the cost and efficiency curves.

We are, but not Niger.

"This article uses the false assumption that Africa and the Islamic World fertility rates would follow the ones of Europe, America and Asia. This assumption which was ludicrous since the beginning has proved false overtime"

Do you have any data for that? It's supposed to follow development and modernization, which seems to still be lagging.

https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPSOC_551_0001--why-ha....

This article explains a bit the findings:

https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2013/08/demographic-transiti...

Tl;dr Demographers have previously assumed that since Asia followed the same path, the European model of demographic transition was a universal truth. However they underestimated the impact of cultures (in Africa having large families is considered has an assurance as if one of the children succeed the parents will be protected), religion (in Islam even if contraception is legal, one need a valid reason and procreation is heavily encouraged), traditions, genetic differences (I think I read somewhere the age of puberty is a bit lower for people of West African descent) etc.

A documentary about this phenomenon in Niger: https://youtu.be/btMUecYNBc4

But we have seen fertility numbers in Africa drop from about 6 to 4. Infant mortality has greatly decreased too, so the chances of kids surviving is higher.

Theres a lot of talk about traditions and cultural norms. Do these people realize that the traditions and culture norms in the US, European, and Asia are not only diverse but have also changed over time as well?

Fertility is negatively correlated to IQ:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960...

"There were strong negative correlations found between national IQ and three national indicators of fertility."

However this plays out, it's going to be a monumental shift in what constitutes human civilization. I see a few possibilities:

Optimistic: falling population levels make automation a top priority and we replace almost all labour both physical and mental with robots/AI. The prospect of extinction drives research into life extension, healthspan extension, and fertility extension and we find a balance where we are able to live long, fulfilling lives and still have enough children to avoid regression or extinction.

Business as usual, sort of: we find the magic mix of incentives and social programs to keep the replacement rate steady at 2.1. We deal with whatever weird effects the previous fluctuations have induced and hold population levels steady. This might be stranger than it sounds since you would either end up in a situation where some people choose not to have children while others have many children to balance things out or you have some kind of tight social control where everyone has the "correct" number of children. I'm honestly not sure how this would work at all since both cases have an air of planned economy about them.

Pessimistic: economic and legislative collapse destroy all existing forms of trade and governance. Population craters due to war, famine, and disease. We regress to a pseudo-industrial level that can be maintained by a greatly reduced population hindered by depleted resources and corrupt local warlords. Who knows how long we could be stuck in this state or if we could ever crawl our way back out of it before completely stripping the Earth.

Horrific: global crisis results in the abolition of women's rights and the enslavement of populations to perform the necessary labour to keep everything running.

I don't necessarily see this trend as a bad thing and though aging populations are bad for economies, the ever increasing population trend was far worse for the planet and its resources. The only problem I see is the imbalance between rich countries with decline and poor and very populous countries..

All of the hand-wringing over population decline is about the continuance of an economic model based on cancerous growth (i.e, without limit, until the host dies). The economists and politicians can't conceive of trying to restructure the economic model to the lived reality (see also: global warming); the lived reality must conform itself to the economic model.

> The economists and politicians can't conceive of trying to restructure the economic model to the lived reality

Yeah, I mean that's the definition of thought hegemony. People think that moving the moon is easier than changing the current economic model[1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-rep-louie-gohmert-forest...

> People think that moving the moon is easier than changing the current economic model

Of course it is. All it takes is for someone to fund designing and deploying a very reliable mass driver, and then prevent it from being shut down or destroyed for some reason or other. That's a walk in the park compared to what politicians call a Tuesday.

Getting a lot of people to positively agree on something, when it's in the immediate self-interest of each of them to disagree, has always been the hardest task for humanity.

In all honesty - if we could avoid economic disaster by moving the moon it'd be a lot cheaper than what's actually ahead for us.

Unfortunately big changes are ahead of us (or our kids) no matter what we attempt to do to keep things from changing, including moving the moon. We better stop lying to ourselves and at least face the music. However, not all of these changes are bad though.

Since longevity and anti-aging treatments seem to be just a few decades away at this point, I don't think it's inherently bad if population growth is below replacement in most countries.

Pack people in tiny spaces like rats and tell them is good for them because urban density will save the world… and you get declining birth rates because having a child with no space having to work so many hours to keep up a marginally reasonable standard of living seems ridiculous to increasing numbers of people.

It’s natural feedback from overpopulation, which was matched with equally dire predictions which were wrong.

Right now your genes can’t get ahead by having lots of kids, unless you’re quite rich they will have disadvantages compared to kids with fewer siblings.

When the population starts declining you get the opposite pressure.

The thing to worry about is world economies based on expectations of infinite growth and the fallout when that starts being not true.

"The world is on the precipice of decline, and possible extinction."

Stopped reading right there.

EDIT: An ever growing human population is not sustainable. Heck, even 8B people may not be sustainable. But I'm pretty sure that human population is not going to go to zero. We could find that something like a stable population of say 4B people is much more sustainable, but it's hard to imagine it would ever go much below that (excepting nuclear war or bioweapons that could get out of hand).

I'm guessing governments will find a way to relieve pressure to educate and invest in children at some point, starting with China's attempt to curb private education, but that's not enough. They will have to dismantle the public education industrial complex as well. After a while parents will not consider childrens education to be too much effort or too costly and they can start producing more again. Unfortunately my generation will be too old to reproduce by the time this happens

Look on the bright side, housing prices would come down to more affordable levels and wages would likely rise in some sectors. And less environmental impact.

Maybe. I don't think the trend towards urbanization is likely to reverse. Generally, for house prices to fall under the current system the area in which they're located needs to become almost unlivable. That's possible with depopulation since you might end up with not enough people to pay for utilities or upkeep of roads in which case the municipality may abandon large areas. Demolition of existing infrastructure and buildings to revert those areas to what could be used for a typical rural home with a large enough lot for well and septic would be quite expensive. I don't think it would be an option for most people or even desirable for those that could afford it.

We still don't have a good grasp on all the factors that depressed wages in the last half century, I don't think they are going to start rising due to a slow change in demographics. More likely people will continue to move where the jobs are and employers will continue to automate or outsource where it saves them money.

I'm also not sure this would mean less environmental impact since as the article states declining fertility rates coincide with increases in education and increased female participation in the economy which indicate an increase in the standard of living. Higher standard of living means more demand for luxury goods, personal transportation, larger houses, more varied diet and all the other consumer demands that drive energy use, construction, agriculture, and manufacturing making up the bulk of CO2 emissions.

> I don't think the trend towards urbanization is likely to reverse.

Except covid does seem to have reversed the move into cities. More people are now being allowed to work from home and we've seen that they're choosing less urbanized places to move to. Whether the trend out of cities continues after covid abates remains to be seen.

archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210922205758/https://asia.nikk...

I don’t know why Thanos went through the trouble of getting all those Infinity Stones. What he really needed to do was promote healthcare and education. A Thanos and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would’ve had much better results IMO.

But also, cutting the population in half wouldn’t solve things permanently. The population was have its current size in 1950. So it would just take ~50 years to get back to its present size.

The coming research on ectogenesis, and it's probable future implementation will allow human civilization to continue without culpabilizing people to have at least two kids.

This will resolve itself naturally: as populations fall, housing and land becomes much cheaper, and wages rise. These are major factors predicting fertility rates in the West.

However that natural feedback loop will be disconnected if Governments worldwide are permitted to import millions of people to replace the populations.

That doesn't seem to be true in Japan yet. Housing and land are relatively affordable and yet they maintain very low birth rates and most people choose to live in large urban areas instead of the country. What would be different about the West?

Japan's population peaked in 2009 at 128.5million:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2009/

And in 2021 its only 2% lower than that.

2009 fertility rate: 1.37

Today: 1.42

So, it is improving.

Cost of living is not the only reason why Western people don't have a lot of kids anymore. A lot of it is a change in values, Western people just don't idealize/value having a big family anymore.

Aside from the rather irritating concept that the world was put here (by some deity?) to produce the absolute maximum quantity of happy humanity, it seems to me that the main fallacy here is that things remain the same with a population reduction.

I can guarantee that a 10:1 or 100:1 shrink in humanity will result in a society that is nothing like today's. Any prediction based on the interactions between 8B people won't hold when it's 800M.

Is humanity disappearing in the next few hundred years really so surprising? Bayesian arguments by physicists already predict it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

In a nutshell, order all humans ever born or to be born. You and me are equally likely to be anywhere in this list, but it's unlikely we're at the beginning or end. Based on estimates on the number of humans born so far, this constrains the lifetime of the human species to a few hundred years.

If you do this calculation today, then you expected humanity to exist untill X

But if a hypothetical medieval person did the same calculation based on data avaliable to him, then his answer is Y

For a hypothetical caveman it's Z, where Z is rather small.

Returning to today, X grows every day.

These results are non-sensical, seems like the base assumption is invalid: "it says that supposing that all humans are born in a random order, chances are that any one human is born roughly in the middle"

Actually a medieval person or neolithic person would have derived large future ages, because in those epochs population growth was slow and arguably not even exponential.

The fact we know there is a fast rise and possible peak in world population around 2050 means most humans born or ever to be born will be born in the years ~1700-2200. This is pure math, and an argument against it is an argument against the Copernican principle.

Yup, i got it wrong. However it seems like a statistical argument from a sample of 1, very similar to this:

https://xkcd.com/605/

Could method adequately predict extincrion of DoDo or brontasaurus?

Why do human ancestors stretching back ~1B years not count?

They could, but most humans ever born have been born in the last 300 years.

You're missing the point, though. Count pre-human ancestors and that's no longer true.

It ceases to become a "doomsday" argument and more the (fairly obvious) idea that our species is likely to continue evolving to some extent, possibly to the point where we're something posthuman.

Most humans ever born so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com