The last woman - How long do countries have until their populations disappear? | Hacker News Reader

The last woman - How long do countries have until their populations disappear?

economist.com

60 pointssasvari56 comments

The obligatory xkcd link to go with this article[1]. But to turn this in a more interesting direction, there are many unimaginable things that can happen in 5,000 years and I can think of a few. And also reasons why people choosing to self correct downwards might be not so bad. Some of the below were very uncomfortable for me to imagine although I try to practice not closing my mind.

Increased Productivity - So far, technology has made each person much more productive but it has also made them more expensive on the environment. I don't see that changing. And with more people being able to do more, the base level of required population drops. so a self chosen drop might be optimal for society's continued well being.

Life span increases and uploaded minds - If I were alive in 5000 years I would be suprised if the average life span had not been extended by a significant amount. Not to mention the possibility of minds hosted [2] on computations carried out by photons, particle spin or whatever phlebotinum they have.

Environmental stress - With people living longer and getting ever more expensive for the earth to host maybe it is ok that we are already self correcting now. Food may not be a problem but exponentially growing economic productivity could be. A lot of the environmental damage would be greatly reduced if there were less people[3]. This is a very dangerous line of thinking to traverse though and must be done only by those with a temperment strongly fortified with wisdom. Too rational an approach at scale will not be good for the individual.

Designer Babies - I read that people are already filtering baby genders and against diseases while they are still embryos [4]. It is only a matter of time till filtering graduates to optimization. Ignoring the possibility of a brave new world or gattaca scenario and the subsequent upheaval then destabilization of society as the have nots revolt, such a population could easily optimally repopulate the world at a controlled rate without people having to marry to make babies.

[1] http://xkcd.com/605/

[2] The idea of mind uploading I find thrilling but very uncomfortable. Even if I were one such uploaded being, the difference between that being and I would dwarf the difference between me and a bacterium. I may as well have died.

[3] Assuming it is not the endpath of civilization to completely dismantle its planet for its needs. and then go invisible.

[4] http://singularityhub.com/2009/02/25/designer-babies-like-it...

On the same line with uploaded minds, a technology that disable your senses, and send custom signals through your neural fibers. This makes it possible to live in a virtual world, reducing resource consumption for entertainments.

"I may as well have died."

then die, lots of people do. your assertion of a discontinuity between yourself and your upload is baseless.

Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" - people who didn't want to 'back up' and 'restore' themselves simply died, and those who wanted to remained.

as is an assertion of continuity. To each their own.

yes, this was my point. in an absence of evidence making a claim either way is foolish. guess I should have phrased it differently.

Interestingly, we'll never have any evidence either way.

If I upload myself into a computer and destroy my old body then the new "me" inside the computer will no doubt say "Oh yes, my experience was fully continuous", because it will have been from his. But that won't mean that my experience was fully continuous. And if the copy of me is not me then you won't be able to ask me because I'll be dead.

To me the idea that my consciousness (as in, what I am currently experiencing) would get transferred across to a copy of me if I made such a copy and deleted the original seems to me rather implausible, though, especially as deleting the original seems to be optional in such a procedure. And no, I don't think quantum mechanics saves us.

So if I upload my mind to a replacement body, but not destroy the current one, by continuity I get to control two bodies? Sounds cool, but somehow I don't believe it.

This whole discussion is baseless as long as we have no clue about the origin and mechanism of consciousness.

I think we have a lot of clues (based on neuroscience), lay people just have trouble understanding them because they don't fit their preconceptions.

Basically: you are (mostly) your brain. If there are suddenly two copies of your brain (whether meat or silicon), there will be two "you"s which will diverge upon receiving different sensory inputs. Both will be "continuous" with past "you" in that they will share memories formed prior to divergence. However without some kind of telepathic link, they will not be continuous with each other (apart from normal communication).

The question of "which one is real" is like asking which deep copy of a variable is "real".

However, destroying one's physical copy in favor of having only a virtual copy living at the mercy of some Matrix would be an ... interesting life choice.

I was not clear enough. This is not a statement on what choice I would make (I would be pro) but an abstract reflection. A reflection based on the idea that the existential framework such a being would operate in would be so diverged from the originating human that the old concerns, wishes and plans would likely pale to utter insignificance. The relationship between a seed and a maple tree.

This is not a statement that presumes that the human's wishes were more meaningful or that things should be a certain way. No, its just an abstract observation that the assumption that the new being would share the same core being, values, views and attach the same significance to old memories is baseless.

"your assertion of a discontinuity between yourself and your upload is baseless."

baseless?? Really? I think it's a legitimate concern.

When this sort of topic of conversation comes up, I can't help but think back to John Weldon's "To Be": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

>> there are many unimaginable things that can happen in 5,000 years and I can think of a few

You must use a different definition of 'unimaginable' than I'm familiar with.

Sorry, just thought that was funny phrasing. First thing I thought of was that xkcd as well. It is interesting to talk about instantaneous population trends, which is what the extrapolation is based on. It's a shame they couldn't have just done that and stopped there without trying to extrapolate into something that can be viewed as 'prediction' by a casual reader. But hey, at least they admitted they used the backs of envelopes for the calculation.

A line like

  However it is all moot anyway since we all die in december next year

would fit nicely as a conclusion for the article.

More seriously the extrapolation just doesnt make sense. a hudred years ago someone extrapolated the city sizes and concluded that urban civilisation was doomed because of all the horse manure produced by a 'civillised' city. Thats why we all live in caves now.

EDIT : link -> http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-th...

All those women who "opt out of the marriage market", who choose a career over a family, these women won't have any descendants. To the extent that this behavior is genetic, it will disappear within a few generations.

If there's one trend that you cannot extrapolate, it is this one.

That's career focused, driven women will bread themselves out of existence? I would think genes from fathers with the same traits would have a counter balancing effect.

Interesting point, I guess we need to know to what extent this behaviour is genetic.

If there is something in society that causes women not to want to have kids and this remains in place then the prediction is correct.

This is a nature versus nurture debate.

Interesting point, I guess we need to know to what extent this behaviour is genetic.

Your interesting and pertinent question has both an easy answer and a hard answer. I'll provide references for both.

The easy answer is that this behavior is "heritable," that is that correlations in rank order on this dimension of behavior are stronger for close relatives than for persons who are not close relatives. That is true of ALL human behaviorial characteristics, without exception. A genetically sensitive study design on any human behavioral characteristic from political behavior (who is "conservative" and who is "liberal") to obesity to IQ will always show a broad heritability greater than 0 (and always strictly less than 1). Everything that people do is heritable.

The hard answer is that even if a human behavior is shown to be heritable, as all human behaviors are, it still remains unknown how much the behavior is subject to environmental influences. Some human behavioral characteristics with high observed heritabilities are nonetheless highly sensitive to environmental influences. Most human behavioral characteristics are polygenic, that is they are influenced by many genes, each with a small effect, and even monozygotic twins are consistently found to differ in highly heritable characteristics, for environmental reasons that are sometimes still quite poorly understood. Knowing the heritability of a human behavioral characteristic says nothing about how much that characteristic is subject to environmental influences.

Here are the references I promised, recent papers by world-famous behavioral geneticists:

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

To sum up, in the context of this thread, a LONG-TERM trend of women having fewer children might be expected to reduce the reproduction most of women who have some genetic propensity to disfavor having children. But all women of all shuffles of the genes respond to societal and individual incentives to have more or fewer children, with few of those incentives yet being well understood. It is certainly possible in principle to reduce the trend toward reduced reproduction, irrespective of which persons (with which genomes) are reproducing.

If this behavior is genetic our future will look something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

You'd first have to show correlation between some genetic factor and women who don't want families. It seems just as likely to me that our current societies simply does not value or reward reproducing, and in some cases, outright punishes child rearing with impoverishment or being socially exiled.

Y'know, I'm usually a believer in the genetic component of human behaviour, but I don't think there's much genetics involved here. Fertility rates have been dropping all over the civilized world. Reasons:

1. Women are pursuing education and careers, which means they're often already thirty before they're "ready" to have children -- leaving no time to pump out more than one or two

2. Children are getting more expensive, both in terms of the absolutely compulsory costs and the things you're just expected to buy for them

3. For people who expect to get around by car, more than three children is a nightmare. In fact, with all the modern safety regulations having more than two children is a nightmare. My parents were happy to cart around three young children in the back of an early 80s Mazda 323, but you couldn't do that any more because a minimal child seat would take up nearly the whole back seat

4. There's really no incentive to have more than two children any more. Child mortality is nearly zero, and it's no longer expected that children will support their parents in their old age.

I have three kids. The incentive? I liked the first one, and then we kept going. How many kids do you have?

So why don't you have twenty? Or one hundred? Did the quality of the children decrease linearly or is it just the third that was so bad you had to quit making more?

I am kidding, of course -- I doubt too many people these days have children for purely dispassionate economic reasons, but we shouldn't pretend that those considerations don't enter into the equation, and aren't entirely legitimate.

Heh, I didn't mean to say that there's no incentive to have more than two children, I should have said that the balance of incentives has changed.

As the youngest of three, I'm well aware of what a great idea it is to have more than two children. ;) (And no, none of my own just yet, but I'll probably have two so that I can avoid owning a minivan...)

Right, so a tiny measurement (relatively) is extrapolated to thousands of years?

That's like standing at the beach, seeing the water rise and predicting when Europe will have sunk.

The article is ridiculously flawed.

Lets not forget that the world put on an extra billion people in just the past 11 years.

It's not a tiny measurement (AFAICS - not entirely sure what you mean by that phrase), it's an extrapolation of a consistent and systematic trend. And it's really not like extrapolating the tides, since we know that tides are by definition cyclical whereas this change is not necessarily cyclical.

The thing is, the article is just extrapolating to make a point about existing conditions. By debunking the article by comparing with tides, you're making an implicit claim of cyclicality with no evidence, which is less defensible than the article.

A better argument would be that just because a bucket has a hole, and will have completely drained in one hour, doesn't mean that the bucket wont be repaired, or refilled. But that would be a fairly obvious thing to point out.

     it's an extrapolation of a consistent and 
     systematic trend

It's a shitty extrapolation to me, just because the fertility rate has been dropping since the sixties (a period of economic growth, following after a world war btw).

2000 years ago the world population was somewhere around 300 million people. Today we are at 6.94 billion people. That's clearly exponential growth.

And equally, from a resource utilisation perspective, the world is enormously more sustainable at a population level of 300m than of 6.94b; a long-term downward trend in population would be a net environmental win and is preferable as a means of achieving sustainability to a series of resource wars with mortality rates to make Russia in 1942 look pleasant.

The downside is that our economies and our social security systems are somewhat designed around the assumption of rising population. How to square this circle as peacefully and comfortably as possible is the challenge...

The trend in question is recent, and only in some parts of the world, so of course the trend over 2000 years is different. That's a no brainer and does nothing to 'combat' the point of the article.

I'm wondering why this article is making so many people really angry and making them state the obvious in attempts to shoot it down. Clearly it really got under some folks' skins. 'Shitty' indeed.

> 2000 years ago the world population was somewhere around 300 million people. Today we are at 6.94 billion people. That's clearly exponential growth.

You can identify exponential growth from two data points? (Yes, population growth is exponential - I'm just pointing out that the data given doesn't "prove" that.)

You need to learn more about the Economist's use of understated British humor and irony, and not be so literal minded.

I stand corrected. I vote yours as the best comment in this thread.

It's something like the Big Mac Index. You can't derive the entire state of the economy from it but it sure helps put some things in perspective.

It's certainly easier to visualize than saying "the net reproduction rate of Hong Kong is 0.547".

And those women will be 300 feet tall because they were 3 feet tall when they were 4 and they were 4 feet tall when they were 8.

Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/605/

Haha! It's probably good there will only be one per country, then. What an amazing spectacle the world will be!

I think the phrase "By the same unflinching logic..." gives some insight into the mood of the author.

I'm surprised they didn't drop in a "it's a well known law of the universe that 20% of women have 80% of the babies..." Pareto adds credibility to any predictive model (just make sure the numbers add up to 100, since you don't want to look stupid)

"The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure."

Just imagine how many people were left out of jobs when cars appeared! (in relation to the recent topic of automation)

I hate to do this to everyone, but what every comment here was saying— that was the joke.

Edit: and for more fun, watch to see what percentage of the comments on the Economist's page fail to catch on as well.

Also in the realm of headline-seeking predictions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

In defense of their thesis, the authors of that book maintain perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future

If we really want to try to take that seriously, I would add several things to the model:

* trend for increasing life expectancy and average reproduction age (I am not saying age of menopause - there are probably pretty hard biological limits on that, but women increasingly choose yo have babies later in life).

* accounting for reproduction rate being dependent on overall population and/or probability density in a given region

* Migration from high reproduction regions to rich low reproduction regions

The article is obviously tongue-in-cheek. But anyways, not all sections of the population are declining at the same rate. Women who attend religious services regularly, for instance, are much closer to the generational replenishment rate, if not above it.

All these economic/demographic studies suffer from a fundamental flaw. They assume that trends will continue to hold for a long time. Nothing could be further from the truth, because any trend tends to correct itself, unless some disaster happens. For example, the trend of economic growth for several countries, including USA and China, is widely speculative because doesn't consider the changes in policy that can take place as soon as the next few months. Similarly for demographic concerns: a single change in policy or an external event can change the trends dramatically.

Interesting.. but it assumes that thousand years from now it will still take an entire woman, not just a sub-component called fertile frozen egg to create a baby ex-vivo

My favorite quote from Ice Age: there goes our last female :)

I do not agree however with the article. There are many reasons for why the female birth rates may be dropping, but all of them are solvable issues with the societies they live in.

And we are over-populated, so fearing that the last human will be born in 1500 years from now seems like toiled-math to me.

toiled-math

I'm not familiar with that expression.

Talking about certain countries going extinct is, of course, a bit facetious, but the actual trend whereby inhabitants of rich countries are breeding way below replacement rate while inhabitants of poor countries are breeding way above is a genuine concern. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...

I meant "toilet math" -- I'm not sure if it's a good expression, I heard it somewhere before; not a native English speaker :)

People never state it explicitly in these articles, but there's a very simple reason for why this is happening.

Most guys treat women very poorly without realizing it. Even here in the liberal Bay Area I encounter lots of guys (who vote Democratic) treating their wives and girlfriends like chattel.

If us guys don't become gents, the trend will continue.

I'm having a really hard time believing what you wrote, so if it was really clever sarcasm or humor, forgive me for being too dense to get it.

"Most guys treat women very poorly without realizing it." I disagree. Certainly there's instances of some guys treating women "very poorly", and there's plenty of instances of most guys treating women differently, but your assertion just seems way, way off. Unless your definition of "very poorly" is incredibly different than mine.

" Even here in the liberal Bay Area I encounter lots of guys (who vote Democratic) treating their wives and girlfriends like chattel." First, is political stance really indicative of ability to treat (ostensibly) loved ones well? I find this a bit hard to believe. Jerks are jerks, regardless of political leanings, and I don't think either party is without plenty of them. Second, what do you mean by chattel? I'm going to be a little pedantic an say that the "ownership" implied by a marriage is actually a good thing. It's bidirectional, voluntary, and symbolic. I know that's not what you meant though -- so if you're meeting "lots" of men who treat their women like slaves or livestock -- well, I don't want to visit the clubs you go to, I guess.

"If us guys don't become gents, the trend will continue." This was the icing on the cake, though. Do you really believe that women were treated better in the past? You're implying that there will be less women because their treatment is getting worse.

No sarcasm or humor. And your reaction is totally understandable - I think most guys have this reaction.

It's true that not ALL men treat women poorly, absolutely. The clincher is that many guys treat women poorly without realizing it. In their minds, in fact, they're liberal types who are pro-choice, pro-equality, etc.

The political comment was just my attempt at some humor. Living in the Bay Area I feel there's often a perception that "liberal guys" are automatically in the clear. So maybe that was a bit sarcastic.

Chattels - yes, here in the US and parts of Western Europe, women are not enslaved. But the "voluntary and bi-directional" bit is one of the biggest falsehoods that we believe in collectively. Sure, it's voluntary - both people said "I do", right?

Well, perhaps and perhaps not. You'd be surprised at the number of women (yes, even here in CA) who feel that their best bet for social mobility is marrying a guy who brings in money. In metro areas this is perhaps less true, but still very much a reality in many parts of this country. Whether women tell guys or not is another matter - in part because men just don't want to hear it.

Do I believe that women were treated better in the past than they are now? Of course not. Women have gotten more rights and freedoms which is a good thing.

The issue is that many guys assume (falsely) that just because women have these rights, they can continue to hold the same attitudes towards them in the past and things will continue on their merry way.

I think gender/sex/family views are the most entrenched views that people hold and the most resistant to change. People are incredibly freaked out by any kind of "deviation" from what is considered the norm.

So, that's why when I read these articles that talk about all kinds "socio-economic indicators" it sounds like complete BS to me. Not all of it, certainly, but if we're going to be candid I feel that it's the bottom line.

Men need to learn how to treat women better.

[UPDATE: interesting - getting downvoted]

> You'd be surprised at the number of women (yes, even here in CA) who feel that their best bet for social mobility is marrying a guy who brings in money.

It's unclear how that has any relevance to your claim that women are treated like chattel.

Marrying a guy who brings in money is a really good way to move up the social scale, so it's unclear why you assume "surprise". Why are we supposed to be surprised that women know that?

> [UPDATE: interesting - getting downvoted]

I suspect that's because your message is a mix of irrelevant true statements and false statements.

You've claimed that women are treated like chattel but haven't provided any evidence, or even examples, of said treatment.

That has to be the most poorly justified argument I've heard in a long time. So many factors such as immigration and inter-racial marriages are ignored.

Its an interesting question to pose, but could do with far more thorough analysis!

To be fair, they did refer to them as back-of-the-envelope calculations. Could have used a little more emphasis on that fact though.

Would love to see some more detailed studies on this. I've long been amazed we (as a country, race, world) haven't been more concerned with our rising population issues. Maybe it will fix itself without drastic intervention?

Google "demographic winter."

The "population bomb" hysterics of the past few decades have drowned out the reality of long-term population decline, which will have disastrous consequences.

(Investigate before down-voting in a knee-jerk fashion.)

I did investigate. The phrase seems to be associated with European white supremacy. Color me unimpressed.

Guilt by association?

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