India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman
science.org
science.org
I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few:
- Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive.
- Wealth inequality will rise just from the fact that there are less productive people and people with wealth will live longer.
- Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up.
I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did.
I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility.
I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards larger families (increases bonuses as you have more children) and starting families earlier (rather than delaying to to their 30s.)
There was a good episode of The Weeds podcast, "Baby making vibes," which talked about this. Some of it is focused on the American political lens of Liberal vs Conservative birth rates, but much is broadly applicable discussion of policy and the more "vibes focused" angle that conservatives tend to take with the issue.
After seeing what it is like, if I was a woman, even the best current European benefits would not be enough.
"Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612
Also, knowing Hungary, this is probably intended as a subtle disincentive for the local Roma ghetto population. All the Central and Eastern European states fiddle with their welfare systems not to incentivize higher birthrates among the Roma ghetto population, even if they do not want to state this aloud. That is why the benefits target taxes, which you only pay if you actually work.
Basically, not enough education and a lot of crime in the community. Combined with enormous brain drain, because whoever manages to succeed a bit, moves away and marries into the majority population, thus disappearing as a potential positive influence.
This is one of the notorious ghettos in Slovakia, a neighbourhood called Luník IX: https://goo.gl/maps/KPnGTyBtX3NDTpdP6
Basically, an awful lot of cliches and self-fulfilling prophecies (such as limiting the employment of Sinti and Roma because of a fear of them being criminal leading to the affected going the criminal route just to survive).
There is always an incentive to re-enter the workforce, in the sense that you (hopefully) get paid to work. But the existence of an incentive doesn't mean that incentive is sufficient. In the absence of other incentives and the presence of Orban's reactionary social politics, it's unlikely that this one is sufficient.
That’s not true in the least. We use economic incentives to drive desirable behavior everywhere.
It might not be the greater good for society, but it is good for women who want to be self sufficient.
>It didn't used to have to be this way and maybe we should figure out why it has to be that way now, then fix that.
It turns out that many women want to have financial freedom (i.e. freedom), and are willing to sacrifice a lot on the homemaking front to have it.
There are plenty of reasonable ways to incentivize people to have children, nearly all of which are applied elsewhere in Europe while also helping (if not outright avoiding) attrition in the workforce. Hungary's approach represents the significant deviation here.
Don’t waste your time raising the next generation! That doesn’t boost our GDP!
So is increasing the proportion of 'true Hungarians' compared with immigrants. Race nationalists have long promoted high birth rates.
Your wife can be a full-time mom and print money at the same time, with no practical change in gender roles.
"As part of the measures, young couples will be offered interest-free loans of 10m forint (£27,400; $36,000), to be cancelled once they have three children."
The average household income in Hungary appears to be $7,100. So essentially they can get a potential 5 years of income for having kids. Massive incentive.
Depends how you look at it. If you're nursing, it takes 5 years to have three kids anyway.
This might sound cruel, but the less humans the better.
There are many ceilings. E.g. there's the carrying capacity of earth. But that carrying capacity changes with technological improvements. There's the carrying capacity of the solar system that changes as we get the technology to settle more and more other planets. There's the number of housing units currently available, and the amount of food currently produced, and so on.
But a lot of these current ceilings are highly malleable given time to address them, which is why what matters is the rate of change.
Even if one assumes there is a hard ceiling on capacity for earth that no technological advance can overcome, as long as the rate of change is low enough we can bypass that by building off-earth colonies fast enough .
So ultimately, while you're right there are ceilings, it's still the rate of change that matters: We can build or obtain more buckets to move water to, but we need enough time to do so.
> This might sound cruel, but the less humans the better.
Honestly any species will ALWAYS displace some other species. Nature doesn't just let usable energy lay around on long timescales.
There are problems with that, yes. That's fewer geniuses, who are in short supply. I like humans. The more humans, the better, quality of life being equal.
So without environmental pressure populations are going to grow
How many working people are there and how many dependents? What’s the ratio? And how many of the dependents will “graduate” to productivity (children v elderly)?
A geriatric society with a large number of elderly is very different from a society with a demographic dividend from fewer children.
Yeah because even in Germany the Kindergeld of ~220€ per child per month isn't nearly enough to cover the extra cost in rent, much less the actual expenses that a child brings with it.
When most people below 30 struggle to make rent, even without children, and actual ownership of a decent sized home is even more unrealistic, they won't have children.
Considering that the majority of emissions came from a select few countries(over half from the EU & USA) that don't make up the majority of the population, and they majority of those emissions have happened while there's been smaller population growth, I don't think it's unfettered population growth that's the problem.
We can't always get what we want. But which goals are attainable depends on policy choices.
Housing prices in suburban and rural areas have exploded across North America. People seem to want their own slice of land distant from others.
People want to be close to cities, but if it means giving up a single family home they’ll gladly live in the suburbs.
Correspondingly the price per square foot in Manhattan is about $1300, while Queens and Staten Island run not even half that.
People may choose to put the savings from less desirable environments into larger homes. But there’s no reason condos shouldn’t be as large as houses. Urban environments are just so scarce that the only way even pretty rich people can get them is to compromise on space.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234783/average-sales-pr...
In other words, the economic incentives today are to "go tall" rather than "go wide" with your kids if family wealth and status is the aim. If inequality is high this becomes more pronounced because the top of the heap will be more desirable and more competitive.
Really I think it'll depend on how good the robots end up being. If they're very good at replacing humans then labor won't be able to bid up its pay rates. If the robots are shitty, though, it might work out okay.
The root cause of all current environmental issues is the massive population growth we've been experiencing.
Even topping out at 9-10 billion seems very challenging. Ideally, in order to protect the climate, environment at large, and quality of life we should aim to bring population down by a few billions...
Think about the fact that the result of a low birth-rate with better medical tech keeping older people from dying when they otherwise would have. The result will be a far higher percentage of voters in democracies will be beneficiaries of the work of people younger than them. They will increasingly vote to expand the benefits they receive, at the expense of the younger folks who have to pay higher taxes to fund them.
Perhaps one of the most distinct, and deliberately obfuscated, characteristics of COVID is its steep risk stratification by age. According to the US CDC data here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics Roughly 94% of all COVID deaths were in people age 50 and up. 28.2% of deaths were in people over the age of 85, 7 years past the average US life expectancy (for men). If you look at the response to COVID in western nations, you can see that the cost/benefit analysis wasn't being evaluated in the context of the vast majority of people dying (and therefore benefiting) were past retirement age, and the vast majority of people bearing the cost of these policies were younger, lower risk people who were put out of work. The government programs that used debt-financed payments to alleviate these issues for the young generated debt that, again, will hurt the younger generations far more than the older.
Even before covid, the USA has universal health care for people over 65, but not for younger people or kids in working class families who aren't broke enough to qualify for Medicaid. I'm 40, so I'm no spring chicken, but western democracies routinely fuck over young people to help the old. It's going to get far worse until it hits an unsustainable level.
I've paid Social Security and Medicare taxes for 25 years, since my first paycheck, and it's not likely I'll ever receive anything from these programs based on current projections.
My state (NH) has no early voting, and absentee/mail-in voting is only allowed for a few specific reasons. (in 2020, COVID was an acceptable reason, but it is not expected to be in future elections).
I think everyone needs to understand what they're voting for, which requires much more effort than habit, so I'm not sure that's a good goal (unless that understanding is part of the habit, of course, which isn't what I've seen).
Looking back, not only did I lack interest, but I was easily swayed by politicians, promising things that would never happen, and news, providing incomplete perspectives and half truths. I was young, living with my parents, and completely lacked perspective on the machine of the world. If I were to go back, I would stop myself from voting that young, because it was completely hollow. From what I've seen, younger people these days don't seem to be much different. Easiest proof being that they're shocked that they're not getting the campaign promises that they voted for.
This is a purely political decision. When Paul Ryan made this assertion in Congress to justify privatizing the system Alan Greenspan shot him down[1]. The government chooses how many dollars to allocate to Social Security and Medicare. Whether those dollars come from taxes elsewhere is almost entirely irrelevant.
The only factor is whether seniors will get enough from the program to buy what they need to live. This has as much to do with the prices of goods as it does with the size of the benefit itself. We will need to ensure we have the production we need to meet the demand by investing in sustainable, productivity amplifying technologies. The reality is with population aging or stagnating we will need one worker to be able to produce what two or more was able to to keep prices stable.
I think the pressure to do this is already being felt by workers here in the US. It's one of the main reasons why there is so much apathy from the ruling classes when it comes to ensuring workers can earn a living wage from one job. The people in charge would rather we keep the conditions such that one worker must work three jobs to scrape by than make the costly investments to increase productivity.
I hope we (the politicians) don't hold tight to a strict plan, because if and when climate changes start to have a big impact, millions of people might have to move to different countries. These two things combined, decreasing population and massive movements of people, are hard to predict and will require a new way of dealing with these issues.
This is not the world ending apocalyptic scenario that’s thrown around in the media.
Perhaps a few countries will become uninhabitable, but I find that unlikely too. The current cases of countries that because uninhabitable dealt with the issues (eg Netherlands) and are still thriving.
I believe the sea level rise will indeed affect the Netherlands. I hope technology will progress so as to allow cheap relocation, or conversion of buildings to seasteads.
I'm pretty sure two centuries from now there will also be completely unforeseeable problems, but also solutions. If you look at old predictions, we feared lots of things that did not turn out to happen: alien invasions, meteor strikes, nuclear war, a disease killing most of the population (COVID-19 has only killed <0.07% so far).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_futur...
"The sea defenses are continuously being strengthened and raised to meet the safety norm of a flood chance of once every 10,000 years for the west, which is the economic heart and most densely populated part of the Netherlands, and once every 4,000 years for less densely populated areas. [...]
The Second Delta Committee [...] expects a sea level rise of 65 to 130 cm by the year 2100."
There will absolutely be major climate-change-related droughts and famines in the next half-century. They might be limited to the third world, but they will still lead to geopolitical unrest and mass migrations.
[1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15...
You need to factor in the problems that population expansion would cause in the future.
An example: Egypt, a former granary of the Mediterranean, is now a net food importer and a sudden swing in world commodity prices could very well topple the ruling junta.
This wouldn't have happened if the Egyptian population growth leveled off at more reasonable numbers (say, only 30 million people crammed into the narrow Nile delta instead of 100 million).
https://www.marketplace.org/2011/12/12/sustainability/food-9...
All authoritarians confiscate property when it benefits them to do so. When communists have taken farm land, they have mostly left it as farm land, even if production has sometimes decreased due to incompetence. No one with a clue would consider Hosni Mubarak a communist, because he transformed land that had produced grain for millennia into "investment vehicles" for cronies, and then into desert. Not even communists are that incompetent, or venal.
This is without taking into account decreasing sperm counts of men in developed countries and excess deaths due to air pollution in developing countries.
Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated.
Can someone point me to a reference where this subject is rigorously treated, without skipping over the gore, but is still accessible to a non-expert (say, to someone who has undergrad-level understanding of health stats)? Could be a paper, a meta study, a blog post, whatever.
Like with this estimate, for example, I'd want to know if it's 10-12 million people who died within X days of a positive PCR test for COVID, or something less naive.
[0] https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa...
It's not obvious this is a tenable assumption, though. Depression and isolation can also increase mortality for things not directly related to depression and isolation, for example.
My favourite take on this:
"I have Type 1 diabetes. I am healthy enough to run ultramarathons.
If I get attacked by a bear & the ICU has trouble managing my blood sugar while caring for my bear attack wounds...and I die... the bear is the cause of my death. "[1]
Start here https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
Exactly, deciding the cause of a single death is a messy complex task that doesn't have correct answers. Deciding the number of deaths due to a cause is much simpler and can be done most of the times.
I'm assuming that you are arguing that from the excess deaths standpoint, death from x vs. death with x both count as death from x, to which I agree. I also think it's a reasonable characterization.
A more accurate way to state would be "This pandemic and the varying response to it by different nations has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist."
You know that our species has a problem when the solution to issues becomes "we need to shit out more babies." This modus operandi is no different than that of a replicating virus or locust swarm. When you are part of the swarm, it's easy to justify your actions as a means for survival, but from an outside perspective, one sees nothing but chaos, environmental devastation, and widespread suffering.
We need to stop the rampant breeding and plug the hole in this sinking ship known as planet Earth.
> I look forward to the problems we will face then [..]
Hey, that's a great untapped market for ad targetting. Facebook and Google must be ecstatic.
I often think we frame things poorly. Wealth inequality is a problem the same way coal is a problem. It's the effects. The problem with global warming is the amount of infrared sensitive gases in the air. A coal fired plant that had zero net emissions (ccs) wouldn't be an issue. Similarly the problem with wealth is that if it is pooled up capitalism doesn't work because it needs a flow and exchange of goods to operate efficiently. Personally I don't care about the wealth gap and the top earners, I care about the bottom. If we can make all the essentials cheap enough it makes money far less valuable in the first place (solving the same problem but with different framing).
I have made an effort to understand climate science. Personally, I think the deference to simulations and experts has been hugely detrimental. The important questions seem to not need either PhDs or simulations. Very rudimentary education for anyone who has a science background suffices. Know the sun's rough temperature and the Earth's rough temperature, plus black-body ration, and you know the mechanism of heating. Know a weather-channel level of humidity temperature dependence, and you can know the water vapor feedback.
So yes, cows, concrete, and steel are going to be problems if we solve fossil fuels. But this seems intentionally misleading. Oil comes from a mile underground and we put it in the atmosphere. We've got to stop doing that fast, before we're locked into future effects, like crop productivity declines.
But now not only has the problem become more difficult (as we've let the problem snowball), but others have been creating new agendas. To be clear, this confusion and misunderstanding is on a continuous scale, not binary (misinformation in the green movements is better than the misinformation in the anti-climate movements). The problem is that if you aren't in the academic spaces it is often difficult to find the actions we need to take because there's this game of telephone going on (I do think it is "the media"'s job to distill this information by talking directly to experts, but they've been failing). What's worrying here is that we often note how climate is "the most complicated crisis that humanity has ever faced" but almost everyone acts like they have an expert opinion on it (I _do not_ but I have worked close to the space and am mostly appealing to authority here).
So I want to give an example of a common myth on the pro-climate side that actually takes us a step backwards but most people think it is an obvious path forward: reforestation. This is confusing because we all learn in school that trees "breathe" CO2 and exhale O2. But in reality young forests are actually carbon sources and old forests are carbon sinks[0]. This is about 20 years and so we have a lag. But that's only the beginning of the problem[1], and things get really complicated really fast because we need to consider the whole ecosystem involved, which is why land management is so important as well.
In this example, taking the "obvious" and simple answer actually is harmful to the goal even though it is "more correct" than the other answers.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDdKOmvIKyg
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/1306221445...
There's a lot of hubris behind predictions like these.
i am not quite sure what the timeframe of this prediction but at the moment all my street in india will pack their bags and relocate without a second thought to USA if given a choice. And this is an upper middle class neighborhood.
Won't someone think of the people picking the seeds out of cotton?
the question is whether these worlds are a mirror or a replacement for the physical reality
Your statement "the earlier the better" makes no sense. Obviously at some point there are limits; we should do as well as we can within those limits. "We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." What?
Very obviously not OPs point. What they're saying is that if you're living in a system that basically runs on a sort of 'lipstick on a pig' mentality being confronted with your problems directly and being forced to solve them is preferable to dragging it out, and there's a lot of truth to that.
You may be familiar with the old startup and systems design mantra 'fail fast', which is the same thing. If you want a long term sustainable system it is good to act in such a way as to bring systemic faults to the surface.
An entire generation will be demanding their golden years be subsidized by the young like they had to subsidize their parents’ generation, who had to subsidize their parents before them.
The world is not ready to be told “No” on this. That’s a time bomb.
Oh dear I wish it was true, but it isn't. Eastern Europe is facing a dramatic brain drain and it isn't slowing down. For instance, Romania has lost 15% of its population in the past 30 years (3.5M people!), most of the loss coming after 2000 and the decline being pretty much constant between 2000 and today. Czech Republic and Slovakia are the only country in the region with a growing population (a few percent in 30 years, even the aging Germany looks dynamic by comparison), and Poland is stagnating. Evey other country is losing population every year.[1] This is an ongoing demographic catastrophe for these countries.
[1]: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/fractures-est-ouest (In French, and the infographics is paywalled, but you can access an animated gif by right clicking on the image and opening it in a new tab)
It would be conservative to estimate that the number of migrants who have not yet surrendered their citizenship is 10x.
The brain drain is massive. I live and work in a tech hub and my social circle depletes every year. Every smart friend/colleague/acquaintance I have has either moved, is moving or hopes to move to the west in the next 5 years.
[1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/over-8-5-lakh-indi...
The media did not invent the worry about "population bombs". That was thanks to what environmentalism was at the time & trotting out the same tired Malthusianism
Covid was fixing this, but then some renegade scientists came up with the vaccines and ruined everything. Again.
I'm not sure that high birth rates are driving emigration so much as corrupt and ineffective governments, and I'm not sure that corrupt and ineffective governments are consequences of high birth rates. And by corruption I'm not refer to the US variety (political donations) but instead low level bribery that is required as part of every day life.
The raw population numbers were always a distraction. 10 billion people at first world consumption rates with be apocalyptic.
And despite glib sound bites from well-to-do upper class families who can afford a fortune for high-quality childcare, it may simply be that the average middle-class woman cannot “have it all”, and must make the choice between a fulfilling career or a large family.
If my assessment is correct, it seems to end up in a scenario where, tautologically, the fecund inherit the Earth. In this case, society naturally drifts back towards a more conservative view of family roles over the next century, since only people who live those values increase their numbers. Perhaps, long-term, we enter a regular cycle of populations rising and falling, with each demographic turnover lasting a full century or more.
But people here are self centred like always, so those are not bigger problem to them but future economy is.
I will add that part of the problems created for the future is how newer generations have been trained to dismiss procreation using various arguments: it's expensive, it will take resources and time away from you, it's bad for the environment, the state will look after us not kids...
Everything just made it so easy for newer generations to fallback to default: naahhh I'll just won't bother.
This is really strange he could have compared fertility rate of Muslims vs Hindus in Utter Pradeep and the same in Kerala. Instead he compares Muslims in Kerala vs Hindus in Utter Pranesh. Kerala is the least poor and most educated state in India and Utter Pradesh is one among the poorest and least educated states.
I think this is the opposite of a "corrected for X factor" we usually see in studies - this is suggesting that economic situation is a bigger factor in fertility than religious practices.
That should be a "duh", but having more resources resulting in fewer kids is the opposite of the malthusian hypothesis that this is limited by resources/mortality & is driven by personal choice to have kids (and kids do better when parents explicitly choose to have them).
They're saying it is a small factor, not that it does not influence it, because if you correct for economic climate, there are definite differences that you can measure, because personal choice is definitely influenced by how many kids your social circle have.
I think what really happens is women with careers, hobbies, etc. have more opportunities for self-actualization that the demands of motherhood, especially of small children, get in the way of. So if women have the education and resources to pursue vocations outside the home, the opportunity costs of spending more months of your life getting sleep in 2 hour chunks are much higher. If, on the other hand, motherhood and the rearing of children is the only sort of legacy they can pursue because the glass ceiling is so low, they'll be willing to put more into it.
> The strikingly different fertility rates in different regions of India reflect the role of education, says EM Sreejit of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in South Asia. Kerala in the south, which has the country’s highest literacy rate, achieved replacement fertility back in 1988. Bihar in the east, with the lowest literacy rate, won’t get there until 2039
An odd euphemism for a program that, in practice, involved forced sterilizations and eugenics: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30040790
According to Vox: "In 1975, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the declaration of a national emergency. She seized dictatorial powers, imprisoned her political rivals, and embarked, with the help of her son Sanjay, on a mass, compulsory sterilization program that registers as one of the most disturbing and vast human rights violations in the country’s modern history." Source: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2019/6/5/186...
Of course, as the OP notes, America is partly to blame. The exact quote from Johnson was...a bit more direct:
> When an adviser asked the president if he wanted to promise [Indira] Gandhi more food aid during her visit, he exploded: “Are you out of your fucking mind? … I’m not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.”
Source: https://qz.com/india/1414774/the-legacy-of-indias-quest-to-s...
Sikh genocide in 1984
Putting the opposition in jail and declaring an emergency
Ass kissing USSR and adopting "socialist" ideals - in the 60s you needed licenses to own things like radios and bicycles - till the 1990s there were only 3 to 4 brands of cars you could buy in India without being a millionaire
The Congress party was so hated for so many decades, which is why the nationalist right-wing party of Modi keeps winning even though he is also over the top.
Or the one comment is just used to defray blame, America does not have cosmic superpowers and India is in fact capable of making their own national decisions, seeing that they are a state.
Sanger like most historical characters is imperfect (so was LBJ) but it is a gross simplification of history to pitch them as the root cause.
But I agree the overall story is complex and we can’t blame things entirely on singular policy comments, even those from powerful foreign nations.
We were kids and had no idea what the word (Hindi for vasectomy) meant but we were still freaked out for a while, because we knew it was bad. I still remember a Hindi protest song about it to this day, almost 50 years later.
This was during the Emergency (as that time is known in India).
But it does mean India joins much of the rest of the world with sub-replacement fertility with just a few outliers.
The challenge now switches to how to move from sub-replacement to sustainable fertility.
Japan and South Korea are leaders in sub-replacement fertility with not that much success in finding a path towards sustainable population. Both I believe are still dropping.
This is the grand social engineering challenge of the next 20 to 40 years I figure.
You can do things like ban childhood vacinations so lots of children die, but that isn't exactly going to make you very popular.
50 to 100 years ago we probably didn't think it was natural to have humans willingly limit their population growth - it was viewed as completely unnatural, but it has basically happened nearly everywhere.
I think you can do it via government rewards to those having larger families and starting them earlier. Housing discounts. Rebates. Tax credits.
I believe Israel does this in combination with being religiously conservative, discouraging/banning most abortions, combined with a lot of government incentives, discounts -- in fact many of the people moving into the occupied territories are people starting families as the government discounts the housing there.
There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations.
There is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations being alive.
At some point yes we do.
> There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations.
For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society.
> here is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations being alive.
I think generational change is a major driver of innovation. Old people get stuck in their ways, more so then we are likely to ever admit -- but maybe we can solve brain plasticity as well? I think if we solve aging completely, we become a rigid oligarchic society.
How can we acknowledge that we need a lot of people to run the sort of society we ended up with today without also reasoning that the more advanced society we might achieve in 100 years might need a lot more people?
There's nothing special about 10 billion people. People have been throwing out numbers as "overpopulation tipping points" for hundreds of years, and we've passed all of them. And now we acknowledge that it's important that we passed them, because we can't even keep our advanced version of "the lights on" without having done so.
But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. So what we need is controlled growth or at least sustainable levels. Right now we are switching into a decrease which will be very jarring and not sustainable.
We've never truly has controlled population growth, we just had unfettered growth, which now has slowed down into a decrease. What is next is for us to increase it again and then have control over this. It is basically getting us to the next level of human development.
We just have to be careful about those that want to exercise differential growth/decrease rates based on people's memberships in ideological, religious or racial groups.
This is vague, and assumes the conclusion. All we've ever known is unfettered growth, and it's been accompanied by people "proving" that it's "not sustainable" for a long time. So far we have not only sustained it, but thrived while sustaining it. More importantly, we have come to rely on it: We're pretty sure we couldn't have a society like this one without hundreds of millions of people.
Right now, every human is on or near the Earth. Let's call this year 0.
In year 1, every human must be within one light-year of the Earth. In year 2, every human must be within two light-years of the Earth. In year N, every human must be within N light-years of Earth.
Take the volume of a sphere of radius N light-years and divide it by the population after N years of 1% growth, and you get the volume available per person if humans were spread out evenly among all possible space that humans could theoretically occupy.
At year 1, that is about 4.39 x 10^38 m^3 per person, so no problem. But at around year 11600 it is 4 m^2 per person. By 12101 it is down to 0.04 m^3 per person. The internet tells me that the average volume of a human is about 0.06 m^3 so 0.04 m^3 per person would be bad news.
What if we manage to invent Star Trek style warp engines right away, which let us go 1000x the speed of light. That makes everything a 10^9 times better. At 12101 we have 40000000 m^3 per person. But by 13524 we are down to 40 m^3 per person, and by 14000 below 0.39 m^3 per person. From there we have only got until 14192 before we are just below 0.06 m^3.
Remember, this is being ridiculous optimistic. Even with warp drive available starting tomorrow we would not be able to spread so fast that 14000 years from now we are uniformly occupying a 28000 light year diameter spherical volume around Earth. In reality we'll hit a space limit a lot earlier.
Hence, we can conclude that 1% is not sustainable for more than a few thousand years even under very optimistic assumptions.
Long term the growth rate must be one that on average declines over time, simply because a growth rate that does not do so leads to exponential growth, but we live in a universe were accessible space cannot grow faster than polynomially.
— Max Planck
That is a good point, and I would like to add that currently most young people on this planet are not part of innovation. They have to make sure they get food and shelter. If in the future we solved poverty and everyone has access to good education and a relative safe life, many more young people can be innovative. One can dream ;)
(There are other fields benefiting from long expertise, like project management...)
As for the grey-aristocracy: it's already here, just unevenly distributed. Bruce Sterling described it vividly in Holy Fire (1996).
In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.
From the perspective of eudaemonia, yes, the surviving population needs goods and services to continue. With a sub-replacement birthrate, there are fewer 'new' people to provide the goods and services for the remaining. This creates inflationary pressure and deprivation.
From the perspective of 'will the world end?' no- the Earth will continue to exist even without any people at all.
Nobody cares about that perspective; it's an obvious and not particularly interesting observation... yeah universe existed without humans and can obviously continue to exist without humans too. When people talk about "world end" they talk about the humanity, not the physical world around us.
And the “solution to aging” stuff is pretty optimistic. Modern medical technology has barely pushed the boundaries of healthy life at the top end. The first five American presidents died at 67, 83, 90, 85, and 73. The two that didn’t make it to their 80s died of a viral disease that still affects us today (influenza) and a bacterial disease that we do have a treatment for today (TB).
This is a problem that every large, developed country faces today, and they generally solve it through immigration. But what happens when every country is in the same situation?
Is population problem really a big deal considering we already have a big elephant in room already like climate change, scarcity of resources, poverty, water crisis?
I think its mostly a financial problem, not a physical labor problem.
what does this mean? i assume in your picture, the taxes (finance) are paying for the labor. if not, what is it that we’re struggling to finance?
Old people like to visit the GP, like every week, to chat about the weather and that weird pimple that's been growing in weird places. That's also paid for by the government.
Here is a breakdown of where one Australians Tax Money goes. https://imgur.co/NmCZa5V
I'm of the opinion that the aged pension should be no different to unemployment benefits given we have free healthcare as well.
Welfare (23.8%)
Health (19.9%)
State Pensions (12.8%)
Education (12%)
National Debt Interest (6.1%)
Defence (5.3%)
Public Order and Safety (4.3%)
Transport (4.3%)
Business and Industry (2.9%)
Government Administration (2.1%)
Housing and Utilities, like street lighting (1.6%)
Culture, like sports, libraries, museums (1.6%)
Environment (1.6%)
Overseas Aid (1.2%)
UK Contribution to the EU Budget (0.7%)
This is the issue that became known as "death panels" in the Obama-era healthcare debate. We're pretty committed to not solving it.
Straight line extrapolations of demographic trends based on current rates aren't super reliable. The system is sort of self correcting. Once population gets low enough people will eventually start birthing more. The only place it gets to be an issue is geo-strategic, like small populations can just get overwhelmed by larger ones either culturally, economically, or militarily.
meanwhile, people from my own similar background are not getting married, not having children, and even more extreme things like that.. yet the average education in my group is a Master degree from a good college
handwaving about "leaders in whatever" and "the answer is more education" are just wishful thinking and denial, in my direct experience
Resources/education/contraceptives/abortion are still easily available to people, just without the dystopian ads or forced sterilization campaigns.
It's notable that most areas of the country are below replacement rates of fertility, which is around 2.2 children per woman.
Mobility is, in the modern world, as much a political argument as an economic one.
A country can be "highly mobile" with flat GDP and limited income growth opportunity for the individual. That is just how the math works out. Social mobility is a term-of-art that does not mean what most people intuit it to mean.
Consider healthcare, usually older people need it more than younger people. If you have a higher proportion of older people in a population compared to younger people, you have a larger proportion of the associated costs being carried by a smaller proportion of the population, this means decreasing healthcare quality, increasing the pool of people paying in by increasing retirement age or increasing taxes. None of which are particularly good.
By far in poor countries healthcare is much more affordable than in rich countries. I think one of the main outcomes of rich countries is just increased costs for everything.
Would you rather old people be dying of starvation/due to lack of healthcare because the country isn't rich enough to support them fully than living in old age homes?
How about having the goals of developing healthcare instead of "being rich"
Look at how the poor in India live. "Getting rich" does not mean becoming multimillionaire, it just means reaching a developed country's standard of living.
On top of this western productivity is linked to low birth rates enabling a larger percentage of the population to work. So low birth rates may be required for a wealthy country rather than being just the result of a wealthy country.
Of course that doesn’t pay for significant medical care etc, but I also ignored economic growth. By the time India has US style age demographic breakdown things should look significantly better.
With accelerating automation, most people are going to have to depend on a much smaller set of people/industries. A shrinking population is not bad given we make plans for the future.
This is most visible in America’s response to COVID but also in Prop 13 etc.
I hope there is more context with that statement, because it sounds downright evil.
> During Carter's presidency, the U.S. continued to support Indonesia as a cold war ally, in spite of human rights violations in East Timor. The violations followed Indonesia's December 1975 invasion and occupation of East Timor. It did so even though antithetical to Carter's stated policy "of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world."
One off famines should be remedied with relief efforts which mandate the recipient country increase its food storage to be able to absorb the next one.
Chronic food shortages are a symptoms of overpopulation of the area, either because of lack of farming technology, terrain, etc. Supplying food aid only compounds the problem by increasing an unsustainable population. The remedy is to remove the mismanagement and relocate, and reducate the willing population and let nature take its course for those unwilling to adapt.
Sounds harsh but a famine of 1 million people being supplied with aid turns to 1.2 million the next time and 2 million the time after. A net increase in misery and suffering.
In reality faced with a starving person face to face, I believe most people would feed the hungry.
It is important tho that everyone procreate and have at least 1/2 surviving child. Large families by individuals shouldnt be incentivized. Human beings are wonderful and we must maintain genetic diversity as an insurance against extinction or genetic congenital vulnerabilities. Also important to preserve genetic material and work on longevity and medical breakthroughs. I wonder how long our generation can expect our lifespan to be and if we can eradicate diseases in our lifetimes.
India has traditional family structures like multi generational families or joint families. These are helpful tools to mitigate the (socio-economic-cultural)pitfalls of too many and too small nuclear families…if india can work on halving or even bring down population to 350-500 million in a balanced manner demographically(age wise and gender wise), the future is bright.
I hope nothing is coercive or manipulative ..punitive or incentivizing to have or not have children.. people should have children because they want the best for their progeny and in the best interests of their next generation.
Perhaps once stabilized, we can increase children per person but that could be 150-250 years from now. It’s key not to drop the ball now. It’s a balance between resource management and population is a numbers game.
Let’s not forget our automated future which might eliminate work. Or longevity/anti ageing breakthroughs. Who knows what the future holds but in my imagination it’s always an utopia.
Hopefully India doesn't run into the same problem down the road, because one a population starts to decline, history has shown that it is not reversible.
For every increment in lifespan, population grows until death rate matches whatever birth rate has been achieved.
https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/s...
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-reports-daily-rise...
Having said that, I suspect that once we crack aging, we may blow past the current limit and see a relativly sudden jump in lifespan
I think people like Elon always says declining fertility is huge problem but i simply don't see it as a problem. People like him will never suffer due to money problems and will live luxurious life. But only people working 996 realize how much exploited we are. And old age is not that big deal because of technology. One person can manage hundreds of people. We can scale a lot.
Your entire comment is basically saying life is hard so people should not be born? This is absolutely the best time to ever be alive in history.
"One person can manage hundreds of people." Have you ever been to a nursing home? This seems insanely optimistic.
You connected nursing home with wrong thing again. The problem with less fertility is that when there are lot of old people many people can't go to factory and old people can't work. But with technological advances one people can manage a lot of machines due to automation. Anyway, nursing home is easier to manage today than it was 100 years ago.
Your entire comment is basically saying life is hard so people should not be born? This is absolutely the best time to ever be alive in history. Is it really? Your source clearly says "Most people in the world live in poverty. 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day, two-thirds live on less than $10 per day, and every tenth person lives on less than $1.90 per day"
Would you like to be that 85% who wants to live on less than $30 per day? So, you are trying to conceal the difficulty saying life is hard but in fact it is extremely hard for many people.
I’m not sure I buy the story about job opportunities, as female participation in the labor force has been dropping in India, even as the country modernizes and slowly develops economically.
Also, this seems kind of self-contradictory:
> Some Indian politicians still talk of a population explosion and have proposed banning people with more than two children from government employment or, in Uttar Pradesh, even withholding welfare benefits. Critics say such rhetoric is often subtly aimed at the country’s Muslim minority. Muslim women on average had 0.5 more children than Hindus, according to the 2015–16 NFHS survey. > But religion is a small factor in fertility today, Muttreja says. “Hindus in Uttar Pradesh, for example, have a much higher fertility than Muslims in Kerala. There is no Hindu fertility or Muslim fertility.”
If a state-level policy is aimed against those with more children, but Muslims in a given state don’t have more children than Hindus there, how can the policy be targeted at Muslims?
Basically, people are given questions, and the answers are used to obtain data. The accuracy of this whole thing depends on the accuracy of those answering the questions.
I would think a better way would be to compile this based on the citizens' data collected by the governments. How do other countries do this?
Before Covid, we had a middle school reunion. Every single one of us had 1-2 kids.
I have 8 best friends (Married for 15+ years). Only one of my friend and I have 2 kids. Everyone else has only 1 kid.
Pretty much all states except a couple are below replacement rate of 2.1. And some are way below 2.1.
This is not to say your anecdotes are wrong but there exist different Indias and some of them have not seen the modern light.
From https://www.vhemt.org/:
> Phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.
Education doesn't explain male sperm counts being down 50% in 50 years.
Those worst case scenarios didn't end up happening because of changes that occurred.
Now we are looking ahead and seeing the opposite. That will motivate change as well -- but we need to have change.
Point to note: 1600 AD: world population was 500 million. 1975: 3.5 billion.
We’ll be fine as a species at one billion tops. It’s better for the planet too.
While I am personally inclined to misanthropy as a kind of social filter, the Malthusian horror of this article celebrating infertility in India strikes me as pretending that an active genocide is somehow more acceptable when you frame it as a kind of cultural euthenasia. Are they saying the quiet part out loud?
Which tenth?
It's like advocates of these policies don't think they're engaged in defacto genocide because of some abstract legalism around their imagined distance from it. I'd say so-called progressives should really examine whether they are the baddies, but it seems to come back to just being nihilists.
The only thing you seem to care about is that you think you aren't getting caught.
Male fragility leading to bad choices? Vasectomies are far cheaper and less invasive than tubectomies for women.
More on this, from an Indian source: https://theprint.in/health/male-sterilisations-simpler-but-t...
"When famine struck, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson initially refused to deliver food aid, citing the country’s high birth rate."
This moralistic Western framing is concerning.
https://www.mnpsych.org/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_dailyplanet...
Promiscuity isn't a novel invention, thus it likely isn't beneficial overall if it isn't widespread right now.
It it also true with societies where men aspire to have 4 wives each. These are societies with too many single men, and a tendency to be violent.
From the above portion of scripture, I wonder why we humans, are so concerned about population growth. Children are a blessing from God, have as many as you'd like.
-Isaac Newton
"Almighty God, Who hast created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service"
-James Clerk Maxwell
Two, really great minds, on whose work we depend on daily
The aim is not to convince though, but to raise the question, why does our generation think that anything scriptural cannot be treated as fact. Why are newtons laws fact, but not his convictions? Are we so taken up by being "scientific" in our own eyes, that we forget the very premise on which science is based, God?
To answer your second question: science is not based on a god or gods. Scientific thinking often branched out of religion, but they're separate now and have been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And science branched off from many different religions, just not the Christian one you seem to believe in.
PS: Note that I avoid the word religion, as it dilutes Christianity, The Gospel of the New Testament.
How many of us actually get to prove newtons laws for ourselves? How many of us consciously wake up and say, today I will test out gravity? But isn't the law of Gravity real, yes it is!
Thing is, most of what we know, we have read from what others have done or experienced, more in the scientific field. Why can't we apply the same standard to scripture? Maybe if we study deep we can prove the things written therein
How do you prove scripture, especially when they contradict each other?
Maybe because most of the ~8 billion people on the planet don't care about a random passage in the Bible, or even know that it exists?
If this creates cohorts without the ability to partner up, them the breaks of free will and socioeconomic forces. Population ballooned, and it will be painful as it contracts. Humanity ran up the credit card of population growth, and it will have to be paid back (socioeconomically speaking, with unrest and economic contraction) .
I admit we’ve sort of painted ourselves into a corner and the deleveraging is going to be a bit wild over the next few decades.
The big issue isn't the number of people, but the amount of energy and resources they require. The carbon emissions per 1000 people in India is 0.922 metric tons a year. For the United States that number is 19.86 metric tons a year. That's a difference of over 21 times. To put it another way, preventing a single US birth is the equivalent of preventing 21 births in India.
Focusing on the raw population is, and always has been, a distraction that high consuming countries use to ignore their own role in our current environment. This isn't to say that populations should rise forever, but it's pretty common for countries that reach higher levels of developments to have their population growth level off. Reducing poverty is by far the best and most ethical way to combat booming population growth.
Number of people does not matter.
Any system capable of enforcing any of the above methods would inevitably be a severe ethical violation of some form.
The real problem isn't population but our insane demand and energy intensive process needed to support the lifestyle of the global wealthy.
Put it this way: Cars required insurance, road infrastructure, gasoline or battery, steel, electronics, etc to make car a viable transportation option both for logistics and to drive people around in general.
Whereas we could have invested in rails which required less of everything to do the same thing. Even better if we use bicycles more, which is the most efficient form of transportation.
A car is a luxury that we made into a requirement pretty much everywhere in north America, which in turn makes our lifestyle more expensive than it needed to be.
So, in short, we should reduce the demand of unnecessary products(like cars). Then we can think about to make stuff in a more efficient manner and more green manner, or find more efficient products, such as using heat pumps.
This is a nice halfpinion, but the entire country can't essentially be some monolithic ecumenopolis like Mega-City One or Coruscant. I'd think most people here would love to see a few more efficient transportation options, more walkable suburbs, and other things you're describing, but there's certain infrastructure that can't really work in a suburban or rural setting. Cars, or something very much like them, are a necessity in areas where food is grown and everything is spread out.
Personally speaking, I'm not worried about the general theme of overpopulation/climate change because nuclear energy has already solved human needs.
Yeah, good luck with that.
I live in city in India with relatively less population density than most metropolitan cities and my colleagues want to buy cars because "it'll be easier to drive".
The city of Bangalore is notorious for its insanely bad traffic and yet I've heard people living still wanting to purchase cars. The reason is that "it's better to be inside a car in traffic than outside".
If nothing else, people fall back to "what if there's a medical emergency?"
It feels like there's no escaping cars.
It was an equal system. But you've just missed out the bit on what options are available to those that are a bit more equal and what happens to those that violate the rule.