Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

Agreed it looks very well put together - but I'm a bit turned down by the lack of clear authorship information ;(

To play along more with the ideas you guys are raising, I think that strong spatial heterogeneity driven by falling birth rates in sink-type effects are having an outsized effect on how we think about nations even if the sink is due to density. Societies and cultures which are pre- or post-sink might look at clusters of pathological behaviors as signs of cultural or genetic inferiority, causing some degree of conflict and bias.

I assure you wholeheartedly that brain-drain is not the big problem for Africa it's made out to be. It's a very big red herring for sure.

Sure you can have this "discussion" but it comes off as needless (and probably racist) concern trolling. The Sweden thing is a favorite among reactionaries trying to mask their racism. The homicide rate in Sweden is lower than Canada. It's lower than Finland.

Totally agreed that the implications of population shifts warrant investigation. Demographic changes have significant impacts on variety of factors—even if one ONLY cares about maximizing investment gains, it's an important subject.

Genuine question: what part(s) of the world do you consider overpopulated?

> We merely attempt to take a sober approach to issues around population decline and potential solutions.

Sober..."The Demographic Apocalypse".

Also what population decline? You and I will both be dead before the peak is even in.

A lot of people haven't developed the muscle to look at anything discussing "demographics" extremely critically.

Everyone alive today has suffered. Everyone alive today will be dead in 150 years. Nothing anyone can do will change that.

Yet, Life will go on. With or without humans.

Don’t take it personally. It’s just Nature.

This is not about deaths (mass extinctions usually not follow from resource exhaustion, but from some crisis), this is about less people being born. Which is how human population self-regulates given the estimation of resource availability.

The subject attracts armchair nazis, sadly. Collaborative editing is not a good format for those types of things.

Thanks for the heads up.

We've been soliciting additional information, counter evidence, criticism, etc. from folks who read the Google Doc since we would like our understanding of the subject to be as clear-eyed as possible. That said, we've disabled comments/suggestions temporarily since a ton of people are reading it concurrently and we want to be able to properly review suggested additions before many other people start reading them; we'd like to vet the ideas in it as much as possible.

It's... unpredictably far away! We suck so bad at estimating these kinds of things, that whether it's tomorrow or 500 years from now, I'm convinced we'll be totally surprised, unprepared, and our nor even sincere effort to stear things down a good path (eg. OpenAI and such...) will be either worthless or detrimental!

We should simply pursue "organic growth" eg. grow as much people as we can care for and educate properly. Unfortunately our elites seem really hell bent of keeping the social landscape hyperconpetitive so the resources we have don't really get distributed... and as a consequence of course (rational) pople have fewer children! Also there's an intellectual war fought on "traditional values" that enabled stuff like extended famimlies to exist and make child rearing at least bearable by sharing the load of caring for the nasty little critters.

Human underpopulation as an existential threat is also extremely far away. Ok, less people means a weaker economy. It still won’t be as bad as an event like World War II which killed tens of millions but that humanity still recovered from. I actually want longer AGI timelines because I don’t trust AGI to share my values.

Thanks for recommending the at section of the document. I’ll take a peak at it. I’m not really worried about yhe birthraye decline case because I think there would be subgroups of humanity with higher birthrates. Both small communities like the Amish and large communities like Nigerians still have birth rates well above replacement level. Africa is industrializing fast and could become an industrial powerhouse like China, if automation doesn’t remove the competitive advantage that high population otherwise would give them. Many African countries GDPs are growing at 10% every year.

This comment of mine goes a little off topic but I think the stuff I’m addressing is interesting and important for predicting the future.

We address this somewhat in the document. It seems the effect affordable childcare has is more limited than one would hope, though it certainly helps!

That said, having kids above repopulation rate might not just be about making things affordable. If people don't have a strong reason to have more than two kids, and if kids don't have tactical value like they did when they contributed to the family business (e.g. did farm labor, helped around a household, provided old-age care), then it can be difficult to justify having more than two even if raising kids is totally cost neutral (simply because it's more complicated to have a larger family—more of a logistical and mental burden).

How cheap kids are is irrelevant. Population grew much faster when people lived in abject poverty. People empirically don't want kids, full stop. Raising them could be free and tfr would still be below 2.

"I can't afford kids" is an excuse used by people who don't want kids but are unable to admit that. You can't actually afford kids if they would be under a real risk of starvation - which is a real risk in North Korea, not any Western country.

Don't read me wrong, I'm not saying here having kids is an obligation.

Children are expensive because the environment they enter is highly competitive.

If you want to make kids cheap, you have to reduce the competition for resources, or increase resource abundance.

Neither one is particularly achievable through bureaucratic policy.

Look at France’s and a few other countries’ attempts along these lines.

>Sample size: zero.

By that logic it's impossible to say that any species is going extinct before it actually disappears.

The entire developed world is slowly going extinct, and drastic changes are needed to stop that. Some countries like South Korea are collapsing faster than others.

I'm not saying humanity itself will go extinct - because the industrial civilization will collapse first, stopping the demographic collapse - but under the current trend the culture will be gone, most likely viewed as degeneracy of the arrogant ancients.

> populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids

That's the problem we should solve. We don't want just "more children". We want "more children in the environments where there are resources available for their proper development". The "more children" in places like you describe problem is currently solved by more polytical instability, more war, more disease etc..

> "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates

Nothing's proven until you run an experiment to f prove it! You're the perfect example of "thinking prfoundly, but in the wrong direction" - under the whole flawed paradigm of "social science" you take the problems to be solved as "implacable natural tendencies" and from this you build flawed arguments against why the actual problems to be solved "can't be solved".

> The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.

That's the freakin problem you need to solve, not a "trend" to placidly observe. We need to run experiments on multiple ways to alter/reverse this human behavior that's not natural but a product of the nasty society we've build for ourselves. OK, it was a price for a faster evolution towards post-industrial stage, but now we can tweak it and adjust the externalities.

We might want to start with the fact that people are rarely "educated and comfortable". Education often makes people slaves of social-loops where they need to work harder to keep the higher status they've got used to and so on. Most higher educated people are more stressed and less happy than lower education people. We need to give people stuff like "job tenures" etc. to create stability - the lower class people actually have this stability by virtue of being "rock bottom", eg. "it's hard to fall any lower down the social ladder, so at least you can lay back and feel good and comfy about it, with whatever rationalizations you can concoct, then start having some kids to get a feel of meaning in life, yey!".

We need to think active social engineering not passive social-"science". We've sold ourselved a bunch of feel good stories about "how things are" in our "society", instead of realizing that society is nothing but a mechanism with thousands of levers we can start tweaking until we get better outcomes...

...bc (1) educated != intelligent, and (2) intelligence is highly multidimensional, maybe the "dumb" people are the ones more intelligent in the dimension of intelligence requiring to "figure out they should opt out".

Also, in general very vey few people are "meta-socially intelligent" and the few that are are semi-psychopaths in positions of power so they probably enjoy the hell out of riding this hellish social machine.

It's eugenics when you force it. It's social engineering when you alter the incentives/rewards landscape to get better outcomes. And it's... evolution when nature does it anyway.

Just labeling it as generically "bad" and charicaturising it in a way that bundles it with other despicable tendencies like maybe racism brings no insight to the discussion. Only muddies the waters and makes the whole discussion stupider.

This is NOT a view expressed in the document (nor is it a view held by its authors).

One of the key risks this document highlights is the risk that many populations, which contribute helpful diversity and different perspectives to the world, go extinct before people find a way to sustain them (e.g. Koreans, Japanese, Jains, Parsi, Emirates, Tanka, Macanese, Taiwanese, Italians, etc.).

This is not about "I want the 'good' people to reproduce and the 'bad' people to stop;" this is about raising awareness of various implications of population decline, which affect not just cultural/ethnic diversity, but also the viability of many major cities, stock markets, and governing formats.

The issue lies in who those 1 billion people will be. The most anti-LGBT, anti-women, anti-education, low income cultures which have the most kids? Or a "controlled landing" in which most of the Western world doesn't become a ghost town or has its culture more or less replaced because it couldn't reproduce itself?

In hindsight I should've probably not make 1b (1800) but rather the 1.65b of 1900 the goal, just because from a time frame and as a vision it is so much easier to communicate: around the turn of the century we already had electric streetcars, electric underground, electric lighting, motorcars, elevators, entire countries with rail networks and so on. I do not see why a slow-ish-ly shrinking population should entail tossing all of our advances since then—in medicine, computers, telecommunication, chemistry, virtually all fields, not least agriculture (although the way we do it now is utterly unsustainable). Rather, I believe that in a situation where you have an extremely high birthrate and a doubling of the population in a matter of just 15 or 30 years you end up with half of population being rather young and lacking experience; you will also, as an economy, have a hard time to build enough schools and housing. People will and already do live, in many places, in cities that are almost entirely without any built history to speak of. This is what erodes local traditions, customs, awareness; I see this and not the OP's notion of 'shrinking societies cause cultural attrition and global homogenization' (paraphrased from memory) as a major cultural problem. Population growth, not shrinkage, is a great contributor to cultural loss.

This is one of the reasons why we put together this document. We (as authors) see there being many benefits to smaller human populations on earth, but we think that any transition made needs to be made very thoughtfully.

So far we we can see, there is very little (effective) proactive action being taken to ensure that as population levels decline, things we value (like technological progress, women's rights, diversity of cultures, etc.) are protected.

>However an economic system that is predicated on constant growth will necessarily fail at some point in the future because physics.

Nonsense. And the audacity to add "because physics" at the end. Newton himself proved this wrong.

1+ 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125....

Is this sequence constant growing? Yes. Is this sequence infinitely increasing? Yes. Does this sum up to a finite value? Also yes!

When creating this document, our goal wasn't to give people the impression that our populations should expand in number indefinitely (especially not on Earth alone). You're right that expecting the planet to shoulder indefinite population growth is impractical.

We're just trying to highlight the hazards of population decline that hits humanity like a tidal wave and produces unnecessary suffering and damage. There are ways for populations to sustainably decline without wiping out entire cultures, for example.

We, personally, care a lot about memetic/cultural diversity and worry that a population collapse for which we don't prepare will eliminate loads of perspectives that would otherwise contribute great new innovations and technologies to humanity's future.

We also think it's important that people know that population decline will affect certain fundamentals upon which their lives are based (e.g. "I put all my retirement savings in the stock market because on average the stock market always goes up" isn't going to be a healthy thought when population decline accelerates).