Car Seats as Contraception (2020)
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
This is an interesting sentence. The authors say this like it's a bad thing. And I recognize there are economic risks to decreasing the birth rate. But I would not murder 57 children to cause 8,000 to be born. So I think it might be okay for these births to be avoided to save these lives? I mean it definitely should be considered in the tradeoffs but facially this seems like a reasonable trade to me.
(That is, you as an infant being born pay the risk of infant death in order for the opportunity to be born -- the shot at existence. On the other hand, asking carseated children to stochastically pay with their lives for the opportunity of a sibling to exist is a different matter morally.)
I get they are talking about in particular year and perhaps want to emphasize the births aren’t simply delayed but the way it’s phrased is off putting
If the births happened next year it would still be an 8k reduction in this year, but not a permanent one.
Children have become so expensive to raise in the west that there is _no_ country which is not in demographic collapse. This is being offset by mass immigration which only works so long as the developing world is producing a surplus of people. Something that is no longer happening.
Because of laws like this we have set up a demographics time bomb where in any country richer than India there aren't enough women under 40 to give birth to a generation of the same size as the previous one.
It's rather bizarre listening to people praise a model which is so unsustainable it produces more 80+ year olds than >30 year olds.
The current average population increase is estimated at 81 million people per year.
Now what happens when the median age is over 50?
The result isn't a population reduction, it is a population extinction. Too few births is just as bad as too many. It's just that you don't notice you've decided to go extinct until 30 years after the point of no return.
In the US less than 5% of the population is over 80 whereas around 30% is below thirty.
They first show up sometime in their 20s or 30s, have more children than the average for the country, then their children have more children than the average too.
When you look at the demographics of people who are third or later generation immigrants the demographics look apocalyptic.
The west is the first fully parasitic society which can't survive without constant colonialism of human capital from the rest of the world.
Expecting a temporary transient condition to be sustained seems incredibly misguided.
Year 0: 100 newborns
Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns
Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
There's always the same ratio people above a given age as there are below, for a given fertility rate, once an equilibrium is established. In cases where your fertility rate is above 2, this ratio will be below 1 (more young than elderly). In cases where your fertility rate is below 2, it will be above 1. Both relationships are exponential, not linear.
I think another interesting issue that demonstrates is the sort of exponential snap, the "demographic bomb", in fertility related issues. In spite of an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubles to 187 by year 60, before suddenly collapsing down to 22 over the next 60 years.
And these are numbers that are not entirely out of question anymore in many places. South Korea's fertility rate has dropped to 0.84.
france has the highest birthrate in europe, followed by ireland and sweden. i don't know what ireland and sweden are doing, but i understand that france offers infant daycare, allowing more parents to work.
as for this article, it specifically talks about families getting a third child when they already have two in car-seat age. it looks to me that the problem is not cost, but possibly the fact that many cars can't fit three car seats in the back.
this comment from the original discussion, and the study authors response also seem to support that idea:
European numbers are largely controlled by Islamic populations. Pew carried out an interesting study [1] on the numbers. The Islamic fertility rate in France is 2.9, the non-Islamic fertility rate is 1.9. In Sweden it's 2.8 vs 1.8. There is no European country with a non-Islamic fertility rate over 2. Ireland is the highest at exactly 2.0.
The fact that these extreme trends exist even within Western countries, emphasize that it's primarily a cultural issue. I am not implying the West should adopt Islamic social views, but the irony is that we will end doing exactly that if nothing changes simply because they are reproducing in healthy numbers while non-Islamic groups are not.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...
what caused the culture in europe to change?
the islamic population in europe is very young. first and second generation mostly. if living standards and education are the cause it's going to take a few more generations before the effect of that set in.
Obviously the middle class individuals could afford to have children and make it work if they genuinely wanted to do so, but it might be uncomfortable and require some sacrifice. So it all comes down to priorities. So the question isn't why people stopped having children, but why priorities shifted so radically away from what is ultimately the most fundamentally important responsibility of humanity?
In the US from 1960-1980 many things happened. And one of these was a precipitous decline in fertility rates, plummeting by about 50% to where it would roughly stay to present day. It's quite unfortunate so many things happened in such a short time frame, because it enables one to create a reasonably compelling case for nearly any argument, including the common economic and educational (though those have many issues outside of this time frame).
One thing that also happened during that period was a dramatic decline in religiosity. And IMO that left a vacuum for meaning in society. And that vacuum seems to have been filled, for most, by indulgent hedonism that would gradually transition into consumerism. Drugs, the "sexual revolution", and various other issues skyrocketed during this period. This would further transition into the endless pursuit of the ever more expensive next shiny thing, be those Jordans, iThing, or exotic/expensive selfies for social media image crafting.
And what could be more antithetical to this shift in values and priorities than doing something that "might be uncomfortable and require some sacrifice"? There's certainly nothing more rewarding or fulfilling than raising a family, but that reward comes at immense cost and time.
---
Ok, I wanted to hit more on how this hypothesis can also work as a casual explanation for the commonly observed correlations (education, income, etc) related to lower birth rates, but this post is already getting far longer than intended.
The question is do we think that individual decisions should be allowed to kill our society?
If you think it's acceptable to let women do so then do you think men ought to be able to refuse conscription without any consequence in a time of war?
what is the alternative to individual decisions? force women to have children?
that's not the kind of world i want to live in.
i think there are a few tv series that show where that leads to.
no, the solution is to help families with children, so that the children are not a burden, but something to enjoy and look forward to.
the USA especially is famously failing at that. european countries are doing better, but obviously way more needs to be done.
as for conscription. we should aim to stop all wars. there should be no tolerance for any aggression today. any aggression should be stopped by a global, neutral police force without exception.
Pain is the least problem of child birth. If you want to realize what childbirth can do to a womans body look up what a prolapsed uterus is. That women aren't having that discussion with you probably means that women just don't want to have children with you.
>what is the alternative to individual decisions? force women to have children?
If a society has conscription for men yes. Alternatively you can have both men and women reject the social contract and only use society as a way to make money before it collapses. We don't live in a fairy tale, we don't all get to ride off into the sunset.
Are you being purposefully obtuse? The pain of giving birth is the least damaging long term effect of getting pregnant.
pain of childbirth and any of the negative after effects are not often a topic, which suggests that they are not a common reason for not wanting children, and so that can hardly be the cause for the birthrate to drop
What's more bizarre is thinking this model can change. Despite financial incentives and many other measures short of coercion, it hasn't.
Different strokes....
The deaths are involuntary. The choice not to have another birth is voluntary. This matters rather a lot, since a lot of the 20th century was spent arguing that contraception should be allowed at all on this basis. Maximising for number of people without considering their crowding leads to squalor, and legalizing and promulgating contracaption across the world has been one of the great liberating stories of the past 100 years.
Now that women have choice, the situation becomes an economic one. If having more people around matters to you economically: you have to make it economically sensible for people to have children. Increasingly there's a cost of living crisis for everyone, and children are a subset of "everyone" that can't make their own income.
Russia hands you a medal if you have lots of children; the UK cuts off child benefit after the second child, as part of an explicit "people shouldn't have children they can't afford" policy. I wonder if anyone added up the "births avoided" of the latter.
While I'm not suggesting that we go back to every car being a rolling death trap cum molotov cocktail, I'm suggesting more forbearance and a thought to cost/return analysis is probably warranted.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but not every preventable death or injury is worth the economic costs (opportunity, regulatory, whatever) that we spend to prevent them.
It feels this way, though I haven't studied it.
> While I'm not suggesting that we go back to every car being a rolling death trap cum molotov cocktail, I'm suggesting more forbearance and a thought to cost/return analysis is probably warranted.
I somewhat agree, but this raises the next question: what is the value of a human life?
It is one thing for a healthcare system or insurance group to try to maximize something (quality of life? remaining life expectancy?) for a particular budget. It is another to tradeoff saving lives against lowering vehicle costs.
Pricing people out of vehicles prices them out of access to affordable housing, decent paying jobs and a whole bunch of other things that are important to not living in poverty, by putting vehicles and access to reliable transportation out of reach for the poor, we're effective condemning them to whatever their status quo is.
Not having access to reliable transportation is not the significant factor w.r.t social mobility you are making it out to be.
Even when you adjust for inflation, the price for a cheap used car is 30-40% higher than it was a decade ago.
It seems you only discuss the rich frugal segment. What about the rest? Middle class folks in the suburbs? Poor urban people who drive to work? Etc...
I'm asking in this way because saying "... you are making it out to be" is based on some comparison between your assessment and your perception of another person's writing. That has several layers of indirection. So I would prefer to just ask you directly.
That said, I wouldn’t attribute my lack of social mobility to my decision to not own a car/lack of money to own a car.
Automobile financing can absolutely be predatory to low income workers and to a degree it might prohibit some mobility when a large portion of income goes to maintaining a vehicle just to maintain an income. Maybe there should be regulation on predatory financing?
Someone making $20k a year is going to be poor regardless if they own a car or not. Economic mobility comes from having marketable skills that provide value to others and the ability to acquire those skills. A college education is not particularly accessible to low-income folks that need to also work to pay rent and food.
Have you studied statistics? Conducted an analysis? Read a statistical study? Designed an experiment?
This (statistical analysis) is where I'd like to take the conversation, but I wanted to pause and see if that would be mutually interesting.
I'm been "done" with non-systematic understandings for a long time. Typical opinion / "analysis" (as seen even in decent newspapers) is good practice for trotting out arguments, but it rarely synthesizes information broadly and convincingly.
Even the most ardent believer of this fallacy will often break when confronted with real costs to their own life.
For example:
Cruel Capitalist: If lowering the highway speed limit to 40 miles per hour (64km/hr) would save 20,000 lives per year on US roads, should we do it?
Bleeding Heart: It would be inconvenient, but yes, it would save lives!
Cruel Capitalist: And if lowering the highway speed limit to 20 miles per hour (32km/hr) would save 40,000 lives per year?
Bleeding Heart: You know, maybe some people just aren't meant to live that long. Isn't the planet getting overpopulated anyway?
It has gone a long way from mandating seatbelts.
https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a32758625/how-many-mil...
Of course the poor, like everyone else, in theory benefits from the positive externality of other people having backup cameras and other safety features.
The car seat requirement limits the extended family who can take kids off your hands for a few hours.
Aunts and uncles used to pop over and take us out for an afternoon at the zoo or to get ice cream. Nowadays I can't take my nieces and nephews out like that until they're practically teenagers because I don't have car seats.
"Sorry no, I don't have a car seat. And I can't get it from you today because it's with you at the office."
The permissible lateral movement specs can be hard to hit even if you know the tricks.
Maybe the first time ever, with safety anxiety it could take half an hour, but also any police or fire department will just do it for you.
"permissible lateral movement specs"? What manual are you reading?
So I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound - and I might even go so far as to suggest you check the lateral movement specs on your child car seat to make sure you are within tolerance. The rule of thumb seems to be no more than 1-inch side-to-side movement at the belt path [2].
I had this one single mother I’d take all the time and she’d have that seat in under two minutes, just clip the little hooks and strap in the kid.
Don’t know how properly the seats were installed because I honestly didn’t care and I never touched the things because then I’d be liable in the case of an accident.
Never once had someone take half an hour because I’d have been pissed for them wasting my time.
What?
So in this case "rolling death trap cum molotov cocktail" means a rolling death trap that becomes moltov cocktail, in a rather unpleasant explodey fiery fashion.
Ala the ford pinto or GM pickups with the gas tanks outside the frame rails.
Which were the two I was thinking of when I wrote that phrase.
Yes, it does disproportionately effect the poor, but that isn’t the fault of safety regulations, it is the fault of societal issues w.r.t wealth inequality, social mobility, etc. California’s housing crisis isn’t caused because new houses need solar panels, for example.
Not sure where you're getting that, it sure as hell contributes. Several thousand dollars extra to every house is just another cost on the pile. It's death by a thousand regulatory cuts.
Way up.
The regulatory hurdles others have mentioned are why having a zoned and permitted structure is so valuable. Having a home so you can do a single wall teardown is worth hundreds of thousands at least - maybe more because it can clear existential regulatory hurdles that block development.
The nimbyism you mention is possible because of these bad regulations, which in theory exist for the greater good -- but which in practice do not provide for it.
I grew up in the Bay Area, specifically the east bay, back in the 70’s and 80’s when there was actually empty land to be had. I was driving through there a couple weeks ago and it’s all gone, one big metro all the way down past San Jose.
All this land you speak of is far from where the jobs are so there’s no incentive to live there without a three hour commute each way. The Bay Area is restricted by the bay (obviously) and the coastal range which isn’t all that wide. They haven’t really let people develop on the hills (except the rich people building mansions) in my lifetime at the very least which is why they don’t all look like the Oakland hills these days.
Far less than half the available valley areas are developed along the 680 corridor between 580/24. The commute to Oakland is 25 minutes and to SF by BART is one hour.
Even on the bay side there are large empty spaces which aren't being developed, often because development is tied up in decades of litigation -- litigation which is based around these onerous regulatory laws.
I'm sure the change you're seeing during a casual visit is striking. But, have you stopped to look at the empty lots which still remain? Have you researched why they're still empty? I have - and this is why.
There's room for entire new cities to be built along 580, between Castro Valley and Dublin. There are vast tracks of empty land along 24, in the lamorinda areas, just minutes away from Oakland.
It's not, relative to other costs. Septic costs around $10k and trenching sewer to lots in urban areas is relatively cheap. Homes on septic are very common and are already regulated. There are also many plots of relatively cheap land with sewer access. I can think of about 20+ buildable acres in my city, for example. The only thing holding back construction is an onerous and expensive permitting process which mostly focuses on visual aspects of the potential development.
Sewer hookups for dense living isn't the part of the permitting process that's the problem.
"This method may be laws and governments of varying qualities."
We are discussing situations where the aggregate impact of these laws becomes a net negative.
Solar is mandated on roofs, and you still need a permit for it, neat, eh?
It is death by a thousand cuts.
Another way to say this is that supply for housing is currently consumed by buyers who can afford the extra cost for solar panels. Until the supply is high enough to where buyers who can't afford the extra $Xk for solar panels are needed to buy the available new housing, the cost of solar isn't a major factor in the housing crisis.
It could eventually be a major factor, but until more housing is built, there are other factors in play that impact the lack of housing more.
If it is death by a thousand cuts, the problem is the thousand cuts, not any single cut in particular.
You're presuming there's no elasticity in supply. That even if pricing goes up there's not any additional units built.
Maybe I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. I’m not making any assumptions about elasticity. If supply increases, I’m saying that the extra cost of solar doesn’t matter (yet) so long as the pool of buyers is large enough that the supply can be consumed by buyers who can afford the extra cost for solar.
It isn’t until either the supply gets bigger or the buyer pool gets smaller that the cost of solar would have an impact (when the entire supply couldn’t be bought by people with the means to afford the extra cost of solar). At that point you’ll see more pricing pressure to finally drive prices downwards (if that ever happens).
Simple econ stuff: add a $10k per-unit "tax" to producers; the cost is borne by the suppliers and consumers according to the elasticity of the supply and demand curves, and quantity decreases.
https://www.reviewecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/excise...
The shaded regions are, of course, slightly different when you're imposing a cost on suppliers that results in some value to the buyer. But the intersection of the supply and demand curves moves left, which means quantity falls.
The only case that quantity doesn't change is if there's no elasticity.
Wouldn’t this all assume balanced supply/demand? Which isn’t what we have in CA. I guess you’re saying that demand isn’t elastic? It seems like an odd term to use to describe a situation where demand >>> supply. It’s not like demand is fixed, but it is so far beyond supply on the curve that it acts as a constant?
Demand equals supply at the price in a market economy (in the long run). If the demand is high and there's an absolute shortage, sellers are incentivized to raise prices. Then the intersection between the supply curve and demand curve set the price and quantity.
The slopes of the two curves may be shallow, though. There may be a large demand for housing at nearly any price (inelastic demand), and supply may not react too much to price (inelastic supply).
How elastic the curves are sets what happens if you add a fixed cost in: who bears the cost, and how much the quantity changes.
There is no upper bound on how safe we can make cars which is why they now cost more than a house did in 1950.
We are essentially stopping the poor from reproducing because we've decided that their lives aren't worth living. Which is fine, until you realize that to billionaires neither are ours.
Yes, because of safety mandates the price of a new car has gone up. I bought a brand new base model Toyota for $11k in 2001, and the cheapest brand new cars now are closer to $20k.
BUT, cars now also last far, far longer. There is still a massive market for cars under $10k that will run for many 10s of thousands, if not 100 thousand more miles with minimal maintenance.
20 years ago cars wouldn't start. Or, you'd need to know just how to turn the key or finesse the clutch. None of that is a thing any more.
Yes, safety makes cars more expensive. It definitely saves lives. But, I'd need evidence that there are not cars available for the poor. It's only NEW cars that are unavailable, but you can find plenty of cars with backup cameras and a lot of life left in them for cheap in the used car market.
Median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
CPI - New Vehicles: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA01
NEW car prices may have grown faster than income, BUT cars last far longer, so there's more market availability at the lower price point. There are more used cars that are reliable for sale.
Covid has us in a weird used car bubble, but generally, once that blip is over we're in an era where reliable cheap cars have far less issues than any time in the past.
Your mental framework of greater reliability leading to a glut of used cars is still theoretical at this point. Used car prices are up 33% from 2001-2022. I don't think it's a sound assumption to believe the rise in car prices is a "blip". The supply chain is as fragile as it ever was. With a move to onshoring (e.g. the chips act), a war with Russia and much-worsening Chinese tensions, I don't see anything but a secular shift in how cars are manufactured.
[0] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...
In terms of mechanical reliability and longevity, this is certainly correct. But I'm really curious what the software side is going to be like, with cars being more and more dependent on the Cloud or other online services. At some point, older APIs and services will be deprecated, effectively disabling the cars. This will be quite extreme with Teslas, of course, but other cars are catching up in terms of requiring a more or less constant Internet connection.
Put another way, if "CPI - New Vehicles" accounted for all of CPI, the comparison you give would mean that people get 9% more car for their income than they did in 2001.
To do this right you'd need to compare nominal median household income, which has gone from ~42k to ~67k over the period in question, an increase of ~60%. This leads me to believe that the ability of the typical household to afford a car increased 2001-2020
Nominal median household income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
There are over 4 million vehicle related injuries per year. How many of those are in the 0-13 year old range, and how many of them are life long?
If they're too expensive, people should take transit.
Cars should be safe, legal, and rare.
https://www.childrenssafetynetwork.org/sites/default/files/c...
> While initial laws typically applied to children ages one to three, since the mid-1990s mandated age limits have seen a huge ratcheting upwards. The median age at which children are allowed to ride in just a seat belt in U.S. states is now eight, and every single law change has increased the age, not reduced it (with the average state making 3.2 such age changes). Enthusiasm for these laws has not been curbed by studies showing that child car seats are no more effective than seat belts in preventing death or serious injury for children above age two (e.g. Levitt 2008, Doyle and Levitt 2010). This may be due to the perception that such mandates are virtually costless, beyond that of the car seats themselves.
My take? Yes on the above. Also, (a) parents are very risk averse w.r.t. their kids and (b) few lawmakers would vote against even marginal or non-existent safety benefits regarding children -- as long as the mandate makes intuitive sense to most voters.
https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/levitt_carsea...
Conversely, I think the fact that we don't see a reduction in the number of deaths is pretty good evidence that car seats also don't significantly reduce the likelihood of serious injury. Perhaps there are certain types of injuries that car seats are more effective than seat belts at preventing - but I would like to see some strong evidence first to justify making car seats mandatory.
That would be a welcome change as far as I am concerned. Front bench seats!
The 7-seater Tiguan which is just big enough to squeeze the parents in when they visit and compact enough for 5 in the city otherwise. Not quite big enough for a road trip for 6 though.
I personally would rather get a 6 seater truck than a bigger SUV for the most part, but I don’t have to haul around 6 or 7 on a regular basis.
That said, thank you, I wasn't aware of the concept before!
> Women with two children younger than their state’s age mandate have a lower annual birth probability of 0.73 percentage points.
0.73% less than what?
On page 2:
> We find that a woman’s annual probability of giving birth declines by 0.73 percentage points when a she has two children below the car seat age, a 7.8% relative drop for women with two children.
As in, for women in the cohort they're using, in any given year 10.65% of them will become pregnant. But if you consider only women with two car-seat-age kids, this falls by 0.73 points to 9.92%.
I'd be happy with that-which-could-be-performed if only that modern huge console wasn't a barrier between the two front seats, and all with no risk of pregnancy; but if we have to go to the trouble to climb into the back seat babymaker, well, all bets are off.
It's surprising what you don't "need" when you can't have it.
The only case that I have seen work is with two rear facing seats on the outer seats and a small/narrow front facing seat in the middle.
I wish manufacturers hadn’t killed off MPVs. Now we are stuck with older models with less to no hybrid/electric drivetrains at higher than new cost. Or getting a huge (for Europe standards) car or an gas guzzling van.
Edit: turns out that, in the Netherlands, a car seat in the center seat isn’t required if it doesn’t fit in your car. Only a raised seat is allowed if the kids are smaller than 135cm. But what about safety? Then the middle one won’t have a car seat.
Car seats as contraception - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24647487 - Oct 2020 (329 comments)
Here's some Cake:
As America’s GDP falls from population and immigration decline, I think things like this and especially Roe v Wade overturn, which I believe will have the complete opposite effect that the GOP desires, will become more important.
If you want ever increasing growth you have to have ever increasing population. The alternative is aging debt-ridden Japan.
* there is too many people
* people are destroying earth
* fewer people are born, but more people live longer, so we are fine
Bottom line is: we desperately need more children born, and at the same time we are doing everything to discourage potential parents from producing any. Car seats are just a tip of an iceberg. Schools, police, social services, nosy neighbors, political activists are all actively making life of parents living hell. This must stop. Society must help parents. Couple thousand bucks a year in tax deductions is not help, it's a pittance. Do you know how much daycare costs? Add on top of it sleepless nights; add occasional child sickness meaning you can't go work and have a career, god forbid some mental illness or other disability. Parents are literally sacrificing their lives for future generations, as the rest of you a$$holes travel, drink, go clubs, go concerts, have sex, and not only care less about what happens to humanity tomorrow, but work on actively discouraging people from giving life to someone else. This is a f#ing disgrace.
Sorry for rant.
Should automation not allow less people to acomplish and care for more?
Better to reach equilibrium or very slow contraction. Give social and economic systems time to adapt.
Have you forgotten that the world population is still rapidly rising?
If the population drops to 5 billion, we can start talking about needing more children. Maybe.
We had plenty of people a hundred years ago, and that was only 2 billion.
I agree that parents should be supported more, but your premise is really off.
Here is a thought experiment: imagine nobody dies and nobody gets born for 50 years. Population not changed. Is humanity in the same position? No, because by now everyone is 50+ years old and physically incapable of reproducing, and now mankind is as good as extinct.
One of the worse population pyramids in the world, Japan, is only slowly shrinking on the base. They are not inverting, but squaring, like Finland, turning a pyramid into a column. Which is good: newborn has almost a guarantee of living at least 60-70 years.
Here's another thought experiment: assets are currently in the hands of the baby boomers. Young people don't have access to those assets, and there are a lot of boomers. Once the boomers get cleared from the population, a lot of those assets get transferred to the younger people, which now have all the incentives to have kids.
So plenty of hypothesis there. Are we in an Universe 25, headed towards complete collapse? Or just purging the boomer generation? Time will tell.
Do you really believe what you are saying? Because recent pandemic was your chance. I presume you were not wearing masks and never got vaccinated, right?
>between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000–10,000 surviving individuals. (This is disputed but for the purpose of a thought experiment, good enough.)
If over the next couple generations the population of the Earth dropped 90% it would bring us back to the year 1760. If robots are doing all the work, and good stewards of humans, who is to say the population couldnt reduce drastically over centuries and also not collapse into chaos and anarchy and apocalypse?
> * there is too many people
If there's any negative feedback effect, like, "holy shit, we have no space-- let's breed less!" then it's all just fine if you have a ton of people around.
Population contracts; there's more resources available per person; population increases. It seeks equilibrium.
If there's even any subgroups breeding above replacement stably, this all works out: the subgroups that breed above replacement replace the groups that breed below replacement.
> we desperately need more children born
Human population isn't contracting.
Even if it starts contracting 10% per generation (call that 25 years), we'll still be over a billion people 475 years from now. Population is increasing; we're not about to start shrinking by 10% per generation anytime soon. There's nothing "desperate" about this.
On the other hand, if we wreck the whole planet and 90% of us die off, we'll reach a billion people in the relatively short term.
Should we be immediately worried that our population is infinity while our resources are finite? If not, why are we worried about extinction from basically the same point?