The De-Population Bomb
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Once the retirement system is socialized or provided by insurance the role of kids for future retirement support immediately goes out of the window and so is the ROI. You privately spend 1 million dollars each to raise them, but society gets to reap the rewards collectively. It's a losing proposition and only a non-smart person would commit to such agreement.
If countries want to raise their birthrates they should immediately liquidate all their pension funds and insurance funds (both public and private) and transfer the stock/bonds owned by such entities to the holders of such rights.
Also countries should stop policing how people raise their kids. Many parents might want a slightly more ignorant kid in the realm of philosophy/English/math... but prioritizing values of family and most importantly the only value that matters to them: taking care of parents as they enter old age , when I say taking care I mean both financially and socially.
Average kid costs $227k, not a million. Just wanted to clarify since that number was very off. The cost of raising a child is growing extremely quickly though, much faster than inflation.
https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/21/pf/cost_raising_child/index...
Edit: That was 10 years ago, probably higher today, but pretty sure it still isn't close to a million.
Kids are expensive but they can be as expensive as you want them to be, as evidenced by poor people having them.
Frankly speaking, if I never get to have kids, I couldn't care less what happens to me when I'm an old fart, ideally I would never reach that age at all.
Well of course, because they don't need it due to the fact that it's already there in the form of socialized retirement.
Remove socialized retirement , pension funds etc. and people will start having more kids as they'd start seeing them as a retirement insurance yet again. As they were seen for the whole history of mankind (and still are in high fertility countries).
It's time we face the fact that people don't make kids out of love but out of need. If you remove the need and you'd remove the kids, which is what is happening.
So is tax evasion, CO2 emissions etc. What are the odds of being audited by the IRS ? What are the odds of being punished for illegally burning weeds? What are the odds of being punished for modifying your semi diesel engine so that you can do the "rolling coal" thing?
When you move from the level of the individual up to the level of society at large, solving problems (or in this case situations that certain people deem as problems) becomes harder not easier.
Good luck trying to force people to have kids and police people's penises and vaginas. Besides it's not even necessary...Nigeria and sub-saharan Africa will take care of that "problem" much like China takes care of the iPhone production problem now.
That's why categories exist. The first world can't do the job of the third world and vice versa, each should do their own job.
Let's take the semantics out of it. People are deciding to have kids less frequently. Obviously there are reasons for it.
For perspective, my grand grand mother had 16 kids. All her grand grand children who are my generation that I know of have either two or three, with no apparent plans to have any more.
How many would have opted for birth control were it more readily available and effective?
Consider that your projections don't apply to people from a 100 years ago.
If you went back in a time machine, and said “here’s some medicine, take it if you wanna stop at three kids” and changed nothing else societally, would everyone who had 16 kids still opt to have 16?
I think it’s unlikely every single woman would make the same choice given an alternative. Modern or otherwise.
That should answer the silly question.
She's not a character from a novel written by a modern day feminist about how hard and traumatic life is in a Middle Eastern country because she has to carry the burden of raising children.
The number of people who had 16 and didn’t want 16 is also non-zero.
Availability of birth control coinciding with a fall in number of children per family suggests what the balance between the two might look like.
And if you ask any mother with >4 children she will tell you that 3 children is the maximal burden in terms of work. Once you have more than 4 children the job gets easier, not harder. Experience, older children pitching in, being forced to drop what's not important, et cetera. One father described it as "zone defense" rather than "man-on-man defense".
But the dollar cost does not go down. Time off work + $250K per child mean that only the rich can have more than 2 children.
Even things like private schooling levels off (many have a “all kids after three or four are free). The biggest one that doesn’t level off would be college.
Many health insurance plans charge for up to two or three kids and then stop increasing.
I know families with 8+ kids and none have made more than $150k a year and some are way below that.
What I would say, though, is that many women want to have kids later in life, and then this probably has an effect on the number of kids they get to have.
Many people have a "I'll have kids after X" where X keeps changing until suddenly they realize they're running out of time.
It's not the man's job to help with child rearing. It's the exact opposite: it's the woman's job to take care of the house so her man can go out there in the world and build up his business or career (or whatever it is), because that is how he fulfills his role in the family.
That's how it has always been done. This is common to all societies with high fertility.
It would be better if people saved up for their own retirement over time and did not depend on the government forcing the working force to give up their income.
The US had that exact system up until about 1935 - when Social Security was founded. It turns out that if we let people save for their own retirement, the vast majority will choose not to.
You can't actually save up the things that retirees need. They will mostly require services. No matter how much cash has been set aside up to pay for it, the supply of services is largely dependent on the labour force available. The production and consumption of services needs to balance instantaneously.
“Sweet, I’m putting all of it in Terra $LUNA!”
Welcome to a golden age of scams.
The charts at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4818a1.htm are pretty striking.
It simply means that you get to keep your own money and get to decide each on your own if you want to test your pills before popping them or if you want install safety systems in your car before hitting the road.
I think it's very peculiar that the US became so socialized given that every kid in the country dreams of hitting the walk-off Home run in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series
The developed world.
> It simply means that you get to keep your own money and get to decide each on your own if you want to test your pills before popping them or if you want install safety systems in your car before hitting the road.
Again, we tried that. We have concrete evidence of how that works.
"Test your own pills" is silly enough I don't think I need to address it.
Car manufacturers got pushed, kicking and screaming, into seatbelts, airbags, and a variety of other safety measures. Market pressure didn't do it, but thousands of people a year stay alive because of that regulation.
> I think it's very peculiar that the US became so socialized given that every kid in the country dreams of hitting the walk-off Home run in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series
These are two very odd things to attempt to tie together.
Right. The famous, old, debunked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus. Of course.
Western countries with their lack of intergenerational support and lack of affordable child care while we have stagnating wages are probably the major reason.
That's your ROI; you spend time and energy raising them, caring for them, cleaning for them, providing for them. In return, they give you affection, love, you enjoy playing with them, or having conversation with them.
If you are someone who does not enjoy spending time with children, or do not think you will enjoy seeing them grow, you usually... avoid having children since you do not see the return.
At some point, you made the decision to have children because you think you would be happier with some.
The first one was actually an accident. As is so often the case. Life cannot always be explained using an Homo oeconomicus.
However, before you are in that situation, ROI calculations absolutely do apply. To give you an example - most people on HN that have children probably have 1-3 of them - and that's about as many as they wanted to have. But if you somehow happened to already have 10 children, would you then be selling 7-9 of them (or indeed any) to the circus? Of course not. You would love them, care for them and do the best you can, and you would miss each of them dearly if they were gone.
And yet, given any degree of control over the situation, you would probably try not to have so many. Why not? Because of some calculation - let's call it the ROI calculation. It is precisely the same calculation that keeps you from having 10 children that keeps others from having any children at all.
Did you enjoy spending time with other toddlers so much, that you thought you would enjoy it more than all your other hobbies (which you may have to give up), that you wanted to be doing it during the majority of your downtime, have sleepless nights etc.?
edit: Extra points for not using ponzinomics to justify it.
I'm looking for those who assert it is a good thing. You said "we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world" which to me suggests it is not a good thing.
If there are more people, it's fine, we should engineer the way to accomodating them without damaging the environment too much.
If there are less people being born, this is also fine, as human population is sort of self-regulating in this regard. Perhaps there is also some engineering needed to adjust for this scenario as well.
But neither growth nor decline are to be regulated in any way.
That cannot possibly be true. A single person can consume a huge amount of resources - far more than any of us currently does. For example, by setting a building on fire, you have consumed that building. We already have a near-infinite capacity for consumption.
Or did you mean something different? If so, could you please explain it better? How can economic growth rely on increasing consumption? Because I would love to consume a yacht - where do I sign up to help economic growth by consuming one?
If the population goes down, the system will go through a phase of chaos before stabilising (E.G: retirement systems will default, factories will not have enought workers, companies not enought clients, loan will not get repaid...), and people are very afraid of that. Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently.
I would argue exponential growth being exponentially hard to maintain, the chances that the system collapse are the highest anyway. Better that it does with a decline in population than a decline in resources. We can stabilitise and recover more easily from the first, than from the other one.
There were several times in the history of humanity when we here just a few millions. If we plan, we can even control the fall instead of going full throttle.
But we won't plan, nobody wants to vote for the end of the good times. We will protest, fight to keep the growth, and we will crash. We always do.
Hardly, you can find plenty of societies that operated at a steady state or even a decline. Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency. Companies don’t become more efficient than their competitors for all time, they become more or less efficient as new management and workers take over. Look at the biggest companies from 1920’s and most have failed or been taken over.
Shrinking populations don’t inherently destroy retirement systems they at most force people to work longer or receive fewer benefits. Social security for example hands people about a 10x benefit range based on contributions but if the minimum acceptable benefit is X, there isn’t an inherent need to hand out more than that.
That's a beautiful theory that doesn't match what we have put in application during the last century.
In pratice, our systems assume growth, and in fact the planetary resource consumption has just gone up and up. Green energy don't replace fossil fuel, it adds to them. When you give faster transport to people, stats tell us they don't spend less time in transport, they just travel more distance. When we make something cheaper, we don't keep enjoying the difference, we give it to more people. Once everybody has one, we make it disposable so people buy them again. You put computers to use less energy? Nope, people use them to do things they didn't do before, and we use more energy as a whole.
So yes, on a paper, capitalism is tied to efficiency. Practically, that's not reflected in our growth, as capitalism distorts incentive toward growth. And so the periods of capitalism are the periods with the most growth ever in human history. Also, when growth stats go down, the stock market goes down as well.
And even better, if the energy input goes down, the production goes down, and the economic health goes down. Because you need calories for all those machines producing things.
Innovation can't beat physics. At some point, if you want more, you need more resources.
False. The US electricity consumption per person has fallen in the last decade. Yet, the grid has revived continuous investments from private companies. It’s the same trend as newspapers, revenue streams require continuous investments and that continues as long as those investments have a net positive result.
It’s easy to assume people want to use endless amounts of energy, but consider once your AC gets things to a comfortable temperature lowering below that isn’t a benefit. People don’t just drive endlessly when they buy cars that use less energy, they have specific places to go and that’s it.
Efficiency doesn’t drive consumption it changes the economic equation. Hauling mangos long distances isn’t an inherent advantage from the trip, it simply allows them to be grown in a more efficient location. But, again once you’re moving them from the perfect farming location there isn’t a reason to make a longer trip after that point.
It’s easy to see a trend like people buying larger homes and assume it can continue forever, but if you look at billionaires you find they eventually find ever larger homes impractical. Rather than simply consuming more resources endlessly wealthy people shift to artificial scarcity.
I don't have stats for the US, but for the world, the trend is growth until 2016:
> It’s easy to assume people want to use endless amounts of energy, but consider once your AC gets things to a comfortable temperature lowering below that isn’t a benefit.
We invent new ways to consume power every day: video games, bitcoin, air sanitizer, food delivery...
> Hauling mangos long distances isn’t an inherent advantage from the trip, it simply allows them to be grown in a more efficient location
That's a good example: before, you just didn't eat mango if it didn't grow next to you, unless you had a lot of money.
> It’s easy to see a trend like people buying larger homes and assume it can continue forever, but if you look at billionaires you find they eventually find ever larger homes impractical
I consume more than my father, and he consumes more than my grandfather. The later didn't have a fridge when young, me, I can use a plane several times a year.
There is a huge margin between me and a billionnaire, and everybody wants to live like one.
> before, you just didn't eat mango if it didn't grow next to you, unless you had a lot of money.
But that already happened, so now once mangoes are already being shipped the energy consumption is effectively capped.
Which is my point you seem to be ignoring, you can’t extrapolate to endlessly increasing resources. Yes comparing a subsistence farmer with a billionaire you see a vast increase, but it’s a sub linear increase. What happens if everyone on earth has the lifestyle of a western billionaire, does resource consumption continue to increase or does it stall?
Also, the US delegated most of the industry in Asia, and the energy consumption moved there.
If you buy an iphone in the US, the energy used to create and ship that iphone doesn't appear on the US consumption, yet it is american.
And of course, any local consumption is affecting the world as a whole.
US per capita oil consumption peaked in 1980 and recently total consumption has also fallen. Net fossil fuel use per capita is down significantly, which is why our CO2 emissions are dropping. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
Musk will make every argument for stability because he won the lottery and wants no more draws, people who are unhappy on the other hand might use some instability because it means a bunch of new draws with high frequency.
It's also the reason why every Senator, Representative, President of every country prioritizes stability.
The population at large might have a different opinion on the matter .
Check out the book "Abundance" by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.
If a resource is finite, you are basically betting the future of the specie on its ability to find a substitute before we run out, in the context of an exponentially growing chance of failure.
Right now we are betting we can find a substitute to fossil fuel before we run out of it, while exponentially consumming more energy. We haven't so far, since nothing comes close to the logistic practically, chemical flexibility and energy density of fossil fuel.
But even if we fail at that, we can recover. We have less performant alternatives that are enough so sustain humanity, albeit not at the current level of productivity (after all, we currently build nuclear plants and wind turbines using fossil fuel).
It's less true for soil we can live and growth food on, water we can drink, air we can breath, since those are complex systems.
It's very easy to bring out that it's not a zero sum game when you can type on a computer and order delivery food. But somebody in the desert will have a very different idea of the practicality of the claim.
There are many possible configurations where we end up with the equivalent of the desert of some sort for some very important resources given our population size.
Claiming we are sure to be able to innovate ourself out of those possibilities is naive, and frankly, arrogant. I'm sure somebody used that argument on the Easter Island.
But we could expand outside our current planet, initially just for mining for precious resources, but eventually also for colonizing other planets.
The problem with fossil fuel is not that we will run out of it, but that we will make the planet uninhabitable before we can move out. What took millions of years of solar energy hitting the Earth to create, we are burning in centuries or decades. This led to climate change.
Not saying we should not try, but that should plan Z, not plan B.
Not maxing out our current petri dish should not be controversial.
It should be controversial if it means that the middle class of the developed world have to lower their standards of living, and the global poor will never get the chance to attain the next level of energy consumption per capita fueled by abundant and cheap energy sources like fossil fuels, all the while the elite advocating for such changes hold on to their jets and mansions.
Except that in most cases the new "mouth" lives an horrendous experience in overpopulated and poor countries and does not even get a shot to bring his "scalable innovation". They usually just die shortly after.
So, no. More people does not equal infinite minds for a better future and a warm, fuzzy feeling. It usually just means suffering. What you want, is more people in first world countries.
Besides, you assume you need more people to be developped, while France is only 60 millions people, smaller than a lot of developping country.
Clearly I’m boiling down more complicated arguments to one sentence descriptions but I think the point is clear. Many human centered value systems can lead you to value more human life. If you have misanthropic values, then the opposite.
Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people. If people stop having a kids, the age demographics of a country will switch from a pyramid shape to obelisk shape, with a smaller number of young people funding the retirement of a larger slice of old people. Young people will be forced to pay significantly higher taxes or retired people will be forced to relinquish some or all of their retirement benefits. Neither solution will result in a happy society.
I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view.
1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced.
2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable.
Here's the definition of Ponzi scheme from Wikipedia:
"A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors."
Social security operates in the same way. It pays earlier investors (old people) with funds from more recent investors (young people). Like a Ponzi scheme, it can only maintain stability with ever larger numbers of new investors. If the demographics shift to a much older population due to a low birth rate, there won't be enough new investors to keep the scheme going.
> 1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced.
This is exactly the scenario that's predicted to play out in South Korea, which currently has a birth rate of 0.81.
https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/south-koreas-demographic-tre...
"Workers between ages of 25-49, those who are in their prime working years, however, are expected to decline from 36.8 percent of the population to 23.1 percent by 2050."
"Based on current trends, Statistics Korea estimates that senior citizens will account for 30 percent of the population in 2036 and 40 percent by 2051."
The US isn't nearly as bad in terms of birth rates, but the decline in birth rates is a global trend that shows no signs of stopping.
> 2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable.
Social security IS inherently unstable, in that it will cease to be funded if there aren't enough young people.
When you have a primitive society, you just need a "wood guy", a "stone guy" and a "plants guy".
If you want to have fancy computers, you need things like "high pressure silane pump control loop guy".
Though I'm pretty sure the number of people needed to maintain the current level of technology is substantially less than 7 billion, because a lot of those people are stuck in subsistence farming and basically don't contribute to industry.
For those in the "Progress church", there is always space for improvement. And under the assumption that we are the ruling intellect, then more people is needed to design more things that don't exist yet. Things: space-ships, space habitats, alternate biologies, video-games, new forms of VR, virtual worlds, new drugs, new lifestyles, new social orders, new ... Yes, we could and should get more working minds by simply improving standards of living all around the world, but there is a limit to that.
There is a material argument for not having more people and their creations: our tiny-winy planet and our ecosystems can't support them. But there is so much perfectly useless and boring dust out there...
Imagine walking up to an arbitrary random person and saying “the world would be better off if you don’t exist.” Or better, imagine someone doing that to you. Not out of malice, not because you’re a bad person, not because you waste resources, just out of the premise that fewer people is a better thing intrinsically. That’d be a load of crap, right? Quod eras demonstrandum.
The optimal number of humans depends on how finite resources are in an environment. Adding an extra person to an island with a shortage of resources would likely increase human suffering.
But maybe person n+1 is able to start catching fish...
I think there's more variables and it's possible our finite resources are more than enough to sustain everyone. However, they may not be enough to sustain endless growth of capital.
As a fellow response comment illustrates, the arrogance of believing you know the "optimal number of humans" means missing out on the amazing and wonderful things future humans are going to make possible.
For context, the "Baby Boomers" were only overtaken in population by "Millenials" two years ago. That's a very long time for a group of people to enjoy political power owing purely due to when they were born. This means that political establishments become gerontocratic, as there are simply more old people to vote themselves into power.
The population-equals-power dynamic also plays out on smaller scales, too. Countries with shrinking populations are at risk of being invaded or having their economies collapse. I'm not going to argue in favor of infinite growth[0], but I will point out that certain things we are accustomed to require a minimum amount of people on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. We can see this in rural America, which has been sucked dry of its population. The only people who still live in small towns are the people who are unwilling or unable to leave, and many towns have collapsed purely due to lack of people living in them.
[0] Though I do want to point out that I haven't seen a good argument as to why degrowth won't come commensurate with a massive surge in ethnonationalism. The only society I can think of that was wholly devoid of economic growth was pre-Meiji-era Japan, and that was the result of literally sealing the country off for centuries, banning an entire religion, and enforcing a very rigid political hierarchy.
IMO, the best strategy is not playing number games and improve your current population instead, that way you increase the likelihood of problem solvers without increasing the pressure on the environment and the average quality of life.
Then there is the power-law concern: while the typical human is producing things of value, some people are producing things of extreme value, such as break-through scientific and engineering, which benefits humans immensely.
This means that more humans can make more valuable things, and that by having fewer people we also have a higher chance to miss those exceptional humans.
None of this really should be in dispute for people on these boards.
Also while some years sucked, if you picked the high point of any five year period you will find that in almost all things the current period is the best. I will except only privacy.
First, raising children shouldn't be an onerous business for two or just one; the current monogamous family is a construct from a few religions with outsize cultural influence (Paradoxically, in the absence of contraceptives monogamous families are good for population growth: you use the bare minimum of adults to raise more than a dozen kids. Ideal stuff if your goal is to go to war with the tribe on the other side of the Nile).
Second... well, second we should forsake heaven, and remain here. Let's keep working on life-extension and rejuvenation, and abolish death.
The atomisation of the western world has forced parents to singlehandedly raise their kids and enact on them their specific faults and biases, whilst crippling everyone mentally and emotionally
Here's a review article of his work: https://docs.iza.org/dp8610.pdf
From the article:
"Becker, Murphy, and Tamura show that the economy exhibits two steady states, one in which income per capita stagnates and fertility is high, and one in which there is sustained growth in income per capita and fertility is low. Thus, the model provides a joint explanation for the demographic and economic differences between pre-industrial, Malthusian economies (characterized by stagnation, a low return to human capital, and high birth rates), and growing, industrial economies with low population growth."
- Globally, there's a drop in fertility rates
- The reasons for this are complicated, but the interview seems to conclude it's due to mindset among young people
- There's no reason this has to be disastrous
- However, in the US we're doing really poorly on most things that would make a shrinking native population workable (sensible immigration policy, stable social safety net, world-class education, etc.)
- Israel is an outlier in that it seems to be avoiding the fertility rate drop of industrialized nations
- The interviewers think American exceptionalism can win the day and either return us to higher fertility rates or figure out a way around it
Unfortunately, nowhere did I see them actually make a strong case that a significantly smaller population is a bad thing. The interview is two boomers. Would they argue that America in the 1970s/1980s when they were having the time of their lives had too few people? They also gloss over any positive impacts of lower population, like housing and the environment. And finally, they seem kind of out of touch with the experience of young people - there's some reference to a few metrics at the end (they seem to think young people are "afraid" or over-value autonomy), but I get the feeling these two people don't really understand why Millennials in particular are choosing fewer children.
When there are too many people, and food is expensive or hard to get, people make fewer kids, or invest in making it cheaper (agriculture innovations - nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process [1]).
When there are too few people, and a lot of states rely on taxing youth to fund pensions and healthcare for elders, anyone able and willing to work will be paid better, attracting migrants or older workers.
[1] - Last paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Economic_and_env...
The Ukraine War is literally a Russian de-population bomb. I wonder if we will see this trend in the future when China's population start to decline in the coming years.
After some time people just tune out.
Tuning out real problems doesn't fix them.
Come to think of it, there was a 1999 GPS week-rollover problem where people fixed it in advance, too