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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t a low birth rate considered good? It’s one of the defining attributes of a developed nation. Not to mention the ecological footprint of each human, contributing to pollution, climate change, and overpopulation? Humanity should be striving to flatten and eventually reverse population growth, so achieving a low rate like this should be admirable.

Maybe it’s bad for our current economic systems, but as we reduce birth rates we also need to be looking for economic systems that don’t simply rely on an ever-increasing population of worker bees.

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It is debatable whether we really have an overpopulation problem or not. Pollution in general is caused by industry not individuals. You could argue big industry is the result of a large population but it's still a systems problem imo.

Reversing population growth means having an ever increasing population of elderly people and increased burden on the young to support those elderly. It's hard to see solutions to this that aren't dystopian and downright cruel.

We do have an overpopulation problem if we expect to increase the quality of life of everyone on Earth.

Wealth-wise, the global bottom 50% emit on average 1.4 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per year. The top 10% emits 28.7 tCO2e [1].

We're not talking about billionaires when we mention "the top 10%. This was a 2019 study, so 10% of the population was about 770 million people— that's roughly the population of the whole of Europe [2].

That bottom 50% deserve their living standards to be elevated. They deserve and should get sewage, home appliances, water pipes, electricity, cars, meat, video games, disposable income, etc etc. When that happens, half of the population could be producing one or two orders of magnitude more tCO2e. Someone in that 10% right now is producing 205x more tCO2e than someone in that bottom 50%, and it isn't because they own private jets, it's because they can afford a washer and dryer.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00955-z#:~:text=G...).

[2]: https://www.worldometers.info/geography/7-continents/

> We do have an overpopulation problem if we expect to increase the quality of life of everyone on Earth.

This assumes that technology remains constant.

There are fundamental limits to physics, to space and to time. If the next generation wants cars, single family housing, authentic meat and fish and various other amenities, there needs to be less competition for resources.

As it stands now, technology is not catching up and a smaller percentage of them will have access to those amenities.

We can't just create more oil out of thin air. Progress on batteries is too slow and renewables and electric cars are too expensive. We're already over-fishing and over-farming the earth with our current population. We are missing all of our climate targets, and that's on an earth where most don't live in developed countries yet.

We could replace those needs with technology like VR experiences and processed food for example, but I have a hard time seeing how that will be enough.

Bringing in younger migrants from countries still growing in population to help look after our elderly is probably the only realistic one (we already do that pretty heavily in Australia despite population growth). At least there's not a problem of space/infrastructure to solve.

That's a good solution for english/latin speaking countries since there's a large pool of migrants to choose from which already know the language but for a country like Japan with its niche language and specific customs.. it's much tougher unless they wish to change their culture which they probably don't and having migrants assimilate into their culture isn't an easy ask either.

It's also only a viable solution for countries with small/medium populations. As India and China start ageing it's going to be hard for them to find the hundreds of millions of migrants required.

I'd imagine China will indeed start to pull out all stops to attract younger migrants at some point, and I'd guess many may even come from India, and certainly from large countries with high fertility like Nigeria. But sure, it can only help so much if too much of the world's population is living in countries with unbalanced demographics.

By that time India will get close to par to China in per capita GDP, and will hopefully still remain democratic. Why would Indians do that?

Even if India's per capita GDP has largely caught up, there'd still be a substantial underclass of young workers who are likely to be attracted by higher incomes they could get in China, given the differences in income distribution. And migrants nearly always sacrifice a certain amount of democratic franchise just by virtue of not living in a country where they have citizenship - it doesn't seem to be a great deterrent, compared to other cultural/language barriers and having to live far from family etc.

All of those worker source countries are facing their own aging problems. It’s not a solution.

They may eventually. And no, it's not a long term global solution, but it buys enough time to avoid the worst impacts in a real demographic crunch. You are right though that, for instance, the outflux of healthcare works from countries like the Phillipines to Australia and other nations with greater income potential does cause strain on their own healthcare systems.

> Pollution in general is caused by industry not individuals.

Industry that serves a number of individuals, so the relationship is direct.

It's not just the economy. A large, old population needs care, which needs to be provided by younger people. It's a problem if these younger people do not exist. The population decreasing as a whole is probably good, but a population that has many old people and few young people will be struggling.

At some point it stops even to pretend to be a society and is just a labour camp.

> low birth rate considered good

considered good by who??? Can you quote some sources? Bloomberg article from above:

> The lack of babies carries long-term risks for the economy by reducing the size of the workforce that underpins its growth and vitality. Welfare spending for an aging population also drains national coffers that could otherwise be utilized to promote businesses, research and other enterprises that are key to prosperity.

This should be taken as an opportunity to automate/remote more things, so less workers are needed to support the economy. It's a problem that warns decades before its arrival.

Smaller populations isn't a bad thing, but a rapid declining population is. At a stable birthrate of 2.1 there would be a workforce of approx 60% of the population compared to 20% elderly and 20% minors.

( Assuming productive age is 20-80 and all people die at 100 )

Once you enter a low birthrate of 1 that would mean at some point your workforce could be cut in half and your elderly population could be doubled. Now, 40% of the workforce will end up needing to sustain a 50% elderly population and 10% would be minors. If you're not carefull the loss of capital in the workforce could mean less people desire to have kids in a world that cannot sustain their needs. Leading to a feedback loop that is very hard to get out of.

One way of improving the situation is by cutting back on all non-essential programs for decades in order to stabilise the population at the magical 2.1 number.

A culture that is not able to sustainably replace itself will eventually die out or be replaced by another culture, regardless of their merit.

> we also need to be looking for economic systems that don’t simply rely on an ever-increasing population of worker bees

Apart from a robotic class of workers, forcing older people to produce, or forcing down living standards, this isn’t a problem different economic systems can solve. It’s fundamental to input/output.

Also, stable populations aren’t super problematic. 0.78 is way below replacement, however.

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