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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

This is a rather serious issue but very few people care. It is at least as important as global warming.

Media and politicians don't care at all.

Yet the world population keeps growing [0], the majority of the world's countries have increased the retirement age since the 2010s [1], and there's more measured productivity per worked hour than ever [2], correlated with people having to work less for the same wealth. The Gini index on a macro level hasn't changed much [3], either.

I fail to see why this issue might be "at least as important as global warming".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_(UN).svg

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_since_WWII.svg

>Yet the world population keeps growing [0],

It's about the survival of peoples, nations, cultures and civilizations. I fail to see how it's not important.

>I fail to see why this issue might be "at least as important as global warming".

See the previous sentences.

Peoples , nations, cultures, and civilizations existed with 1/5 of the population 100 years ago. Cultures should adapt to population, not the other way around

This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions. A drastic reduction could cause serious short term issues for humanity (not for any other form of life) but were not here at all, curves are stabilizing around 2kids.

You shouldn't be afraid to let go of the gas pedal on the freeway, the car won't stop straight away. Especially if your speed is exponential for 300 years and everyone know keeping accelerating is gonna harm the majority life conditions.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1500..lat...

The issue is that retirement systems are built on a certain assumption of the population pyramid. This will cause very serious political and societal strife as the retired will largely have more political and financial power and the few young will be (attempted) to be bled dry to maintain the system

> a certain assumption of the population pyramid

What is this assumption? The pyramid should look like… a pyramid? Don’t you see the elephant in the room: the population can’t infinitely grow on a finite universe.

GDP, dept, income… anything that is virtual can grow as long as you find a way to describe and write them. Ressources and space can be optimized within the boundary of what the known science let us do and what the humans tolerate.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a future with 100s Billions humans eating delicious and healthy meals made of pure fusion energy in a Saturn orbit cafè. Let’s find out solutions of the problems caused by the current demography before increasing it, otherwise it’s betting our descents future on the retirement system.

>This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions

So the operation succeeds but the patient is dead? The survival of people and cultures trumps GHG emissions. Unless you prefer an empty planet with no GHG emissions.

We’re at the highest the human population has ever been. Worrying about an “empty planet” seems extremely silly.

The incentives will change as population decreases to where having kids is profitable at some point in the curve

They are connected though. I know many people under the age of 35 who choose not to have kids because they don't want to bring children into a world threatened by climate change.

Here in Finland, a female child born today has a >50% chance to live to an age of 100. That means our new children will probably still be alive in 2123. The projections for worst-case climate change over that time span are terrifying. You can't blame people for not wanting that kind of future for their children.

If you want people to have more kids in the West, doing something about climate change is part of the solution, not a separate issue.

For every single decade in the 20th century there was some kind of doom hanging over our head.

Imagine deciding to have kids in the 80s where the two superpowers were pointing insane amounts of nuclear weapons at each oter. Or in the 70s when people feared a new ice age. Not to mention 1910 or 1930.

You may say "but this time it is real". The nuclear threat in the 80s was very real as well. As was WW1 and WW2.

Finland has done it's part against climate change. They built a large nuclear power plant, and can run the rest of the economy using PV and wind. Retire ICE vehicles, and then be proud of yourself and be more optimistic.

Even in the worst case scenarios the climate in finland will be just fine...

> I know many people under the age of 35 who choose not to have kids because they don't want to bring children into a world threatened by climate change.

Do you think the majority of people are into that ideology?

I didn't claim there's any kind of majority. It's a factor for people I know.

Why is it serious?

Most countries social security systems rely on workers today paying in.

The dependency ratio of workers to people on pensions may get to the point where it breaks.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOPDPNDOLUSA

Yeah, but more worker doesn't automatically mean more money for pensions.

What matters is productivity and the workers share of it.

Fewer workers with higher wages have the same effect on pension payments.

Pretty much hot topic in finland right now

Aging population, lower economic growth (less consumer demand for goods and services).

Aging population per se isn't a problem, because better hygiene, lower child mortality and enough food creates the same effect.

Lower economic growth doesn't have to be. Fewer people means less supply on workforce means higher wages means higher purchasing power. The existing people would like to be more, but can't afford because of low wages. Fewer people will give them leverage.

Higher purchasing power per person not overall. That would increase the wealth inequality divide and the aging population would suffer as lower and middle class services struggle in favour of high wealth services. We are seeing that in clothing at the moment, high end clothing is doing really well but serves fewer people.

Japan is a country to watch, it has an aging population but historically good support for middle class services through lots of small businesses. If that changes for them it is a bad sign for the West, as we generally have greater wealth divides to begin with.

I'm talking about workers, they are mostly middle and lower class. Your example of higher clothing, it's not the workers who do really well, it's the designers and labels. Wouldn't consider them as workers.

Less pollution, less global warming, lower use of resources, less conflict.

Counties with declining populations tend to become industrial catastrophes.

Japan and Fukushima come to mind. Russia does too.

Russia and Ukraine both have abysmal fertility rates. I don’t see less conflict there. Or between China and Taiwan.

I doubt that that's a causality. Japan isn't a catastrophe compared to any country with a rising birth rate.

And Fukushima was an accident caused by a natural disaster and human errors. More babies wouldn't have prevented that.

Because it's exponential decay: population_n = population_0 * 0.55^n (made-up exponent).

In any oscillating trajectory you’d see exponents above and below 1. Tomorrow’s birth rate is not impacted by today’s. But the fear is that today’s birth rate will continue forever until societal collapse, which seems unlikely.

Extinction of peoples, nations, cultures and civilizations is not trivial. At least for normal people.

8 billion people isn't extinction of people and nations, cultures and civilizations went extinct even with and sometimes because of more people. Resources are limited and more people fighting over them leads to war which leads to extinction of nations, cultures, civilization and people.

> It is at least as important as global warming.

Global warming is irreversible, low birth rates are not.

"Irreversible" feels like an overstatement for a planet that has documented swings in both its temp and atmospheric composition. I'd agree the timescales of changing warming trends is certainly slower than birth rates, though.

Fine, irreversible on a human scale. The last time the earth was this hot (known as the Eemian period) was back when humans just started migrating from northern Africa to the Arabian peninsula, ~125000 years ago.

That's a whole lotta damage done in under 200 years since we industrialized.

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