World Population Estimated at 8 Billion | Hacker News Reader

World Population Estimated at 8 Billion

census.gov

114 pointsgeox164 comments

The end of the article raises a point in terms I hadn't quite thought about it before.

Yes, the birth rate is decreasing, but the survival rate of young children has also never been better. That would mean the number of children each woman is raising to adulthood is changing slower than the birth rate.

It cites Niger as an example where more than 1 in 5 children were dying before the age of 5, and now the number has dropped closer to 1 in 10. So as to avoid dealing with fractional numbers of children, I'm going to use an example of ten mothers, but doesn't this mean that, for a group of ten mothers to have 40 children survive to adulthood, they previously needed to give birth 50 times, but now they only need to give birth 44 times? So the birth rate can fall by more than 10% without affecting the total population in a situation where the childhood survival rate increases?

What would you call a statistic about "children who made it to adulthood, per adult woman"?

It sounds like, at least in some countries, women aren't "choosing to have smaller families" as much as "not having to give birth an additional time to bring the family number back to what it would have been had they not lost a child."

> Yes, the birth rate is decreasing, but the survival rate of young children has also never been better.

Not in the US. The infant mortality rate is increasing. https://apnews.com/article/infant-deaths-us-cdc-mortality-c8...

That report [1] shows an increase from 5.44 per 1000 to 5.60. But if you look at the longer timeline [2] you can see that its a general downward trend with the occasional slight uptick. The increase this year just looks like random fluctuation, not a reversal.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr033.pdf

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr72/nvsr72-11.pdf

Falling birth rates lag falling child mortality by a generation or two. Lived experience is the key.

I think also that's why historically, wars have come in (roughly) 50-year cycles.

> What would you call a statistic about "children who made it to adulthood, per adult woman"?

Infant mortality rate, under-5 mortality rate, child mortality rate.

Under-5 is the most common measure.

I'm referring to the inverse of this, though. I'm looking for the number of children per family who do survive childhood.

Okay so invert the number

I want to do research on the stat and what people have learned about it. I'm specifically trying to find out what that stat would be called so I can search for it in existing research, not just how to calculate it.

That would be part of it. You'd have to multiply the mortality rate by the birth rate, right?

For population growth? Yeah

I was responding to "children who made it to adulthood, per adult woman"

Isn’t that statistic basically the population growth rate?

Not really, because the population growth rate also includes adults dying later.

If someone dies at 75 instead of 80, their mother isn't going to consider giving birth another time to maintain the family size, but that person still gets counted in the total population size for five extra years.

I'm wondering how we could separate out these two situations.

That's just the life expectancy metric.

Sure, but how do you separate out the change in life expectancy metric for people who do survive childhood from the ones who don't?

Basically the stat I'm looking for is "number of children per family that survive to adulthood," because I want to compare the change in that to the change in birth rate.

That is "total fertility rate"

>The total fertility rate in a specific year is defined as the total number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her child-bearing years and give birth to children in alignment with the prevailing age-specific fertility rates. It is calculated by totalling the age-specific fertility rates as defined over five-year intervals. Assuming no net migration and unchanged mortality, a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman ensures a broadly stable population. Together with mortality and migration, fertility is an element of population growth, reflecting both the causes and effects of economic and social developments. The reasons for the dramatic decline in birth rates during the past few decades include postponed family formation and child-bearing and a decrease in desired family sizes. This indicator is measured in children per woman.

That's still not quite what I'm looking for. I want to compare that stat to the total number of children the average woman raises to adulthood, to understand better how an improved survival rate affects the number of children a woman gives birth to.

I'm looking for the term itself because I want to look up existing research on the subject, but can't figure out what to search for because I don't know what that stat would be called.

These two effects are not similar in scale. Fertility across the globe is falling by a lot. Africa went from 6.7 to 4.2 in a span of 50 years. Asia went from 6 to 1.9.

Anywhere but least developed countries child mortality is low, such that fertility replacement level is estimated at 2.1 (vs 2.0 if everyone survived until reproductive age).

We used to have 5-6 kids, with one dying if you were a bit unlucky (statistically speaking). Now we have 2 or less.

Sure, it's not the full cause of the fall in birth rates.

Somehow it had just never occurred to me that of course any family that has an "ideal size" is going to have fewer births if all the children survive than it will if one or more of them die, and now I'm trying to figure out what terms I would even look up to find out how much of the effect could be attributed to that.

In other words, how much of the decline in birth rate is due to parents reaching their ideal family size without the death of any children? I'm reasonably sure it's small, but are we talking <1% small or 10% small?

Edit: typo

Well, the overall rates still need to be at least 2 to sustain population.

Something weird to think about is that it's literally impossible to fully know about every human on earth. 8 billion seconds is 253 years. Even staying 24/7 with a rapid information stream on every single person would only get through less than half in a person's lifetime.

I'd say it would be impossible to fully know about every human on earth even if there were like 10,000 people total. The human brain has a certain capacity for maintaining relations, and once you cross the size of a small community/village it's basically all the same.

Are you really any more isolated from 8 billion people than you were from 7 billion?

If people keep funneling data into Meta Platforms Inc, they'll soon get there.

For some value of "know".

Maybe we can get ChatGPT to summarize them all into bullet points.

Who wants to read ‘mostly harmless’ 8 billion times though?

you won the internet today sir

Weird? I dunno, I kinda think that's pretty neat.

Weird and neat are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I'd argue they often go hand-in-hand.

Absolutely true, I suppose I just think that in this particular instance I don't identify with seeing or feeling anything "weird" about it.

Another crazy way to think about it: every two years, humanity experiences more time (in terms of “total hours of existence”) than the entire age of the universe, from the Big Bang to now. A universes lifetime of collective experience, every two years.

Which means the sum of all human experience every two years is the equivalent to what some immortal entity born at the dawn of time would have ever experienced. And we can all share it and it’s so cool!

Until the government-mandated microchips at birth, anyway.

“Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion” - talk by Han’s Rosling (7yr ago)

https://youtu.be/2LyzBoHo5EI?si=ezHx2TfJa4-llCzX

He was popular at TED and built gapminder data viz tool when web2 tech started becoming popular.

An excellent talk (I seem to remember it being 10 billion - two boxes next to each other, stacked five high)

great communicator of complex ideas simply

There is some discussion about population decrease trends, and I actually had a question about it yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38207457#38212649)!

I guess, I’ll ask here again — is there anyone working on preparing for a potential bad case scenario in developed world? As in, we would end up with extremely high average age, and not enough young people to support the elderly or the economy in 30-40 years. That’s, obviously, if we fail to reverse the trend of falling birth rates.

> That’s, obviously, if we fail to reverse the trend of falling birth rates.

Make it cheaper to have babies and people will have babies. Of course, that hits everyone's bottom lines by a little or a lot, including the healthcare industry, daycare industry, baby food and supply industries. Make housing more affordable, nobody wants to live in a 1 bedroom apartment that doesn't even accept pets and raise a newborn. The list goes on and on. We won't address all that in time, and it's going to hit us where it hurts later.

From what I've read so far, the data doesn't really support that argument. Even in my circles, the richer the couple, the less likely they have kids and so on. I don't think it's just "if you have money you'll have babies" scenario anymore. All the countries that have tried to be super-pro-baby, so far, have failed to reverse the trend as well.

"The data" doesn't really mean much to me, especially without context. By all metrics, I'm pretty well off now. 3 bedroom house, stable job with better income than anyone in my family ever dreamt of. But I spent the last 10-12 years digging myself out of poverty from homelessness. My wife and I don't have kids because we see them as a potential anchor back into poverty and the scare of going back literally haunts us. So I'm curious about your data, but I'm an anecdotal example of someone with money that is not having kids due to the cost.

Besides that, haven't you ever heard before that the richer you get, the more parsimonious you become?

Fair enough. My point was, in developed world, if you’re poor you might not have kids because of its costs. If you’re rich, why would you have a kid if they might experience extreme problems in the near future? And it’s also hard for me to imagine to have ~3 kids, even though that’s needed to sustain the population.

But yeah, might be a big problem in the future, appreciate your input.

From what I've read, it's a vaguely U shaped curve. The poor and the very rich have more babies than the middle class. That jives with my experience. Surgeon friends of my wife are both more likely to have 4+ kids and to have 0 kids than middle and upper-middle class friends who almost invariably stop at 2 unless the second baby turns out to be twins.

The uptick in the rich is very small and insignificant but it is interesting. It's not enough to have any real impact on the birth rate, but it does provide evidence that people will have more kids if financial circumstances are favorable.

France has had some success and while they're still below replacement, it's going to be a glide to population decline, not a hard crash like it's going to be with some other European countries.

I mean, they had protests against increasing the age of retirement to 62 from 60, while in countries like the Netherlands the same figure will be 67 starting next year.

Here in the UK my retirement age (can claim state pension) is currently 68. Work and personal pension age still seems to be 55.

UK folks can find theirs here https://www.gov.uk/state-pension-age

As for the on-topic I doubt I'll be able to afford a family in this lifetime haha, given up on that one as a goal a while back along with getting on the property ladder. Maybe if a relative or two leave an inheritence I can reconsider.

Because there are no countries super pro-baby. Some countries have better policies, but still babies are really expensive to rise. Of course if you want them to grow in decent environment, with separate room for each child, good school, hobbies etc.

Year or two of maternity leave helps, but parents will struggle untill school starts.

Few hundred euro per month will help, but not too much, will not cover the difference in rent of bigger apartment.

Career? Forget about promotions for few years.

This is 2018 but it states that women on average want to have 2.7 children.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...

As far as I know, the biggest correlation to fertility is religion, which makes some sense to me as a non-religious person; I'm not willing to put children through this existence.

Polls have shown that people want more children than they're having. People can't afford the children they wish they could have.

Median housing was smaller 50 years ago and people had more kids then.

Poor people have smaller houses than rich people yet have more kids.

Very few people are dying to have a baby but they just need a little more money or a state stipend before they can afford it. The problem isn't money although it makes for a convenient excuse. The fact is that for young people today, there are too many competing interests. All of the 26 year olds I know want to go to Italy next summer not change a diaper. The average age of average and first time motherhood is higher than it's been in the history of the human race. It really is uncharted territories.

> Median housing was smaller 50 years ago and people had more kids then.

Adjusting for inflation and the average household income, do you think things, in general, were way cheaper 50 years ago, or way _way_ cheaper? By trying to argue against my 1 bedroom apartment portion of my comment, I almost feel like you've bolstered the rest of it.

> Poor people have smaller houses than rich people yet have more kids.

Are we accounting for other factors like are poor people typically using (or even have belief systems that allow for the use of) contraception? Do poor people, speaking potentially overly broadly, tend to plan their financial arrangements as cautiously as people that are more well off? I've been well off, and I've been homeless, and I can personally tell you that I never thought more about planning for retirement as I did once I started having a disposable income.

IIRC, poor people have a lot of kids, but rich people have the most kids.

I'm well above median salaries in my state, but actually somewhat below median salary when you consider that I'm the sole earner for a household of four people. And I'm here to tell you that life isn't so hard here slightly below the middle.

The problem isn't primarily the cost of babies, it's primarily creeping credentialism.

Women are fertile from 18 to 40 (legally and safely). If the years to 28 are taken up with getting credentials (degrees and post-grad quals) and then from 28 to 34 or so establishing a career and forming a household, the're isn't much time left to have babies. And the thirties are much lower fertility than the teens and twenties biologically speaking.

Credentialism and housing costs. Not direct childcare costs.

Housing is a zero-sum Red Queen race. Increase someone's income, they'll want to live in a "better" neighborhood so the time taken to form a household is the same or longer.

TLDR: the problem is not lack of money but lack of time.

> Housing is a zero-sum Red Queen race

Only because we don’t build more. Remember, even the desirable areas like Atherton or San Francisco had near zero populations a few hundred years ago. New places can be built if we allow it.

Would the new places be handy to good schools (primary, secondary, teertiary)? And good enrichment activities for the kids?

The housing problem is not just houses. Although that'd be a great place to start.

There were no great schools in Atherton or SF 300 years ago.

It doesn't work, people don't want kids because of the culture. They're trained to become "sexually liberated" wage slaves and the few kids get sent to kindergarden at 6m.

Before trying I was also scared to death to have kids and thought it would ruin my life - spoiler it didn't.

I agree, choosing to have a family over a career or ambition is social suicide to many young people. High wage earning women are especially vulnerable to this. "you're just giving up to have a basic life in a basic city..", my wife heard this from many of her supposed friends when she decided to leave the workforce to raise our two boys. Ironic, my wife has grown her career leaps and bounds since returning to the workforce yet her former friends, so sure they were destined for greatness, are doing the exact same thing they were doing 15 years ago. It's really them who hit the "stop" button on life.

If women want to be sexually liberated wage slaves, we have to respect that as well. I guess, I am sexually liberated guy who is a wage slave, there’s no difference.

We should definitely make it more possible for women to have an easy life even when they have children though. Dunkin on others’ choices isn’t cool. That being said, the choice is less attractive nowadays for myriad of reasons.

It's less about affordability itself and more about the time young people need to figure out and take control of their lives. The longer that takes, the fewer children people will have on the average.

If experienced professionals make more money than fresh graduates, things that are affordable to the average person may be unaffordable to the average young person.

If people accumulate wealth over their careers, young people are at a disadvantage when they try to buy a home.

If young people can't find stable jobs with good career prospects near their friends and family, they need more financial stability before they feel comfortable having children away from their support networks.

Some of these issues can be alleviated by redistributing wealth from middle-aged people to young people. For others, it may be necessary to tune down the competitive meritocracy and expectations economic efficiency.

> It's less about affordability itself and more about the time young people need to figure out and take control of their lives.

> If young people can't find stable jobs with good career prospects near their friends and family, they need more financial stability before they feel comfortable having children away from their support networks.

And it's such a big financial decision that requires having a perception of complete financial stability because...

I posit that it's because it's such a huge financial burden. Lessen that burden, and you lessen young adults' apprehension to accept that burden.

I think there's another dynamic at play which makes you both right in some ways. My mom and both of my sisters began having kids in their teens. Despite my family always struggling with money I don't ever recall it being seen through an economic lens. My girlfriends family on the other hand is very comfortably middle class, and when her brother had a baby a year or two shy of 30 there were a lot of economic concerns from her parents, they were almost upset at first. It seemed odd to me since him and his wife both had decent jobs and were doing way better than any of my siblings with children, but I realized it's because they weren't going to be able to raise their kids the same way they were raised. It seems like a big problem is that if you're from a middle-class background and want to have a family you'll likely have to come to terms with being worse off than your parents.

I think it's much more a problem for middle class families because unlike poorer families they seem more cognizant of what they have to lose, or at least the perception of what they have to lose, and maybe there's also an aspect where it's more ingrained that they should do better than their parents. I don't know maybe that's obvious to everyone but it was something that got me thinking.

I made this point in another comment but you have to also fix the current trend that having kids is some how "less than" grinding at a job. I'm a man and so not totally qualified to make this statement but I know from experiences my wife has had that women are especially vicious to other women choosing a family over career and status.

All developed nations got there by exploiting cheap/free labor from immigrants, slaves, and oppressed minorities. There's plenty of extremely poor people left in the world, so I don't see that stopping anytime soon. Already, Japan depends primarily on foreign seasonal labor for their agricultural industry. I predict the same will continue for hundreds of years to come (if we survive that long.

Robotics will be ready well before then

We just have to put underpaid workers in fancy StarTrek knock-off spandex costumes, like Tesla did.

The answer is simple, but rather unpopular: immigration.

Unfortunately this answer is not simple... Or I should say, it's only a short term solution.

What happens when the places that are making lots of people now, stop?

Us: "Hey India, send me some more people"

India: "Sorry dude, we're out"

India currently is at 2.05 fertility rate, which is replacement rate. Now for quite some time they will have excess population in relation to their wealth, but I don't expect that to last forever.

If there aren't enough young people to take care of the old, this is directly the fault of the prior generations. Importing labor to take care of them (indirectly) would be a ridiculous overvaluation of their interests over the younger generations' interests. Permanent change to solve a fundamentally temporary problem.

Most immigrant groups don't generate engineers and scientists at the same rate that western countries.

When push comes to shove, developed countries without enough workers will open up immigration and open their wallets.

But when every country (we are going towards it right now) is going below replacement birth rates, what is the solution then? It's just hard to imagine how the society and infrastructure would function when any countries median age is around 50s/60s, making it physically unfit for a significant amount of mission-critical jobs.

The solution is still what I said above: spend money and change policies. Birth rates can be changed given the political and economic will to do so. If things really become bad, people will demand it.

That will be a problem only for poor countries with old people.

Rich countries could easily import people from all over the world.

Very few countries have positive birth rates anymore. Literally all of South East Asia was below replacement in terms of birth rates in 2022. All of Latin America was below replacement in 2022. For the first time, there are countries in Africa that have now fallen below replacement.

Automation of most jobs basically solves the problem with progressive UBI or social welfare policies.

>we would end up with extremely high average age, and not enough young people to support the elderly or the economy in 30-40 years.

Thats the best case scenario, because economies would dictate massive adoption of AI assisted technologies.

At which point you won't have issues like kids being born out of selfishness because you need someone to take care of you in later years.

AI can't pour concrete

AI can control robots which can pour concrete. There are 3d printed houses already available.

"What is PALM-2 Robot model"

> At which point you won't have issues like kids being born out of selfishness because you need someone to take care of you in later years.

I want humans to exist 200 years from now, 1000 years from now. This means it's selfish if I have them for that reason too.

If people (on average) can't have children for that reason, then humanity will become extinct. It's not as if people have them for the reason of "aren't you supposed to have them!?" anymore.

Which, if you think about it, makes the "you're selfish to have kids" a sort of species-wide suicidal ideation. But then, non-suicidal people are sort of selfish, wanting to continue to keep living.

Eh, this in itself involves quite a bit of handwaving too...

Humanity went from just under a billion to 8 billion in 120 years. Between us and our livestock we have have completely dominated the surface of the earth, wild animals are not even close.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/total-biomass-weight-...

In most mammal populations there can be wild swings in total population without extinction. Humans, at least at this point could reduce the total population by multiple times and be just fine.

> In most mammal populations there can be wild swings in total population without extinction. Humans, at least at this point could reduce the total population by multiple times and be just fine.

In all of those examples, the fertility rate remains constant. In every single one. When the moose all die off, it's not because they all decided that they enjoyed double income households with no offspring. Or that their parents kept nagging them for grandmoose.

It's "all the vegetation on the island was stripped" and they all starved but a few.

If their fertility rate dropped, we wouldn't see it swing back and forth. The only way they even survive is that the fertility rate doesn't drop.

This will become apparent even to the current naysayers... but not nearly soon enough.

I mean, if population gets 'too low' then we'll likely just fall into some kind of authoritarianism where forced breeding occurs. I'm not saying this is a good outcome, I'm just saying it's the most likely one.

Also, UNIVERSE 25.

I don't think forced breeding works, or doesn't work well for those unprepared to do it well. That said, I can definitely see China managing the attempt efficiently.

What horrors await.

I wonder, what percent of plants are agriculture ?

By count or biomass? Biomass is low, doubt it goes past fractional one percent. Count might be interesting, row crops can be really dense.

i guess its around 2% by biomass. But 38% of earth land surface is devoted to agriculture. https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/....

Just trying to guess at carrying capacity of the earth.

>Which, if you think about it, makes the "you're selfish to have kids" a sort of species-wide suicidal ideation. But then, non-suicidal people are sort of selfish, wanting to continue to keep living.

You do know that you will continue living if you don't have kids, right?

I'm glad to hear you're not selfish, however you do seem inappropriately judgy.

What have you done to ensure "humans exist 200 years from now?" Have you done anything to minimize your carbon footprint? Do you walk/bike/take the bus to work instead of drive a petrol/diesel vehicle? Have you petitioned your government to stop using fossil fuels and demand they spend money on green infrastructure and science to improve current technology?

What have you done to stop senseless wars? Do you help out at food banks? Do you support government programs to ensure that children get adequate nutrition, you know, programs like SNAP, WIC, or free school lunches/breakfasts? Since you are so invested in the species, I'm sure you're also in favor of national health service to ensure every person, documented or not, receives adequate health care.

I applaud your efforts supporting these things and am curious what other things you think will ensure the human species is not endangered by climate change, natural disasters, wars, infertility, and so forth.

> What have you done to ensure "humans exist 200 years from now?"

Drive by comment. The only way humans cease to exist in 200 years is if something horribly catastrophic happens. Which is much more like to happen if the population grows exponentially. And much less likely if the population declines steadily over the next 200 years.

> You do know that you will continue living if you don't have kids, right?

This might supposed to be some snarky gotcha, but it's just dumb. I know with absolute certainty I won't continue to live, for every human dies eventually.

You could replace the "continue" with "temporarily", but it takes the bite out of it.

> I'm glad to hear you're not selfish, however you do seem inappropriately judgy.

People should judge. The 20th century experiment of non-judgementalness has been an abject failure. If one cannot analyze and determine what does and does not work (the act of judging), then one will continue to do things that don't work.

The "let's not reproduce" thing isn't working. And it's slightly disturbing that we had to run the experiment to foresee the results.

> What have you done to ensure "humans exist 200 years from now?" Have you done anything to minimize your carbon footprint?

Non sequitur nonsense.

One rhetorical about something that an individual can't actually do (though I've done my part), followed up with environmentalist propaganda that is commonly used to instill the proper behavioral sterility that you've spayed the zoomers with.

> What have you done to stop senseless wars?

If I could, why would I? Do you believe that they're serious extinction threats?

No one is working on this in a serious way. Some are aware of it, the terms "demographic implosion" and "demographic time bomb" are used when discussing it.

It's generally considered a right-wing talking point, and those who discuss it are lumped in with white supremacists and other similar kooks and villains.

Inasmuch there is a solution, some say that we can replace the missing citizens with immigrants. The trouble there being that they too will soon stop showing up (Africa's fertility rates are dropping too).

It is unlikely that the trend is reversible. The social environment of low fertility normalizes the idea of low fertility in children and young people, who then not only practice and reinforce it in their generation, but amplify it for the next.

Wait, "generally considered a right-wing talking point" is this real? Like it's even a bigger problem in Asia than in North America. Looking at demographics, as you mentioned, it's going to be a problem in Africa as well.

I'm fairly pro-immigration, but I assumed everyone understands it's a bandaid solution that won't last once everyone experiences population decrease? I think I mentioned it in my other comments as well, that I could see a case where they start limiting emigration from countries where young people would be fleeing to other developed countries.

Regarding normalizing low fertility - I mean, it's not my place to tell anyone whether to have kids or not. I am not planning to have one anytime soon either for myriad of reasons, but this reverse "tragedy of commons" problem itself is also one of the reasons.

But yeah, was hoping I could find more reading where real work is being done to see how we will sustain ourselves with aged population.

Just reinforcing NoMoreNicksLeft, this is definitely considered a right wing talking point in the US. On hearing about this leftists immediately jump to "you want to roll back the gains of feminism, keep women in the home, blah blah".

What we need is to rearrange culture and institutions so that women wish to have children young, and so that they are valorized or at least not penalized in terms of career prospects or lifetime earnings for doing so. In relation to men, but even more so in relation to women who choose not to have children.

I have no idea how to go about doing that.

I think I am miswording the question — I don’t care about fixing the trends. My worry us to be prepared for the case if we can’t fix the problem. Basically “how we can prepare society to live with less younger population?”.

> Wait, "generally considered a right-wing talking point" is this real?

Yes, at least within the US and the UK. In the US, it's definitely an issue that, if talked about at all, is 100% within the realm of the GOP, and in the UK (as far as I can follow its politics) a Tory thing. The issue is big in Japan and South Korea (China too), and I don't know how it maps to their politics. Would be easier to tell in places like Germany where they have a well-defined "right-wing", but language barriers make it difficult for me to determine.

> but I assumed everyone understands it's a bandaid solution that won't last once everyone experiences population decrease?

Have a conversation about it sometime. Here on Hackernews, elsewhere. Everyone is in either some strange form of denial or maybe ignorance about it, and refuse to acknowledge it. Apparently there is this magical, infinite well of people that we can just import to make up the difference that will never, ever go away, and if it does go away... aw well shucks, that's not so bad. And if it is bad, I'm glad the human race is going extinct anyway, they've harmed the planet.

> Regarding normalizing low fertility - I mean, it's not my place to tell anyone whether to have kids or not.

I'm a father. It is my place to say this, and I have. Since the very first day, well before they understood what the words were saying.

I don't just love my children, I like them. I want them to go out and make little half-clones of themselves someday. And anyone telling them they shouldn't is a monster.

> But yeah, was hoping I could find more reading where real work is being done

There are some instinctive reactions to this at the collective level. Various groups are withdrawing from society as much as possible to (in my hypothesis) quarantine their families from the contagion of these ideas. Homeschoolers, those trying to get away from cities and run off to the wilderness. I do not think they'll find much success. The biggest culprit, electronics, can't be easily taken away from children without crippling their economic success in adulthood, which is necessary if they are to become particularly fertile.

This is a complete shitshow. It's a slow motion train wreck that is, somehow, still too fast to escape. I do not know if it is a human extinction thing, or if we just end up reverting to some pre-tehchnological subsistence thing, but if they're still around your descendants 1000 years from now might look like cavemen.

For top 10 wealthiest counties immigration pool will not drop.

But poor countries are doomed. With increased population decline they will be even poorer, more people will want to emigrate.

Not just poor countries, but poor areas inside rich countries. The demographics of the small rural town I grew up in are getting older and poorer every year, as young people move out into the cities where there is opportunity.

like - what is italy today?

Looks like the population will grow to 10 billion primarily fueled through Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, but it really depends on whether those economies can have their own "economic miracle" by utilizing the new workers being born. If not, they'll go through a population boom and bust cycle and it might be another 50 years until their next one. If they do utilize it well, the population is predicted to drop, perhaps to 5 billion, in the next few hundred years.

Economic success is associated with reduced fertility, not greater fertility. (And it's almost certainly causal.) If regions don't have economic miracles, that will mean higher population, not lower.

One part of this came up at the end of the article, namely that increased childhood survival rate leads to decreasing number of births. It makes a lot of sense to me that this would correlate with overall improvements of living standards.

If you want to have a family four children, I'd think it's pretty universally agreed that it's better if you only have to give birth four times to do it than five, because all four babies survive childhood.

That doesn't negate that there are other factors, especially in countries that already have low birth rates and high childhood survival rates. It was just a factor I hadn't paid much attention to before or heard people mentioning very often.

In theory it would make sense that fertility falls a bit with lower childhood mortality, but your explanation doesn't explain the data that lower childhood mortality is associated with fewer surviving children.

Not an expert but AFAIK these demographic transitions are when an economy has the highest share of its population as economically active adults. It's a well known challenge to use that opportunity to develop and become rich enough to deal with the following ageing population and avoid the middle income trap.

Fertility continues to fall even lower as the population ages out of prime working age, e.g., Japan.

If we can continue to figure out basic needs better like housing and healthcare then it may not always be the case that one must sacrifice progeny for economic progress.

Hell just high speed rail could encourage populating less desirable areas if a 30 minute trip to the beach was a weekend event.

This is what I've always heard, but I've also heard that the financial precarity of young people in the west is leading them to have fewer children. Which seems mildly contradictory.

Prospect theory can explain this.

If you are precarious now, but expect or hope to be better off in future, you will delay having children. If you don't expect better prospects, then children are the best available investment in your future.

The second thing you've heard is wrong.

If you give people resources conditional on them having children (e.g., free child care), they will of course on the margin have slightly more children. But it's a mistake to interpret this as "financial precarity" causing reduced fertility, because if you give them more unconditional money they have fewer children.

Yes, however it doesn't necessarily mean that the population grows monotonically. It is still based on cycles to some extent.

Why are people downvoting this?

Perhaps because that was already what was said by the parent comment, but the reply is phrased in a tone of disagreement.

> If they [developing countries] do utilize it [economic opportunity] well, the population is predicted to drop, ...

Indeed, that is basically what I said anyway.

That isn't how I read it.

That is how I meant it, yes.

Well, sure. OK. But it isn't how it comes across IMO.

> they'll go through a population boom and bust cycle and it might be another 50 years until their next one

There are zero (as far as I am aware of) examples of this outcome. Care to share any?

I am referring more to the middle income trap, to be clear [0]. If a country fails to become at the level of prosperity of the first world, it will take some time for them to try again, as its level of prosperity is enough for many of its populace to not have children but not high enough to truly prosper.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap

I have no clue how this relates to your comment regarding population growth and decline.

Not sure why you are downvoted. Every example in recent history is rise in population followed by drop or stable population. No example of cycle I know of.

Pro-natalists, maybe? Seems like they have been getting more popular.

I see more anti-natalists than anything these days. Separately, I see more people who don't want children than those who do, at least online. I am one of the former in that I don't want children, but of course I can extrapolate what might happen if many did not have children. Of course, it is not my job or problem to care about such a scenario in the first place.

There is a real pro-natalist push: https://nationalpost.com/feature/pronatalism-reborn

The plagues, several other pandemics, WWI & II, countless countries that have committed genocide, countless deadly civil wars, Taiping rebellion, French Revolution, Irish Famine, Bengal Famine, Russian Famine, several Indian famines, several Chinese famines, etc.

That's not an example.

> by utilizing the new workers

Hope they treat newborns as people rather than workers.

In an economic system, everyone must work to survive. How one labels them is beside the point.

This estimate assumes no major catastrophes and continued stability for developed nations. I am not sure that either of those are great predictions.

More hilariously, however, let’s take the trend line out forever. A few thousand years and the entire human race is Mormon.

According to Bunker by Bradley Garrett, the Mormon's are extensive preppers and have supplies for more than the population of Salt Lake City underground. So if there is a worldwide catastrophe, this prediction may come true.

> have supplies for more than the population of Salt Lake City underground

Just to clarify, individual households will keep months of supplies which are often stored in the basement.

So basically enough to starve out the rest of the population should civilisation collapse?

And why exactly would civilization collapse?

It doesn't really matter; the whole notion is mistaken. In the long run survival is dependent on flows of food and materials, not stocks.

Survival requires continuous replenishment. Are Mormons investing in farming skills and knowledge of how to make fertilizers and agricultural equipment at various technology levels? Not to mention mining or medicine or textile-making or construction or any of the other skills required...

Famines and societal collapse/crisis are common historically, and usually short enough that stocks can make the difference in survival.

Most famines were too long and large for stockpiles, they were always a general avaiability and distribution problem (holodomor, Ireland, Bengal, Africa multiple times). Fun thing so, society as whole never really collapsed, not even during the Plague.

It’s not unusual for Preppers to store a year of food or more for the entire family. That absolutely would make the difference in surviving even a many year famine.

The idea that storing large amounts of food to prepare for shortages is useless is a really silly concept considering how widespread it is amongst humans and many other mammals.

Utah fertility rate is dropping like elsewhere, just at a higher baseline. It's 1.92 right now, below replacement.

The alternative would be trying to predict disasters and conflict and their respective roles in population decline. Even more impossible to do

I have been thinking about this a lot lately! When I was born the population was 5 billion. When my father was born the population was 2.5 billion. You have to go back several more generations to get to the 1 billion mark. The growth within the last couple generations has been crazy!

It's exponential.

Well, Bad Religion was wrong with their song “10 in 2010.”

Crazy Taxi best video game soundtrack in a century.

What about Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1?

THPS2 is the best

found my people in this thread

What if we make the same game with bikes?

Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvziPPpryv0

This, on the school level, trying to get enough air on the half pipe to make it into the secret room.

Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/11/world-populati..." on this server.

I guess, I'm in the part of the world that shouldn't know this.

I'm in a GDPR/EU country and did not get that message. What is your ISP location?

Kazakhstan. Probably banned by the server together with Russian IPs.

One graph at the end of the article shows the population growth per age group. According to that, the number of children in 2060 will be the same as today (1.8 billion). But the number of people that are 70+ will grow form 0.3 to 1.5 billion. I was not aware of that. This impresses me a lot.

I see this strong trend for the first time. I wonder what it will change in the society and economy.

I like this idea as in 2060 I'll be 73. Seems like old age won't be as lonely as currently is.

It looks like it’ll hit 2^33 around 2033.

The word "fertility" strikes me as a odd word to use for the average number children women in a population have.

"Fertility" relates to how capable something is of reproduction, not its willingness. It's not that human fertility is dropping (as this article implies with the use of the word), it's specifically that our desire to reproduce is dropping and our ability to prevent unwanted reproduction has greatly increased.

"Declining reproduction rates continues" seems like a far more accurate description here than "declining fertility continues".

Adding to rfrey's comment, in demography "reproduction rate" is the number of daughters per woman.

I think it's from a more general population biology definition, the number of female descendants per female.

Yes, for the long run reproduction rate matters more. Demographers mostly assume fixed sex ratios at birth, making the point moot. But "fixed sex ratios" is no longer necessarily true, now that the sex of unborn fetuses can be determined and semen can be sex-selected.

From Merriam-Webster:

1: the quality or state of being fertile

2: the birth rate of a population

Thanks for correcting me.

There will soon be so many extra houses.

I'm going short on human population based on the graph and considering recent trends

I thought we hit 8 billion decades ago. At least I think I remember hearing that number in the late 90s.

Population counting isn't an exact science, there were estimates suggesting we hit 8 billion about a year ago. But the 90s are right out- last big milestone was 7 billion in 2011.

Then again, that's also the decade where people thought you could make dinosaurs out of dead mosquitos.

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