Fertility as Metascience | Hacker News Reader

Fertility as Metascience

maximumprogress.substack.com

31 pointssafaa199352 comments

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

We are in new territory. With 8 billion people, a global internet, climate change, etc. this is a scenario we haven't seen before.

I am skeptical that it is helpful to make sweeping pronouncements of this sort.

Some countries have high rates of disease and low levels of education. I bet getting people healthier and better educated would improve productivity more than having more children.

We also don't necessarily know how more people raises GDP per capita. Maybe it's a situation where having basics in place fosters more people who are healthier or something and maybe in some countries that pattern is not what's happening.

the only difference between before is that we are much much better at handling nature and the climate. We are so good at it that we reduced death from climate related catastrophees by 95% the last 100 years.

Unfortunately the youth is being lied and manipulated thinking the opposite. Its become a religion worshipping nature and politicians and the media is our days priesthood, promising salvation if we repent.

The most dangerous thing humanity can do is to not believe in the future. If you dont believe in tomorrow you wont invest into it. Its the principles of a death-cult.

It is so sad to see the youth wasting their years on pessimism when life is mostly positive even if you are not rich.

And now we see the new contender based on the same defaist attitude in the AI doomers using same speculative frameworks to claim the end of the world without a single thread of evidence

The AI doomerism is definitely overblown, but I don't think the same is true of climate change. It won't be a fast extinction by any means, but if the heaps of scientific evidence are to be trusted, we are rapidly losing leeway to feasibly reverse/mitigate the consequences.

Only looking at deaths up to this point is like seeing an empty road, walking onto it, and texting people while standing still.

I often see this thrown around, that the youth today are being peddled some nature-worshipping fantasy, when the "hard truth is that nature is a cruel entity, tamed forcefully by the work of our forefathers".

It kind of ignores the fact that young people just want clean water. Clean air. I don't want long-lived hormone-like pollutants in my mattress. I don't want the river that supplies most of the clean water to my city to become polluted, and I also do not want it to dry out due to over-diversion to industry (okay, sue me, I want a good view). I do not want to take massive risks with how I affect the environment, before I have a chance to fully understand future repercussions.

Last, but not least: I do not want to lose knowledge. Currently, a lot of nanotechnology and pharmaceutical technology is being driven not by de-novo design of proteins, but by trawling through information about existing ensembles (which mostly come from come from organisms we had ready access to). Destroying previously inaccessible/invisible (e.g. 99% of the ocean) ecosystems just because "woops, we didn't bother thinking that we live in a chaotic dynamical system" is akin to purposefully deleting hard-drives with millenia's worth of hard-won data.

Climate is an issue too, sure. But its mostly overblown as the reason why people care about environmental issues (especially given how much we do not know about climate, period), rather than: as the scapegoat that the media finds most convenient to trumpet (because it is the easiest for governments and businesses to try and quantify). Most real people (i.e. not the strawmen) aren't nearly so simplistic.

On the other hand, the rather simple concerns along the lines of: "hey, can we just be a bit more careful about just pumping this random shit into the air, until we understand better?", "hey, can you not put selinium rich mining byproducts in my local river?", or "can you not use low-grade silicone with questionable health consequences for my cat's grooming brush" don't get much attention.

I'm all for believing in the future. It becomes harder to do so when one realizes that a) they are disposable, and b) people in power do not care abou the messes they create, because they will never have to personally deal with cleaning up those messes.

Which makes me think: aw shit, I don't want to have clean up those messes either! Why can't they move a little slower, and a lot more thoughtfully?

So...uh, nothing to do with "oh no, death cult!".

your comment is a prime example of the complete ignorance towards the circumstances most people used to live under. Cruel brutish and short for most people dont even begin to explain it. We have access to more clean water than ever, sanitation and i could go on, but unfortunately the youth has been hijacked by antihuman people who under the guise of moral virtue signalling spread unscientific FUD. Imagine how many years they are wasting on worrying rather than learning to solve problems as they appear.

The "95% reduction in the last 100 years" feels like a misguided argument since our improved abilities to handle weather events will not hold if the weather patterns we've gotten so good at handling, change. If you exceed design conditions, your 95% reduction can quickly turn into a Texas blackout.

I agree that optimism is critical to keep moving forward. However I do disagree with your implication that young people believe that we cannot handle nature and the climate. The view I (anecdotally) encounter most is not the belief that we are incapable of handling it, but that we will refuse to handle it till it's too late.

its not misguided, but i am not surprised you are skeptical, its impossible for most people to actually get rational perspectives because of the hysteria.

> we reduced death from climate related catastrophees by 95% the last 100 years.

This seems like a casual claim that requires a strong citation to back it up.

Especially in the matter of seperating "death from a climate related catastrophe" from "death from a weather related catastrophe" .. if in fact such a difference is recognised.

Is this absolute global "death by weather" per annum you're quoting or some locale relative percentage "death by weather" ?

How solid are the numbers?

this is relative to the size of population. The numbers are right, you should also be able to reason how much better weve become at living places that used to be impossible.

> The numbers are right,

.. and your source for this is .. ?

> you should also be able to reason how much better we[']ve become

I can reason quite well thank you, multiple STEM degrees, decades in global exploration geophysics, decades of hearing people pull numbers out of thin air, etc.

With that many degrees it should be trivial for you to realize that it has to be like that.

https://humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-related-de...

> We also don't necessarily know how more people raises GDP per capita. Maybe it's a situation where having basics in place fosters more people who are healthier or something and maybe in some countries that pattern is not what's happening.

Is there some type of underlying assumption that goes like this: "more people ==> more people participating in the market ==> more consumers for your product"?

In that case, to add to your point, I think "more people ==> more people participating in the market" is problematic. It is perhaps true in the following grotesque sense: "the more 'shit'(objectified, person/product) that's produced and thrown at the wall, the higher the chance we find some(thing/one) that sticks to the wall (meaningful market participant)", but that grotesque perspective ignores that the "things that doesn't stick to the wall" may unexpected systemic effects that reduce market size (e.g. greater depression amongst the wall-clingers, due to the suffering they see around them, harder to elicit feelings of shared community between all pieces (whether they clung to the wall, or pooled to the bottom) because they know they are disposable: i.e. loss of trust in humanity), etc.). It reminds me of the country my parents came from.

In general, people don't like to believe that every human being has great potential (and that most people do not get to reach this potential, for a variety of reasons, many systemic) because then actions that negatively affect other people's potential, even in small ways, have greater-than-expected negative externalities. That's bad for business; while any benefits reaped from the other perspective (in building a stronger market in the future) can only be reaped in the future, and therefore worthless ("a society grows great, when old persons plant trees whose shade they will never get to rest under...").

So it's easier to think that people are born with a fixed maximum potential. Those that can reach it, will most likely reach it, while those who do not do so well likely did not have that potential to begin with.

Based on this, it makes sense to have more shit thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

I think also many of the fertility arguments are based off of "undesirables have high fertility rates", therefore, "desirables must increase their fertility rates!". Put differently, it's not always a call for "greater human fertility; without any qualifications", but a dog-whistle with some uncomfortable qualifications. (c.f. the discomfort of having "desirable persons be in relationships with undesirable persons").

Related to this is the perspective that desirability is due to the existence of certain historical traditions, therefore, desirable parents have a better chance of inculcating desirability into their offspring, than society has of inculcating desirability into undesirables through lost causes such as education or inter-cultural understanding.

Not related to the last, but other similar ideas are: "If we do not have enough humans, who will do the dirty work? Could end up being us!" or "Children are the machines who support us when we grow older!". Anyway, I'm getting bored, so will stop here.

To sum up: whenever entities present "we need more fertility" arguments, it's rarely because they want to explore reality for everyone's benefit, and often because they have certain pre-decided perspectives on how their future (not their children's) may be safe-guarded.

> Is there some type of underlying assumption that goes like this: "more people ==> more people participating in the market ==> more consumers for your product"?

No, the theory (promoted by Oded Galor, now becoming mainstream) is:-

More people ==> more ideas ==> more new technologies that dramatically improve productivity, and therefore the material wellbeing of families, such as electricity or the Germ Theory of disease. Or maybe digital packet radio (wi-fi, cellphones, bluetooth), or computer vision + lithium batteries + ambulatory robots.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oded_Galor

I don't think everyone should have bunch of kids. However, if you are in a good relationship and both like having kids, think about having 5 instead of 2. My personal experience of having 5+ kids is that the difficulty mostly scales logarithmically, meaning kid 1 is a lot of work, kid 2 is a lot more work, but kid 3 more (but less more) work.

The social dynamics can really work well. Kids can be less work when they can entertain each other. Add some homeschooling, work from home, and creative projects and it makes life really fulfilling.

YMMMV, but it's a valid and reasonable way to live for some.

The issue is that a bunch of people living in conventionally valid ways are contributing to climate change and overpopulation. Not making a value judgement, because no one is used to or equipped to deal with the scale of billions of humans. Still a problem.

If those models are true, then most of economists' prescriptions (deregulation, taxation) are useless. It's population growth that dictates economic growth.

Wonder if their models integrate the fact the Earth is finite...

There are a lot of metals in the asteroid belt.

Or even the Moon

Not terribly useful ones, though. The available metals on the moon are largely just silicon, aluminum, iron, magnesium, and titanium -- much like on Earth. https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/the-chemical-com...

Asteroids are more interesting because they contain high concentrations of slightly denser metals of considerably more interest -- nickel, cobalt, etc. They can also contain much higher than normal concentrations of very heavy metals -- iridium, platinum, etc. -- that are rare in the Earth's crust because they're so heavy they tended to migrate to the core!

Just a note. They migrated to the core because they easily form alloys with iron ("siderophiles").

There's more metals in the Earth's crust and core. The metals in the asteroid belts are more accessible.

I wonder if their models take into account the cost of mining asteroids.

People have been saying that resources are gonna run out for 200 years... hasnt happened yet... the opposite... we have less people starving today than 200 years ago...

Ressources aren't our problem.

We have enough fossil fuels to change our climate, destroy the soil with too much fertilizer and build fishing trawlers until the oceans are empty.

The oceans are huge

More importantly, ~50% of fish we eat are harvested through aquaculture rather than wild caught.

So are deserts ... neither of which are especially relevant to whether or not the parts that produce most of the fish are being over taxed beyond replenishment rates or not.

This casual "the world has infinite resources to sustain unlimited human growth" is a bit 19th century and hasn't dated well.

Lol Malthus was literally 19th century.

> Malthus ...

Name a century without contrary characters and governments.

'LoL' and 'But Wat About' aren't considered responses.

Ocean resources are being depleted - it's simple enough to look up over fishing and a variety of reports on this from about the planet, not just direct overharvesting of fish, also reef destruction and other side effects from net dragging and industry that drive numbers down.

The accelerating rate of species going extinct doesn't look like "opposite" to me.

As long as these f*** i**s don't plausibly explain to me at what point we're supposed to stop with demographic and economic growth it's just a lot of hogwash, misguided at best.

We're living on a finite planet with finite resources; our collective metabolism has been producing greenhouse gases at exponentially increasing levels for the past 200 years and shows no signs of slowing down, even though the population growth has somewhat slowed down.

There's nothing, nothing in the books that tells us that even when populations should start to shrink globally, they won't go on to continue increasing their GHG outputs, for the simple reason that there are still sizable demographics who will want to attain a higher level of living i.e. a higher level of industrial products consumption.

A massively decreasing global population is one of the key factors for a livable future. Another one is stopping to believe that electric cars are doing any good or that we'll ever be able to 'just' suck the CO2 out of the air and dispose of it underground. A third inevitable step must be a reduction of energy and product consumption on part of those who are responsible for major parts of the global figures; that would include many people in the West.

I find it pretty hard to get alarmed about the impacts of declining population when my family and I have spent the 2019 summer on the run from a raging bushfire, and a few years later, I watched my neighbouring suburbs get washed away in the 2nd once-in-a-century flood we've had in a decade.

Sorry, but I think the world needs fewer people right now, and I'm doing my bit to help.

It's an interesting problem. Less people means scaling issues - the CFA, government flood funds etc work significantly better with density creates by higher population. We also have a hugely aging population we need younger people to be able to care for.

With fewer people you're going to experience raging fires, cataclysmic flood, and a massive pensions and social security deficit on top of the previous two.

I don't think a gradual shrinking populations are a bad think in the long-term, but a sharp decline in birth rates will have negative effects.

Elon has a similar take on the importance of fertility. Both him and TFA focus on the upside of more humans and not the downside. For every human capable of advancing science, or even just engineering in one of the increasingly specialized industries, there will be a hundred humans who cannot. And this ratio only gets worse as we go.

Those who cannot will have to work in the shrinking market for manual labor or non-innovative white collar work. As scientific progress accelerates, the number of these jobs goes to zero.

Just attacking the problem with quantity of scientific minds creates a byproduct of excess suffering in the form of "waste" humans. Losers of the same genetic lottery that is creating the precious scientific minds that we can't get enough of.

We don’t need more growth. Japan is still Japanese and Japan is fine. The owners on Wall Street might, but the average wagie doesn't.

Tabarrok is not a common family name. I wonder if Maxwell is related to Alex, also an economist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation

Human overpopulation seems to hyperfocus on subsistence ie we aren't overpopulated until people start dying due to no more food or water.

I would like to see more models around first world overpopulation. ie what growth rate etc is good for keeping a first world standard of living without changing the way of live of the current population.

The concern is obsolete. 183 out of 195 countries have below replacement fertility, and the others are expected to get there within a generation.[1]

Over-rapid depopulation is a real concern. Especially in East Asia and Europe.

If you want to know more search YouTube for the documentary "Birthgap" by Stephen J Shaw.[2]

Feminist/leftist thought leaders don't want to hear this message because they immediately jump to the conclusion "so you want to put women back in the home, barefoot and pregnant" and try to cancel you.

Instead, Shaw offers this: Make university free for mothers of 2 or more children, and change employment law and retirement ages so they can have full careers after having their kids at the safest age.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

"Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century. / And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100."

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6s8QlIGanA

3. https://www.birthgap.org/

Somehow you never mentioned the climate catastrophe, which is one of the direct consequences of overpopulation and overconsumption. More children will definitely make it worse in the middle term, and we may not have time to fix that, making our children suffer a lot.

>Reallocating people across the world is the right thing to do but it probably quickens the global demographic transition.

Is this some Soviet propaganda piece? "Reallocating" people is the right thing to do? Seriously? Rhetoric like this is part of why globalism was finally rejected over the past several years.

I don't disagree that a growing population is crucial to growing an economy, but the narrative the author advocates is asinine.

It's a very technocratic mindset that leads to this type of thinking, where humans are reduced to economic production and consumption units, to be moved around like a Factorio level.

Economists commonly talk this way. They talk about "the optimal allocation policy of a Social Planner", and use other such language. In reality the planner is the market, possibly with a few hints from government policies.

This is understood by other economists but is disconcerting for real people.

Welcome to correlation vs causation 101.

Could it be that the growth of the population and the GDP has a common cause like advances in technology and medicine?

Why is the conclusion of the article more kids equals higher GDP and not the other way around.

If there are more people, there are more person-hours in the world that can be used to produce things.

With more machines we need less people to produce more things and more people will be without job.

They do indeed have a common cause. It is the exploitation of non-organic energy, that is, fossil fuels. Without them the English industrial revolution would have come to a stop around 1850, or earlier.

Why do kids mean more economic growth? Current thinking is that of Oded Galor.[3] More people, more ideas, so more one-in-a-billion great ideas that improve everyboy's lives.

1. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/energy-and-the-english-...

2. Ayres and Warr 2005, "Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work" (pdf) http://113.212.161.150/elibrary/Library/Structural_Change/Ay...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_growth_theory

Having children is a nightmare.

Employers (especially in tech) actively discriminate.

People talk about ageism etc, but the discrimination against parents is real.

Can you be more specific? Is it recruiting or advancement in-role?

Obviously having kids is hard, but I haven't experienced discrimination that I know of. Sure, my career hasn't grown as quickly, but it has continued to grow. I work at Meta, which I think has great child benefits (I think thanks to Sheryl): 4 months paid leave per child, baby cash (a cash bonus per child), a child care FSA, and another annual cash pool benefit that can be used for more child care.

I'm 2 kids in, and I do not feel discriminated against at all. Culturally, there are tons of parents here. It wasn't like this 10 years ago though, when we were all so much younger... Maybe there is more discrimination outside the large companies?

Companies seem to have lots of great policies from the inside but getting back in is the challenge for me, having been a stay at home dad for roughly 3 years now (also 2 kids in). Family responsibilities expand to use all available time so the time I have for grinding leetcode, working on my portfolio, or other similar activities comes late at night after the brain fog sets in.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's active discrimination, but the hoops aren't doing anyone any favors.

Meta in particular is one company I backed away from after the recruiter helpfully suggested I study for 4-8 weeks before scheduling interviews.

I've seen the opposite too. People with kids are assumed to be busy outside of work hours, people without assumed to have nothing to do and get work piled on. Which is of course why the discrimination against parents happens in the first place, because they want people they can pile work on.

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