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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

This idea that we should depopulate is the terrifying perspective. People have been crying that the sky is falling since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. There is no "saving the planet as we know it now". The planet is ever-changing, and has never been static.

There are certainly dangers to the path we're on that we have to mitigate, but depopulation is not one of the solutions.

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This argument is equating human perspectives of the world to physical realities.

Ancient populations certainly left their mask, Romans deforested Europe for the sake of glass making. But that is nothing compared to the resource extraction and ndustrial waste that support the world 9 billion people.

Willing it away with "the sky has always been falling" is denialism at best.

I acknowledged the real dangers like climate change in my original post. I simply don't agree that the other issues you mention are actual dangers. Your argument that these are problems is a naturalistic fallacy.

It’s not terrifying because it has been happening since the 1950s. One theory is that as countries industrialize, their males become less fertile over subsequent generations. (This theory accounts for socioeconomic changes like abortion and being too poor to afford children.) It’s not too surprising given chemicals like BPA aka synthetic estrogen is so pervasive that now it’s in clothes and paper receipts. Almost no country is safe except for a few in central Africa

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/25/world-popu...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/ageing-planet-...

How can one look at those numbers, and take, after mixing it other issues like birth control, such a deeply wrong conclusion?

They account for socioeconomic changes like abortion and birth control ie these trends started long before the sexual revolution and long before abortion was even legal. It is not a “deeply wrong conclusion” unless no one bother to read any of it. Completely ignoring the endocrine disrupter pollution just shows you completely ignored my comment.

The key is declining male fertility

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is...

I know, declining male fertility is such a nice talking point, you know men being less manly and all that.

Funny so, that while micro plastics and whatnot sure are ugly and cannot be ignored, all other studies do not mention male fertility as a root cause, but rather:

- urbanization and changes in lifestyle

- women pursuing a life other than being a mother

- birth control (the reason why birth control reduces the number of kids per couple should be obvious...)

- economic incentives change from large families (old style, labour intensive farming) to smaller families (industrial labour and office work in cities)

- Covid

source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-...

That’s a moot point. Yes, socioeconomic factors do negatively affect birth rates, but what you don't understand is that even before those socioeconomic factors were in play, male fertility was already on the decline. A good example is Canada. Before contraceptives were popular, before abortion was legal, and before economic incentives for having nuclear families disappeared; they already lost the ability to replenish their population in 1972 (birthrates fell below 2.1), meaning their birthrates were already declining during decades of an optimal socioeconomic environment. ie that’s what it means when the male infertility studies accounted for socioeconomic factors.

1972? So, after the sexual revolution, the pill, emancipaction, the beginning of urbanization (which really started in the early 60s), the rise of automated agriculture, the beginning of women having real career opportunities as part of the work force and both, a rise of the industrial and service sectors of the economy.

All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down. But sure, it was male fertility that caused all of that...

> which really started in the early 60s

Thats when the sexual revolution happened in the US. As I’ve already mentioned in my previous comment, in Canada it started later than 1972. Even then, the effects of the sexual revolution shouldn’t be immediate, so it’s obvious that something else was at play since birthrates actually started to go down in the early 1950s. It just came to an irreversible head in 1972

> All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down.

There are still a lot of places where abortion and contraception are both frowned upon and aren’t even legal, yet they still experienced lower birth rates. Again, socioeconomic factors have been accounted for

You can encourage lower reproduction with tax incentives. Nothing wrong with that.

We don't need to encourage it, birth control and capitalism have already produced a depopulation trend in all developed countries. It's not a good thing.

It's not a good thing because???? I'll accept a well reasoned argument, but you've not presented any yet in this discussion and engaged in your own naturalistic fallacies. If you're using the reason that "Wanting to breed is natural" then surmise that you've never been involved in animal husbandry before. Nor have you studied mammal populations between species, especially those that have boom and bust cycles.

The article outlines plenty of good reasons, that's why we're discussing it. Most depopulation scenarios are nightmares (wars, famines, genocides), and even the good ones are very, very unpleasant (disproportionate resources must be directed towards caring for the aging population, leaving little labour for maintenance of existing infrastructure, let alone development).

It seems like you didn’t finish your response… Why is depopulation terrifying? And why shouldn’t we be concerned about resource constraints? Malthus being wrong implies nothing about the future.

Depopolating is just another word for genocid, that's why it is terrifying. Or at least should br, but then some people are just too edgy to get that.

Or it's a cute term for oppressing people to a degree that they don't want to follow natural instincts to procreate. For instance, developed nations economically penalize parenthood to such an extent that native birth rate is now below replacement in all of them with only a few exceptions.

That birth rates go down withe conomic prosperity has nothing to do with government oppression... That talking point is utter BS, and close to the conspiracy theory of the great "replacement" ...

Who said anything about government oppression?

This seems to me only partially true. Sure if everyone had one-percenter level resources they'd be more inclined to procreate, though the cultural change and the shifted focus to individualism and one's own experience in life (YOLO thinking, if I may) probably has as much or even more effect on it.

As an anecdata, most people I know are somewhere on the low-class to upper-mid class, and the ones who want kids seem to always have at least one, consequences be damned, and the ones who don't, often don't put a price tag on it and merely use it as an excuse if they feel pressured.

Also the `natural instinct` may not be a given here, since up until recently the instinct to have sex and procreate meant the same results for humans just like other animals, which no longer holds true either.

>Sure if everyone had one-percenter level resources they'd be more inclined to procreate

When we look at actual billionaires, we don't see huge fertility levels. Maybe on average a bit higher than the average couple today, but nothing really significant. It's not like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have been trying to compete with the Duggars.

The only thing more resources do is allow people to have the number of kids they truly would like to have. Most women really don't want to squeeze 15 kids out of their vaginas, and are generally happy with 2 or maybe 3.

Wouldn't most of the so-called "West" already be in the process of depopulation, based on current birthrates, if not for immigration from other regions?

No, just in a demographically problematic situation of having a bad ratio of young vs. old people.

That would also be true but, yes, the population would be decreasing without immigration from regions with higher birth rates.

Long term? Yes. Long term as in "by 2100". Until then, the more immediate issue is the aging population, making everything from health care to retirement financing (the public, European-style models), in the current form difficult. This was a topic already discussed in the late 80s to a degree to be part of classes when I was in my very early teens.

Migration helped to mitigate that. Regarding fertility rates so, the developed West is just ahead of the curve. With economic growth and stability, the rest of the world is following the same curve Europe and the US do for quite a while.

I think, that ultimately, global population will stabilize, including individual countries. There will be dips and spikes, as usual, overall so we should be fine as a species.

How to support the elderly in a world where the same GDP is produced by less and less working age people is a question so: using salaries as a basis for social securoty and public health care won't really work as well anymore. Taxing corporations and wealth (as in really wealthy, being a paper millionaire just because you happen to own a house does not qualify) is one option.

depop is fine as long as we start with the depops

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