That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
It is true that the average age of first birth varies widely based on socioeconomic factors, but it's up for all groups. The average age to have a first child was 21 for a woman in the US in 1972. In 2018, it was 26. For women without a college education it was 23.8, but that's still higher than it was in 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir....
The US is not the most extreme country in this regard either.
So yes, there will probably be fewer great-grandmothers in the future, though of course there still will be some.
I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.
Using your education to feel better than others doesn't serve us to advance as a society. I suggest that if you're as smart as you think you are then you find a way to frame the issue such that you're lifting up those people and not punching down.
I think the issue is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people.
There's a mid-level of people who are happy to have more than they need and don't have the Machiavellian drive to extract every last ounce of money and power.
And there's an upper-level who are fine exploiting anyone and everything.
There are of course altruistic people who are extremely wealthy. But sort of by definition, the middle-level is never going to have the drive & energy to fight that upper-level, who's willing to do anything.
I guess my point is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people, and the ones complaining about the lower class being exploited are not the ones who are doing the exploiting. It's a classic setup where the upper class keeps the middle class happy enough to not make it worth the middle class joining the lower class in revolution. And they aim the ire of the lower class at the middle class while they exploit the lower class.
children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views. just look at any subreddit that has youths are complaining about the backwards views of the parents/uncles/grand-parents -- i know it's not a representative sample, but children challenging their elders views is not an anomaly.
on the flipside, there's the trope of only children raised being raised by high-class, open-minded families turning into spoiled, selfish brats.
The kids who agree with their closed-minded parents probably aren't going online to rant about it.
the subreddit threads don't prove that these views are a majority, just that they are a non-zero proportion.
Why the poor? And is poor the correct label or is this just strongly correlated with the actual reason? In the past children were desirable as sources of additional income and for support at old age, is this still relevant? Otherwise it seems that you would want fewer children if you are poor because they obviously come with additional costs. Is it the cost of contraceptives or abortions instead of a deliberate choice? If it is not poverty directly but worse education because of poverty, how exactly would that work? How much education do you need to realize that additional children will cause additional costs? What other mechanisms are there? In the end it will probably be a mix of factors, but the phenomenon seems more complex than it looks like at first glance.
Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?
Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.
However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.
I think this is a very important world view conflict.
Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out.
Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.
This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing.
Even with a handful of countries still breeding like rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline.
Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia: "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal."
Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is routinely increased by human activity.
For instance, when humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-planted crops sprung up in places they never had before.
Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now have an entirely different problem: for the first time in human history, there are more people consuming too many calories than there are people consuming too few calories. Clearly, food isn't the problem.
The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean on the planet hundreds of times over even with our current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem.
While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've had fission for decades now. You can power the global electricity needs of twice the population of today's planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed of continuously by launching it into the sun for something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP.
Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine using a bullet train to get from one side of the humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem.
In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.
I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population - just what demands are being made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to, but continuing to expect more of?
Of course it will continue to accelerate. There's a mechanism that causes this. Some conspiracy theorists mistake this for an active, purposeful goal, but it may be as simple as children growing up in environments where childlessness has become a norm, internalizing that same norm. Since there are fewer children with each successive generation, the norm is amplified for the next.
> In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.
There are some who seem to want to kill humanity. They don't come right out and say it, of course, that would sound weird and awkward. If you're oblivious to that widespread sentiment, they're perfectly ok with that. The curricula they design for your children in school will slowly be modified so that they aren't quite so fond of your Star Trek visions for the future.
How can anyone prove your intents if you fully conceal them?
That said, I do find your argument here pretty compelling. Hanlon's Razor exists for a reason, at the end of the day.
So who's doing this deliberation? Again, you're pointing to a conspiracy but also denying its existence in the same breath.
There is a desire that humanity go extinct. But this isn't a goal for them, more like a fantasy. They're not actively working towards it, and they don't like to say it out loud.
They do design curricula (they're in positions where that's a responsibility, quite often). But they aren't conspiring. They're bumbling towards a doomsday, instinctively. They merely want to change the curricula to discourage the Star Trek future. In some vague hand-wavy way, this "makes it better". They're not sure why, and if you were to ask one hundred of them, you'd get 100 answers. And then if you asked months later, you'd get 100 different answers. It's just not purposeful, and there is no actual conspiracy.
If only there were one. Conspirators can be found out, rounded up, the evil plot exposed. But this microbe-like quorum sensing, where none need feel guilty, but simple coordination can take place, they're all innocent. There's no secret documents, no secret plan, no sinister mastermind.
Even you, you're part of it, and you don't even know it. People like you come by, mistake it for some conspiracy theory, and stir up shit as a sort of invisibility cloak. Unless of course, you were doing it deliberately. like when you quote a statement where I said "neither/nor [...] deliberately" with the very direct and simple negation of that idea.
> the invention of fertilizer
Nitrogen-based fertilizers are made with hydrogen from natural gas. The agriculture industry, at its base, is like the rest of modern economy: based on drawing down a vast reservoir of non-renewal fossil fuels, with the unfortunate massive externality of altering the composition of our atmosphere and the global climate in a bad way.
While technology will play a role in how humans adapt to the changes we've brought on ourselves, it's important to take realistic stock of where we are and where our trajectory is. Human population peaking will happen--the question is whether it's gradual or whether it's sudden. You don't want the global equivalent of this: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer....
Massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are wasted because it's so cheap [3]. There's headroom for bringing back crop rotation of nitrogen-fixing crops. Nitrogen-fixing microbes are an emerging technology [4].
I am not convinced that we're all going to die.
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2023/04/17/climate-tech-to-wat... [2] https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/09/fertilizer-prices-... [3] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/06/07/nutrient-challeng... [4] pivotbio.com
So that's not really a problem worth refuting.
On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people dying, 10s of millions of species going extinct, massive migration causing chaos in our current understanding of "nation states", sea level rise causing the abandonment and destruction of many of the world's great cities ... these are actual likely problems. The human race will still exist in the face of them, but what will be lost?
Also, why is it that the people constantly screaming about sea levels rising are the same millionaires and billionaires who own $$$$$ properties in places like Miami or Martha's Vineyard, which are ostensibly going to be underwater within their lifetime, if true?
Migration can be ultimately be summed up as someone else's problem, if you have a political elite with enough backbone to represent the interests of the citizens of their own country above those of non-citizens.
According to the US Republican Party, the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone" ?
Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
You're losing credibility quickly
>the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
Okay, A. What's happening at the southern border isn't any more of an "invasion" than the J6 riots. If only 1/500 people in your "invasion" even has a firearm, let alone training with it, it ain't much of an invasion.
B. What's happening at the southern border has absolutely NOTHING to do with climate change, it's strictly economic.
>What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone"?
What if there were some kind of relatively safe, yet impassable barrier? The kind that doesn't exercise force against anyone, ever. One that's so safe that the only people who get injured by it are those stupid enough to delibarately decide to try to scale it, while being incompetent enough to be incapable of doing so safely. Perhaps one that was tall enough that it couldn't be scaled by 20 or 40 foot ladders? Besides, this is a ridiculous question. Even under the president with the highest amount of illegal immigration in US history, Joe Biden (10,000,000 and counting!), we barely hit a tenth of that figure across 3.5 years.
Sadly, there's just no way we're gonna be able to afford such a barrier. That would have to cost what, $10bn? $50bn? Except that's still less than we've spent securing the border of a country on the other side of the planet that almost no Americans have any real, significant, substantial interests in (besides Hunter Biden, of course, who made millions of dollars per year as a Ukrainian energy executive thanks to his deep expertise and demonstrated thought leadership in the hydrocarbon exploration and extraction business... /s)
>Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
No, what I'm asserting is that the people screeching about the oceans rising and the sky falling are the same ones buying up all the properties being sold by the people who are afraid of oceans rising. It's a racket.
The problem is collective action. It's ALWAYS collective action. As long as people keep lapping up petrochemical lobby propaganda, it doesn't matter that we could pretty easily solve our climate crisis, nobody is going to DO it.
Too bad hundreds of thousands of species are going to have gone extinct by then. Hope we don't kill the wrong ones.
Just a sidenote, I know.
All I know is they're never coming back. If that doesn't hurt you as a fellow living organism in this, as far as we can measure, dead universe, there's nothing left to say.
Enjoy your meal while it's still plentiful. Just recently they found a thousand starved birds (1) near the North Sea, who couldn't find food because their hunting grounds are overfished.
(1) these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_murre and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorbill
My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?
Do you find your primary occupation entirely defines every aspect of yourself?
The thing with statistics, is that you have to gather data which have some consistency before you apply any statistics tool and try to draw some conclusions.
We can agree that any individual is more than the indefinitely various number of categories under which we can label this individual, but at the end of the day there only a limited amount of data we actually really have on any person that ever existed, and even less consistent set of data other many people under any category we can think of.
The industrial revolution shook things up.
I'm not sure you're paying much attention to politics, but there are massive movements that want exactly that, if not to drag us back to the past kicking and screaming.
I think the premise of we are like our parents is actually incorrect.... Our parents are like our culture would be the more correct assessment. In conservative more hierarchy based cultures you're much more likely to be like your parents, because if you are not you'll be shunned or worse.
Western culture in general has more of a "make your own path" ideology that increases the chances you'll be different from your parents.
Are those otherwise-horrible people comparatively cleansed of their sins solely from their decision to not have kids?
Is it not classist to hold more contempt for the poor rednecks in some flyover state with the traits you describe than the conservative millionaires and billionaires hiding among us?
“Classist” is a faux-woke term for the belief that certain socioeconomic groups are better than others. If you believe that certain socioeconomic groups are inferior compared to [probably upper-middle class people] then that is by definition classist.
There are countries where the average age of first childbirth is still in the early 20s, and countries like Switzerland, where it's over 30.
Among western countries, it looks like the median age for a mother's first child has gone up about 5 years in the past 50 years, which obviously reduces the likelihood of a great-grandparent even with increasing longevity offsets, but it's still going to happen because there is a natural cap to this figure.
However, demographic data clearly shows a trend over the past several decades. Look up "Mean Age of New Mother" statistics. E.g. here's data from the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf It's more dramatic if you extend the data back to the 70's. You can see the same trend in most countries.
On average, people are having their first children at a significantly older age than a couple of generations ago.
That doesn't mean that folks _aren't_ having children early at all. E.g. I have _tons_ of friends that had kids as teenagers (and a lot at 14, too) and were already grandparents years ago in their 30's. But that's not representative of the overall population.
This means that children knowing their great grandparents really is becoming more rare today than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
On average, birth rates have been shrinking virtually everywhere on this planet over the last decades.
We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.
That being said, Don't Look Up wasn't good satire for me. It was funny and well made, but negligently validates emotional ignorance.
So if the goal is to have children eventually? The young parents win.
In any case. Shouldn’t people be a bit embarrassed to embrace such an upper-middle class sneerfest in current year? Idiocracy? Christ.
- Jesus