Except shut-ins rarely procreate, and just that will be a huge hit on their average contribution to society. It's cool if an individual finds their niche, but as a generational trend it seems highly problematic to me.
Do they mentor others and pass skills on though?
I've travelled in Japan and met childless swordmakers and glass blowers who have apprentices and former students who have their own aprentices.
You're aware not all things are due to nepotism I assume?
In many (western inspired) parts of the world, the retirement scheme depends on productivity being increased for every generation. This because every generation that retires is larger than the previous generation that retired. The population growth drives the need for an increase in productivity.
You can increase the productivity by either increase the size of the working population, or make the working population more productive per individual. Up until recently we actually did both. That's why our elderly now can enjoy VERY comfortable retirements compared to two generations ago.
For us, those who are now working, it doesn't look great. We're not having children and it's getting hard to squeeze more productivity out of us.
Here according to the latest projections, I'm not supposed to retire until I'm 69. And this is with today's data. I fully expect it to increase further. Those that were born in 2015 or later are expected to work until they are 71, according to today's data.
The problem is that I don't think that on average we can work until we hit 70. My father's generation was quite broken right about around 65 when they retired.
I just don't see a way to decrease the population levels in a way that doesn't lead to a collapse of our way of life.
The population should imperatively shrink, it should already be at most half of the current size.
With this completely different viewpoint, the real contributors to society wellness are those who have less (or no) children.
The problem is how we can make this transition from a large population to a smaller one with as little suffering as possible.
As I said, here we are expected to work into our 70s on average already, which just will not be possible. At some point there won't be enough resources to care for those who can't produce. We need a substantial increase in productivity per individual for society to keep working while the population numbers are decreasing, and that doesn't seem to be happening.
Not pretty thoughts, but just mechanistically unavoidable...
I'd say, let's reduce our comfort, let's do it now, yeah we'll be poorer and all. Still better than the alternative.
The point is to go out of our way to remain (and become more) altruistic and united at a global scale... in order to spread evenly the diminishing resources.
If everybody gets poor in a similar way, it will reduce anger and unrest. Or avoid wars, if that's a country that would have felt wronged otherwise.
The Earth can easily support 2-10x as many humans as presently live on it.
Our way of life, however, is quite wasteful and inefficient.
Nah, it's both, not either, of these elements of the solution.
Only lowering our way or life (in your scenario, lowering it at an unimaginable level), while being twice as many, is unacceptable, as we'll deal with absence or regression of medicine (too costly in energy or resources), drastic reduction or extinction of research and exploration, and end of the "global village" concept because of too expensive communication and transport. Education is at stake too.
And only reducing how many we are is as unacceptable, as it implies too much lives lost too suddenly, of course.
It must be a combination of both.
So, the point I raised stays true, we need (also) to reduce the population. But not only.
Right now I'm thinking I found the right way to explain the problem: even if you (and me, and a handful of other groups of humans) would agree to live like ancestral tribes, it would still not be the case of a lot, the vast majority, of people. And they would be much, much angrier of this plan, than of some alternative plan, e.g. to reduce the population and get altogether to a moderately poor level of life (not as drastically poor as if we keep on procreating. Say, way poorer than US citizens, but still wealthier than the average inhabitant of a Third World country).
And how to deal with social unrest is crucial, in how we'll solve the equation.
The work you are talking about, that we are supposed to do well in our 70s, is just a means to determine how we distribute our stuff, not a means to create more stuff.
I believe death does this. Breeding does not.
More change to get healthy, smart kids when might achieve great things.
Thanks to medicine, the burden of ailments on individuals has become negligible, and moreover the speed at which our culture and technology evolves is incomparable to the speed of genetic selection.
Education has arguably way more impact on the success of an individual than their genes.
why is it problematic? Procreation is not the be all and end all of one's purpose in life.
(for those not into the whole recombination thing, I haven't heard anything about human cloning yet, but there was a high-level equine competition recently in which six of the competitors shared their genotype)
it's already decreasing in first world countries, so this isn't a problem limited to shut-ins.
Fun times ahead.