Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
wsj.com
wsj.com
- economists & businesspeople who can't conceive of a world without growth
- religious people who think God wants them to be fruitful and multiply
- atheists who think we have some kind of evolutionary imperative
- parents who think that being childfree is an affront to their choices
It sounds more like this might be a choice you feel strongly about but are projecting selfishness on to others?
This can be a totally fine choice for someone to make personally (which I support), but also not good for society as a whole. Both things can objectively be true.
Parents have natural urges to have kids (literally, evolution!). So it is self-explanatory.
Non-parents will need a younger generation when they grow old for satisfying all the Maslow hierarchies of needs (food, medical care, entertainment, funding social safety nets etc). So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.
People in both categories may not be aware of their own flavor of selfishness.
When my father was dying, I out of all his children was able to help him the most since I don't have children of my own. Clearly I could devote my life to helping old people and do more overall good for that group, then just producing children (who may or may not do so). In fact, I could make the claim that "the ones who *are* producing kids by choice are consciously producing more work for future generations to do hence acting selfishly". That position would be similarly asinine.
But sure if you understand there is no inherent good to parenting and it's basically just people doing what they want to do (well when having the children by choice anyway), then I guess you maybe show a little humility. I may someday have children, but I'm under no illusion that I'd be doing the world a favor.
I was saying that it didn’t feel like they were arguing in good faith by ascribing only selfish motivations for those who advocate for that point of view.
And aging population means you have more dependents than caretakers for them.
An aging population in some parts of the world means you have fewer men to fight in a conflict (assuming your adversary doesn’t have an aging population).
There’s loss of specialization, loss of skill transfer, younger people do more manual labor like harvesting food.
You need people of a certain age range to basically run society.
Procreation kinda is an evolutionary imperative- atheism or not
I've yet to meet anyone able to do so coherently.
You've also presented no argument for why it is impossible to define. If free will is possible, there should be no reason you can't define what it is.
If we have no free will we are just like candle flames; any argument that says we are more than candle flames is not valid when you assume we are candle flames.
People forget that logic requires axioms.
If I were to ask you to act a certain way and you do, this would neither prove nor disprove free will, because it tells me nothing about whether causality required you to act that way or differently and whether or not you deviated from causality, and so your analogy is meaningless. It is not what we'd ask you to do in order to prove free will.
You're using an assumption about an invalid argument as an argument in favour of free will, and that's no more valid than the original invalid argument.
To prove free will you need to prove that there are decisions in the brain that does not follow a) strict causality, b) randomness, c) any combination of the two. As you've pointed out, experiments where you ask a subject to act in specific ways do not produce evidence for it, as they can just as well just be causality in action. That the strawman hypothesis you presented is not valid does not prove the inverse, nor does it release any obligation of proponents of the idea of free will from providing evidence, or even just a definition to support their idea.
Free will is an absolutely extraordinary claim in that respect, because it implies a third category of events that is not a mix of strict cause-effect chains and random events, but introduces a "will-effect" chain that has no direct causal link but at the same time is not random.
As it stands, without a definition, the notion of free will is not even a fanciful hypothesis - to suggest it is a hypothesis would imply a fully formed idea. But the concept is so woolly and meaningless it tells us nothing.
It's at most a fervent wish or hope of not being an automaton. But a wish is not evidence, nor an argument, or even a hypothesis.
If you want to produce a valid argument for free will, you need to be able to either proffer a hypothesis for how such a "will-effect" chain can exist, or demonstrate physical transitions in a mind that are demonstrably not cause-effect or random byproducts of ordinary physics.
Even just come up with a coherent definition and you will be world famous, as you'd have introduced a new area of logic. If you can prove a physical mechanism for it, you'll have Nobel Prize in physics in the bag.
The main issue is that we approach the topic with a different set of axioms. E.g. your limitation of requiring a proof involving (a-c) is analogous to asking someone to build a steel bridge with three colors of legos.
Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
If your starting point is that no one is actually conscious, it’s impossible to disprove, and it’s obviously wrong (and any attempt to prove it’s not obviously wrong would knee-cap itself since it’s impossible ‘to logic’ without a reasoning engine).
Well, yes. The alternative is for you to give me a definition of free will that allows for it within the constraints of cause-effect and randomness.
Without such a definition, the option we are left with is inherently "breaking free" of that, and then we need another category of effect.
I don't believe either is possible, but we specifically do not have evidence that such other category of "will-effect" transition is possible, no observed mechanism, no observation of such a category, nor a hypothesis that provides even the starts of a coherent definition of what it would even mean.
So yes, the point is that the problem appear obviously impossible to resolve in favour of free will without either new logic or a definition of free will I don't think possibly can meet expectations.
> Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
Only partially, in the positive case. Consciousness would seem to need to exist for free will to exist, but in the event free will does not, there's no reason to presume that affects the possibility of consciousness.
> It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
It does not have the same issue. Whether you have free will or not, there's no reason why that need to affect your life at all. Clearly we think we make choices. Whether we make those choices or not, we act as if we do. As it is, we already have solid evidence that our conscious "decision" often is not causally linked to the actual "choice", so we can't rely on our introspection to even give us an accurate description of what "choices" we make, or why, and we know from e.g. split brain experiments that the brain can easily be made to rationalise how it "chose" things it never did. Accordingly, whether the mechanism actually controlling actions exercise free will or not, we'd expect our consciousness to experience it the same way.
“Well, yes. The alternative is for you to give me a definition of free will that allows for it within the constraints of cause-effect and randomness.”
https://youtu.be/itLIM38k2r0?si=1wTeSVdX28UlB2jf
This interview with Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist Roger Penrose describes a framework where quantum mechanical time hopping during a measurement removes this cause-and-effect concern you have. E.g. The nature of reality of time and matter fields is even more complicated than we understand, and our macros scale understanding of cause and effects might be too limiting when considering constraints of consciousness.
But what will the price of that labor be when birth rates collapse and there aren't sufficient people around to do this labor? Retirement savings mean nothing when the people needed to do the work are not available. For wealthy western countries immigration is the only realistic solution address the shortage of working-age people. It's not a silver bullet, though. Immigration scares people and populist politicians will exploit this fear of change.
We should also remember that politicians in rich countries are very old. They care a great deal about anything that affects their own retirement. To young people who don't have high expectations for their quality of life in their last couple of decades on earth this panic about demographic change may seem silly. But baby boomers care and they are the ones making policy.
At some point my generation will have to question the validity of that social contract.
I'm asking because whatever policy you'd like to see applied to the current elderly, is to be applied with twice the intensity to yourself, as the generation behind you is even smaller.
So any fix would involve changing the age structure of representation. The particulars of the fix would depend on the specifics of a particular system, but one idea that could fix things would be absolute limits to the time you can be in office. So for example a rule that states any person may serve only X years in parliament over the course of their life. Those limits might have other benefits.
Maybe even an absolute age limit would make sense, e.g. retirement age + X years. Of course old people should get political representation, but maybe putting a cap on it would work to make it more a government of working people.
Another idea would be a voting multiplier, that gives proportionally more power to representatives that are from age brackets that are underrepresented in the governing body.
All of these might have unanticipated side effects and there are probably even better ideas, but the point is: whatever it is, it has to be something that gives true concessions to the young people, otherwise there can be no true political negotiation between the retired many and the working few.
Mainly though, I wonder - where is all the extra productivity that has supposedly developed over the last half century or so? Shouldn't that be able to cover over a declining population?
I think we can also make a Moore's law analogy here. As CPUs get faster we write slower code.
We do this all the time, including with debt, pensions, etc. Once born, the currently unborn have the choice to take care of their parents or not, to decide en masse not to become a doctor or nurse, to emigrate to a different country without a pension system (or to just be jobless forever to avoid paying for that)...
For myself I don't believe I have the wherewithal for it regardless of my view on the matter of selfishness.
>The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies. Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support, we hypothesize that parental status differences in happiness are smaller in countries providing more resources and support to families. Our analyses of the European Social Surveys (ESS) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) reveal considerable variation in the parenthood gap in happiness across countries, with the U.S. showing the largest disadvantage of parenthood. [0]
The response to the above tends to be something like, it's not so bad, kids don't really need that much anyway. Which always leaves me with the question - how much money do you make? Could it be expressed as "several times the median US household income"?
The point you’re trying to make is contradicted by the demographics of who is having kids. My friends from law school are the ones who disproportionally aren’t having kids. Meanwhile my wife’s step mom’s rural Idaho family is bursting at the seams with kids.
For those without good career prospects, ruin is not such a big deal. I looked it up, and no surprise that medicaid pays for a huge share of births in rural Idaho; if anything, 48% is lower than I'd expect.
> Medicaid coverage is even higher for births in rural Idaho. For instance, 48% of births in Lemhi County involved mothers covered by Medicaid. [0]
[0]https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/11/28/idahos-infant...
That’s what I’m calling selfish. These people could have kids. They just choose to prioritize their lifestyle, and the pursuit of their individual career. They forgo the fundamental pillar of the human experience for marginally better odds at a career that makes some giant corporation marginally more money.
Family planning was one of my dad’s specialities in public health, and most of our family friends are in that field. At a party a few years ago, someone jokingly asked if my wife and I planned to have a fourth kid, and someone reflexively interjected “nobody needs four kids.”
Arguably it was a necessary policy at the time, but has probably doomed countries like Korea and Japan to extinction.
Humanity would shrink (I think this is calculated to start after 2050 or so), but besides those two reasons, does that matter? Where is the foundation of the argument that we must have population growth to sustain? Or where is the research that shows if we halve the population, everything will be terrible?
please talk to your grandparents about the topic and report back to us.
But what great insights would they come up with pray tell? In those days (it was WOII) it was to work the land (economy), cannon fodder and pension plan (have them take care of you). What else?
That's what is else, your very existence!
I'm sure you would agree, your life has value and meaning beyond a utilitarian or disposable cog in a wheel.
By extension therefore all lives are equally valuable and necessary.
It does? Measured by what? That's what I say; I'm a consumer, but beyond that, how am I valuable? How are you?
> By extension all lives are equally valuable and necessary.
You are a vegan? Are plants lives lives?
Also, putting too much pressure on the planet with over population makes it the opposite of valuable.
We are an accidental blib in a cold vast cosmos; nothing and no-one would think of us or remember us if the earth explodes today (or if someone hits the nuke button). I 'value' my life in so far that I am not in pain and I was born in the right location with the right interests (math + computing) to do whatever I want to sit it out until I die.
How is any of it a reason to make more babies though or a sign we have a shortage just because we make less than we need to create a population equilibrium or growth?
I think that creating more happy people is better, not more people per se.
- the pension system can't be sustained, but also
- more and more people need support of doctors, nurses, care homes, etc. but can't find it or it becomes more and more expensive (but see problem above regarding their pensions).
Historically children take care of their parents when they are old and in need; in the past century more and more of this has been delegated to society at large. In both cases though you need young people.
If you'd like to implement it you're welcome to go tell your largest voting bloc that your primary objective is to almost completely remove their entitlements and leave them to starve to death. Who knows, maybe after they are finished lynching you you might get elected.
And the articles states that "some estimates now put the number of babies each woman has below the global replacement rate of about 2.2. The U.S. long ago passed that level." - so even finding one that works at replacement birth rates could not be enough.
A larger population means bigger numbers on the everything that's on a normal distribution, like intelligence. That one genius in a 100 million? With 1B population, you only have 10 of them. With 8B population, there are 80. That's 8x more chances one of them does or finds something revolutionary, 8x chances that person is not perishing somewhere in a cobalt mine as a kid. It slashes times waiting for a genius to appear 8x.
A bigger population also enables extreme specialisation in very niche fields. It enables bigger recruitment pools for complex processes and manufacturers like, for example, ASML.
It's, in a short word, massive parallelism.
Now, a counter-argument to everything I said is looking at the demographics of geniuses, revolutionaries, specialists and noticing most of them were well-fed, well-educated and raised in stable, liberal societies (liberal as opposed to, say, taliban-like societies). So, in theory, we could get by with a smaller population, if it was a rich, western-like, population. In that case, the only constraint would become genetics; so an 100M population would have to wait a couple of generations for their genius, instead of a 8B pop potentially getting them all at once.
Like: flying costs a lot in terms of resources, but is it more than 1% of the perceived living standards?
It might sound misanthropic, but the average person is average. Nothing wrong with it, morally or otherwise, but they won't be doing revolutionary work in specialist fields, they will be raising families and be happy.
Like I said in my original comment, we can get by with a smaller population with western levels standard of living, and then only be constrained by genetics.
It’s the most stupid of arguments for growth. Everyone in funnel optimization knows that.
Genetic engineering might also be a way out of the reproductive Ponzi scheme. Grow ready-made adults in pods! No painful stupid 25-year investment period with uncertain payoff.
Fix the former first if you want the latter to happen.
If you expect x plumbers to be needed in year y and x/2 not many years later (within the span of a plumber's working life), how many should choose to become plumbers in each year? How about buildings and other infrastructure with long lifetimes?
Rapid change makes those things difficult. Don't want random home owners to have to speculate on that, and for some of them to lose their shirts when the population is too low to find a buyer for their home.
But this kind of thing always exists. For example, logistics companies have problems hiring in some countries right now because young people don't see driving trucks as a viable career for forty years, but the logistics companies need drivers for the next ten years or more.
Others have listed why this will be bad.
In case there is some kind of reduction in the workforce, then we do not have a plan to care for our elderly. Already, young adults are finding it difficult to afford homes for themselves, even with a higher proportion of families with two incomes.
We would see an increase in the chasm between the rich and poor, as those able to own property would be able to both look after themselves and their families, and would be able to continue to grow their wealth by charging rent to those who are unable to afford to buy. This especially would be accentuated if population decline were gradual, as then the rich would be able to continue to snap up the homes that come onto the market and rent them out.
A short sharp halving of the population would likely leave a surplus of homes on the market, at affordable prices for everyone, and would perhaps even lead to a better quality of life for most. But that's not an organic process, and certainly leads to a worse quality of life for the unlucky half...
I do some fantasy world-building in the little free time I have. The setting is diesel-punk/atom-punk, so 1950s era. A little bit of disco-punk mixed in too. Essentially, modern post-war USA.
So, when I try to model a city, or a country in this era, you gotta go after the data. Because we actually have it for this setting.
Medieval data is just horrible in comparison. The high fantasy settings will get a little bit of data on city dynamics and some on 'nation' level data and the like. But most of the modeling is starting from pretty much guessing with wide errorbars.
But in the atom-punk setting I have, there is just mountains of data from all over the world. It makes modeling really easy and you can get really fine-grained about it (much to the detriment of story-telling, I get lost in those tables and charts, happily so).
One thing that really stands out in trying to model this data is that population is literally everything.
How grimy a city is, how tall the skyscrapers are, the walking speed of people in the city, the talking speed of bank tellers, the number of patents per capita, the monthly charge for sewer access, tonnage of warships, the length of subway track and it's heights, etc. Pretty much every metric will correlate best with the population of the area. It's not just cities, it's states and countries and smaller towns too. Really anything about the setting and world-building is best modeled by looking at the population first and then working from there.
To be clear here, not the population density. The only metric I could find in my notes that better correlated with population-density was the number of subway stops on a line. I'm sure there are other examples, too.
But, in the years that I've been doing this, the number one thing that seems to pop out to me is: Raw population is everything.
Now, I'm mostly interested in themes and settings and the like. But most of the data is coming from the motivation of trying to increase the quality of life of people. So I get to stare at that a lot and make graphs.
And I can say from my eyeballing of all this data over the last few years: More people = better.
Most of the metrics we use to quantify if things are 'good' or 'bad' will correlate with more people = better. It's not, by any means, a 1-1 thing. This is human population stuff, If you see a r2 value of, like, 0.6, that's pretty darn good. There is a lot of noise here and the stats that are taken have just huge issues with them.
I'm not going to be able to really prove this, I'm just mucking around with a setting and world-building. But from the years that I have been staring at my poorly organized notes and the various governmental and NGO data tables, the underlying message is that things get better with more people around.
I wonder what the end game of this decline is. The population of countries couldn't go to zero (right?). So at some point fertility rate must rebound. But at what point? 50% of the current population? 20%? 5%? Could we (or our great grand children, if we have any) see a world with just 2 million people living in Japan, finally beginning to grow again?
It seems to me if there is ANY sub group in the country reproducing above the 2.1 replacement rate, eventually they will come to dominate the population, if they pass this inclination on to their children. The "bottoming out" of the population might be determined by the relative size of that sub group today, and how much over replacement rate they are reproducing at. So maybe in America, the population bottoms out at 100 million people, with Mormons making up 50% of those, and as time goes on the population slowly grows and becomes more and more Mormon.
The other thing I think may happen, at least in more authoritarian countries like China, is that the state steps in directly. If offering tax breaks and free day care just aren't moving the needle (which they haven't so far), governments set up, for lack of a better term, "baby farms". Giving birth is turned into a full time job, completely separate from raising the children, which is done by some other state institution, and the population is stabilized that way.
We can simultaneously have "too many people" and be on the verge of decline. We aren't there yet. Most countries are still growing, just at a decelerating rate.
And the reason isn't a Children of Men biological fertility collapse. We've spent 60 years telling women to get jobs, everyone to defer employment for higher education and housing age childcare are both the most scarce and expensive they've ever been. This isn't a mystery collapse. It's money. Always has been.
Edited for grammar.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/suddenly-there-aren-t...
JSON-only, no cruft:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1mhbxT
When given the choice, most still want children. How many? 2. As some want 0 or 1, this averages out to the typical 1.5 - 2.0 range as seen in most countries. Which is below replacement.
Most people maxing out at 2 children makes sense. Two children already give a full and rich family experience, both the joy and its burdens.
There's no incentive to go for 3, 4, 5. You may not have space for them in your home, car or schedule. A cold thing to say perhaps, but there's diminishing returns.
Money doesn't fix this, it doesn't move the needle. Yet people will passionately argue that if only homes were cheaper and childcare free, we'd boost that number. It makes little difference. There is no quick policy fix for this.
It's also extremely hard to get people to care about this because for anybody alive today, they'll experience the world as getting ever more crowded for another 4 decades.
Fundamentally, I think individualism is at the root of the problem. We've sacrificed the institute of family and community to the economy. Modern couples are increasingly financially independent workers. We outsource childcare to strangers so that we can maximize work. There's no neighborhood or community support network because they are at work too. We outsource elderly care, again so that we can maximize work.
The irony of a dual income career culture is that it drives up the cost of living but an even more counter-intuitive effect is that it's a major cause of worker shortages. Why? Because all the wealth this labor produces fuels an ever growing demand, of which much is consumerist bullshit.
We won't change though. We will have all our bells and whistles and double down on this path.