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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

In that sense, civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Let's just give up.

Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme. But our current financial system that has never-ending growth as an axiom, where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be.

Never ending growth is an axiom because population growth is a given. Unless we forcibly control birth rates, that won't go away.

And yet, we are discussing a movement that wants to artificially increase birth rates that have fallen too low for their tastes. It seems you don't actually need to force control birth rates, just give women agency over their own lives.

Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given" it is definitely not a given. We will suffer the fate of every other organism that exceeds the carrying capacity of their environment. And right now our civilization is based on mining energy from previous hundreds of millions of years in the form of (C-H bonds) which is the definition of unsustainable.

It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.

Essentially infinite economic growth is possible.

Thought experiment: let's suppose we have a stable population that produces & consumes two things: food & TV shows. The food is sustainably produced so it doesn't contribute to economic growth or decline.

But the TV shows cumulate. Therefore generation X+1 is richer than generation X since it has access to more TV shows.

And "TV shows" in this thought experiment can be physical objects too. An iPhone 12 is more valuable than an iPhone 11 despite being smaller and using less resources to create.

Of course we're a long way from sustainable infinite growth. But it is possible.

> Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme

But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve.

> where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be

This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork.

[0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.

One could even argue that life itself is a Ponzi scheme.

The food chain certainly is

What a petty response to efforts to avert an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. Maybe you should just give up if that's the best you can do.

give up? you mean you wanna kys or live in dirt huts? sounds good for you, but I'm gonna go make some more bag holders

> In that sense, civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Let's just give up.

I think this is incredibly disingenuous. A steady state population that lives within the means of what the sun and planet can provide, without exceeding planetary boundaries, is an ambitious yet reasonable goal. A planet with a population that must grow forever to pay off debt today incurs against tomorrow without tomorrow's consent is simply not realistic, a "spherical cow."

When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children. What does this tell us? It tells us that the global population boom was driven by lack of agency and contraceptive access for women. What did most socioeconomic systems do with this "demographic dividend"? Capitalism, leading to wealth inequality, and also incurring substantial debts to pay for the future (both financial and physical system). And now this system is in material structural peril.

So, should we listen to the pro-natalism harpies that everyone should have more kids to continue to allow a suboptimal economic system predicated on returns and debt to continue to trudge on unimpeded? Or should we continue to empower women and force the economic systems to serve humans instead of using them as a resource? Managing a rapid total fertility rate decline resulting from self determination of a population cohort isn't giving up; it is living within our means as a species and respecting human rights.

It seems disingenuous to you because you’re unfamiliar with the underlying statistics. A steady state population is what pronatalists want, and they’re generally quite comfortable with the idea that this might require structuring society to better enable women who’d like to have a child. The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline.

8 billion (today) to 10 billion people (~2100) is not a reasonable steady state based on all available evidence. We'll head towards half that over the next 200-250 years as total fertility rates approach 0.5-1 on average, and 4B people is certainly more approachable to support sustainably vs 8B-10B (under the assumption of living standards somewhere between Europe and the US). South Korea is at 0.72, China at 1, Japan at 1.2, Mexico City at 0.96, (all 2023 figures as of this comment) and the rest of the world is not far behind.

> The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline.

This gets us to steady state.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/...

https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

I don't understand what you mean. A TFR of 0.5-1 means that every generation is about 2-4 times smaller than the one which came before it. In what sense can that be or get us to a steady state?

Society might have the will to move towards economic policies that would encourage a fertility rate closer to replacement rate as the global population halves. Today's politicians clearly don't, but 50-150 years from now, new folks will be in positions of power who might make it worth potential parents' time and effort. Unfortunately, if you can't convince women it's worth their one life to raise children "for the good of society" or whatever the messaging is, you're up a creek without a paddle and the situation is likely hopeless. Society should make them a very compelling offer (exceptionally robust support to be a parent), if it is willing and can, otherwise, prepare for the consequences of people having free will and self determination.

Wouldn't it be better if a movement to promote natalism - "pronatalist", if you will - convinces politicians to address the problem now? After 150 years of population decline, we're going to have substantial secondary issues. (Who's taking care of the disproportionate number of elderly people?)

I think there are a lot of problem now to attend to, and there is only so much human time to go around, which is currently better spent taking care of humans here today and fixing the problems we have already incurred. Future humanity will need to figure out a way forward due to past humanity being reckless. There is a debt to be unwound, and it has to start somewhere. Here is a fine place to start.

> (Who's taking care of the disproportionate number of elderly people?)

Whomever is left at that point.

>When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children.

Are those the only factors that are affecting the decision?

Are they even the main factors?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (citations)

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... ("Our World in Data: What explains the declining fertility rate?")

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... ("57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them")

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("Why more U.S. adults are choosing not to have kids: 64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/population-policies-0... ("Chinese women unimpressed by government's plan to make more babies")

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/the-last-gener... ("‘The last generation’: the young Chinese people vowing not to have children")

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-fert... ("South Korea's fertility rate, already the world's lowest, continued its dramatic decline in 2023, as women concerned about their career advancement and the financial cost of raising children decided to delay childbirth or to not have babies.")

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-07/latin-... | http://archive.today/RFf3U ("Bloomberg: The Age of the Big Latin American Family Is Over")

> Some of the reasons for this trend in Latin America are similar to those elsewhere: There is less social pressure for women to have babies at a young age. Contraception is more accepted and more available. People are living longer and spending more time in school before entering the workforce. Couples tend to wait until achieving a certain standard of living before considering children.

> But there are also reasons specific to Latin America. Simone Cecchini, director of the demographic center at the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, says the region has made considerable progress in reducing the number of teenage pregnancies. On the other hand, he notes, its recurrent macroeconomic crises and financial uncertainties tend to discourage people’s interest in becoming parents.

> In 1950, Latin America’s fertility rates were similar to Africa’s. By the end of this century, he says, they will match Europe’s. Demographically speaking, “this is a very significant and rapid change.”

I also highly recommend the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline" on this topic.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...

So when I look at the list of countries that have declining birthrates, all are wealth post-industrial.

Also note that according to Pew, the reasoning does not differ across gender: "For the most part, the experiences of adults without children and the reasons they give for not having them don’t vary much by gender. This is the case across both age groups."

So that diminishes the claim that "When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children." as it is both men and women choosing this.

Hence my questioning that Women empowerment is the main driver.

It appears to me that the main driver is societal wealth, societal cost and also a desire to focus on the self.

>They want to focus on other things, such as their career or interests (44% vs. 21%)

>They can’t afford to raise a child (36% vs. 12%)

Korea had a sudden birth rate drop after running an ad campaign about how children are a burden. https://www.prb.org/resources/did-south-koreas-population-po...

We in the west have had a massive change in our values and society since the last baby boom. We had the 60's where we rejected alot of the traditional values and then up through the 80's we had "greed is good" and a large focus on the self rather than society as a whole.

We also spread these views and cultural outlook wildly via Hollywood.

Are we sure this had had no impact?

> When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children. What does this tell us?

It tells me that unless we find a solution, women of the future won't be empowered.

Definitely an argument to ensure, through systems, future women have both financial and physical security, regardless of what the sociopolitical macro looks like. Would I say it is a call to arm women? Maybe? Depends on what the landscape looks like. Hard to predict the future.

Systems are built of people. If these people gradually cease to exist so will the system.

Some systems, not all. Asymmetric power and force is available and material in such matters. If the argument is "women empowerment is in danger due to not enough children being born who will champion women empowerment," the problem statement is "how do you robustly equip women to empower and defend themselves as well as future women as structural demographics lock in a population decline?" Doesn't necessarily mean you need more people, it means you need more leverage and force projection, systemized, depending on what you're defending against. I agree we need to be mindful about how and what to build (in a world of less humans) to maintain high levels of women empowerment and self defense into the future.

I don't see this happening. Love of life is stronger than other incentives, we've been evolving for this target for millions of years.

If the current system doesn't produce new generations of humans then people will eventually convert to other systems that do. And when that happens no one will care whether these other systems empower women or not, not even women themselves. Empowerment is inconsequential compared to life.

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