We do not know how to stop population decline | Hacker News Reader

We do not know how to stop population decline

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That's fine, because population will not begin to decline for another 25 years. Our children can figure out how to do it, and then our grandchildren can put it into practice, if they care to; but they may feel, as I do, that it would be much easier to create a sustainable civilization with a substantially smaller population than the one we have today.

It's not as simple as that. As population growth slows, median age goes up. A declining population means a very high median age, non reproductive age. If this goes on it's a spiral to extinction.

The few people that are having kids will inherit the earth, but it's going to be a rough road.

No need to burden ever smaller generations with the previous childless. If one can no longer care for themself and can't find/buy someone else to do it, there should be a clean euthanasia path open. At least I wish that it will be open to me.

"Can't take care of yourself? Discouraged from having kids in your younger years? Nobody to care for you? Are you lonely in your old age? Fear not! We have the solution for you! Call 1-800-KILL-YOURSELF and we will dispatch an agent to assist you for the low low price of your remaining home equity!"

Joking aside (and I know I'm the only one joking), I think the outcome is not far off from what youre suggesting. When a government has a choice between stagnating to extinction and culling their unproductive subjects, well, governments do what they have to to ensure continuity.

Under the assumption that the earth's biosphere is a self-regulating system, population decline can't be considered a bad thing. Human economy certainly is not the measure of it's survival. There is a limit to senseless growth and finding a balance will be enforced by our environment's self-regulation.

If finding balance will be enforced by the environment's self regulation, why do we need to do anything about it? If the earth's biosphere is a self regulating system, population decline due to anything other than resource scarcity is a bad thing.

And why should anything matter at all, right?

Wrong.

The problem is that it's declining in all the countries that have nice things like women's rights and freedom of religion while it isn't in countries where rape and violence is commonplace.

The world is going to be a much less pleasant place in the future if this problem isn't solved.

"Some people will point to different reasons for this happening but they all fall apart under close scrutiny

1) People can't afford kids.

That does't make sense. The world is richer now than ever before."

The WORLD is "richer" than ever before. People aren't.

That's not true. I promise you your home, food, entertainment, tools to live your life are significantly better and you have way more of them. In developing countries, hunger is on it's way down, as is disease. All in all people are richer.

The answer here is pretty simple — you take money, resources, etc from people who don't reproduce and you redistribute them to the people who do until the population stops declining.

That is also not working where it is tried.

But even if you do that, you'll have an issue in a generation or so when those childless people are old. They're retiring, they're drawing from pensions and social security programs, they're using the hell out of the medical services, and someone has to pay for that. They don't have kids to take care of them, so all that capital that went towards the children gets siphoned from them in their working years. Now they're in a situation where they can't afford kids, and that trick can't be done anymore. It won't actually get population growth up over a few generations.

And while we're at it we can take money, resources, etc from people who have the highest carbon emissions to solve global warming, right?

Right?

As an added bonus, in accomplishing this task society actually becomes worth participating within, and people might naturally wish to bring a child in to this crazy... crazy world.

The more grandchildren you have, the even more you should get. Encourage all your children to have a quiverful on top of yours.

Turn it into an even more obvious pyramid scheme.

</sarcasm>

Financialized retirement (public or private) is pretty obviously a major part of the problem.

Before we leap into demography communism maybe let’s establish that this is actually a long-term trend in need of stopping.

There is no connection between the title of this post and the tweet.

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