What will it take to have a stable society that doesn't depend on indefinite economic/population growth?
The "illness" is very simple, in my mind.
As rights for women progress, they choose not to have children. Which makes a lot of sense - having children is risky. The reason women in underdeveloped countries choose to have them is because they have less rights and less autonomy, as well as a worse economy.
If you're poor and require a husband to function, then having children is a huge boon. Not that you have much of a choice - your husband usually chooses. He bears little to no risk to having children, so of course he says yes.
What we cannot do in the West is backtrack on education and equality. It would probably work, yes, but we would literally develop backwards. Our economy relies on women working, our economy relies on education, etc.
So, instead, we should make having children a sweeter deal, rather than pseudo-forcing women to have children. We should offer generous and safe maternity leave, we should offer free childcare, and we should implement universal healthcare to eliminate risks associated with infant care, pregnancy, and postpartum care. We could even make higher-education free, to eliminate risks associated with saving for college.
Basically, women aren't having children because it's incredibly risky for little to no gain. By having children, you are ensuring greater economic hardship, health challenges, and less autonomy. It's a Catch 22 - if you choose to stay home, you have sabotaged your career. If you choose to work, you must pay exorbitant childcare fees.
We should not be surprised that women are opting out.
They have lower birth rates than the United States. Look at Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
I'm not saying these aren't good policies, but they aren't a fix for having more children.
Stable populations are completely irrelevant at the microscopic levels; InBev would fold within a week if yeast populations were stable.
I know there's a joke in here about this being literally in the bible, with God using such an insect birth rate swing as a punishment for an entire state. That's how "stable" it is.
You need to know what the current population is, what the carrying capacity is, etc etc.
Generic statements sound and feel good, but are completely useless.
This is just the natural and obvious outcome of what we’re already dealing with. The fertility crisis is just our refusal to deal appropriately with the ultra rich and the collapse of our institutions.
Yet we have made (hopefully this is not contentious) great strides in technology, human rights, and general quality of life.
Certainly there were some stable societies in that timeframe?
It would also take a society where people don't need investment appreciation to have enough wealth to live on, which again requires a much larger amount of automation and economic abundance than we have now.
It's not impossible, but it requires the kind of deliberate effort which seems beyond our political capabilities at the moment. The abundance people are at least aiming in the right direction though, hopefully they get more of a foothold.
If someone cracks the "robots that can do human-like things" boundaries in the real world versus just text - and there are enormous efforts in this regard going on - I'd fully expect some tasks to be handled by non-human workers.
It seems a lot more likely than "number goes up" next-quarterism driven economies are to survive a thousand years.
I don't even know what you mean by that. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, and likewise women trapped in DV situations unable to leave has dropped considerably.
Today is far more urban than the US I grew up in. And organized religion is far less popular.
Population hasn't been stable since at least the invention of steam engines.
Etc.
I don't want "stable"; I want "safe". I want the next generation to live in a world that is AT LEAST as safe as this one, healthwise, likelihood of war, crimewise... and really I want better on all of those. As my childhood time vastly improved on the early 20th-C when my parents were kids.
It's not really clear to me what the point of this question is. Are you advocating for infinite growth? For eventual extinction? Perhaps for a slow, long-term contraction but not extinction (i.e. eventual stability)? The latter is certainly what makes the most sense to me, but I'm just some random guy on the internet.
Am I allowed to ask a question without having an agenda? What’s with the hostility?
You are the one advocating for a stable population. The responsibility is on you to support that position.
When you retire there will only be two. Expect less than half the care, because automation of elderly care is more expensive than a person.
There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid. Not even hunter gatherers could function like that
Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce. They’re not ready to make peace with this though (or unwilling to between now and death). One of the few things we do well as a species is kick the can into the future, or steal from it, depending on perspective.
That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.
Automation would need some breakthrough as profound as life itself to be useful without the millions of people behind the scenes making automation possible.
In other words, there is a point, quite likely less dramatic than 2:1 where "allowing" people to be unemployed becomes economically absurd.
This is a low-ball guess, it assumes it'll stay the same price, with not even inflation and just price stability requires a LOT more children than we have, and a LOT more immigration than we have. In fact, you can easily calculate it requires a lot more immigration than is available. Birth rates are dropping everywhere. Immigration into Europe and US will dry up over the next 10 years or so. Plus the metaphorical "You" also don't want neither children nor immigration.
Second: it means paying for effective robotics research (a lot more than is happening atm) NOW. I can only observe funding is going down through deliberate government policy (seriously, the US military is effectively sponsoring robotics research more than our own government, through hand-me-downs). Other critical elder-age (and younger age) needs are also being defunded, like medical care. Both the care itself and educating new doctors, nurses, lab technicians, ... So medical care is reducing in quality, and can't stop reducing further at this point for at least 4-5 years, with no change in sight.
This will also make elder care more expensive. Unless you enjoy suffering for months when you simply hit your foot at 60 years or older.
Of course, all your current actions effectively mean private companies will solve these issues, and raise the price of robotic care significantly. "You" COULD pay a little now, and have this covered, but even paying for maintaining the currently insufficient level of medical care is too much to ask (and my Northwest-European country is far from the worst, in fact it's one of the best. But waiting lists have doubled in 3 years, and are at this point 100% certain to increase again next year. Still better than UK I guess)
> My McDonalds order is already taken by a robot. Perhaps a significant part of my aged care will be as well.
No. It can't. Not if "You" act like this now.
You'll be paying a lot to private robotics companies instead. Not rich? Tough. Plus, without kids, I hope you enjoy loneliness.
Robotics is an investment into the future, not a word that means everything's free. If it's "You" investing, you'll profit of it. But "you" won't do that. Even a basic investment to maintain medical care that "you" WILL need is too much to ask. Robotics and AI (and medical care) are therefore becoming a race to the bottom where the name of the game is to outcompete humans for jobs, lower quality for lower price. In THAT game, what happens to outcompeted humans? They lose. But it's the game "you" want to play: it's the cheapest one right now.
Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).
So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....
Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.
Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.
The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.
I am increasingly tired of arguments for the elites to do something for the betterment of society. They have repeatedly shown that they don't care.
No form of civilization has ever had the access to automation we have today.
And in another 20 years, I suspect that'll be even more clear.
You can't just think about raw numbers, you have to think about demography.
I'm not talking about self-service kiosks, I'm talking about "talk directly to the machine" sort of things they're already testing out.