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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

>America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.

This is kind of misleading. There were 16 nonprofit college and university closures in 2024 [1]

I also have reservations about making predictions of what will happen in 10 years, much less 40. There are challenges relating to demographic change but it's not predetermined as you present it.

Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book [2]

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/financial-healt...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

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The Population Bomb is a great reference. This was something a family member of mine was seriously worried about in her younger days.

Population is an extremely complex, dynamic system, and I don't think we have any way of actually predicting it -- all we can do is look at trend lines and make projections.

(caveat - not a social scientist; just my current opinion; etc.)

And now less than half a century later, there are even people who are worried about falling birth rates in some places, because apparently it's concerning if we don't keep growing the population at the same rate.

It is concerning when all of our major social systems are built on the idea of an growing population and a growing economy (most pressing right now is funding pensions).

Maybe we'll have a billion humans living in orbit in a century. Unsure if they'll be willing to pay Earth Tax though.

US Citizens have to pay taxes even in orbit or on the ISS, or even on Mars or wherever in the universe they may be. This is fairly unique though, there's like one African dictatorship that does the same and that's about it.

Let's see how that goes after the Lunar Tea Party

That sounds a lot more like an argument for being concerned about our major social systems than the population trend. I guess I just don't think that introducing millions of extra humans into existence purely to avoid fixing Social Security or other similar issues makes any amount of sense.

Immigration can easily cover that though. If you can get past the widespread anti-immigrant sentiment.

Immigration at that scale is completely indistinguishable from invasion.

At small scales you can have them give up their culture and assimilate but at replacement scales you just turn your country into a third world country. That's completely unacceptable.

Dubai has managed to not let that happen even at rates far faster than replacement, but they don't give their immigrants voting rights, and usually not permanent residence (unless they are rich).

Right the only way to actually use immigration that way is essentially slaves and that has other economic (not to mention horrible moral) problems.

They definitely have literal slaves there, as well as the highest per capita rate of influx of high-net-worth individuals of anywhere in the world, and then a lot of people in-between.

invasion is forced upon the receiving country and immigration is controlled by the receiving country. They are not the same thing at all

Immigration is easily distinguishable from invasion, by anybody who understands the concept of consent.

One is invited, the other is unwanted.

I'm not sure there's a single Western country that wanted the kind of immigration it's getting. Many of them like Sweden seem like slow motion wars complete with an average two bombings per day. Other places like the UK have mass rapes, in the US everyone just quietly circles the wagons and stops socializing, in Canada pretty much every public service is suddenly unavailable and there are no jobs etc.

No one wanted or invited any of that.

I'm in the US, and I'm honestly not sure what connection you are trying to draw between immigration and socializing.

There's a bit of a difference.

Population Bomb's core claim was about the instantaneous rate of reproduction. This is a complex stochastic process. It could drop to 0 overnight if people decide no more babies.

But population decline is easier to model mid term because you don't need to make almost any assumptions. The next 18 years of university intake are all already born and there ain't a lot of them. The only way for them is down.

Clearly, what's beyond that is hard to forecast, but even then making a pretty good forecast for the next 25 years only depends on forecasting births in the next 7 years.

Not at all - immigration flows in and out can dramatically change the cohort.

Sure. But the numbers are down everywhere.

> Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book

Fortunately, almost twenty years before the Population Bomb book, others such as Alfred Sauvy were already warning against confident overpopulation arguments. They suggested more reasonable arguments such as examining countries on a case-by-case basis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sauvy#Key_ideas

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