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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

There's an extremely low fertility rate paired with a rapidly aging population. When I visited there were endless advertisements for geriatric type care / end-of-life type planning / etc, and a notably older population working quite low wage jobs in a place where everything was crazy expensive, especially relative to its northern neighbor. It felt depressing.

It seems like one of those places that is probably quite nice if you're loaded, but it seems like a pretty rough place if you're not already well off. I was also surprised that many of the stereotypes about 'one fine city' were not quite on the mark. Jaywalking, crossing against a cross-walk light, and various other little infractions were ever-present which left me feeling a bit odd as when in Rome do what the Romans do, but yeah... not gonna risk that.

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Your commentary has me reflecting on my own hometown. I grew up in a wealthy resort and retirement island, the kind of place that is now so expensive I could not afford real estate anywhere on or even near to.

Very aged population relative to the rest of the nation and so during the Great Recession a wave of retirees found themselves owning a home but otherwise impoverished and working service jobs out of desperation. Always was a sad interaction, and working alongside them was often worse. You would never hear the end of their misery, understandable bitterness, and regret.

Nowadays, thanks to the same demographic shifts, those jobs are back in the hands of the youth. Except now it’s all folks who grew up on the island that seemingly will live at home with their parents for the rest of their lives working those jobs. They otherwise would not be able to live anywhere close.

I have to ponder what the next shift in staffing there will look like.

This is actually the whole developed world at the moment.

Every place is a retirement community now.

Even though it feels depressing right now, I think the post-boomer world is going to be an amazing place.

If we don't get into a world war, sure.

There's an interesting aspect of fertility rate that most don't know. They also determine the exact age ratios within a society! Imagine a population has a global fertility rate of 1 (and in Singapore it's even lower, though not globally - yet). That means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. And we can approximate the age of fertility as between 20 and 40. So now let's start with 1 newborn and we can work backwards from there.

---

1 new born ->

2 20-40 year olds ->

4 40-60 year olds ->

8 60-80 year olds ->

16? 80-100 year olds

---

Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.

You can see this visibly playing out in Singapore right now with their population pyramid [1]. They had a nice solid pyramid in the past, so you end up with a very healthy economy and society - lots of young people for relatively fewer older people. But as fertility rates declined you can see it start to flip, so right now it looks a bit like a vase, and in the future it will be an upside down pyramid.

So basically as the old folks move on, they are replaced by even more old folks. And this never really stops until we return to being societies that are having enough children to sustain ourselves.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#/med...

Thankfully there's infinite people from other countries who can migrate freely and replace the aging population, right?

(Serious question)

Where do you propose regularly finding hundreds of millions of skilled English speakers of similar values who are interested in permanently migrating to what will be countries clearly in decline?

India, that's where everyone else gets them. People are just economic units

Even India's fertility rate is now below replacement, and they're increasingly actively working to turn the tide on their brain drain. And India's economy is both already massive and growing quite rapidly. At current trends they'll pass the US within a decade or two. They certainly aren't just this long term sustainable pool of people to draw from.

In my observation, there are a lot of unaccounted for and unintended issues that can arise from this.

Where I live, we are going through a lot of this right now (98+% of population growth is from immigration).

Immigrants have more kids than the non-immigrant population, but they do not actually have above replacement rate amounts of kids, so they are going to require more immigrants to take care of them later on. Also, the children of immigrants have non-immigrant level fertility rates. So, it's not a long term, sustainable way to "replace the aging population."

On top of this, immigrants often want to bring their elderly relatives with them when they are possible. I know there are some ways to try to mitigate this (e.g., immigration limits, charging them extra fees on immigration), but at some point there becomes a large enough immigrant voting bloc that this changes. Now you have extra, unaccounted for elderly people that are required to be looked after.

I have no idea what the solutions are, but if we are trying to plug the gap through immigration, it'll require perpetual immigration. Most countries globally are now at below replacement fertility rates, so this opens up a huge can of worms. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem like anything other than a quick band-aid or a solution that's doing anything other than adding "debt" to the issue.

Indeed. And this burden of a top heavy population pyramid is a major reason for not having [more] kids - a vicious circle, which, if left to continue, will result in humanity simply evaporating.

A pretty depressing place, with whole towns and cities abandoned, as the dwindling population huddles closer together. Not just geography though, there would also be a retreat in the arts, sciences, etc as there are simply not enough people to maintain let alone advance these endeavours. Life would be about eking the last out of what was left over from the 'glory days', a sort of slow motion apocalypse.

I really am not following your logic here at all. You're precisely describing what happens from not having more kids.

The next generation of the ownership class they raised will gleefully usher in the fascism some of their cohorts fought physically and ideologically against, and there isn't the threat of global communism to keep them in check anymore.

I wish I had your optimism.

The capitalist will NOT produce the rope that hangs him, but the tech nerd will design, and the labourer assemble, the robot that will replace them.

What a shame communists failed every time they gained power.

Oh, and killed 145.000.000 people in the process.

We will be them soon enough. Don’t cut your nose to spite your face

We will be old, not boomers. Boomers are a special generation at a special moment in world history - they made decisions based on the limited amount of knowledge they had about how the world works and while some think those decisions have doomed us forever, I remain optimistic.

Nice bit of agism there.

It’s more generational-cohort-ism.

Please re-read what was written by typhon and take your prejudice elsewhere.

There’s no “typhon” in this thread. Did you mean “typon”? I did reread his comment; it expressed a negative view of a specific generational cohort rather than old people in general.

Boomer isn't an age group, it's a generation.

FFS. Please re-read what was written by typhon. And then take your prejudice elsewhere.

No it isnt. What are you talking about!?!?!

Yes. Annapolis, where I live, is fucking depressing.

wrt the age demographics...

1.theres a constant supply of malaysian chinese who want to migrate to singapore. they're the best, cos they're culturally similar.

2.failing that,a few taiwanese or china chinese can also be allowed to immigrate. singapore is small, and china is huge. only need a few..

wrt living costs.. if u stick to govt subsidised housing(hdb),(public) transport,(hawker) food and healthcare, u shld be spending less as a % of income than the rest of asean on those things. but singaporeans want more, and leave in droves on trips overseas at every opportunity....

> but singaporeans want more, and leave in droves on trips overseas at every opportunity....

Probably because, as the title of the article states, Singapore isn't cool.

Singapore is small enough to kick the can down the road, but it’s still not sustainable to depend on immigration from other places that also have below replacement TFR

Singapore is the greatest example of failure of public family policies. A whole "Flirting" department (1) was setup since the 80's to push births, starting from a marginally racist approach only to educated women. This only had modest results until now, despite the billions that costed.

Every single such policy in the developed world has failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network

I have to push back on this because you’re basically saying that old people visibly existing killed your vibe, and that jaywalking made you think less of the place.

Heck, in a country with top-tier public housing (17th most affordable housing in the world) and healthcare (2nd best outcomes in the world, 12th highest life expectancy), how are you even sure those older people working jobs are “low paid?”

Maybe you’re seeing older people working because they live healthier for longer in Singapore?

If you work at McDonald’s in Mississippi you are much more low wage than working at McDonald’s in Denmark, especially considering guaranteed paid time off, healthcare, and other quality of life factors. You literally live 10 years longer on average in Denmark (or Singapore) compared to Mississippi. But those two people wear the same McDonald’s uniform.

How can you tell someone is making a “low wage” just by looking at the job they’re doing?

The rapidly aging populace is bad for everyone including the old. Isiah 57:1. We should have had the “day of the pillow” that conservatives in Texas were advocating for during Covid.

So your plan is endless growth? When is the population high enough to stop doing that? How is that supposed to work logistically? In what scenario does that not result in societal collapse within a short few lifetimes?

Endless growth and the inevitable planetary destruction/exhaustion from that process isn’t good for anyone, either.

It’s easier to adapt to a shrinking population than one that is too large to sustain with food and energy.

I hate to say it but tossing bible versus around isn’t going to make your case very well. If we want to talk about things that are grounded in reality maybe let’s not cite a book that says god sent bears to kill children who made fun of a guy for being bald (2 Kings 2:23-24).

Let’s be real: the Christian plan is to trash the earth (Genesis 1:26) until rapture comes around to bail out believers who have been dutifully praying and fucking.

Any day now!

You're creating a false dichotomy since there's always the obvious option of sustainability which is a fertility rate of around 2.1. And declining populations will likely create a far less sustainable world than increasing would. I described in a peer thread how fertility rates directly lead to the age ratios in society. Low fertility rates means you're going to have a low number of working age people for a large number of elderly people. On top of this, positive fertility rates mean that economies naturally increase in size even if you do absolutely nothing - negative growth rates mean that economies will naturally shrink.

We're nowhere even remotely near our production capacity for food, water, or energy - but we're already facing labor issues in achieving such. And in a low-growth future, which is our future, these labor issues will magnify exponentially. And it's not like you can just pay people more and everybody lives happily ever after - there simply won't be enough people to do everything that needs to be done, even if everybody's willing to work themselves to death. The expectations for what a society can provide will begin to unravel.

And I see no reason not to go sci-fi here because there's every reason to believe it's our future. Earth will not be humanity's only domain. It's practically inconceivable that we won't have thriving off-planet civilizations within a century and realistically - far sooner. And a century of unsustainable growth would be vastly less damaging to society than a century of unsustainable decline.

The global total fertility rate is already just above your stated ideal rate of 2.1, it's currently at 2.35, so I am really confused at why the comment I originally responded to thought we should all shack up and fuck during the pandemic.

I don't think you're discussing in good faith there. Obviously what happens in Chad, Nigeria, and so on has relatively little consequence on what happens in America and the Western world in general.

Please don’t confuse disagreement with discussion in bad faith. I promise you I’m making a serious argument.

It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates.

Country boundaries are arbitrary.

Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size.

And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.

Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years.

I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria.

The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before.

The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.

You're only considering superficial last mile manufacturing of stuff - not the entire labor pipeline involved in processes. Going from elemental silicon to RAM requires an absolutely insane amount of labor across a vast array of fields and specializations. And imminent seeming doesn't mean imminent.

A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still.

As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.

After Covid and AI progress, I'm constantly bewildered at peoples' consistent inability to extrapolate the immediate following step in a trajectory.

Global TFR: 1990–1995=3.31, 1995–2000=2.88, 2000–2005=2.73, 2005-2010=2.62, 2010–2015=2.59, 2015–2020=2.52

Our current 1.6 predicament was just at 2.35

>I hate to say it but tossing bible versus around isn’t going to make your case very well

Not if you actually read the verse, it's a relevant, experience driven philosophical statement.

Are we reading the same verse? I read it and it doesn’t seem relevant at all. It almost looks like the commenter pasted the wrong book/chapter/verse.

I don't know. I thought it made sense in that the previous commenter was lamenting the "boomers" and how everything will be better when they are gone. Without actually realizing that their isn't anything inherently problematic with boomers, it's just that they are the first generation that didn't reproduce at a replacement level. Making the aged a larger demographic than than the youth. That problem, however isn't going away, and is in fact magnified in each subsequent current generation.

You have to read the correct translation. The one that specifically references why it's good to die young

Well, that’s stupid. It’s not admirable to die young.

My grandma lived 96 years of a happy, healthy, enriching life. She got her college degree at age 60. She had a beaming smile when she played with her great grandchildren. She enjoyed the company of her husband well into her 90s. She lived independently until the last month of her life.

And there we go with the bible, you gotta read the correct telephone game translation of it and interpret the right way for it to make any bit of sense.

Nobody can just accept that it was written in a human developmental era that most of us wouldn’t relate with in any way.

For example, it was considered a blessing to die young and “go to heaven” in an era before surgical anesthesia. Better than living a long life with ailments that a modern doctor can treat in an afternoon.

We didn’t even get basic antibiotics until less than 200 years ago.

Yes, but your grandmother still died young. The future is one where fewer and fewer people reproduce but we have a far greater pace of longevity breakthroughs. The first humans to live to be 200 are almost certainly alive today, and in that 100 extra years the pace of innovation should increase and 200 will become young. The inevitable outcome is that machines will enslave humans, humans which never die and thus are trapped as slaves never reaching heaven. i.e. in hell. Constantly surveilled,too valuable to die and yet fully capable of experiencing pain, anguish and torment.

The alternative is that some sort of societal collapse resets humanity to a much lower technological level in which case your grandmother was likely also fortunate to have missed that.

The overall concept is that the only way to get to heaven is to leave earth. Thus, anyone who does that, has, from the perspective of those that remain and inevitably break the longevity barrier, died young.

Think of how disappointed the billions of souls in heaven, experiencing only peace and bliss, would be if their time on earth had increased 10x due antibiotics. It's not the dead who mourn, but the living.

> not result in societal collapse within a short few lifetimes?

Seems like you're more conditioned by apocalyptical Christian logic than you think

No? That's the opposite. Christian logic dictates that we don't have to care about societal collapse, because it's prophesied and it's actually a good thing because that's when believers are raptured into heaven. There are accelerationists who actually hope this happens faster.

The population went from 1 billion to 8 billion in the last 226 years. So my question to you is: how many more billions do you really think our planet can support? How long can we support 8 billion?

According to the MAHB, the world's oil reserves will run out by 2052, natural gas by 2060 and coal by 2090. Maybe those estimates are sooner than reality, but still, I'd love to hear about how a solution to running out of fossil fuel energy abundance in the next 25-200 years involves growing the population.

We have a whole damn solar system we’re barely even using. Overpopulation is a fake bugbear of small minded bucket crabs.

I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system.

It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.

Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?

Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?

Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400 per kg. This is still quite a lot but it can be contrasted against the ~$54,000 per kg from Space Shuttle to understand why the 'hype' around Starship is justified, with the big goal there being to drop another couple of orders of magnitude off the price. At that point costs will be low enough that the door to space will finally be open to full commercial exploitation.

I’ll buy your argument for the sake of it. We are killing two orders of magnitude of cost.

$14 per kg to get something to space.

Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US.

So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg).

Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are.

Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates.

Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.

Deep space solar solves the intermittency problem of solar, benefits from an inverse square relationship with the distance meaning you can get way more power per panel, is directly applicable to SpaceX's primary goal of getting to Mars, and so on. The big picture goal is making humanity multiplanetary, of which every SpaceX project can tie into one one way or the other, even the ultimately unsuccessful Boring Company.

As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1]

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...

Batteries also solve the intermittency problem, for less money, and their materials are essentially 100% recyclable. Solar+batteries together are already cheaper than any other form of grid scale electricity production. Entire islands with thousands of people on them have replaced their fuel-based power generation with solar+battery and are seeing lower costs and higher reliability.

If the economy is dysfunctional on earth, why is SpaceX a special snowflake company that is not also dysfunctional? It’s a US-based company. It’s publicly traded just like UPS. UPS has more competitors than SpaceX (FedEx, USPS, DHL, Amazon fulfillment, numerous B2C couriers, international couriers)

Using the price of bottled water is not meaningful to this discussion. Bottled water is a convenience product, the water is not a significant aspect of the retail cost of the product. Bottled water costs $5 inside the airport and $.15 at the Costco 2 miles down the road. The water is not the driver of the cost.

We only have one proven habitable planet and we need to protect it. Multi planetary habitation is some combination of 4 things:

1. Billionaires’ excuse to extract the earth dry for profit.

2. Billionaires’ fantasy to escape the pitchforks at their doorsteps, to build a gated community in the cosmos

3. Billionaires’ pump and dump investment vehicle

4. Billionaires’ science fiction affirmation of their narcissistic belief in their own demigodhood.

Batteries don't scale well when you're speaking of extremely high energy needs, especially given their deterioration over time. There's more clever things like artificial hydroelectric, but even that runs into scaling issues. Deep space solar, once established, has nice scaling potential. The inverse square distance:luminosity relationship really opens the door to some truly sci-fi type scenarios.

SpaceX is not publicly traded. It's privately owned and operated, with Elon's motivation behind the company being consistently ideological in nature. The water prices were apples to apples comparisons - the cost of a 0.33 liter bottle of water in an average restaurant.

> I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system.

A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier.

> It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.

There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels.

> Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?

Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research.

The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa).

There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.

Why does everyone in this thread keep talking about bucket crabs like they’re in some kind of groupthink cult? I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs.

Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. We don’t do that and never have because it doesn’t really make logical sense, we have better options available. It lends the question of “why do that?”

Why? Why do we want to live in space colonies? To what end?

This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it, certainly moreso than the vacuum of space.

> I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs.

If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor.

> Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges.

Maybe we’ll do that too someday.

> This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it

With a very limited amount of space and resources. We got into this discussion because of concerns about overpopulation. The Earth has plenty of natural resources and can almost certainly handle a much higher population than it has now, but exploiting the rest of the solar system will make it last even longer and allow significantly more material wealth for every person alive even at a significantly higher total population.

Thank you! You will have a place in the world post singularity. The person who keeps responding to you won’t.

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