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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Because all plausible theorized causes (birth control, global reduction in poverty enabled by technology, women's rights) are not temporary conditions. (Or at least we better hope they aren't.)

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Those are just hypothesis. Here’s ankther likely hypothesis - isn’t this is a mega fauna arriving at capacity?

The problem is that's not a likely hypothesis. There's no evidence lack of capacity is the cause of declining birth rates. In fact there's strong evidence for the opposite: countries with more resources to go around tend to have lower birth rates than countries with less resources. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec... There's no equilibrium here, if anything the feedback loop is positive rather than negative. That's the concerning part.

I thought this was common knowledge, but given the reaction I'm getting in this thread I guess it's not as common as I thought and I should have explained myself better in my original comment.

You’re right. I mean that’s certainly interesting, I just keep struggling with the question of - why is this a disaster? Seems like it’s only a disaster under a narrow set of conditions - capitalism, economies that need to grow to survive, lack of robotisation of elderly care.

Well, like I said, if the trend is caused by something that's not easily reversible, and there's no negative feedback loop which would naturally cause birth rates to come back up in the future, then unless something happens to reverse the trend then mathematically speaking the end result of global birth rates below replacement rate is human extinction.

Granted that's not an imminent threat, it would take quite a few generations at current first-world birth rates. But I still find it a concerning long-term trend, and there are a lot of less severe negative consequences that could occur between now and then. If you care to dig into it more, this podcast episode has a good discussion of the short-term problems, which go beyond just elderly care: https://www.thepoliticalorphanage.com/p/the-great-baby-short...

Why are you concerned about something that’s so far away from your lifetime ? There are so many problems - this one might even be self correcting - yet you seem prone to seeing it as an imminent catastrophe where you have to focus your attention on?

I literally just said it's not imminent. I'm focusing my attention on it in this thread because that's what this thread is about. Not like I walk the streets proclaiming our doom on my days off. :P

Also, as I just said, there are less severe short and medium-term problems caused by low birth rates as well so it's not just the looming threat of human extinction I'm concerned about; that's just the biggest and most obvious consequence so it's a convenient counterpoint to people asserting that low birth rates are not a problem at all.

It's a disaster from many quality of living standards (healthcare worker availability, funding for social safety net and social security and elderly care/retirement, ability for a society to fund new infrastructure or maintain existing infrastructure, etc).

Under another set of criteria (environmental concerns), it's probably a positive.

I mean "capacity" isn't some magic barrier. Usually it involves increased chances for the organism in question to starve to death due to reduced availability of food. We don't seem to be that close to reaching that.

We seem to have reached, maybe, the point where more human beings is not necessarily a positive. Capitalist society through supply and demand seems to be signalling this - we seem to be running out of transformative capacity to keep building essential stuff like housing in many countries, without increasing our already fairly disruptive footprint.

This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis. It’s an organism not a linear process. It will fix itself later same as it seems to be doing now.

> we seem to be running out of transformative capacity to keep building essential stuff like housing in many countries

Eh, I think we all know that we could build the housing if we really wanted to.

> This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis.

I agree, but it could a rough ride if the correction is too fast or too far. I think quite a lot of people would prefer the industrial system to keep running, and there is probably a minimum population below which it cannot run.

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