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I'm not only conflicted. I'm annoyed. Immigration is being sold as a solution to aging and shrinking population. While opening to immigrants certainly helps so

• firethief 7y ago
  I think you have it backwards. The question we should be asking is, how can the rest of the world march as slowly toward Malthusian hell as Japan?
• whytaka 7y ago
  Why does that matter to you? I don't know if I'll have children and if I do, it'll certainly be <= replacement rate. It's often said that people used to have a lot of kids in order to insure against child mortality. I understand financial stress et al may be one reason for the lower reproduction rate but less kids can also be a sign of success.
  • slang800 7y ago
    If successful people are having fewer kids than unsuccessful people then haven't we created a dysgenic system?
    • CptFribble 7y ago
      This view is popular, even if in jest like "haha Idiocracy was right guise!!" but in real life it smacks of eugenics and the Divine Right Of The Rich. Success correlates well with things like wealth, education level of your parents, early-age nutrition, and other things that can be considered "inherited" in a way, but children of poor and "unsuccessful" people can become financially and socially important as well, it just happens at a lower rate. Suggesting that more poor children than wealthy children will impoverish society in more than just a statistical sense implies there's something immeasurably special about the people who become wealthy and famous, as if the mere act of breeding with them will produce superior humans.
      • mistermann 7y ago
        Impressive unpacking of a low detail, fairly innocuous comment, into a high detail, somewhat sinister assertion. What mechanism do you use to add specific details where none existed before?
        • Apocryphon 7y ago
          The very use of the word "dysgenic" wrt human populations is a form of virtue signaling that is far from unknown to internet circles such as HN. The comment might have been overzealous about rebutting a perceived narrative, but that statement is a basis for that narrative.
          • mistermann 7y ago
            Fair enough, but back to my question: what mechanism do you use to add specific details where none existed before?
            • Apocryphon 7y ago
              I can't speak for the commenter, but it could be a simple yet rigorous heuristic of seeing a particular buzzword used in certain conversations, reading the context statement that the buzzword is employed under, and matching that statement to a particular ideological narrative that is often prevalent in discussion circles such as HN.
              • mistermann 7y ago
                I just realized the original person that made the comment wasn't the one that replied, my bad. But I agree, this is indeed what happened. Another similarly true explanation is, he used his imagination. It's interesting to me how judging people based on heuristics is sometimes fine, even admirable, but other times it is Very Very Bad. It's also funny how these types of ideas seem to offend people, judging by voting anyways. No looking behind the real curtain or something like that I suppose.
    • GoblinSlayer 7y ago
      You can't increase success by breeding successful people, because success is created from loss, eventually they add up to zero.
      • bencollier49 7y ago
        You're arguing that value creation is a zero-sum game?
    • whytaka 7y ago
      Not if we improve the opportunities of unsuccessful people.
  • michaelt 7y ago
    Well, essentially everyone in the world comes from an unbroken line of people who had children, stretching back untold generations. So it's really the ultimate in traditional family values. More traditional than Shakespeare, the scientific method, religion and apple pie all put together.
• jdietrich 7y ago
  The ageing and shrinking population is a temporary, one-off problem. There's no fundamental reason why a replacement or below-replacement birth rate is a problem - in many ways it's advantageous - but it's a really big problem over the next few decades because we didn't plan for it. We have a big cohort of baby boomers with long life expectancies, grossly inadequate pension savings and considerable political power. We built our economy on the back of a Ponzi scheme, with the assumption that we'd keep giving birth to more suckers to fund the social security system. Immigration doesn't fix that problem completely, but it allows us to deflate the Ponzi scheme gently rather than waiting for it to collapse. We buy ourselves three or four decades to raise the retirement age, raise taxes and rebalance the economy to suit a stable population. It's not perfect, not everyone will be happy with it, but it's the only good option.
  • georgeburdell 7y ago
    >The ageing and shrinking population is a temporary, one-off problem. There's no fundamental reason why a replacement or below-replacement birth rate is a problem - in many ways it's advantageous - but it's a really big problem over the next few decades because we didn't plan for it. Taking a perhaps unwarranted broad view, economies of scale allow for us to achieve certain productive activities that we would otherwise not be able to. Taken to an extreme, a tribe of 100 humans would never be able to develop a space program, for example. Even aside from that, more people means more "black swan" thinkers/entrepreneurs that can have a population-wide impact. It took just one Einstein to develop General Relativity and now humanity will benefit forever. Obviously humans are chewing through natural resources at an astounding and unsustainable rate, and we'll extinguish ourselves in a few hundred years if nothing changes. If your view is that humanity should co-exist in much smaller numbers in harmony with nature on Earth, your statements are reasonable. I take the optimistic view that we're meant to keep growing indefinitely beyond the Earth, and so a shrinking, aging population is indeed a concern.
    • jdietrich 7y ago
      UN forecasts suggest that the global population will plateau at between 9 and 11 billion by 2100 to 2150, followed by stasis or a very gradual decline. IMO, those are excellent numbers - more than large enough to launch an interplanetary civilisation, but manageable within the resource constraints of Earth. I'd be worried if the population was forecast to shrink below a billion, but that's highly unlikely on any reasonable timescale. I'd be worried if the population rose much above 11 billion, because then resources start getting really tight. Anywhere in the middle is fine by me. If we do start terraforming Mars, I might be inclined to incentivise population growth. Unless we're absolutely certain that we can make it work, further population growth is a huge risk - every extra billion increases the pressure on resources, which increases the risk of conflict, which increases the risk of an extinction-level event.
• rdm_blackhole 7y ago
  Kids cost a lot of money. Kids change your life and not always for the better. Women who have kids also sacrifice time away from their careers and end up with significantly less money in their 401k/ pension equivalent.
  • skohan 7y ago
    Going through my dad's fight with cancer and death recently significantly changed my view on the value of having kids. I shudder to think what it would have been like for him and my mom had my brother and I not been around. Yeah there's care facilities for people who don't have anybody, but there's no replacement for family for when you stop being able to take care of yourself.
• coldtea 7y ago
  >* it is nothing more than a duct tape over what is happening: people no longer want to have kids.* Yeah, and the idea is: "Let's replace them with other people, from other cultures".