11 ms·

The world might run out of people (2019)

64 points by WheelsAtLarge 6y ago

chiph 6y ago
Something they didn't mention is the rise of personal wealth. As people enter the middle class, they start having fewer children. As to why - I'm not a economist or sociologist, but I expect it's partly because they aren't family farming anymore and don't need the free labor, and partly because they have access to birth control.
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  Educated women is the reason usually put forward - once women are educated they find more interesting things to do than have a lot of kids [1] [1] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati... [pdf]
  - it 6y ago
    Kids used to be allies of their parents; now they are adversaries. If you are sitting at a computer all day, your kids will probably annoy you unless they are watching cartoons. On a farm or in a hunter-gatherer setting, your kids can learn by watching you and they can help in more useful ways over time.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      Do you have kids?
      - it 6y ago
        No, but my roommate has a five year old daughter and my girlfriend has a five year old son. I have plenty of evidence for what I’m saying.
        searchableguy 6y ago
        I think you are expecting too much from 5 year olds if you think they can go hunting by seeing their parents given their motor skills. On the other hand, depending on what you are doing on the computer. They can learn it by watching you unless you are doing something very complex which most people using their pcs or devices don't. It's not hard for them to learn to comment on HN. And two anecdotes isn't plenty of evidence. I can provide more contrary to yours.
        it 6y ago
        I'm not expecting anything. When my roommate's daughter comes into my room while I'm on the computer, she tries to interact with me a for a little while but loses interest after she finds there is nothing for her to do. When I'm in the garden, I can usually find little things for her to do to help me out, like evening out the soil in a raised bed or putting flower bulbs in a bag. She happily does them and it holds her interest. Part of the difference is that the computer doesn't lend itself to collaboration the way the outdoors does. Part of it is that what I'm doing on the computer is far more obscure than what I'm doing in the garden. If you can provide contrary anecdotes, why don't you? Edit: Maybe a child can't hunt right away, but gathering can certainly be done by a child. For example, this morning my roommate's daughter was up in a tree picking mulberries.
    - chadcmulligan 6y ago
      it depends on your focus doesn't it? Like if you're goal is to spend all day at a computer then yes kids are a distraction. Surprisingly a lot of people like spending time with their family, and regard sitting at a computer as a necessity.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I'd imagine it has more to do with independence than with hobbies. Educated women get jobs that pay well and can do whatever they please, they don't have to rely on a husband and stay at home. IIRC, it's strongly correlated to income (which of course is closely coupled to education), and I'm pretty sure that poor women do not have more children because they're bored or don't know what else to do.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  In my country "middle class" means people that pay a lot of taxes and have little left for their own kids. When the government takes more than half of your income to give it to others and when the healthcare is free, but kind of missing, having your own kids is sometimes an economic challenge, especially when the fertility age is when people are also juniors and financially lacking; pushing childbirth to later in life is challenged by reduced female fertility rate over 30 years old.
  - boomlinde 6y ago
    > In my country "middle class" means people that pay a lot of taxes and have little left for their own kids. If that's anywhere like where I live, "lower class" means people that don't pay as much taxes but on the other hand end up having even less money left. Yet, lower class people tend to have more children and fertility has a negative correlation to income. Perhaps it's a matter of education and ambition rather than the economic challenge.
    - quantified 6y ago
      Maybe it’s that offspring are a form of survival wealth that become less necessary when you have more material wealth in your house and your community? Pure speculation as I read this.
      - sukilot 6y ago
        What is "survival wealth"? Is that "savings and investments for future"?
        quantified 6y ago
        Essentially. I just coined that while writing it, glad someone made sense of it. “How do I survive when I’m unable to fully provide or do for myself?” If my children are likely to be successful I don’t need to spread my luck out among 12 of them. As others have pointed out, they are labor-intensive and if you buy into certain socio-economic structures they’re fairly capital-intensive too. I wonder if some if it is also the capital intensity of children, the higher the monetary investment you bring (clothes, gear, schools, activities) the harder it is to have lots unless you have the money.
- dghughes 6y ago
  I would say education more than wealth but both seem to be factors in fewer children. Maybe both those reasons result in more planning of families and the decision to not have 12 children. My dad's family had nine and he grew up in the city in a small house. I think religion may have some part in it for example Roman Catholic where contraception is frowned upon. It was quite common to have a dozen children. My mother's family who were farmers for awhile (then a restaurant) also has nine children. Government financial support may also play a role. My country Canada has many social support systems that allow larger family sizes. I'm not criticizing it but the support is there for the children. It would be curious to see family size versus government support.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Education is the most portable form of wealth for aspiring middle class people.
  - agensaequivocum 6y ago
    > Roman Catholic where contraception is frowned upon. It's completely prohibited.
- thefz 6y ago
  And because it is very well documented that a predictor of the inverse number of babies a woman will have, is her level of education.
- imtringued 6y ago
  There are lots of factors. One major factor is that women are working now. If you are a full time mom it's possible to take care of 4 children or even more. If you are working you have to pay for childcare and it gets more expensive the more children you have. Those pregnancies also impact your career negatively so there is an upper bound that limits how many children you can have. It wouldn't surprise me if that upper bound is around 2-3 children and other factors drag it down to reach the average birth rate.
ZhuanXia 6y ago
Humans are subject to selection both genetically and memeticly. Some portions of the population have high birth rates. Fecundity in modern environments appears to be partially heritable and can be inculcated to a degree. There is little reason to think human fecundity will not go back to historically normal, Malthusian levels eventually once selection for fecundity takes its course. One reason to be bullish on religion is exactly this. Secular cults such as Randianism, modern wokeism, and arguably Reform Judaism are (whatever you thing of such idealisms) largely sterile and so unlikely to persist in their modern forms in the very long term.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  And yet, Malthusian societies tend to compete poorly against advanced technological societies for resources. This seems like it will only become more of an issue as technology continues to improve. Seems like the setting for an infinite number of dystopian sci-fi stories.
- klyrs 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - ZhuanXia 6y ago
    Then those resistant to conversion will be selected for.
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      Someone who believes this has to necessarily be bearish on the continued march of technological progress, which is in opposition to the fairly well-regarded notion that human technological development has been consistent and continuous wrt population for the past ~6000 years.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        The near-sterility of these subsets of the population is a modern phenomenon.
hirundo 6y ago
"All he was doing was adding one new variable to the forecast: the level of improvement in female education." This may be a bit of a trolley problem. If population were indeed controllable by this one variable, where too little female education resulted in overpopulation and too much resulted in population collapse, would it be ethical to impose an upper and lower limit on it? Would it be ethical not to? As a libertarian my default position is, that should be left up to those women. I don't believe that authoritarian measures are useful for human flourishing. But if I were convinced that this is an existential issue for the species I'd have to struggle between 1) maybe an authoritarian species shouldn't survive, and 2) ethics are ultimately in service to our survival and must adapt to that end.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  It is more like a one and zero, not a spectrum of shades of gray: women can be educated enough to know about fertility, contraception and birth control or not. The part that is a large spectrum is the desire of people (not only women) to have kids. I know educated people with 4 kids and people with the same level education with 0 kids, with all the intermediary numbers being present. I talked to women that are childless and they have various reasons for that, I talked to women that have 3-4 kids and they have various reasons for that, but the common theme is they all have made some informed decisions. For women without education having kids is mostly out of their control.
- narag 6y ago
  Why authoritarian measures instead of incentives?
- strken 6y ago
  The ethics of it are irrelevant in a world where genes and memes[0] are under intense selective pressure. Wait long enough and the infertile will weed themselves out. [0] In the original sense of the word.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- 6y ago
quicklime 6y ago
> The United Nations predicts that the global population will soon explode. No, they don't. They predict it'll plateau at 11 billion by 2100, and believe that the fastest growth is behind us. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Line/900 https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Lin...
- timerol 6y ago
  The text has the same number, but interprets it, ah, interestingly: "By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario." This is a pretty ridiculous statement from the article, considering the history of population growth. Growing from 7.8B humans to 11B in 80 years is a significantly reduced growth rate compared to historical data. It's even reduced growth on an absolute scale. Starting from 1930, we went from 2B to 6B humans in 69 years[1]. We added tripled the world population in a few generations. I think we'll be able to handle to slow, steady population growth of the 21st century. We have a lot of hard problems to solve in the 21st century, and population growth isn't even on the list. Edit: I finished reading the article. I would not recommend that course of action. The so-called "running out of people" scenario is that the world has between 8 and 9 billion people in 2100. While that is a significant change to the model, calling it "running out of people" is clickbait garbage. [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
  - curo 6y ago
    > We have a lot of hard problems to solve in the 21st century I've been on the hunt for an apolitical assessment of what humanity's greatest challenges are. Anyone know where this body of work might be? Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting one as a list of economists ranking cost-to-impact ratios. Something similar or adjacent? [1]: https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/ https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      > an apolitical assessment of what humanity's greatest challenges are No such thing exists. Such an assessment would be inherently political.
walt0 6y ago
>those numbers come from one of the most "trusted" world authorities, the United Nations. eh, not really
williesleg 6y ago
Note to all software developers and data engineers: fuck you, do something useful with your life, and quit doing this shit, you're always wrong. Always.
makerofspoons 6y ago
Has anyone plugged Lutz's education variable into scenarios for climate change? It could be one of the silver linings is we have more runway than anticipated. Edit: It doesn't appear that it would make a difference, the low-end emission scenarios already have population growth similar to what is described in the article: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3 https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3
novalis78 6y ago
It will be interesting what the fertility rate of new frontier worlds might look like. Technologically advanced but in constant need of humans to build and push further.
usrusr 6y ago
Not all educated women who are in control of their lives decide against children, far from it. If all women are educated and in control, every child of the next generation will have an educated mother who decided to have children and those mothers will likely pass on the cultural traits that lead to this decision. The result will be a generation whose reproduction rate is much less impacted by education and being in control than previous generations who to a large part had mothers lacking education and control. Reproduction rates will stabilize as motherly role models adapt.
carapace 6y ago
The Amish win. Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent. Their biggest problem is that they are so good at farming that land prices around their communities go up and their children have to move farther and farther to afford their own farms.
- aphextron 6y ago
  >"Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent." They're also completely reliant on the larger economy to sell their goods, and are in no way self sufficient. Not to mention sky high rates of child and spousal abuse. Humanity moved away from sustenance farming for very good reasons.
  - carapace 6y ago
    I'm kind of joking. I think that something would give before "100% Amish!" became the actual Earth equilibrium state. The point is, not every one will stop having large families. I don't think we're in danger of an empty planet.
- dahdum 6y ago
  Eh, I'm not strongly against the Amish but I wouldn't hold them up as an ideal. They are theocratic communities with strictly gendered roles, harsh discipline, and practice shunning and excommunication of their undesirables.
  - hayez1 6y ago
    Maybe those qualities are what is making their society so successful and why ours is failing (in biological terms). Just a thought.
  - carapace 6y ago
    > I wouldn't hold them up as an ideal. I'm not.
- annoyingnoob 6y ago
bkirkby 6y ago
wired was instrumental in educating me about the "vertical knowledge" on this subject over 20 years ago with this article: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ until then i had never been exposed to any of the evidence countering the "population bomb" hypothesis. not in education, not in media, not in personal discussion.
cesaref 6y ago
The website subscribe banner that keeps appearing makes it unreadable for me. I wonder if anyone at these companies actually tries to use their websites?
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
> Once that decline begins, it will never end. I always roll my eyes at researchers who take a trend and then expand it to its infinite conclusion. The forces that are causing a change in the rate of growth may look very different once the dynamics inherent in a large population with lots of resource competition go away. Also, if you look at the UN numbers, as another commenter said, they are NOT expecting a "population explosion". Indeed, they are seeing the rate of decline accelerating pretty much everywhere. The big difference is that the proportion of young people in places like Africa is enormous, so there is already a lot of "population momentum". It will take time for those huge cohorts to pass their way through the population pyramid.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I think it is pretty lazy to think that this is irreversible. It only took a century for the growth to happen in the first place. Having lots of children is much easier than not having children.
econcon 6y ago
Educated women have more options and they do not marry guys just because they happen to have some comfy jobs and can pay for living expense for her. A lot of women are adopting "all or nothing" approach, aka "I'd rather live alone than with someone I am not attracted to". There are various articles where women are interviewed and they report shortage of "attractive males" for relationships. Also others where women claim, "men no longer chase" (my personal opinion is that it's because of metoo men are afraid of pursuing and asking out unless if some woman displays explicit interest) Meanwhile there are lots of women who have children with the guys they deemed attractive but that guy never commited as a husband or father, some of those are now struggling to pay their bills and raise kids as a single parent. Society has to come forward and help them raise their kids. Maybe we should get done with traditional marriage and assume every country man or woman is father or mother to every kid existing within the borders of the country and pay for their maintenance and good upbringing as a community as a whole. Maybe the cost of having kids is too high? And we need to lower it through incentives? If we choose to not do this - where will the future tax payers come from when the present ones will be on retirement? We borrow from future. Today the taxes you are paying have been used already in past for the welfare of the previous generation. Tomorrow when you'll need welfare, you'll want to have fresh population supporting it. You can bring in the immigrants but will they have the values which your community needs? Will it require a period of time before they are able to contribute to your society in a positive way?
- qeternity 6y ago
  > Also others where women claim, "men no longer chase" (my personal opinion is that it's because of metoo men are afraid of pursing and asking out unless if some woman displays explicit interest) I really don't think it has anything to do with #metoo. I'm a very outgoing millennial male, and I think this all boils down to a decrease in sociability, largely centered around mobile phones. When I go out, I never think about pulling my phone out, but I see countless people in social settings on their phones...not socializing. Men used to have to get over the fear of rejection but now there are countless apps that put that fear to rest and let people pursue behind the comfort and safety of a screen, even if it means lower success rate.
polycaster 6y ago
While I didn’t read the article, telling from the title this talk by Hans Rosling could be a resourceful addition to the topic: https://youtu.be/fTznEIZRkLg https://youtu.be/fTznEIZRkLg
info781 6y ago
These guys are wrong. The population needs to find a stabilisation point. Right now it's still heading much higher. Nigeria is expected to go to four hundred million people from 200 million now. Once we find that stabilization point we could start having more kids, as women will get more support to do so. projections more than 30 or 40 years into the future are extremely difficult.
dannykwells 6y ago
Population decline is very well documented. The global trends hide countries like Germany, South Korea, and Japan where the numbers have sunk as low as 1.3 births / female, far below replacement. The world might have more people by 2100 but many countries, including US, Europe and others will be shrinking, unless they take aggressive action on immigration reform. My personal belief is this is ultimately how humans will go extinct. Not with a bang (apocalyptic global warming, war, famine, etc) but a whimper (gradual fade out into black over the next 1000 years).
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  > My personal belief is this is ultimately how humans will go extinct. Not with a bang (apocalyptic global warming, war, famine, etc) but a whimper (gradual fade out into black over the next 1000 years). Yup. Our economic system will ensure nobody produces kids, or at least, not more than one kid.
- toast0 6y ago
  Barring any of the fun post-apocolyptic fertility problems, if people are simply chosing not to reproduce in response to their environment, I would expect many would change their choice as the population shrinks. Especially if there are strong government incentives.
CodesInChaos 6y ago
Educated people voluntarily choosing to have fewer children is an important effect in the short term. In the long term, sub-populations which choose to have more children will outgrow sub-populations which have fewer children. Until the growth is eventually stopped by external factors, like limited resources, famine, war, or strictly enforced government policies.
rishav_sharan 6y ago
How come we never consider the climate catastrophe as a variable for any of these studies? If some of the forecasts are correct, we will hit a 5'C increase in overall global temperatures. the mass famines, dieoffs due to logistics breakdown, water scarcity, insane human migrations, wars over scarce resources etc. will be far bigger factor making most of these variables look like non factors. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01125-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01125-x I think it will be lucky if even half/4B of humans survive 2100
- pluto9 6y ago
  Because those forecasts are outliers, if you can even call them forecasts. Is this quote from your linked article what you're referring to? "Despite a temporary drop in carbon emissions from the 2020 outbreak, countries turned to cheap fossil fuels to revive their economies after the crisis. Carbon emissions soared and temperatures followed, setting the stage for 5 °C of warming by the end of the century." That's not a forecast, that's speculation. Might as well factor in WWIII while we're at it.
dctoedt 6y ago
Totally anecdotal: When my wife and I were having kids 30 years ago, we stopped at two, as did many or even most of our friends. Now, however, on our block in our upscale neighborhood, with educated professional women, just about every one of the young families has three kids, and I can't think of a single young family that has just one kid. (Nowadays during the recent COVID-19 lockdown, pretty much every afternoon we see hordes of kids, roughly ages three to ten, riding bikes and scooters and skateboards back and forth on the street, although that's slowing down as the Houston summer weather sets in.)
- paulcole 6y ago
  Kids today are a status symbol. Everybody can finance the same iPhone and luxury sedan. So how do you show you’ve made it? It’s a real flex to have a gaggle of kids filling up a giant house.
  - dctoedt 6y ago
    > Kids today are a status symbol. Out of curiosity, do you have kids? They're a pretty labor-intensive "status symbol." <g>
    - paulcole 6y ago
      Lol no way would I ever have kids. Got a vasectomy as soon as I could find a doctor to do one. But I also don’t have to own a Porsche to know why people buy them. Status symbols aren’t just expensive to buy, they’re expensive to own, too. You think the orthopedic surgeon mows the lawn on their vacation cabin upstate every weekend? Or the big law litigator does the mechanical work on their Cessna? No, those things cost a ton to store, maintain, fuel, and use. Same as kids. But then the status comes from putting in as little work as possible (through hired help) and only showing them off when you want. Send ‘em to boarding school, hire an au pair, etc. etc. Another way to think of it. Look at things the working classes have out of need/desperation and that require tremendous amounts of work. The upper classes want those things for recreation/enjoyment/status and to do as little work as possible themselves.
benja123 6y ago
I didn't read the entire article. I take issue with any article that uses female education as a reason for the decrease in family size. I understand where it is coming from, but I think it is oversimplified... Increased female education happens when a society is more educated. That is you could probably switch female with male and get the same results (which is also over simplified). The reality is so many things are changing that is causing the birthrate to decrease and it's way to hard to blame it on one factor over another. You could probably argue that technology, wealth and what is the social norm in the society we live have a massive effect on the decrease in birthrate in western countries. Now I live in Israel. The religious have an extremely large number of children and it has nothing to do with the female education level and everything to do with religion! In fact the females are often more educated than the men and are the ones with Jobs!. What is interesting though is the secular Jews, like my wife and I, usually have 3+ kids (we are at number 2). It's just the norm here and society caters to families with children
archived22 6y ago
Writer didn't accounted for covid or something more dangerous coming up in future.
hamilyon2 6y ago
Clearly author did not read enough sci-fi. If by 2100 we had any shortage of humans, we will clone just enough of them.
1e-9 6y ago
> Based on his analysis, the single biggest effect on fertility is the education of women. Although it's not surprising that controlling for education of women would provide a better model fit, it seems unlikely to me that this is the main causal relationship. I think logic and evidence suggest that the main driver of fertility is child mortality. Humans appear to adjust fertility to maximize the probability that their offspring will successfully reproduce. Higher child mortality in a population tends to result in higher fertility as insurance against loss of a child [1]. Lower child mortality tends to result in lower fertility. The human species would not be around today if we lacked a natural tendency to place utmost priority on offspring reproduction success. Parents must trade off the number of children they have versus the quality of care per child. Our current rate of child mortality reduction is shifting the optimal strategy to fewer children and higher quality of care per child. I see improved education of women (and men) as largely a consequence of this trend. I expect this will continue until disrupted by high-mortality events such as natural disasters, disease, or major wars. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4411230/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4411230/
rexgallorum2 6y ago
In agrarian societies, children are economically productive. In urbanised industrial/post-industrial societies, children are expensive and thus an economic liability. Many of the conditions that accompanied falling fertility rates in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are now evident in the developing world.

64 points by WheelsAtLarge 6y ago

Something they didn't mention is the rise of personal wealth. As people enter the middle class, they start having fewer children. As to why - I'm not a economist or sociologist, but I expect it's partly because they aren't family farming anymore and don't need the free labor, and partly because they have access to birth control.

chadcmulligan 6y ago
Educated women is the reason usually put forward - once women are educated they find more interesting things to do than have a lot of kids [1] [1] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati... [pdf]
- it 6y ago
  Kids used to be allies of their parents; now they are adversaries. If you are sitting at a computer all day, your kids will probably annoy you unless they are watching cartoons. On a farm or in a hunter-gatherer setting, your kids can learn by watching you and they can help in more useful ways over time.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Do you have kids?
    - it 6y ago
      No, but my roommate has a five year old daughter and my girlfriend has a five year old son. I have plenty of evidence for what I’m saying.
      - searchableguy 6y ago
        I think you are expecting too much from 5 year olds if you think they can go hunting by seeing their parents given their motor skills. On the other hand, depending on what you are doing on the computer. They can learn it by watching you unless you are doing something very complex which most people using their pcs or devices don't. It's not hard for them to learn to comment on HN. And two anecdotes isn't plenty of evidence. I can provide more contrary to yours.
        it 6y ago
        I'm not expecting anything. When my roommate's daughter comes into my room while I'm on the computer, she tries to interact with me a for a little while but loses interest after she finds there is nothing for her to do. When I'm in the garden, I can usually find little things for her to do to help me out, like evening out the soil in a raised bed or putting flower bulbs in a bag. She happily does them and it holds her interest. Part of the difference is that the computer doesn't lend itself to collaboration the way the outdoors does. Part of it is that what I'm doing on the computer is far more obscure than what I'm doing in the garden. If you can provide contrary anecdotes, why don't you? Edit: Maybe a child can't hunt right away, but gathering can certainly be done by a child. For example, this morning my roommate's daughter was up in a tree picking mulberries.
  - chadcmulligan 6y ago
    it depends on your focus doesn't it? Like if you're goal is to spend all day at a computer then yes kids are a distraction. Surprisingly a lot of people like spending time with their family, and regard sitting at a computer as a necessity.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I'd imagine it has more to do with independence than with hobbies. Educated women get jobs that pay well and can do whatever they please, they don't have to rely on a husband and stay at home. IIRC, it's strongly correlated to income (which of course is closely coupled to education), and I'm pretty sure that poor women do not have more children because they're bored or don't know what else to do.
AdrianB1 6y ago
In my country "middle class" means people that pay a lot of taxes and have little left for their own kids. When the government takes more than half of your income to give it to others and when the healthcare is free, but kind of missing, having your own kids is sometimes an economic challenge, especially when the fertility age is when people are also juniors and financially lacking; pushing childbirth to later in life is challenged by reduced female fertility rate over 30 years old.
- boomlinde 6y ago
  > In my country "middle class" means people that pay a lot of taxes and have little left for their own kids. If that's anywhere like where I live, "lower class" means people that don't pay as much taxes but on the other hand end up having even less money left. Yet, lower class people tend to have more children and fertility has a negative correlation to income. Perhaps it's a matter of education and ambition rather than the economic challenge.
  - quantified 6y ago
    Maybe it’s that offspring are a form of survival wealth that become less necessary when you have more material wealth in your house and your community? Pure speculation as I read this.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      What is "survival wealth"? Is that "savings and investments for future"?
      - quantified 6y ago
        Essentially. I just coined that while writing it, glad someone made sense of it. “How do I survive when I’m unable to fully provide or do for myself?” If my children are likely to be successful I don’t need to spread my luck out among 12 of them. As others have pointed out, they are labor-intensive and if you buy into certain socio-economic structures they’re fairly capital-intensive too. I wonder if some if it is also the capital intensity of children, the higher the monetary investment you bring (clothes, gear, schools, activities) the harder it is to have lots unless you have the money.
dghughes 6y ago
I would say education more than wealth but both seem to be factors in fewer children. Maybe both those reasons result in more planning of families and the decision to not have 12 children. My dad's family had nine and he grew up in the city in a small house. I think religion may have some part in it for example Roman Catholic where contraception is frowned upon. It was quite common to have a dozen children. My mother's family who were farmers for awhile (then a restaurant) also has nine children. Government financial support may also play a role. My country Canada has many social support systems that allow larger family sizes. I'm not criticizing it but the support is there for the children. It would be curious to see family size versus government support.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Education is the most portable form of wealth for aspiring middle class people.
- agensaequivocum 6y ago
  > Roman Catholic where contraception is frowned upon. It's completely prohibited.
thefz 6y ago
And because it is very well documented that a predictor of the inverse number of babies a woman will have, is her level of education.
imtringued 6y ago
There are lots of factors. One major factor is that women are working now. If you are a full time mom it's possible to take care of 4 children or even more. If you are working you have to pay for childcare and it gets more expensive the more children you have. Those pregnancies also impact your career negatively so there is an upper bound that limits how many children you can have. It wouldn't surprise me if that upper bound is around 2-3 children and other factors drag it down to reach the average birth rate.

ZhuanXia 6y ago

Humans are subject to selection both genetically and memeticly. Some portions of the population have high birth rates. Fecundity in modern environments appears to be partially heritable and can be inculcated to a degree. There is little reason to think human fecundity will not go back to historically normal, Malthusian levels eventually once selection for fecundity takes its course. One reason to be bullish on religion is exactly this. Secular cults such as Randianism, modern wokeism, and arguably Reform Judaism are (whatever you thing of such idealisms) largely sterile and so unlikely to persist in their modern forms in the very long term.

matthewdgreen 6y ago
And yet, Malthusian societies tend to compete poorly against advanced technological societies for resources. This seems like it will only become more of an issue as technology continues to improve. Seems like the setting for an infinite number of dystopian sci-fi stories.
klyrs 6y ago
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- ZhuanXia 6y ago
  Then those resistant to conversion will be selected for.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    Someone who believes this has to necessarily be bearish on the continued march of technological progress, which is in opposition to the fairly well-regarded notion that human technological development has been consistent and continuous wrt population for the past ~6000 years.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      The near-sterility of these subsets of the population is a modern phenomenon.

hirundo 6y ago

"All he was doing was adding one new variable to the forecast: the level of improvement in female education." This may be a bit of a trolley problem. If population were indeed controllable by this one variable, where too little female education resulted in overpopulation and too much resulted in population collapse, would it be ethical to impose an upper and lower limit on it? Would it be ethical not to? As a libertarian my default position is, that should be left up to those women. I don't believe that authoritarian measures are useful for human flourishing. But if I were convinced that this is an existential issue for the species I'd have to struggle between 1) maybe an authoritarian species shouldn't survive, and 2) ethics are ultimately in service to our survival and must adapt to that end.

AdrianB1 6y ago
It is more like a one and zero, not a spectrum of shades of gray: women can be educated enough to know about fertility, contraception and birth control or not. The part that is a large spectrum is the desire of people (not only women) to have kids. I know educated people with 4 kids and people with the same level education with 0 kids, with all the intermediary numbers being present. I talked to women that are childless and they have various reasons for that, I talked to women that have 3-4 kids and they have various reasons for that, but the common theme is they all have made some informed decisions. For women without education having kids is mostly out of their control.
narag 6y ago
Why authoritarian measures instead of incentives?
strken 6y ago
The ethics of it are irrelevant in a world where genes and memes[0] are under intense selective pressure. Wait long enough and the infertile will weed themselves out. [0] In the original sense of the word.
- deleted 6y ago
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6y ago

quicklime 6y ago

> The United Nations predicts that the global population will soon explode. No, they don't. They predict it'll plateau at 11 billion by 2100, and believe that the fastest growth is behind us. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Line/900 https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Lin...

timerol 6y ago
The text has the same number, but interprets it, ah, interestingly: "By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario." This is a pretty ridiculous statement from the article, considering the history of population growth. Growing from 7.8B humans to 11B in 80 years is a significantly reduced growth rate compared to historical data. It's even reduced growth on an absolute scale. Starting from 1930, we went from 2B to 6B humans in 69 years[1]. We added tripled the world population in a few generations. I think we'll be able to handle to slow, steady population growth of the 21st century. We have a lot of hard problems to solve in the 21st century, and population growth isn't even on the list. Edit: I finished reading the article. I would not recommend that course of action. The so-called "running out of people" scenario is that the world has between 8 and 9 billion people in 2100. While that is a significant change to the model, calling it "running out of people" is clickbait garbage. [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
- curo 6y ago
  > We have a lot of hard problems to solve in the 21st century I've been on the hunt for an apolitical assessment of what humanity's greatest challenges are. Anyone know where this body of work might be? Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting one as a list of economists ranking cost-to-impact ratios. Something similar or adjacent? [1]: https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/ https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    > an apolitical assessment of what humanity's greatest challenges are No such thing exists. Such an assessment would be inherently political.

walt0 6y ago

>those numbers come from one of the most "trusted" world authorities, the United Nations. eh, not really

williesleg 6y ago

Note to all software developers and data engineers: fuck you, do something useful with your life, and quit doing this shit, you're always wrong. Always.

makerofspoons 6y ago

Has anyone plugged Lutz's education variable into scenarios for climate change? It could be one of the silver linings is we have more runway than anticipated. Edit: It doesn't appear that it would make a difference, the low-end emission scenarios already have population growth similar to what is described in the article: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3 https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3

novalis78 6y ago

It will be interesting what the fertility rate of new frontier worlds might look like. Technologically advanced but in constant need of humans to build and push further.

usrusr 6y ago

Not all educated women who are in control of their lives decide against children, far from it. If all women are educated and in control, every child of the next generation will have an educated mother who decided to have children and those mothers will likely pass on the cultural traits that lead to this decision. The result will be a generation whose reproduction rate is much less impacted by education and being in control than previous generations who to a large part had mothers lacking education and control. Reproduction rates will stabilize as motherly role models adapt.

carapace 6y ago

The Amish win. Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent. Their biggest problem is that they are so good at farming that land prices around their communities go up and their children have to move farther and farther to afford their own farms.

aphextron 6y ago
>"Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent." They're also completely reliant on the larger economy to sell their goods, and are in no way self sufficient. Not to mention sky high rates of child and spousal abuse. Humanity moved away from sustenance farming for very good reasons.
- carapace 6y ago
  I'm kind of joking. I think that something would give before "100% Amish!" became the actual Earth equilibrium state. The point is, not every one will stop having large families. I don't think we're in danger of an empty planet.
dahdum 6y ago
Eh, I'm not strongly against the Amish but I wouldn't hold them up as an ideal. They are theocratic communities with strictly gendered roles, harsh discipline, and practice shunning and excommunication of their undesirables.
- hayez1 6y ago
  Maybe those qualities are what is making their society so successful and why ours is failing (in biological terms). Just a thought.
- carapace 6y ago
  > I wouldn't hold them up as an ideal. I'm not.
annoyingnoob 6y ago

bkirkby 6y ago

wired was instrumental in educating me about the "vertical knowledge" on this subject over 20 years ago with this article: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ until then i had never been exposed to any of the evidence countering the "population bomb" hypothesis. not in education, not in media, not in personal discussion.

cesaref 6y ago

The website subscribe banner that keeps appearing makes it unreadable for me. I wonder if anyone at these companies actually tries to use their websites?

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

> Once that decline begins, it will never end. I always roll my eyes at researchers who take a trend and then expand it to its infinite conclusion. The forces that are causing a change in the rate of growth may look very different once the dynamics inherent in a large population with lots of resource competition go away. Also, if you look at the UN numbers, as another commenter said, they are NOT expecting a "population explosion". Indeed, they are seeing the rate of decline accelerating pretty much everywhere. The big difference is that the proportion of young people in places like Africa is enormous, so there is already a lot of "population momentum". It will take time for those huge cohorts to pass their way through the population pyramid.

imtringued 6y ago
I think it is pretty lazy to think that this is irreversible. It only took a century for the growth to happen in the first place. Having lots of children is much easier than not having children.

econcon 6y ago

Educated women have more options and they do not marry guys just because they happen to have some comfy jobs and can pay for living expense for her. A lot of women are adopting "all or nothing" approach, aka "I'd rather live alone than with someone I am not attracted to". There are various articles where women are interviewed and they report shortage of "attractive males" for relationships. Also others where women claim, "men no longer chase" (my personal opinion is that it's because of metoo men are afraid of pursuing and asking out unless if some woman displays explicit interest) Meanwhile there are lots of women who have children with the guys they deemed attractive but that guy never commited as a husband or father, some of those are now struggling to pay their bills and raise kids as a single parent. Society has to come forward and help them raise their kids. Maybe we should get done with traditional marriage and assume every country man or woman is father or mother to every kid existing within the borders of the country and pay for their maintenance and good upbringing as a community as a whole. Maybe the cost of having kids is too high? And we need to lower it through incentives? If we choose to not do this - where will the future tax payers come from when the present ones will be on retirement? We borrow from future. Today the taxes you are paying have been used already in past for the welfare of the previous generation. Tomorrow when you'll need welfare, you'll want to have fresh population supporting it. You can bring in the immigrants but will they have the values which your community needs? Will it require a period of time before they are able to contribute to your society in a positive way?

qeternity 6y ago
> Also others where women claim, "men no longer chase" (my personal opinion is that it's because of metoo men are afraid of pursing and asking out unless if some woman displays explicit interest) I really don't think it has anything to do with #metoo. I'm a very outgoing millennial male, and I think this all boils down to a decrease in sociability, largely centered around mobile phones. When I go out, I never think about pulling my phone out, but I see countless people in social settings on their phones...not socializing. Men used to have to get over the fear of rejection but now there are countless apps that put that fear to rest and let people pursue behind the comfort and safety of a screen, even if it means lower success rate.

polycaster 6y ago

While I didn’t read the article, telling from the title this talk by Hans Rosling could be a resourceful addition to the topic: https://youtu.be/fTznEIZRkLg https://youtu.be/fTznEIZRkLg

info781 6y ago

These guys are wrong. The population needs to find a stabilisation point. Right now it's still heading much higher. Nigeria is expected to go to four hundred million people from 200 million now. Once we find that stabilization point we could start having more kids, as women will get more support to do so. projections more than 30 or 40 years into the future are extremely difficult.

dannykwells 6y ago

Population decline is very well documented. The global trends hide countries like Germany, South Korea, and Japan where the numbers have sunk as low as 1.3 births / female, far below replacement. The world might have more people by 2100 but many countries, including US, Europe and others will be shrinking, unless they take aggressive action on immigration reform. My personal belief is this is ultimately how humans will go extinct. Not with a bang (apocalyptic global warming, war, famine, etc) but a whimper (gradual fade out into black over the next 1000 years).

nine_zeros 6y ago
> My personal belief is this is ultimately how humans will go extinct. Not with a bang (apocalyptic global warming, war, famine, etc) but a whimper (gradual fade out into black over the next 1000 years). Yup. Our economic system will ensure nobody produces kids, or at least, not more than one kid.
toast0 6y ago
Barring any of the fun post-apocolyptic fertility problems, if people are simply chosing not to reproduce in response to their environment, I would expect many would change their choice as the population shrinks. Especially if there are strong government incentives.

CodesInChaos 6y ago

Educated people voluntarily choosing to have fewer children is an important effect in the short term. In the long term, sub-populations which choose to have more children will outgrow sub-populations which have fewer children. Until the growth is eventually stopped by external factors, like limited resources, famine, war, or strictly enforced government policies.

rishav_sharan 6y ago

How come we never consider the climate catastrophe as a variable for any of these studies? If some of the forecasts are correct, we will hit a 5'C increase in overall global temperatures. the mass famines, dieoffs due to logistics breakdown, water scarcity, insane human migrations, wars over scarce resources etc. will be far bigger factor making most of these variables look like non factors. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01125-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01125-x I think it will be lucky if even half/4B of humans survive 2100

pluto9 6y ago
Because those forecasts are outliers, if you can even call them forecasts. Is this quote from your linked article what you're referring to? "Despite a temporary drop in carbon emissions from the 2020 outbreak, countries turned to cheap fossil fuels to revive their economies after the crisis. Carbon emissions soared and temperatures followed, setting the stage for 5 °C of warming by the end of the century." That's not a forecast, that's speculation. Might as well factor in WWIII while we're at it.

dctoedt 6y ago

Totally anecdotal: When my wife and I were having kids 30 years ago, we stopped at two, as did many or even most of our friends. Now, however, on our block in our upscale neighborhood, with educated professional women, just about every one of the young families has three kids, and I can't think of a single young family that has just one kid. (Nowadays during the recent COVID-19 lockdown, pretty much every afternoon we see hordes of kids, roughly ages three to ten, riding bikes and scooters and skateboards back and forth on the street, although that's slowing down as the Houston summer weather sets in.)

paulcole 6y ago
Kids today are a status symbol. Everybody can finance the same iPhone and luxury sedan. So how do you show you’ve made it? It’s a real flex to have a gaggle of kids filling up a giant house.
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > Kids today are a status symbol. Out of curiosity, do you have kids? They're a pretty labor-intensive "status symbol." <g>
  - paulcole 6y ago
    Lol no way would I ever have kids. Got a vasectomy as soon as I could find a doctor to do one. But I also don’t have to own a Porsche to know why people buy them. Status symbols aren’t just expensive to buy, they’re expensive to own, too. You think the orthopedic surgeon mows the lawn on their vacation cabin upstate every weekend? Or the big law litigator does the mechanical work on their Cessna? No, those things cost a ton to store, maintain, fuel, and use. Same as kids. But then the status comes from putting in as little work as possible (through hired help) and only showing them off when you want. Send ‘em to boarding school, hire an au pair, etc. etc. Another way to think of it. Look at things the working classes have out of need/desperation and that require tremendous amounts of work. The upper classes want those things for recreation/enjoyment/status and to do as little work as possible themselves.

benja123 6y ago

I didn't read the entire article. I take issue with any article that uses female education as a reason for the decrease in family size. I understand where it is coming from, but I think it is oversimplified... Increased female education happens when a society is more educated. That is you could probably switch female with male and get the same results (which is also over simplified). The reality is so many things are changing that is causing the birthrate to decrease and it's way to hard to blame it on one factor over another. You could probably argue that technology, wealth and what is the social norm in the society we live have a massive effect on the decrease in birthrate in western countries. Now I live in Israel. The religious have an extremely large number of children and it has nothing to do with the female education level and everything to do with religion! In fact the females are often more educated than the men and are the ones with Jobs!. What is interesting though is the secular Jews, like my wife and I, usually have 3+ kids (we are at number 2). It's just the norm here and society caters to families with children

archived22 6y ago

Writer didn't accounted for covid or something more dangerous coming up in future.

hamilyon2 6y ago

Clearly author did not read enough sci-fi. If by 2100 we had any shortage of humans, we will clone just enough of them.

1e-9 6y ago

> Based on his analysis, the single biggest effect on fertility is the education of women. Although it's not surprising that controlling for education of women would provide a better model fit, it seems unlikely to me that this is the main causal relationship. I think logic and evidence suggest that the main driver of fertility is child mortality. Humans appear to adjust fertility to maximize the probability that their offspring will successfully reproduce. Higher child mortality in a population tends to result in higher fertility as insurance against loss of a child [1]. Lower child mortality tends to result in lower fertility. The human species would not be around today if we lacked a natural tendency to place utmost priority on offspring reproduction success. Parents must trade off the number of children they have versus the quality of care per child. Our current rate of child mortality reduction is shifting the optimal strategy to fewer children and higher quality of care per child. I see improved education of women (and men) as largely a consequence of this trend. I expect this will continue until disrupted by high-mortality events such as natural disasters, disease, or major wars. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4411230/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4411230/

rexgallorum2 6y ago

In agrarian societies, children are economically productive. In urbanised industrial/post-industrial societies, children are expensive and thus an economic liability. Many of the conditions that accompanied falling fertility rates in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are now evident in the developing world.