7 ms·

Well this seems to be causing a lot of unnecessary worry. A fertility rate of 2.0 is fantastic news! It’s just below replacement rate, meaning a gradual decline

by jl6 5y ago

Well this seems to be causing a lot of unnecessary worry. A fertility rate of 2.0 is fantastic news! It’s just below replacement rate, meaning a gradual decline in population size without a dramatic collapse. Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth. “But this trend means we will eventually go extinct!” you say? Only if you believe we can’t correct the trend when the population starts to dip low. But we are centuries away from that and the remediation plan is trivial - just have more babies.

mattigames 5y ago
And the amount of people is just ridiculous, why 8 billion? When was this stablished to be the right amount? Why not -lets say- 1 billion and destroy the planet much much less?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Because a combination of women not having the ability to say no to sex and people liking sex. Women’s financial independence and IUD/vasectomies/birth control pills are relatively new, and still only available to a small portion of the population.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Surprisingly, about three condoms per year are made for every fertile male in the world.
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  I don’t want to live in a society where someone can establish an ideal population size. Free humans making their decision one birth at a time establish population sizes.
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    There's a difference between deciding an ideal population size and enforcing it. Also, there are different ways of enforcing it, many involving little that we would term coercion: establishing child tax credits, for example; funding schools and healthcare via mechanisms which make raising children more or less burdensome. Free people can react to these incentives via their own free choice while society at large, acting as a collective of free people, decide what these incentives should be. The incentives established by other people's choices are inevitable unless you want to go live like the Martian.
  - cbshsjsh 5y ago
    I am totally okay with free humans making their own decisions but I don’t want to financially support their decisions. I believe if society collectively pay for someone’s kids schooling or other expenses then society should be able to determine what is ideal number of children and punish (financially) those who take more than their fair share.
  - mattigames 5y ago
    I don't want to live in a society that expands without limits and causes its own destruction in a few centuries instead of one that could live many millenniums if it figured out not to self-destroy by unbounded replication; but hey different strokes for different folks.
Ygg2 5y ago
We have no known way of increasing birth rate other than letting society collapse and letting whichever society survives to continue. That or something horrible like abolishing woman's rights, decreasing rate of survival, etc.
- DelightOne 5y ago
  > We have no known way of increasing birth rate A blatant generalization, in the face that it wasn't much of a priority for now. Or is there any proof that it was much of a priority, for example in terms of media influence, % of budget, etc?
  - Ygg2 5y ago
    Is there any case, where country reversed sub replacement rate to above replacement rate? I've heard of examples that increased it, but only like +0.2 on 1.7 replacement rate. Nothing substantial enough to actually reverse the trend.
    - naravara 5y ago
      Aside from Japan and (very recently) China I don’t know of many countries where it was a big enough deal to care. We’re working with very very tiny sample sizes here within a problem space where almost no sincere effort has been applied.
- knuthsat 5y ago
  There are belief systems that promote making children (Amish, Islam, etc.). Populations that practice these systems will eventually take over.
  - mk81 5y ago
    The absolute most illiberal ideologies. Yay!
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I would be curious to see how the birth rate in those populations would fare if the women in those populations had financial independence.
thunderbird120 5y ago
The issue is uneven distribution. While the world fertility rate is trending toward a moderate population decline starting mid century, this will be mostly driven by extreme declines in specific areas rather than a gradual decline everywhere. There are many developed countries are projected to lose more than half of their populations by 2100 using current estimates. That alone is a major problem for policymakers but what's worse, those estimates have been consistently underestimating the severity of the decline in number of births. In predicting future demographics, there have been longstanding assumptions that the birth rates of countries that fall significantly below replacement will eventually recover. This does not appear to be true, at least on timescales which would appear during any of our lifetimes. Instead, fewer kids reduces social pressure to have kids and results in fewer community resources available to parents (schools, playgrounds, etc). This further reduces the fertility rate. You can see this in countries like South Korea[1] which are seeing rapidly shrinking elementary school populations and have been closing lots of schools as a result. South Korea, always the overachiever, is down to a total fertility rate of 0.82 this year with that expected to fall below 0.8 next year. To put that into perspective, in a country without significant immigration, if that rate were sustained you would come to a point where the country would lose ~85% of its population every two generations. That's an extreme example, almost to the point of absurdity, but even so it sort of illustrates the problem. To support the ever increasing number of old people, policy makers can either A) Accept much higher levels of immigration (unpopular) or B) Increase the tax burden on the fewer and fewer working young people (which will probably decrease fertility even further). Even if we assume option C exists (no immigration but replace all workers with robots) you're still looking at a situation in many countries where the actual human population of the country is reduced by >90% within one human lifetime. While countries like the U.S. won't be hit quite as hard by this, the trends are pretty clear. Younger generations are having a fraction of the number of kids older generations had[2] and this trend will continue to accelerate in the near term. [1]https://www.insider.com/south-korea-birth-rate-abandoned-schools-photos-2021-7#south-koreas-fertility-rate-has-been-in-free-fall-for-years-and-the-country-no-longer-has-enough-children-to-fill-its-schools-1 https://www.insider.com/south-korea-birth-rate-abandoned-sch... [2]https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kearneylevine_fertilityrate_fig1-01.png https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/...
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth. What if economies had already borrowed from the future expecting exponential growth?
- naravara 5y ago
  All this means is we’ve built something in the present that someone in the future doesn’t get paid for. We still have the thing we built so I’m not sure what the problem is so long as we’re building something useful (e.g. infrastructure, public services) and not something pointless (e.g. overpriced real estate and other economic rents).
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Technically, yes, but politically, it does not work that way. If people are sold a certain quality of life, and then they do not get it, they will fight (or vote) for direct as much of society’s resources into accomplishing that quality of life as possible. Even diverting society’s resources from quality of life that were offered generations ago when they were younger. It manifests as reduced investment in infrastructure, higher taxes, lower funding for schools (see US universities getting less money from government and raising tuition).
- jl6 5y ago
  Some people will be left holding bad debt. That could be bad if it happened overnight, but a fertility rate of 2.0 is a very gentle off-ramp. Either way would be preferable to exponential population growth continuing.
  - candiodari 5y ago
    It's not really, look at it like this: it takes people 65 years from birth to dependence. That means every generation has to deal with 47 years of fertility decline before getting a pension. Right now there's about 1 dependent per 1 working person in most of the western world. In 20 or so years that'll be 2 dependents per 1 working person, and it'll go over 5 in most of Europe before 2050, less than 40 years, and actually earlier in Eastern Europe. Even in the US it's definitely going to 2 dependents per 1 working person. For one thing that means the current level of tax pays for either the military OR pensions in 20 years, not both, and even 100% tax in the US won't pay for both. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Fertility_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... And this isn't a "print your way out of this" situation. At minimum, every child and elderly person is going to have to do with half as many humans providing services like education or medical services to them. It's real humans that we are short on, not some made up quantity like money. You could print $100 trillion per year and spend it entirely on elderly care, and we'd still have to deal with the reduction of workers per elderly. Anyone working today will not have people taking care of you when they retire at the current rates. Half as much time as today, probably a lot less. We're actually close to the tipping point in Europe: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growth-rate-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growt... If someone's paying attention, Europe will need another Syria and Afghanistan soon. Perhaps in North Africa?

by jl6 5y ago

mattigames 5y ago

And the amount of people is just ridiculous, why 8 billion? When was this stablished to be the right amount? Why not -lets say- 1 billion and destroy the planet much much less?

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Because a combination of women not having the ability to say no to sex and people liking sex. Women’s financial independence and IUD/vasectomies/birth control pills are relatively new, and still only available to a small portion of the population.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Surprisingly, about three condoms per year are made for every fertile male in the world.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
I don’t want to live in a society where someone can establish an ideal population size. Free humans making their decision one birth at a time establish population sizes.
- DFHippie 5y ago
  There's a difference between deciding an ideal population size and enforcing it. Also, there are different ways of enforcing it, many involving little that we would term coercion: establishing child tax credits, for example; funding schools and healthcare via mechanisms which make raising children more or less burdensome. Free people can react to these incentives via their own free choice while society at large, acting as a collective of free people, decide what these incentives should be. The incentives established by other people's choices are inevitable unless you want to go live like the Martian.
- cbshsjsh 5y ago
  I am totally okay with free humans making their own decisions but I don’t want to financially support their decisions. I believe if society collectively pay for someone’s kids schooling or other expenses then society should be able to determine what is ideal number of children and punish (financially) those who take more than their fair share.
- mattigames 5y ago
  I don't want to live in a society that expands without limits and causes its own destruction in a few centuries instead of one that could live many millenniums if it figured out not to self-destroy by unbounded replication; but hey different strokes for different folks.

Ygg2 5y ago

We have no known way of increasing birth rate other than letting society collapse and letting whichever society survives to continue. That or something horrible like abolishing woman's rights, decreasing rate of survival, etc.

DelightOne 5y ago
> We have no known way of increasing birth rate A blatant generalization, in the face that it wasn't much of a priority for now. Or is there any proof that it was much of a priority, for example in terms of media influence, % of budget, etc?
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Is there any case, where country reversed sub replacement rate to above replacement rate? I've heard of examples that increased it, but only like +0.2 on 1.7 replacement rate. Nothing substantial enough to actually reverse the trend.
  - naravara 5y ago
    Aside from Japan and (very recently) China I don’t know of many countries where it was a big enough deal to care. We’re working with very very tiny sample sizes here within a problem space where almost no sincere effort has been applied.
knuthsat 5y ago
There are belief systems that promote making children (Amish, Islam, etc.). Populations that practice these systems will eventually take over.
- mk81 5y ago
  The absolute most illiberal ideologies. Yay!
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I would be curious to see how the birth rate in those populations would fare if the women in those populations had financial independence.

thunderbird120 5y ago

The issue is uneven distribution. While the world fertility rate is trending toward a moderate population decline starting mid century, this will be mostly driven by extreme declines in specific areas rather than a gradual decline everywhere. There are many developed countries are projected to lose more than half of their populations by 2100 using current estimates. That alone is a major problem for policymakers but what's worse, those estimates have been consistently underestimating the severity of the decline in number of births. In predicting future demographics, there have been longstanding assumptions that the birth rates of countries that fall significantly below replacement will eventually recover. This does not appear to be true, at least on timescales which would appear during any of our lifetimes. Instead, fewer kids reduces social pressure to have kids and results in fewer community resources available to parents (schools, playgrounds, etc). This further reduces the fertility rate. You can see this in countries like South Korea[1] which are seeing rapidly shrinking elementary school populations and have been closing lots of schools as a result. South Korea, always the overachiever, is down to a total fertility rate of 0.82 this year with that expected to fall below 0.8 next year. To put that into perspective, in a country without significant immigration, if that rate were sustained you would come to a point where the country would lose ~85% of its population every two generations. That's an extreme example, almost to the point of absurdity, but even so it sort of illustrates the problem. To support the ever increasing number of old people, policy makers can either A) Accept much higher levels of immigration (unpopular) or B) Increase the tax burden on the fewer and fewer working young people (which will probably decrease fertility even further). Even if we assume option C exists (no immigration but replace all workers with robots) you're still looking at a situation in many countries where the actual human population of the country is reduced by >90% within one human lifetime. While countries like the U.S. won't be hit quite as hard by this, the trends are pretty clear. Younger generations are having a fraction of the number of kids older generations had[2] and this trend will continue to accelerate in the near term. [1]https://www.insider.com/south-korea-birth-rate-abandoned-schools-photos-2021-7#south-koreas-fertility-rate-has-been-in-free-fall-for-years-and-the-country-no-longer-has-enough-children-to-fill-its-schools-1 https://www.insider.com/south-korea-birth-rate-abandoned-sch... [2]https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kearneylevine_fertilityrate_fig1-01.png https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/...

lotsofpulp 5y ago

> Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth. What if economies had already borrowed from the future expecting exponential growth?

naravara 5y ago
All this means is we’ve built something in the present that someone in the future doesn’t get paid for. We still have the thing we built so I’m not sure what the problem is so long as we’re building something useful (e.g. infrastructure, public services) and not something pointless (e.g. overpriced real estate and other economic rents).
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Technically, yes, but politically, it does not work that way. If people are sold a certain quality of life, and then they do not get it, they will fight (or vote) for direct as much of society’s resources into accomplishing that quality of life as possible. Even diverting society’s resources from quality of life that were offered generations ago when they were younger. It manifests as reduced investment in infrastructure, higher taxes, lower funding for schools (see US universities getting less money from government and raising tuition).
jl6 5y ago
Some people will be left holding bad debt. That could be bad if it happened overnight, but a fertility rate of 2.0 is a very gentle off-ramp. Either way would be preferable to exponential population growth continuing.
- candiodari 5y ago
  It's not really, look at it like this: it takes people 65 years from birth to dependence. That means every generation has to deal with 47 years of fertility decline before getting a pension. Right now there's about 1 dependent per 1 working person in most of the western world. In 20 or so years that'll be 2 dependents per 1 working person, and it'll go over 5 in most of Europe before 2050, less than 40 years, and actually earlier in Eastern Europe. Even in the US it's definitely going to 2 dependents per 1 working person. For one thing that means the current level of tax pays for either the military OR pensions in 20 years, not both, and even 100% tax in the US won't pay for both. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Fertility_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... And this isn't a "print your way out of this" situation. At minimum, every child and elderly person is going to have to do with half as many humans providing services like education or medical services to them. It's real humans that we are short on, not some made up quantity like money. You could print $100 trillion per year and spend it entirely on elderly care, and we'd still have to deal with the reduction of workers per elderly. Anyone working today will not have people taking care of you when they retire at the current rates. Half as much time as today, probably a lot less. We're actually close to the tipping point in Europe: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growth-rate-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growt... If someone's paying attention, Europe will need another Syria and Afghanistan soon. Perhaps in North Africa?