32 ms·

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent abou

by zpeti 5y ago

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive. - Wealth inequality will rise just from the fact that there are less productive people and people with wealth will live longer. - Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up. I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did.

bhouston 5y ago
> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility. I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards larger families (increases bonuses as you have more children) and starting families earlier (rather than delaying to to their 30s.)
- mastax 5y ago
  Many European countries have extremely generous benefits for raising children, but it has been broadly ineffective at raising birth rates - with the possible exception of the Czech Republic. I agree though that governments are going to try, and they may find a way to do it. There was a good episode of The Weeds podcast, "Baby making vibes," which talked about this. Some of it is focused on the American political lens of Liberal vs Conservative birth rates, but much is broadly applicable discussion of policy and the more "vibes focused" angle that conservatives tend to take with the issue.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    Isn't the simple explanation for child birth falling so rapidly being the participation of women in the workforce? I didn't do any research but I just always assumed that it is.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I am curious what the market rate for pregnancy, giving birth, and breastfeeding will end up being. After seeing what it is like, if I was a woman, even the best current European benefits would not be enough.
    - bhouston 5y ago
      In Hungary, if you do it four times you are exempt from paying taxes for the rest of your life: "Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612
      - ativzzz 5y ago
        Women with four children will most likely be full time moms for the majority of their productive lives so that's a pointless benefit, unless this policy manages to somehow reverse gender roles as well.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        Even if said lady only rejoins the workforce for 20 years, the savings are fairly significant. Also, knowing Hungary, this is probably intended as a subtle disincentive for the local Roma ghetto population. All the Central and Eastern European states fiddle with their welfare systems not to incentivize higher birthrates among the Roma ghetto population, even if they do not want to state this aloud. That is why the benefits target taxes, which you only pay if you actually work.
- soperj 5y ago
  >you could say that global warming is one of its legacies Considering that the majority of emissions came from a select few countries(over half from the EU & USA) that don't make up the majority of the population, and they majority of those emissions have happened while there's been smaller population growth, I don't think it's unfettered population growth that's the problem.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I assume people not consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA have a goal of consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      They very much do, but now they have to pay "carbon tax" invented by people who were responsible for most of the pollution until China
      - downWidOutaFite 5y ago
        History isn't fair but this resentment is going to destroy humanity.
        sangnoir 5y ago
        I think it's the "Screw you, I got mine" race-to-the-bottom attitude will destroy us faster. Pointing out this ongoing problem is not resentment - no one wants to talk about per-capita carbon footprint, or have binding targets, because everyone is selfish.
        tshaddox 5y ago
        Well, no, it wouldn’t be the resentment destroying humanity, it would be the people who caused all the emissions destroying humanity.
        mensetmanusman 5y ago
- naravara 5y ago
  Wealth inequality is one of the drivers of reducing family size. As well-compensated, high-status professions require either high up-front costs in education and socialization or high risk early investment the rationale shifts from "needing a lot of hands to keep the family firm going" to "needing to dedicate a lot of resources to set the kids up for success." In other words, the economic incentives today are to "go tall" rather than "go wide" with your kids if family wealth and status is the aim. If inequality is high this becomes more pronounced because the top of the heap will be more desirable and more competitive. Really I think it'll depend on how good the robots end up being. If they're very good at replacing humans then labor won't be able to bid up its pay rates. If the robots are shitty, though, it might work out okay.
  - pokstad 5y ago
    Not sure this makes sense. The biggest driver of family size seems to be lack of birth control or religious beliefs. Wealthy people avoid having children because they either expect too much for their kids or are enjoying their child free lifestyles. Meanwhile, in the US many children are born to the poorest portion of the population.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  It will be much easier to meet carbon emission targets when your population is shrinking rapidly. :)
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  Massive population is causing massive issues. The root cause of all current environmental issues is the massive population growth we've been experiencing. Even topping out at 9-10 billion seems very challenging. Ideally, in order to protect the climate, environment at large, and quality of life we should aim to bring population down by a few billions...
baybal2 5y ago
[flagged]
- newsclues 5y ago
  [flagged]
pradn 5y ago
There's certainly better opportunities for well-trained professionals in developing countries, but there's still a large pay differential. On top of that, immigrants to wealthier Western countries seek the low levels of day-to-day corruption, well-maintained infrastructure, good air quality, safety from violent crimes and theft, and access to leading universities and companies, where cutting-edge research and product development is done. In the US at least, there's plenty of gloom for our decline, some relative and some absolute, in many of these categories. But there's still a clear and stark difference for someone coming from India or Brazil.
- rzanella 5y ago
  Yep, I had a pretty comfortable salary and life back in Brazil, fear of violence around every corner made me leave.
baskire 5y ago
[dead]
JPKab 5y ago
Agreed. Think about the fact that the result of a low birth-rate with better medical tech keeping older people from dying when they otherwise would have. The result will be a far higher percentage of voters in democracies will be beneficiaries of the work of people younger than them. They will increasingly vote to expand the benefits they receive, at the expense of the younger folks who have to pay higher taxes to fund them. Perhaps one of the most distinct, and deliberately obfuscated, characteristics of COVID is its steep risk stratification by age. According to the US CDC data here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics Roughly 94% of all COVID deaths were in people age 50 and up. 28.2% of deaths were in people over the age of 85, 7 years past the average US life expectancy (for men). If you look at the response to COVID in western nations, you can see that the cost/benefit analysis wasn't being evaluated in the context of the vast majority of people dying (and therefore benefiting) were past retirement age, and the vast majority of people bearing the cost of these policies were younger, lower risk people who were put out of work. The government programs that used debt-financed payments to alleviate these issues for the young generated debt that, again, will hurt the younger generations far more than the older. Even before covid, the USA has universal health care for people over 65, but not for younger people or kids in working class families who aren't broke enough to qualify for Medicaid. I'm 40, so I'm no spring chicken, but western democracies routinely fuck over young people to help the old. It's going to get far worse until it hits an unsustainable level. I've paid Social Security and Medicare taxes for 25 years, since my first paycheck, and it's not likely I'll ever receive anything from these programs based on current projections.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  That won't end until young people actually show up to polls just as significantly. Politicians cater to their voting constituents and the elderly show up to vote stronger. Some of this is due to our suspect "you have this 1 Tuesday to do it" voting day. But what young people can do is make it socially unacceptable to not vote like the elderly do to each other.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Most states have some form of early voting, although access can still sometimes be a challenge.
mpol 5y ago
The dark horse in this race will be climate changes. These predictions look natural, as extrapolation from the current situation with decreasing growth in population. I hope we (the politicians) don't hold tight to a strict plan, because if and when climate changes start to have a big impact, millions of people might have to move to different countries. These two things combined, decreasing population and massive movements of people, are hard to predict and will require a new way of dealing with these issues.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Climate changes are way exaggerated. Almost all official predictions by IPCC etc, which aren’t addicted to clickbait, say that over the next few decades we will lose some GDP growth due to climate change. But world GDP will still grow. There won’t be starvation, or famine, etc. This is not the world ending apocalyptic scenario that’s thrown around in the media. Perhaps a few countries will become uninhabitable, but I find that unlikely too. The current cases of countries that because uninhabitable dealt with the issues (eg Netherlands) and are still thriving.
  - mpol 5y ago
    Two decades, sure, but two centuries? If sea level is about to rise 1 or 2 or 3 meters, things will surely change more than what we see now. I live in the Netherlands, I am not worried about myself. But the world for our children might look different in this regard than ours. And we should not fall into the trap that it only exists when it touches us, then it will be way too late.
    - danuker 5y ago
      > but two centuries? I believe the sea level rise will indeed affect the Netherlands. I hope technology will progress so as to allow cheap relocation, or conversion of buildings to seasteads. I'm pretty sure two centuries from now there will also be completely unforeseeable problems, but also solutions. If you look at old predictions, we feared lots of things that did not turn out to happen: alien invasions, meteor strikes, nuclear war, a disease killing most of the population (COVID-19 has only killed <0.07% so far). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_future_now_past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_futur...
Angostura 5y ago
> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. You need to factor in the problems that population expansion would cause in the future.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  The ones predicted by Malthus, that never happened and never will?
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Malthus wasn't completely wrong, but international trade mitigates the problem. This, of course, requires large surpluses in the exporting countries and fully operational supply chains, which we tended to take for granted until now. An example: Egypt, a former granary of the Mediterranean, is now a net food importer and a sudden swing in world commodity prices could very well topple the ruling junta. This wouldn't have happened if the Egyptian population growth leveled off at more reasonable numbers (say, only 30 million people crammed into the narrow Nile delta instead of 100 million).
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Egypt's grain imports were caused by bad governance and theft, not by population. Mubarak instituted a bizarre form of reverse land reform in which he stole land from families who had farmed it for ten generations and gave it to cronies who attempted to grow fruit and flowers for Europe. The cronies were not farmers, their crops failed, the desert rolled in. Truly, the apex of capitalism. https://www.marketplace.org/2011/12/12/sustainability/food-9-billion/food-fuels-egypts-revolution/ https://www.marketplace.org/2011/12/12/sustainability/food-9...
      - jtbayly 5y ago
        When the government takes your land that’s generally called communism, not capitalism.
powerapple 5y ago
I am hoping that machine will finally be the new slave so humans can really be free! Maybe western countries population problem won't be a real issue before developing countries can be wealthy.
addsidewalk 5y ago
I predict that commercial profit will dry up as ML ends consumer media creation, re-shoring via high tech manufacturing implodes shipping and retail as on demand production rises to combat the environmental destruction of factories on 24/7. 20-30 year olds now will begin to call the shots politically in 10+, pushing GenX aside where they belong. GenX as a group is pre-info economy and sycophants to inheritance and will have few answers. 20-30 something’s see no future for themselves in this system, and are currently normalizing their platform via the internet. As it spends its time now making itself irrelevant to the kids, progress elsewhere will give them alternatives and once in power, having spent their lives discussing each other’s inherent value collectively all their lives, they’ll finally just change the fucking rules and police the violent as usual. Artists can grow flowers to make paint and dig clay out of the ground. We will accept human expression must exist without the industrial convenience applied to all contexts or we risk the species.
rmk 5y ago
Unless there are more pandemics and wars that intervene. This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. I think we are perhaps 80% of the way to an endemic with successive mutations becoming less and less lethal, so perhaps the true death toll is in the 15-20 million range. Any large scale war between nation-states can have a pretty high death toll if things escalate out of control. How much could that be? And how would that affect future population growth? This is without taking into account decreasing sperm counts of men in developed countries and excess deaths due to air pollution in developing countries.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated. Can someone point me to a reference where this subject is rigorously treated, without skipping over the gore, but is still accessible to a non-expert (say, to someone who has undergrad-level understanding of health stats)? Could be a paper, a meta study, a blog post, whatever. Like with this estimate, for example, I'd want to know if it's 10-12 million people who died within X days of a positive PCR test for COVID, or something less naive.
  - bart_spoon 5y ago
    I'm fairly certain they use excess deaths, not necessary "deaths with COVID".
  - zuminator 5y ago
    It has nothing to do with PCR tests. The Economist based their estimate on a ML analysis based on excess mortality estimates. [0] https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-global-excess-deaths-model https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
  - 5y ago
lr4444lr 5y ago
The transition will be hard for the possible reasons toy give, but long term we should again return to a normal age/population pyramid. The tricky part is managing the shift.
tediousdemise 5y ago
All of these issues are functions of a growing population. You know that our species has a problem when the solution to issues becomes "we need to shit out more babies." This modus operandi is no different than that of a replicating virus or locust swarm. When you are part of the swarm, it's easy to justify your actions as a means for survival, but from an outside perspective, one sees nothing but chaos, environmental devastation, and widespread suffering. We need to stop the rampant breeding and plug the hole in this sinking ship known as planet Earth.
odiroot 5y ago
> Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. > I look forward to the problems we will face then [..] Hey, that's a great untapped market for ad targetting. Facebook and Google must be ecstatic.
z3t4 5y ago
When the cost of human labor goes up, the inequality will go down. One question is if cities will keep growing, or if we will see decentralization. The corona pandemic has proved that many jobs can be decentralized using modern communication technology. While the average population gets older, we are also more healthy at higher ages, so we might not need as much care.
- nradov 5y ago
  In the US and some other developed countries we are not more healthy at higher ages. Life expectancy has flattened out of even declined. Obesity rates are rising.
- rafiki6 5y ago
  I feel you might be conflating decentralization with location dependency. I actually expect things to centralize and concentrate further in a fully location independent world.
godelski 5y ago
A lot of these problems can go away if we can get automation right and done soon enough (though it comes with other problems itself). With automation Western nations need not rely on immigrants as much for labor as their own populations decline and age. Some services can also become a lot cheaper, like food delivery and even the food itself. I often think we frame things poorly. Wealth inequality is a problem the same way coal is a problem. It's the effects. The problem with global warming is the amount of infrared sensitive gases in the air. A coal fired plant that had zero net emissions (ccs) wouldn't be an issue. Similarly the problem with wealth is that if it is pooled up capitalism doesn't work because it needs a flow and exchange of goods to operate efficiently. Personally I don't care about the wealth gap and the top earners, I care about the bottom. If we can make all the essentials cheap enough it makes money far less valuable in the first place (solving the same problem but with different framing).
- whatshisface 5y ago
  In a world that already has Teslas running around the roads and solar farms being built for profit, but that doesn't already have economical carbon capture, it turns out that renewables are actually the conservative way out.
  - godelski 5y ago
    I mean to solve climate change we need a lot of things. More that solar and wind. Frankly we need to be carbon negative, which will require some ccs, reforestation, land management, fixing the reefs, and more. It's a complex problem that if you treat it as being simple you're taking steps backwards.
    - AlanSE 5y ago
      The simple part is that we need to stop gathering geologically sequestered hydrocarbons and putting them in the atmosphere. I have made an effort to understand climate science. Personally, I think the deference to simulations and experts has been hugely detrimental. The important questions seem to not need either PhDs or simulations. Very rudimentary education for anyone who has a science background suffices. Know the sun's rough temperature and the Earth's rough temperature, plus black-body ration, and you know the mechanism of heating. Know a weather-channel level of humidity temperature dependence, and you can know the water vapor feedback. So yes, cows, concrete, and steel are going to be problems if we solve fossil fuels. But this seems intentionally misleading. Oil comes from a mile underground and we put it in the atmosphere. We've got to stop doing that fast, before we're locked into future effects, like crop productivity declines.
wyager 5y ago
> Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. There's a lot of hubris behind predictions like these.
dominotw 5y ago
> Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. i am not quite sure what the timeframe of this prediction but at the moment all my street in india will pack their bags and relocate without a second thought to USA if given a choice. And this is an upper middle class neighborhood.
gromitss 5y ago
As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.
- otikik 5y ago
  "is going to be"?
  - gromitss 5y ago
    Yes, we are nowhere near what it is going to take.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Or productivity goes up, since we don't need a massive population doing menial tasks. Just like every time someone has said this for the last 300 years. Won't someone think of the people picking the seeds out of cotton?
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    This is a point I often make that people dismiss out of hand quite often. "People need jobs to have meaning, people need jobs to feed their families" and while thee are true, nobody really wants to screw toothpaste tube caps on toothpaste tubes for a living, and a world where nobody has to do that job is inarguably a better world for everyone.
- gavin_gee 5y ago
  one hope is innovation in creating virtual worlds will distract the population from what is already happening. the question is whether these worlds are a mirror or a replacement for the physical reality
newobj 5y ago
Why does it top out there?
tsycho 5y ago
On the other side, unfettered population growth for the purposes of maintaining a sufficiently large proportion of young people (in a world where people are living longer as well) is basically a Ponzi scheme. We’ll have to eventually stabilize to a sustainable demographic distribution; the earlier the better.
- closeparen 5y ago
  The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi scheme is the lack of any real productive activity. The growth on paper is fake. We care about working-age population because working-age people are actually out there fighting entropy to provision the stuff we like, and there's more or less of it to go around depending on how much of that is happening. That's reflected on paper but it's also true in the world, in our standard of living. Your statement "the earlier the better" makes no sense. Obviously at some point there are limits; we should do as well as we can within those limits. "We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." What?
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    >"We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." Very obviously not OPs point. What they're saying is that if you're living in a system that basically runs on a sort of 'lipstick on a pig' mentality being confronted with your problems directly and being forced to solve them is preferable to dragging it out, and there's a lot of truth to that. You may be familiar with the old startup and systems design mantra 'fail fast', which is the same thing. If you want a long term sustainable system it is good to act in such a way as to bring systemic faults to the surface.
    - headmelted 5y ago
      This. An entire generation will be demanding their golden years be subsidized by the young like they had to subsidize their parents’ generation, who had to subsidize their parents before them. The world is not ready to be told “No” on this. That’s a time bomb.
littlestymaar 5y ago
> Already eastern europe are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Oh dear I wish it was true, but it isn't. Eastern Europe is facing a dramatic brain drain and it isn't slowing down. For instance, Romania has lost 15% of its population in the past 30 years (3.5M people!), most of the loss coming after 2000 and the decline being pretty much constant between 2000 and today. Czech Republic and Slovakia are the only country in the region with a growing population (a few percent in 30 years, even the aging Germany looks dynamic by comparison), and Poland is stagnating. Evey other country is losing population every year.[1] This is an ongoing demographic catastrophe for these countries. [1]: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/fractures-est-ouest https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/fractures-est-ouest (In French, and the infographics is paywalled, but you can access an animated gif by right clicking on the image and opening it in a new tab)
- omk 5y ago
  Not true in case of India either. A report[1] released just a few weeks ago mentions 0.85 million Indians who have surrendered their Indian citizenship in favour of US, Australia or other western countries in last 7 years. It would be conservative to estimate that the number of migrants who have not yet surrendered their citizenship is 10x. The brain drain is massive. I live and work in a tech hub and my social circle depletes every year. Every smart friend/colleague/acquaintance I have has either moved, is moving or hopes to move to the west in the next 5 years. [1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/over-8-5-lakh-indians-gave-up-citizenship-in-past-7-years-till-sept-30-govt-101639472368605.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/over-8-5-lakh-indi...
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    But 0.85 million is honestly a drop in the water for India. That's still less than 5% of the babies born in India in that time frame.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
> apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this The media did not invent the worry about "population bombs". That was thanks to what environmentalism was at the time & trotting out the same tired Malthusianism
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
> But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive. Covid was fixing this, but then some renegade scientists came up with the vaccines and ruined everything. Again.
hardtke 5y ago
> - Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up. I'm not sure that high birth rates are driving emigration so much as corrupt and ineffective governments, and I'm not sure that corrupt and ineffective governments are consequences of high birth rates. And by corruption I'm not refer to the US variety (political donations) but instead low level bribery that is required as part of every day life.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
China and India want US and EU-level per-capital resource consumption. That is the real problem. The raw population numbers were always a distraction. 10 billion people at first world consumption rates with be apocalyptic.
fvv 5y ago
Automation and taxes on Automation will be enough to compensate aging workforce
tkinom 5y ago
Religion can help? - I have a Mormon co-worker. They have 8 kids. Move whole family to Japan. Told me that every time they came home to US they took a row in the wide body Jet.
- crystalmeph 5y ago
  I’ve wondered about something like that. Lower population growth seems to be a direct consequence of modern liberal society, where women are allowed and encouraged to choose having a career over raising a family. And despite glib sound bites from well-to-do upper class families who can afford a fortune for high-quality childcare, it may simply be that the average middle-class woman cannot “have it all”, and must make the choice between a fulfilling career or a large family. If my assessment is correct, it seems to end up in a scenario where, tautologically, the fecund inherit the Earth. In this case, society naturally drifts back towards a more conservative view of family roles over the next century, since only people who live those values increase their numbers. Perhaps, long-term, we enter a regular cycle of populations rising and falling, with each demographic turnover lasting a full century or more.
birksherty 5y ago
Over population of humans created the biggest problem already. Climate change, farming too much to feed that, 96% of all mammals are human and livestock, only 4% are wild that we can't exploit, 70% birds are poultry, other species are going extinct. But people here are self centred like always, so those are not bigger problem to them but future economy is.
627467 5y ago
I agree in many points. I will add that part of the problems created for the future is how newer generations have been trained to dismiss procreation using various arguments: it's expensive, it will take resources and time away from you, it's bad for the environment, the state will look after us not kids... Everything just made it so easy for newer generations to fallback to default: naahhh I'll just won't bother.

by zpeti 5y ago

bhouston 5y ago

> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility. I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards larger families (increases bonuses as you have more children) and starting families earlier (rather than delaying to to their 30s.)

mastax 5y ago
Many European countries have extremely generous benefits for raising children, but it has been broadly ineffective at raising birth rates - with the possible exception of the Czech Republic. I agree though that governments are going to try, and they may find a way to do it. There was a good episode of The Weeds podcast, "Baby making vibes," which talked about this. Some of it is focused on the American political lens of Liberal vs Conservative birth rates, but much is broadly applicable discussion of policy and the more "vibes focused" angle that conservatives tend to take with the issue.
- rowanG077 5y ago
  Isn't the simple explanation for child birth falling so rapidly being the participation of women in the workforce? I didn't do any research but I just always assumed that it is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I am curious what the market rate for pregnancy, giving birth, and breastfeeding will end up being. After seeing what it is like, if I was a woman, even the best current European benefits would not be enough.
  - bhouston 5y ago
    In Hungary, if you do it four times you are exempt from paying taxes for the rest of your life: "Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612
    - ativzzz 5y ago
      Women with four children will most likely be full time moms for the majority of their productive lives so that's a pointless benefit, unless this policy manages to somehow reverse gender roles as well.
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        Even if said lady only rejoins the workforce for 20 years, the savings are fairly significant. Also, knowing Hungary, this is probably intended as a subtle disincentive for the local Roma ghetto population. All the Central and Eastern European states fiddle with their welfare systems not to incentivize higher birthrates among the Roma ghetto population, even if they do not want to state this aloud. That is why the benefits target taxes, which you only pay if you actually work.
soperj 5y ago
>you could say that global warming is one of its legacies Considering that the majority of emissions came from a select few countries(over half from the EU & USA) that don't make up the majority of the population, and they majority of those emissions have happened while there's been smaller population growth, I don't think it's unfettered population growth that's the problem.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I assume people not consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA have a goal of consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    They very much do, but now they have to pay "carbon tax" invented by people who were responsible for most of the pollution until China
    - downWidOutaFite 5y ago
      History isn't fair but this resentment is going to destroy humanity.
      - sangnoir 5y ago
        I think it's the "Screw you, I got mine" race-to-the-bottom attitude will destroy us faster. Pointing out this ongoing problem is not resentment - no one wants to talk about per-capita carbon footprint, or have binding targets, because everyone is selfish.
      - tshaddox 5y ago
        Well, no, it wouldn’t be the resentment destroying humanity, it would be the people who caused all the emissions destroying humanity.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
naravara 5y ago
Wealth inequality is one of the drivers of reducing family size. As well-compensated, high-status professions require either high up-front costs in education and socialization or high risk early investment the rationale shifts from "needing a lot of hands to keep the family firm going" to "needing to dedicate a lot of resources to set the kids up for success." In other words, the economic incentives today are to "go tall" rather than "go wide" with your kids if family wealth and status is the aim. If inequality is high this becomes more pronounced because the top of the heap will be more desirable and more competitive. Really I think it'll depend on how good the robots end up being. If they're very good at replacing humans then labor won't be able to bid up its pay rates. If the robots are shitty, though, it might work out okay.
- pokstad 5y ago
  Not sure this makes sense. The biggest driver of family size seems to be lack of birth control or religious beliefs. Wealthy people avoid having children because they either expect too much for their kids or are enjoying their child free lifestyles. Meanwhile, in the US many children are born to the poorest portion of the population.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
It will be much easier to meet carbon emission targets when your population is shrinking rapidly. :)
mytailorisrich 5y ago
Massive population is causing massive issues. The root cause of all current environmental issues is the massive population growth we've been experiencing. Even topping out at 9-10 billion seems very challenging. Ideally, in order to protect the climate, environment at large, and quality of life we should aim to bring population down by a few billions...

baybal2 5y ago

[flagged]

newsclues 5y ago
[flagged]

pradn 5y ago

There's certainly better opportunities for well-trained professionals in developing countries, but there's still a large pay differential. On top of that, immigrants to wealthier Western countries seek the low levels of day-to-day corruption, well-maintained infrastructure, good air quality, safety from violent crimes and theft, and access to leading universities and companies, where cutting-edge research and product development is done. In the US at least, there's plenty of gloom for our decline, some relative and some absolute, in many of these categories. But there's still a clear and stark difference for someone coming from India or Brazil.

rzanella 5y ago
Yep, I had a pretty comfortable salary and life back in Brazil, fear of violence around every corner made me leave.

baskire 5y ago

[dead]

JPKab 5y ago

Agreed. Think about the fact that the result of a low birth-rate with better medical tech keeping older people from dying when they otherwise would have. The result will be a far higher percentage of voters in democracies will be beneficiaries of the work of people younger than them. They will increasingly vote to expand the benefits they receive, at the expense of the younger folks who have to pay higher taxes to fund them. Perhaps one of the most distinct, and deliberately obfuscated, characteristics of COVID is its steep risk stratification by age. According to the US CDC data here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics Roughly 94% of all COVID deaths were in people age 50 and up. 28.2% of deaths were in people over the age of 85, 7 years past the average US life expectancy (for men). If you look at the response to COVID in western nations, you can see that the cost/benefit analysis wasn't being evaluated in the context of the vast majority of people dying (and therefore benefiting) were past retirement age, and the vast majority of people bearing the cost of these policies were younger, lower risk people who were put out of work. The government programs that used debt-financed payments to alleviate these issues for the young generated debt that, again, will hurt the younger generations far more than the older. Even before covid, the USA has universal health care for people over 65, but not for younger people or kids in working class families who aren't broke enough to qualify for Medicaid. I'm 40, so I'm no spring chicken, but western democracies routinely fuck over young people to help the old. It's going to get far worse until it hits an unsustainable level. I've paid Social Security and Medicare taxes for 25 years, since my first paycheck, and it's not likely I'll ever receive anything from these programs based on current projections.

reducesuffering 5y ago
That won't end until young people actually show up to polls just as significantly. Politicians cater to their voting constituents and the elderly show up to vote stronger. Some of this is due to our suspect "you have this 1 Tuesday to do it" voting day. But what young people can do is make it socially unacceptable to not vote like the elderly do to each other.
- nradov 5y ago
  Most states have some form of early voting, although access can still sometimes be a challenge.

mpol 5y ago

The dark horse in this race will be climate changes. These predictions look natural, as extrapolation from the current situation with decreasing growth in population. I hope we (the politicians) don't hold tight to a strict plan, because if and when climate changes start to have a big impact, millions of people might have to move to different countries. These two things combined, decreasing population and massive movements of people, are hard to predict and will require a new way of dealing with these issues.

zpeti 5y ago
Climate changes are way exaggerated. Almost all official predictions by IPCC etc, which aren’t addicted to clickbait, say that over the next few decades we will lose some GDP growth due to climate change. But world GDP will still grow. There won’t be starvation, or famine, etc. This is not the world ending apocalyptic scenario that’s thrown around in the media. Perhaps a few countries will become uninhabitable, but I find that unlikely too. The current cases of countries that because uninhabitable dealt with the issues (eg Netherlands) and are still thriving.
- mpol 5y ago
  Two decades, sure, but two centuries? If sea level is about to rise 1 or 2 or 3 meters, things will surely change more than what we see now. I live in the Netherlands, I am not worried about myself. But the world for our children might look different in this regard than ours. And we should not fall into the trap that it only exists when it touches us, then it will be way too late.
  - danuker 5y ago
    > but two centuries? I believe the sea level rise will indeed affect the Netherlands. I hope technology will progress so as to allow cheap relocation, or conversion of buildings to seasteads. I'm pretty sure two centuries from now there will also be completely unforeseeable problems, but also solutions. If you look at old predictions, we feared lots of things that did not turn out to happen: alien invasions, meteor strikes, nuclear war, a disease killing most of the population (COVID-19 has only killed <0.07% so far). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_future_now_past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_futur...

Angostura 5y ago

> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. You need to factor in the problems that population expansion would cause in the future.

jtbayly 5y ago
The ones predicted by Malthus, that never happened and never will?
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Malthus wasn't completely wrong, but international trade mitigates the problem. This, of course, requires large surpluses in the exporting countries and fully operational supply chains, which we tended to take for granted until now. An example: Egypt, a former granary of the Mediterranean, is now a net food importer and a sudden swing in world commodity prices could very well topple the ruling junta. This wouldn't have happened if the Egyptian population growth leveled off at more reasonable numbers (say, only 30 million people crammed into the narrow Nile delta instead of 100 million).
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Egypt's grain imports were caused by bad governance and theft, not by population. Mubarak instituted a bizarre form of reverse land reform in which he stole land from families who had farmed it for ten generations and gave it to cronies who attempted to grow fruit and flowers for Europe. The cronies were not farmers, their crops failed, the desert rolled in. Truly, the apex of capitalism. https://www.marketplace.org/2011/12/12/sustainability/food-9-billion/food-fuels-egypts-revolution/ https://www.marketplace.org/2011/12/12/sustainability/food-9...
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      When the government takes your land that’s generally called communism, not capitalism.

powerapple 5y ago

I am hoping that machine will finally be the new slave so humans can really be free! Maybe western countries population problem won't be a real issue before developing countries can be wealthy.

addsidewalk 5y ago

I predict that commercial profit will dry up as ML ends consumer media creation, re-shoring via high tech manufacturing implodes shipping and retail as on demand production rises to combat the environmental destruction of factories on 24/7. 20-30 year olds now will begin to call the shots politically in 10+, pushing GenX aside where they belong. GenX as a group is pre-info economy and sycophants to inheritance and will have few answers. 20-30 something’s see no future for themselves in this system, and are currently normalizing their platform via the internet. As it spends its time now making itself irrelevant to the kids, progress elsewhere will give them alternatives and once in power, having spent their lives discussing each other’s inherent value collectively all their lives, they’ll finally just change the fucking rules and police the violent as usual. Artists can grow flowers to make paint and dig clay out of the ground. We will accept human expression must exist without the industrial convenience applied to all contexts or we risk the species.

rmk 5y ago

Unless there are more pandemics and wars that intervene. This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. I think we are perhaps 80% of the way to an endemic with successive mutations becoming less and less lethal, so perhaps the true death toll is in the 15-20 million range. Any large scale war between nation-states can have a pretty high death toll if things escalate out of control. How much could that be? And how would that affect future population growth? This is without taking into account decreasing sperm counts of men in developed countries and excess deaths due to air pollution in developing countries.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated. Can someone point me to a reference where this subject is rigorously treated, without skipping over the gore, but is still accessible to a non-expert (say, to someone who has undergrad-level understanding of health stats)? Could be a paper, a meta study, a blog post, whatever. Like with this estimate, for example, I'd want to know if it's 10-12 million people who died within X days of a positive PCR test for COVID, or something less naive.
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  I'm fairly certain they use excess deaths, not necessary "deaths with COVID".
- zuminator 5y ago
  It has nothing to do with PCR tests. The Economist based their estimate on a ML analysis based on excess mortality estimates. [0] https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-global-excess-deaths-model https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
- 5y ago

lr4444lr 5y ago

The transition will be hard for the possible reasons toy give, but long term we should again return to a normal age/population pyramid. The tricky part is managing the shift.

tediousdemise 5y ago

All of these issues are functions of a growing population. You know that our species has a problem when the solution to issues becomes "we need to shit out more babies." This modus operandi is no different than that of a replicating virus or locust swarm. When you are part of the swarm, it's easy to justify your actions as a means for survival, but from an outside perspective, one sees nothing but chaos, environmental devastation, and widespread suffering. We need to stop the rampant breeding and plug the hole in this sinking ship known as planet Earth.

odiroot 5y ago

> Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. > I look forward to the problems we will face then [..] Hey, that's a great untapped market for ad targetting. Facebook and Google must be ecstatic.

z3t4 5y ago

When the cost of human labor goes up, the inequality will go down. One question is if cities will keep growing, or if we will see decentralization. The corona pandemic has proved that many jobs can be decentralized using modern communication technology. While the average population gets older, we are also more healthy at higher ages, so we might not need as much care.

nradov 5y ago
In the US and some other developed countries we are not more healthy at higher ages. Life expectancy has flattened out of even declined. Obesity rates are rising.
rafiki6 5y ago
I feel you might be conflating decentralization with location dependency. I actually expect things to centralize and concentrate further in a fully location independent world.

godelski 5y ago

A lot of these problems can go away if we can get automation right and done soon enough (though it comes with other problems itself). With automation Western nations need not rely on immigrants as much for labor as their own populations decline and age. Some services can also become a lot cheaper, like food delivery and even the food itself. I often think we frame things poorly. Wealth inequality is a problem the same way coal is a problem. It's the effects. The problem with global warming is the amount of infrared sensitive gases in the air. A coal fired plant that had zero net emissions (ccs) wouldn't be an issue. Similarly the problem with wealth is that if it is pooled up capitalism doesn't work because it needs a flow and exchange of goods to operate efficiently. Personally I don't care about the wealth gap and the top earners, I care about the bottom. If we can make all the essentials cheap enough it makes money far less valuable in the first place (solving the same problem but with different framing).

whatshisface 5y ago
In a world that already has Teslas running around the roads and solar farms being built for profit, but that doesn't already have economical carbon capture, it turns out that renewables are actually the conservative way out.
- godelski 5y ago
  I mean to solve climate change we need a lot of things. More that solar and wind. Frankly we need to be carbon negative, which will require some ccs, reforestation, land management, fixing the reefs, and more. It's a complex problem that if you treat it as being simple you're taking steps backwards.
  - AlanSE 5y ago
    The simple part is that we need to stop gathering geologically sequestered hydrocarbons and putting them in the atmosphere. I have made an effort to understand climate science. Personally, I think the deference to simulations and experts has been hugely detrimental. The important questions seem to not need either PhDs or simulations. Very rudimentary education for anyone who has a science background suffices. Know the sun's rough temperature and the Earth's rough temperature, plus black-body ration, and you know the mechanism of heating. Know a weather-channel level of humidity temperature dependence, and you can know the water vapor feedback. So yes, cows, concrete, and steel are going to be problems if we solve fossil fuels. But this seems intentionally misleading. Oil comes from a mile underground and we put it in the atmosphere. We've got to stop doing that fast, before we're locked into future effects, like crop productivity declines.

wyager 5y ago

> Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. There's a lot of hubris behind predictions like these.

dominotw 5y ago

> Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. i am not quite sure what the timeframe of this prediction but at the moment all my street in india will pack their bags and relocate without a second thought to USA if given a choice. And this is an upper middle class neighborhood.

gromitss 5y ago

As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.

otikik 5y ago
"is going to be"?
- gromitss 5y ago
  Yes, we are nowhere near what it is going to take.
xxpor 5y ago
Or productivity goes up, since we don't need a massive population doing menial tasks. Just like every time someone has said this for the last 300 years. Won't someone think of the people picking the seeds out of cotton?
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  This is a point I often make that people dismiss out of hand quite often. "People need jobs to have meaning, people need jobs to feed their families" and while thee are true, nobody really wants to screw toothpaste tube caps on toothpaste tubes for a living, and a world where nobody has to do that job is inarguably a better world for everyone.
gavin_gee 5y ago
one hope is innovation in creating virtual worlds will distract the population from what is already happening. the question is whether these worlds are a mirror or a replacement for the physical reality

newobj 5y ago

Why does it top out there?

tsycho 5y ago

On the other side, unfettered population growth for the purposes of maintaining a sufficiently large proportion of young people (in a world where people are living longer as well) is basically a Ponzi scheme. We’ll have to eventually stabilize to a sustainable demographic distribution; the earlier the better.

closeparen 5y ago
The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi scheme is the lack of any real productive activity. The growth on paper is fake. We care about working-age population because working-age people are actually out there fighting entropy to provision the stuff we like, and there's more or less of it to go around depending on how much of that is happening. That's reflected on paper but it's also true in the world, in our standard of living. Your statement "the earlier the better" makes no sense. Obviously at some point there are limits; we should do as well as we can within those limits. "We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." What?
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >"We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." Very obviously not OPs point. What they're saying is that if you're living in a system that basically runs on a sort of 'lipstick on a pig' mentality being confronted with your problems directly and being forced to solve them is preferable to dragging it out, and there's a lot of truth to that. You may be familiar with the old startup and systems design mantra 'fail fast', which is the same thing. If you want a long term sustainable system it is good to act in such a way as to bring systemic faults to the surface.
  - headmelted 5y ago
    This. An entire generation will be demanding their golden years be subsidized by the young like they had to subsidize their parents’ generation, who had to subsidize their parents before them. The world is not ready to be told “No” on this. That’s a time bomb.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> Already eastern europe are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Oh dear I wish it was true, but it isn't. Eastern Europe is facing a dramatic brain drain and it isn't slowing down. For instance, Romania has lost 15% of its population in the past 30 years (3.5M people!), most of the loss coming after 2000 and the decline being pretty much constant between 2000 and today. Czech Republic and Slovakia are the only country in the region with a growing population (a few percent in 30 years, even the aging Germany looks dynamic by comparison), and Poland is stagnating. Evey other country is losing population every year.[1] This is an ongoing demographic catastrophe for these countries. [1]: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/fractures-est-ouest https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/fractures-est-ouest (In French, and the infographics is paywalled, but you can access an animated gif by right clicking on the image and opening it in a new tab)

omk 5y ago
Not true in case of India either. A report[1] released just a few weeks ago mentions 0.85 million Indians who have surrendered their Indian citizenship in favour of US, Australia or other western countries in last 7 years. It would be conservative to estimate that the number of migrants who have not yet surrendered their citizenship is 10x. The brain drain is massive. I live and work in a tech hub and my social circle depletes every year. Every smart friend/colleague/acquaintance I have has either moved, is moving or hopes to move to the west in the next 5 years. [1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/over-8-5-lakh-indians-gave-up-citizenship-in-past-7-years-till-sept-30-govt-101639472368605.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/over-8-5-lakh-indi...
- N1H1L 5y ago
  But 0.85 million is honestly a drop in the water for India. That's still less than 5% of the babies born in India in that time frame.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

> apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this The media did not invent the worry about "population bombs". That was thanks to what environmentalism was at the time & trotting out the same tired Malthusianism

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

> But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive. Covid was fixing this, but then some renegade scientists came up with the vaccines and ruined everything. Again.

hardtke 5y ago

> - Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up. I'm not sure that high birth rates are driving emigration so much as corrupt and ineffective governments, and I'm not sure that corrupt and ineffective governments are consequences of high birth rates. And by corruption I'm not refer to the US variety (political donations) but instead low level bribery that is required as part of every day life.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

China and India want US and EU-level per-capital resource consumption. That is the real problem. The raw population numbers were always a distraction. 10 billion people at first world consumption rates with be apocalyptic.

fvv 5y ago

Automation and taxes on Automation will be enough to compensate aging workforce

tkinom 5y ago

Religion can help? - I have a Mormon co-worker. They have 8 kids. Move whole family to Japan. Told me that every time they came home to US they took a row in the wide body Jet.

crystalmeph 5y ago
I’ve wondered about something like that. Lower population growth seems to be a direct consequence of modern liberal society, where women are allowed and encouraged to choose having a career over raising a family. And despite glib sound bites from well-to-do upper class families who can afford a fortune for high-quality childcare, it may simply be that the average middle-class woman cannot “have it all”, and must make the choice between a fulfilling career or a large family. If my assessment is correct, it seems to end up in a scenario where, tautologically, the fecund inherit the Earth. In this case, society naturally drifts back towards a more conservative view of family roles over the next century, since only people who live those values increase their numbers. Perhaps, long-term, we enter a regular cycle of populations rising and falling, with each demographic turnover lasting a full century or more.

birksherty 5y ago

Over population of humans created the biggest problem already. Climate change, farming too much to feed that, 96% of all mammals are human and livestock, only 4% are wild that we can't exploit, 70% birds are poultry, other species are going extinct. But people here are self centred like always, so those are not bigger problem to them but future economy is.

627467 5y ago

I agree in many points. I will add that part of the problems created for the future is how newer generations have been trained to dismiss procreation using various arguments: it's expensive, it will take resources and time away from you, it's bad for the environment, the state will look after us not kids... Everything just made it so easy for newer generations to fallback to default: naahhh I'll just won't bother.