16 ms·

Do we really need more people? America has almost 350 million, and is completely dwarfed by India and China. That seems like plenty of people to me.

DuskStar 5y ago
This depends. Do you want someone to be able to take care of you after you retire? Medical care, that sort of thing? If so, that means that you need people. People younger than you. People with some sort of societal attachment to you that results in them not just tossing your entire generation into a metaphorical woodchipper, because taking care of old people is a ton of work. The traditional way to ensure that such a population of younger people exists has been to have children. Importing immigrants might solve the "people younger than you" side of things, but it is yet to be determined if it adequately solves the "societal attachment" side of things.
- igetspam 5y ago
  But we don't parity or growth. A decline would would tax our systems less and we could still provide for our elderly.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    It depends on the systems. Social security is a system that would be under greater pressure, not less.
    - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
      Hot take: social security is a Ponzi scheme.
      - snovv_crash 5y ago
        By implication, the people who get out first are the only winners?
        bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
        My point was more that it only works as long as new people are joining.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        If new members join the scheme at the rate that old members die, and the average member expects to get out what they put in, then it is a very sustainable Ponzi scheme. In theory you'd have the problem of inflation if each generation put all their contributions into a dedicated fund which was later used to pay their expenses in old age, but fortunately the current contributors can pay for the current beneficiaries, which mitigates that problem.
        collegeburner 5y ago
        It also makes it very hard to roll back because some generation will get screwed, paying for handouts to old people and getting 0.
- plasticchris 5y ago
  I just read an article about how immigrants (to the us) working in elder care were more culturally suited than Americans to the work, having more respect for old age. So it might be just the opposite, or perhaps respect for elders is a consequence of the demographic shift over time? Or just correlated?
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    By the time most of us are old, there will be no immigrants remaining.
    - shigawire 5y ago
      Climate change might make more climate migrants
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > I just read an article about how immigrants (to the us) working in elder care were more culturally suited than Americans to the work Immigrants to the US are more financially suited than Americans to the work. Same goes for immigrants in almost any country, or women, or minorities, or anyone who is willing to take a small amount of money for a lot of work. They have various and diverse cultures, just like native-born Americans do.
    - plasticchris 5y ago
      There is certainly a dystopian angle there, but my point was about the implication that having kids is necessary for this specific need.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Isn't that what technology is for? Maybe we should stop screaming about technology putting everybody out of work for five minutes before demanding an answer about who'll do the work to take care of old people.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  If I had the option to kill myself off once I hit the point that I'm no longer able to look after myself then I'd be pretty happy with that. And frankly with what I've seen of last the years of my elderly relatives lives even with care, I rather hope that I do have that option. Dementia looks no fun at all.
  - everforward 5y ago
    This is probably more than most people are willing to accept, but if modern medicine keeps going the way it is, I think we're going to have to have some frank conversations about this. We're pretty good at preventing people from dying young, and we're pretty good at keeping the elderly barely alive. We're pretty bad at extending how long someone can take care of themselves. I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates. You can start to see it with that new Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm. Was originally $56,000 a year, and is now $28,000. The average prognosis for Alzheimer's is 8 years, so we would be talking about an increase of $224,000 in cost of care for an Alzheimer's patient. That's between 4 and 5 years of labor at the average wage in the US. Add in nursing home care, and it won't be shocking if a lot of people's end of life care exceeds their total lifetime earnings. I don't have a great solution for that. If insurers reduce coverage for end of life care, the effects are going to be mediated by personal wealth. The wealthy will be allowed to retire since they can pay for their own treatment, and the poor will only be allowed to die. You can tax the rich harder, but it's only going to delay the effects for a while.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      > This is probably more than most people are willing to accept You say that, but this a majority opinion amongst people I know both in my own age group (late twenties) and my parents age group (late fifties). My circles probably skew liberal, but even so I think that most people now have first-hand experience of elderly loved ones with dementia and the effects of that on both the person themselves and those who have to care for them. I can't see many people wanting that either for themselves of their descendants. > I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates. And massive birth rates aren't sustainable either. That only pushes the problem back a few decades. This is why I'd ultimately prefer to my life to be cut short. The only alternative on a societal level is to work much harder while I am alive. I'd rather enjoy my time here and then go and let others have their turn.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  When does it end? First we make generations of long-living old people, now we need generations of young people to care for them? We are close to making fully functional life support and robotic nurses. It's more ethical to have robots do this labour than force young people out of their happiest days.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Exponential growth is unsustainable in the long term. Eventually we will have to come up with an alternative, might as well do it now.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    This has nil bearing on exponential growth by virtue that the fertility rate in the West is stagnant. Countries with high fertility rates tend to be more impoverished.
- tzs 5y ago
  Assuming that we don't crack the immortality problem, a population can continue to have children without that population growing. A population of 8 billion for example with sufficiently good medical care that the average person lives to 75 could have about 100 million children a year without having net population growth. If a population is depending on continued net growth it has to very careful. If there is some constant above which it needs to maintain its growth rate growth will be an exponential process and exponential processes can blow up on you way faster than you might expect. As an example, suppose we were depending on 1% annual population growth indefinitely and bad things would happen if we could not sustain that. Let's try to put an upper limit on how long we could theoretically sustain that. Assumptions: we do not develop faster than light travel, do not discover any extra dimensions of spacetime that we can occupy, every human now in existence is near Earth, we don't need space for anything other than holding people, and you can't pack people tighter than 16 people per m^3 (the number of present day people you could fit in a 1m x 1m x 1m cube if we were versatile shape shifters who could take on arbitrary shapes but not change our volume). Given those assumptions, then N years from now every human in existence must be within N lightyears of Earth. Take the volume of that sphere at year Y and divide it by the number of people that would be alive in year Y at 1% annual growth and we get how much space is in the most optimistic case available per person. Q: How long before that space per person is less than 1/16th of a cubic meter? A: ~12000 years. If we can drop the growth rate to 0.5% we get about 24500 years. If we can drop it to 0.1% we get around 127000 years. Exponentials are scary.
slothtrop 5y ago
We don't, and the global population rate is poised to level off in 50-100 years anyway. Chasing the growth dragon is nice for the elites right now (and sold to us as a virtue and/or "good for the economy"), but it's unsustainable in the very long run, and has consequences in the short-run at certain thresholds. Always a source of amusement because the absurdity of perpetual growth is gleefully acknowledged by the left, but as it pertains to population, the blinders go on. We have two potential paths as a society between a return to Serfdom, and a future where people still own things.

DuskStar 5y ago

This depends. Do you want someone to be able to take care of you after you retire? Medical care, that sort of thing? If so, that means that you need people. People younger than you. People with some sort of societal attachment to you that results in them not just tossing your entire generation into a metaphorical woodchipper, because taking care of old people is a ton of work. The traditional way to ensure that such a population of younger people exists has been to have children. Importing immigrants might solve the "people younger than you" side of things, but it is yet to be determined if it adequately solves the "societal attachment" side of things.

igetspam 5y ago
But we don't parity or growth. A decline would would tax our systems less and we could still provide for our elderly.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  It depends on the systems. Social security is a system that would be under greater pressure, not less.
  - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
    Hot take: social security is a Ponzi scheme.
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      By implication, the people who get out first are the only winners?
      - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
        My point was more that it only works as long as new people are joining.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      If new members join the scheme at the rate that old members die, and the average member expects to get out what they put in, then it is a very sustainable Ponzi scheme. In theory you'd have the problem of inflation if each generation put all their contributions into a dedicated fund which was later used to pay their expenses in old age, but fortunately the current contributors can pay for the current beneficiaries, which mitigates that problem.
      - collegeburner 5y ago
        It also makes it very hard to roll back because some generation will get screwed, paying for handouts to old people and getting 0.
plasticchris 5y ago
I just read an article about how immigrants (to the us) working in elder care were more culturally suited than Americans to the work, having more respect for old age. So it might be just the opposite, or perhaps respect for elders is a consequence of the demographic shift over time? Or just correlated?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  By the time most of us are old, there will be no immigrants remaining.
  - shigawire 5y ago
    Climate change might make more climate migrants
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > I just read an article about how immigrants (to the us) working in elder care were more culturally suited than Americans to the work Immigrants to the US are more financially suited than Americans to the work. Same goes for immigrants in almost any country, or women, or minorities, or anyone who is willing to take a small amount of money for a lot of work. They have various and diverse cultures, just like native-born Americans do.
  - plasticchris 5y ago
    There is certainly a dystopian angle there, but my point was about the implication that having kids is necessary for this specific need.
pessimizer 5y ago
Isn't that what technology is for? Maybe we should stop screaming about technology putting everybody out of work for five minutes before demanding an answer about who'll do the work to take care of old people.
nicoburns 5y ago
If I had the option to kill myself off once I hit the point that I'm no longer able to look after myself then I'd be pretty happy with that. And frankly with what I've seen of last the years of my elderly relatives lives even with care, I rather hope that I do have that option. Dementia looks no fun at all.
- everforward 5y ago
  This is probably more than most people are willing to accept, but if modern medicine keeps going the way it is, I think we're going to have to have some frank conversations about this. We're pretty good at preventing people from dying young, and we're pretty good at keeping the elderly barely alive. We're pretty bad at extending how long someone can take care of themselves. I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates. You can start to see it with that new Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm. Was originally $56,000 a year, and is now $28,000. The average prognosis for Alzheimer's is 8 years, so we would be talking about an increase of $224,000 in cost of care for an Alzheimer's patient. That's between 4 and 5 years of labor at the average wage in the US. Add in nursing home care, and it won't be shocking if a lot of people's end of life care exceeds their total lifetime earnings. I don't have a great solution for that. If insurers reduce coverage for end of life care, the effects are going to be mediated by personal wealth. The wealthy will be allowed to retire since they can pay for their own treatment, and the poor will only be allowed to die. You can tax the rich harder, but it's only going to delay the effects for a while.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    > This is probably more than most people are willing to accept You say that, but this a majority opinion amongst people I know both in my own age group (late twenties) and my parents age group (late fifties). My circles probably skew liberal, but even so I think that most people now have first-hand experience of elderly loved ones with dementia and the effects of that on both the person themselves and those who have to care for them. I can't see many people wanting that either for themselves of their descendants. > I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates. And massive birth rates aren't sustainable either. That only pushes the problem back a few decades. This is why I'd ultimately prefer to my life to be cut short. The only alternative on a societal level is to work much harder while I am alive. I'd rather enjoy my time here and then go and let others have their turn.
Bancakes 5y ago
When does it end? First we make generations of long-living old people, now we need generations of young people to care for them? We are close to making fully functional life support and robotic nurses. It's more ethical to have robots do this labour than force young people out of their happiest days.
bawolff 5y ago
Exponential growth is unsustainable in the long term. Eventually we will have to come up with an alternative, might as well do it now.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  This has nil bearing on exponential growth by virtue that the fertility rate in the West is stagnant. Countries with high fertility rates tend to be more impoverished.
tzs 5y ago
Assuming that we don't crack the immortality problem, a population can continue to have children without that population growing. A population of 8 billion for example with sufficiently good medical care that the average person lives to 75 could have about 100 million children a year without having net population growth. If a population is depending on continued net growth it has to very careful. If there is some constant above which it needs to maintain its growth rate growth will be an exponential process and exponential processes can blow up on you way faster than you might expect. As an example, suppose we were depending on 1% annual population growth indefinitely and bad things would happen if we could not sustain that. Let's try to put an upper limit on how long we could theoretically sustain that. Assumptions: we do not develop faster than light travel, do not discover any extra dimensions of spacetime that we can occupy, every human now in existence is near Earth, we don't need space for anything other than holding people, and you can't pack people tighter than 16 people per m^3 (the number of present day people you could fit in a 1m x 1m x 1m cube if we were versatile shape shifters who could take on arbitrary shapes but not change our volume). Given those assumptions, then N years from now every human in existence must be within N lightyears of Earth. Take the volume of that sphere at year Y and divide it by the number of people that would be alive in year Y at 1% annual growth and we get how much space is in the most optimistic case available per person. Q: How long before that space per person is less than 1/16th of a cubic meter? A: ~12000 years. If we can drop the growth rate to 0.5% we get about 24500 years. If we can drop it to 0.1% we get around 127000 years. Exponentials are scary.

slothtrop 5y ago

We don't, and the global population rate is poised to level off in 50-100 years anyway. Chasing the growth dragon is nice for the elites right now (and sold to us as a virtue and/or "good for the economy"), but it's unsustainable in the very long run, and has consequences in the short-run at certain thresholds. Always a source of amusement because the absurdity of perpetual growth is gleefully acknowledged by the left, but as it pertains to population, the blinders go on. We have two potential paths as a society between a return to Serfdom, and a future where people still own things.