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The population pyramid is not sustainable. The exponential function just will not allow for the combination of age pyramid and our increasingly effective health

The population pyramid is not sustainable. The exponential function just will not allow for the combination of age pyramid and our increasingly effective health care keeping us alive to all become parents. Watch this talk: https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY Tl;DW: we can not prevent the end of exponential population growth. We can only choose how it ends. By starvation, war, disease, or fewer births. Pension systems have relied on growth for a long time, but it's just not mathematically possible is the long run.

modeless 4y ago
I'm not advocating for growth. I'm advocating for stability. The population pyramid is already over for us. Shrinking is now the default. We need more parents simply to stop the future shrinking. I know some advocate shrinking for sustainability reasons, but a policy of shrinking is a policy of irrelevance. Other cultures with a growth mindset will continue growing and ruin your sustainability plans. Let's have abundance instead of austerity. Instead of intentionally reducing the population for sustainability, we can make the current population sustainable with technology. We don't need to stop population growth. It's already stopping. We now need to stop population shrinkage to reach a stable equilibrium.
- knorker 4y ago
  > Let's have abundance instead of austerity Others in this thread have, in so many words, said that being a parent should be paid by tax payers as a full time job. It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. So that lessens abundance, creating a poorer world. It's like the conversation about UBI. If it's actually U and (as often stated by proponents) enough for a middle class lifestyle I would quit today. No way I'd be a sucker paying taxes to support government funded FIRE, without doing it myself. And so would most of the population. On a small scale I've soon this in friends' relationships. "Can I stay home with kids and video games, and you just support us?".
  - modeless 4y ago
    > It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economically unsuccessful people should have children), or economically successful people should not spend time raising their children (meaning they should foist their children into the care of economically unsuccessful people instead). I hope you can see the clear issue with the former, and while the latter is pretty much status quo it has big issues as well. If the children of doctors and lawyers do better when their parents care for them instead of other people, and become doctors and lawyers too, then society didn't lose after all. Childcare is an investment in the future, not pure waste to be avoided. I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child. But I do think that parenthood deserves to be subsidized, and more than it is now, even for economically successful people, up to the point where the fertility rate stabilizes at the replacement rate.
    - knorker 4y ago
      > I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child But we pretty much are already. First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination". Like people who are away for a year, and come back promoted. And that's not even mentioning how much of the slack coworkers he to pick up from a parent needing to leave at 3pm every day from now on. We're all meant to pretend they work just as hard, and deserve to be paid just as much. (Not every parent offloads work like this onto their coworkers, but a lot of them do. So it's a huge cost statistically not paid by the person who made the choice)
      - modeless 4y ago
        > But we pretty much are already. LOL sorry, not even close. But it doesn't matter whether we are or not, not in the slightest. What matters is whether we're subsidizing enough to stabilize the fertility rate. Which we're empirically not.

modeless 4y ago

I'm not advocating for growth. I'm advocating for stability. The population pyramid is already over for us. Shrinking is now the default. We need more parents simply to stop the future shrinking. I know some advocate shrinking for sustainability reasons, but a policy of shrinking is a policy of irrelevance. Other cultures with a growth mindset will continue growing and ruin your sustainability plans. Let's have abundance instead of austerity. Instead of intentionally reducing the population for sustainability, we can make the current population sustainable with technology. We don't need to stop population growth. It's already stopping. We now need to stop population shrinkage to reach a stable equilibrium.

knorker 4y ago
> Let's have abundance instead of austerity Others in this thread have, in so many words, said that being a parent should be paid by tax payers as a full time job. It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. So that lessens abundance, creating a poorer world. It's like the conversation about UBI. If it's actually U and (as often stated by proponents) enough for a middle class lifestyle I would quit today. No way I'd be a sucker paying taxes to support government funded FIRE, without doing it myself. And so would most of the population. On a small scale I've soon this in friends' relationships. "Can I stay home with kids and video games, and you just support us?".
- modeless 4y ago
  > It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economically unsuccessful people should have children), or economically successful people should not spend time raising their children (meaning they should foist their children into the care of economically unsuccessful people instead). I hope you can see the clear issue with the former, and while the latter is pretty much status quo it has big issues as well. If the children of doctors and lawyers do better when their parents care for them instead of other people, and become doctors and lawyers too, then society didn't lose after all. Childcare is an investment in the future, not pure waste to be avoided. I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child. But I do think that parenthood deserves to be subsidized, and more than it is now, even for economically successful people, up to the point where the fertility rate stabilizes at the replacement rate.
  - knorker 4y ago
    > I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child But we pretty much are already. First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination". Like people who are away for a year, and come back promoted. And that's not even mentioning how much of the slack coworkers he to pick up from a parent needing to leave at 3pm every day from now on. We're all meant to pretend they work just as hard, and deserve to be paid just as much. (Not every parent offloads work like this onto their coworkers, but a lot of them do. So it's a huge cost statistically not paid by the person who made the choice)
    - modeless 4y ago
      > But we pretty much are already. LOL sorry, not even close. But it doesn't matter whether we are or not, not in the slightest. What matters is whether we're subsidizing enough to stabilize the fertility rate. Which we're empirically not.