5 ms·

This is fine, it's a small blip. Millenials and Zoomers and some Gen Xers will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down.

croes 4y ago
How's the birth rate in India or the african countries?
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  Maybe google it. Trending down also. World population will max at around 10bn
  - b112 4y ago
    Last I heard though, in Africa, population decline was due to endemic aids/hiv, and no real inexpensive treatment. And some refusal to use condoms. If this changes, the trend will sharply reverse.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      That makes little sense - what we're seeing in Africa like everywhere else is that increased living standards, education and healthcare including family planning consistently leads to dropping birth rates. At most improved treatment of HIV will lead to a short-term bump if life expectancy increases faster than birth rates drop.
    - Tchakra 4y ago
      In the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly). Most forecast say population will peak at 10bn to 11bn - https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth - A big part of this increase in indeed from Africa which is expected to increase by 3bn - from 1.3bn in 2020 to 4.3bn in 2100 - The largest uncertainty is also about Africa where faster economic growth is expected to bring down population growth (counter-intuitively).
      - idlehand 4y ago
        I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.
        Tchakra 4y ago
        No one knows the future - but all we do know points that the future is far more optimistic than people realise. If Africa fails to reach 4.3bn then it will most likely be because of faster prosperity and not due to the pessimistic causes you mention. To illustrate the point: The last 40 years have been the worst we will see in terms of stability, economic growth etc .... yet Population growth in Africa thrived and the % of people living in poverty reduced dramatically and the current population is healthier, wealthier, and more educated than ever before (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-poverty-line-world-bank?country=~Sub-Saharan+Africa https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-po... ).
- maneesh 4y ago
  India has dropped to just above replacement rate (2.2 births per women), down from just under 6 births per women in 1960 Africa fertility rate is dropping around 1.5% per year annually for the region as a whole. Increasingly technologized populations drop fertility fast
  - wngr 4y ago
    Survival rate is probably up compared to 1960.
- j245 4y ago
  We need to re-work the economic system. Currently the incentives are greater for the “first world” to divide and exploit the “third world”. Once you start increasing quality of life and education, birth rates will plummet. It would only be “over population” because our current in-effecient systems can’t keep up and they need to evolve.
usrn 4y ago
It doesn't matter when Africa is exploding. All the low birthrate in the West does is weaken the countries trying to protect the environment. As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them. This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.
- chuckSu 4y ago
- V__ 4y ago
  Yeah, all these African people with their checks notes unsustainable lifestyle of nearly no co2 emissions compared to the rest of the world.
  - usrn 4y ago
    Heh. When the complaint is that the high birthrates of the world are unsustainable, it's the people with the high birthrates that are doing that. Also keep in mind that Africa relies heavily on aid from these countries with the high CO2 emissions. Cutting CO2 really means starving them.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      CO2 emissions per capita includes your imports...
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  > ... undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them. I hope you are aware of the carbon footprint of an american versus someone from, say, ethiopia?!
  - loonster 4y ago
    Doesnt matter how small of a footprint the Ethiopian has. The Ethiopian is an exponential function, and the Westerner is a linear one. The exponential function will always overtake the linear function. Eventually.
aortega 4y ago
>will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down. Why? intuitively it would seem that that less humans will improve the environment, but intuition is often wrong. The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment. Remember, most of the environmental damage was done by a very small number of very rich countries. The poorest countries is where most of the population lives, and those cause the least environmental impact.
- padjo 4y ago
  > those cause the least environmental impact For now! They all want the quality of life of the rich nations and understandably so. I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living, let alone more. There isn’t enough land to grow feed for all the livestock we’d need for a start!
  - aortega 4y ago
    >I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living That's a completely different problem. So basically what you want is to poor people to stay poor. Well, luckily technology improves and with that resource consumption is optimized. But that wont happen if you halve the population because there will be half of the scientists and engineers to do it (and likely, much less than half).
    - padjo 4y ago
      I’m definitely not saying I want the poor to stay poor! I’m saying I’d like more equality and that isn’t possible at current technology levels. I don’t buy that decreasing population would limit technological progress at all. The vast majority of people are currently living subsistence existences and contributing almost nothing to technological progress. We could easily reduce population and end up with more not less scientists and engineers
    - dathos 4y ago
stefl14 4y ago
For how long? Being recent (on evolutionary timescales), evolution has created selection pressures on previously irrelevant variables (the desire to have children, in particular). Without contraception or female labor force participation, people didn't decide how many children to have before urbanisation: everyone who didn't die just kept having kids. The poorest places are still like this. But in evolutionarily novel urban contexts, people choose how many kids to have; if this decision has a genetic component, that means the current urban millieu selects for people who want more kids. Basic genetics tells us that the number of people who "want more kids" will grow exponentially (so long as culture doesn't keep driving preferences for children down). The key question, of course, is "what's the exponent?". It depends on the heritability of fertility, and data from behavioural genetics indicates that it's high in urbanised societies. If your parents had more kids than average, you probably will (even if you were adopted at birth and didn't grow up with your parents). The effect is large enough that it would have a big impact on the UN population estimates by 2100. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513817302799?fbclid=IwAR0MrM2w9ilHpe7TJeNdmNhV-vtocmMlSYxRq5djFV5j-Yeeg4hJeuvDnyc#bb0180 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905... The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important. I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow. All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.

croes 4y ago

How's the birth rate in India or the african countries?

cloutchaser 4y ago
Maybe google it. Trending down also. World population will max at around 10bn
- b112 4y ago
  Last I heard though, in Africa, population decline was due to endemic aids/hiv, and no real inexpensive treatment. And some refusal to use condoms. If this changes, the trend will sharply reverse.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    That makes little sense - what we're seeing in Africa like everywhere else is that increased living standards, education and healthcare including family planning consistently leads to dropping birth rates. At most improved treatment of HIV will lead to a short-term bump if life expectancy increases faster than birth rates drop.
  - Tchakra 4y ago
    In the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly). Most forecast say population will peak at 10bn to 11bn - https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth - A big part of this increase in indeed from Africa which is expected to increase by 3bn - from 1.3bn in 2020 to 4.3bn in 2100 - The largest uncertainty is also about Africa where faster economic growth is expected to bring down population growth (counter-intuitively).
    - idlehand 4y ago
      I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.
      - Tchakra 4y ago
        No one knows the future - but all we do know points that the future is far more optimistic than people realise. If Africa fails to reach 4.3bn then it will most likely be because of faster prosperity and not due to the pessimistic causes you mention. To illustrate the point: The last 40 years have been the worst we will see in terms of stability, economic growth etc .... yet Population growth in Africa thrived and the % of people living in poverty reduced dramatically and the current population is healthier, wealthier, and more educated than ever before (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-poverty-line-world-bank?country=~Sub-Saharan+Africa https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-po... ).
maneesh 4y ago
India has dropped to just above replacement rate (2.2 births per women), down from just under 6 births per women in 1960 Africa fertility rate is dropping around 1.5% per year annually for the region as a whole. Increasingly technologized populations drop fertility fast
- wngr 4y ago
  Survival rate is probably up compared to 1960.
j245 4y ago
We need to re-work the economic system. Currently the incentives are greater for the “first world” to divide and exploit the “third world”. Once you start increasing quality of life and education, birth rates will plummet. It would only be “over population” because our current in-effecient systems can’t keep up and they need to evolve.

usrn 4y ago

It doesn't matter when Africa is exploding. All the low birthrate in the West does is weaken the countries trying to protect the environment. As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them. This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.

chuckSu 4y ago
V__ 4y ago
Yeah, all these African people with their checks notes unsustainable lifestyle of nearly no co2 emissions compared to the rest of the world.
- usrn 4y ago
  Heh. When the complaint is that the high birthrates of the world are unsustainable, it's the people with the high birthrates that are doing that. Also keep in mind that Africa relies heavily on aid from these countries with the high CO2 emissions. Cutting CO2 really means starving them.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    CO2 emissions per capita includes your imports...
isoprophlex 4y ago
> ... undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them. I hope you are aware of the carbon footprint of an american versus someone from, say, ethiopia?!
- loonster 4y ago
  Doesnt matter how small of a footprint the Ethiopian has. The Ethiopian is an exponential function, and the Westerner is a linear one. The exponential function will always overtake the linear function. Eventually.

aortega 4y ago

>will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down. Why? intuitively it would seem that that less humans will improve the environment, but intuition is often wrong. The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment. Remember, most of the environmental damage was done by a very small number of very rich countries. The poorest countries is where most of the population lives, and those cause the least environmental impact.

padjo 4y ago
> those cause the least environmental impact For now! They all want the quality of life of the rich nations and understandably so. I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living, let alone more. There isn’t enough land to grow feed for all the livestock we’d need for a start!
- aortega 4y ago
  >I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living That's a completely different problem. So basically what you want is to poor people to stay poor. Well, luckily technology improves and with that resource consumption is optimized. But that wont happen if you halve the population because there will be half of the scientists and engineers to do it (and likely, much less than half).
  - padjo 4y ago
    I’m definitely not saying I want the poor to stay poor! I’m saying I’d like more equality and that isn’t possible at current technology levels. I don’t buy that decreasing population would limit technological progress at all. The vast majority of people are currently living subsistence existences and contributing almost nothing to technological progress. We could easily reduce population and end up with more not less scientists and engineers
  - dathos 4y ago

stefl14 4y ago

For how long? Being recent (on evolutionary timescales), evolution has created selection pressures on previously irrelevant variables (the desire to have children, in particular). Without contraception or female labor force participation, people didn't decide how many children to have before urbanisation: everyone who didn't die just kept having kids. The poorest places are still like this. But in evolutionarily novel urban contexts, people choose how many kids to have; if this decision has a genetic component, that means the current urban millieu selects for people who want more kids. Basic genetics tells us that the number of people who "want more kids" will grow exponentially (so long as culture doesn't keep driving preferences for children down). The key question, of course, is "what's the exponent?". It depends on the heritability of fertility, and data from behavioural genetics indicates that it's high in urbanised societies. If your parents had more kids than average, you probably will (even if you were adopted at birth and didn't grow up with your parents). The effect is large enough that it would have a big impact on the UN population estimates by 2100. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513817302799?fbclid=IwAR0MrM2w9ilHpe7TJeNdmNhV-vtocmMlSYxRq5djFV5j-Yeeg4hJeuvDnyc#bb0180 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905... The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important. I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow. All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.