4 ms·

I don't want to sound melodramatic, but when humanity on average produces less than 2 children per woman, it is heading for extinction. I keep hearing all sorts

by kova12 4y ago

I don't want to sound melodramatic, but when humanity on average produces less than 2 children per woman, it is heading for extinction. I keep hearing all sorts of counter-arguments, such as: * there is too many people * people are destroying earth * fewer people are born, but more people live longer, so we are fine If you are of a thinking kind, you can see none of these points addresses the problem. I could understand if those were idiots were making these arguments, but many people who do are quite intelligent; yet they keep being in denial that humanity is heading to existential crisis. What's even more disappointing is that the same people who say this have been hugely vocal during recent pandemic. Which means, they do care for individual human life, but apparently not for the human race. Bottom line is: we desperately need more children born, and at the same time we are doing everything to discourage potential parents from producing any. Car seats are just a tip of an iceberg. Schools, police, social services, nosy neighbors, political activists are all actively making life of parents living hell. This must stop. Society must help parents. Couple thousand bucks a year in tax deductions is not help, it's a pittance. Do you know how much daycare costs? Add on top of it sleepless nights; add occasional child sickness meaning you can't go work and have a career, god forbid some mental illness or other disability. Parents are literally sacrificing their lives for future generations, as the rest of you a$$holes travel, drink, go clubs, go concerts, have sex, and not only care less about what happens to humanity tomorrow, but work on actively discouraging people from giving life to someone else. This is a f#ing disgrace. Sorry for rant.

29athrowaway 4y ago
We do not need to increase the birth rate. Doing so would lead to a faster exhaustion of resources. We are already 8 billion and counting.
- zionic 4y ago
  The birth rate is sub replacement in all developed countries. That’s a huge deal.
  - basch 4y ago
    Why do we need replacement? Should automation not allow less people to acomplish and care for more?
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Overshooting into rapid contraction in developed countries sucks. Better to reach equilibrium or very slow contraction. Give social and economic systems time to adapt.
    - zionic 4y ago
      The entire social safety net was designed to run on a population ponzi scheme. The old outnumbering the young presents existential threats to the current world order.
      - basch 4y ago
        Technology is a labor multiplier. It’s invention creates efficiently and allows more production from the same work.
  - jacobsenscott 4y ago
    It doesn't make any sense to only look at the birth rate in a geographically constrained area. Of course you can cherry pick a place and say the birth rate is sub-replacement. But the world wide population has more than doubled in the last 50 years. These 'developed' countries are shooting themselves in the foot with their immigration policies, not their birth rates. Over the next 50 years, the countries with the most open borders will be the countries with the strongest economies.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    That is fine. Developed countries consume a disproportionate amount of resources.
- junofan 4y ago
  By the same logic, shouldn’t we increase the birth rate to grow the renewables market? That would eliminate the problem of resource exhaustion.
Dylan16807 4y ago
Desperately need more children? Have you forgotten that the world population is still rapidly rising? If the population drops to 5 billion, we can start talking about needing more children. Maybe. We had plenty of people a hundred years ago, and that was only 2 billion. I agree that parents should be supported more, but your premise is really off.
- kova12 4y ago
  I don't think you understand what is going on. It's not the quantity, but the quality. Whatever numbers you quoted, (and I'm sure you haven't just made them up) would only make sense if there is a healthy ratio of young vs old. If your population growth is fuelled by increasing life expectancy, it's not a healthy growth Here is a thought experiment: imagine nobody dies and nobody gets born for 50 years. Population not changed. Is humanity in the same position? No, because by now everyone is 50+ years old and physically incapable of reproducing, and now mankind is as good as extinct.
  - otherme123 4y ago
    Nice experiment, but that's it. One of the worse population pyramids in the world, Japan, is only slowly shrinking on the base. They are not inverting, but squaring, like Finland, turning a pyramid into a column. Which is good: newborn has almost a guarantee of living at least 60-70 years. Here's another thought experiment: assets are currently in the hands of the baby boomers. Young people don't have access to those assets, and there are a lot of boomers. Once the boomers get cleared from the population, a lot of those assets get transferred to the younger people, which now have all the incentives to have kids. So plenty of hypothesis there. Are we in an Universe 25, headed towards complete collapse? Or just purging the boomer generation? Time will tell.
    - kova12 4y ago
      > Once the boomers get cleared from the population, a lot of those assets get transferred to the younger people, which now have all the incentives to have kids. Do you really believe what you are saying? Because recent pandemic was your chance. I presume you were not wearing masks and never got vaccinated, right?
adrianN 4y ago
You're extrapolating from (hypothetical! population is still growing!) current birth rates to extinction at least a dozen generations in the future. That's probably not a good model: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
basch 4y ago
Extinction? >between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000–10,000 surviving individuals. (This is disputed but for the purpose of a thought experiment, good enough.) If over the next couple generations the population of the Earth dropped 90% it would bring us back to the year 1760. If robots are doing all the work, and good stewards of humans, who is to say the population couldnt reduce drastically over centuries and also not collapse into chaos and anarchy and apocalypse?
mlyle 4y ago
> I don't want to sound melodramatic, but when humanity on average produces less than 2 children per woman, it is heading for extinction. I keep hearing all sorts of counter-arguments, such as: > * there is too many people If there's any negative feedback effect, like, "holy shit, we have no space-- let's breed less!" then it's all just fine if you have a ton of people around. Population contracts; there's more resources available per person; population increases. It seeks equilibrium. If there's even any subgroups breeding above replacement stably, this all works out: the subgroups that breed above replacement replace the groups that breed below replacement. > we desperately need more children born Human population isn't contracting. Even if it starts contracting 10% per generation (call that 25 years), we'll still be over a billion people 475 years from now. Population is increasing; we're not about to start shrinking by 10% per generation anytime soon. There's nothing "desperate" about this. On the other hand, if we wreck the whole planet and 90% of us die off, we'll reach a billion people in the relatively short term.
zten 4y ago
Malthusian thinking is rampant in public policy discourse. Many people will become intent on stopping planning for growth when they buy a home.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
You're assuming the trend of <2 children per woman would continue forever with the thought of "heading toward extinction". Its as silly at saying having >2 births per woman is "heading towards an infinite population". Should we be immediately worried that our population is infinity while our resources are finite? If not, why are we worried about extinction from basically the same point?

by kova12 4y ago

29athrowaway 4y ago

We do not need to increase the birth rate. Doing so would lead to a faster exhaustion of resources. We are already 8 billion and counting.

zionic 4y ago
The birth rate is sub replacement in all developed countries. That’s a huge deal.
- basch 4y ago
  Why do we need replacement? Should automation not allow less people to acomplish and care for more?
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Overshooting into rapid contraction in developed countries sucks. Better to reach equilibrium or very slow contraction. Give social and economic systems time to adapt.
  - zionic 4y ago
    The entire social safety net was designed to run on a population ponzi scheme. The old outnumbering the young presents existential threats to the current world order.
    - basch 4y ago
      Technology is a labor multiplier. It’s invention creates efficiently and allows more production from the same work.
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  It doesn't make any sense to only look at the birth rate in a geographically constrained area. Of course you can cherry pick a place and say the birth rate is sub-replacement. But the world wide population has more than doubled in the last 50 years. These 'developed' countries are shooting themselves in the foot with their immigration policies, not their birth rates. Over the next 50 years, the countries with the most open borders will be the countries with the strongest economies.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  That is fine. Developed countries consume a disproportionate amount of resources.
junofan 4y ago
By the same logic, shouldn’t we increase the birth rate to grow the renewables market? That would eliminate the problem of resource exhaustion.

Dylan16807 4y ago

Desperately need more children? Have you forgotten that the world population is still rapidly rising? If the population drops to 5 billion, we can start talking about needing more children. Maybe. We had plenty of people a hundred years ago, and that was only 2 billion. I agree that parents should be supported more, but your premise is really off.

kova12 4y ago
I don't think you understand what is going on. It's not the quantity, but the quality. Whatever numbers you quoted, (and I'm sure you haven't just made them up) would only make sense if there is a healthy ratio of young vs old. If your population growth is fuelled by increasing life expectancy, it's not a healthy growth Here is a thought experiment: imagine nobody dies and nobody gets born for 50 years. Population not changed. Is humanity in the same position? No, because by now everyone is 50+ years old and physically incapable of reproducing, and now mankind is as good as extinct.
- otherme123 4y ago
  Nice experiment, but that's it. One of the worse population pyramids in the world, Japan, is only slowly shrinking on the base. They are not inverting, but squaring, like Finland, turning a pyramid into a column. Which is good: newborn has almost a guarantee of living at least 60-70 years. Here's another thought experiment: assets are currently in the hands of the baby boomers. Young people don't have access to those assets, and there are a lot of boomers. Once the boomers get cleared from the population, a lot of those assets get transferred to the younger people, which now have all the incentives to have kids. So plenty of hypothesis there. Are we in an Universe 25, headed towards complete collapse? Or just purging the boomer generation? Time will tell.
  - kova12 4y ago
    > Once the boomers get cleared from the population, a lot of those assets get transferred to the younger people, which now have all the incentives to have kids. Do you really believe what you are saying? Because recent pandemic was your chance. I presume you were not wearing masks and never got vaccinated, right?

adrianN 4y ago

You're extrapolating from (hypothetical! population is still growing!) current birth rates to extinction at least a dozen generations in the future. That's probably not a good model: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/

basch 4y ago

Extinction? >between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000–10,000 surviving individuals. (This is disputed but for the purpose of a thought experiment, good enough.) If over the next couple generations the population of the Earth dropped 90% it would bring us back to the year 1760. If robots are doing all the work, and good stewards of humans, who is to say the population couldnt reduce drastically over centuries and also not collapse into chaos and anarchy and apocalypse?

mlyle 4y ago

> I don't want to sound melodramatic, but when humanity on average produces less than 2 children per woman, it is heading for extinction. I keep hearing all sorts of counter-arguments, such as: > * there is too many people If there's any negative feedback effect, like, "holy shit, we have no space-- let's breed less!" then it's all just fine if you have a ton of people around. Population contracts; there's more resources available per person; population increases. It seeks equilibrium. If there's even any subgroups breeding above replacement stably, this all works out: the subgroups that breed above replacement replace the groups that breed below replacement. > we desperately need more children born Human population isn't contracting. Even if it starts contracting 10% per generation (call that 25 years), we'll still be over a billion people 475 years from now. Population is increasing; we're not about to start shrinking by 10% per generation anytime soon. There's nothing "desperate" about this. On the other hand, if we wreck the whole planet and 90% of us die off, we'll reach a billion people in the relatively short term.

zten 4y ago

Malthusian thinking is rampant in public policy discourse. Many people will become intent on stopping planning for growth when they buy a home.

xboxnolifes 4y ago

You're assuming the trend of <2 children per woman would continue forever with the thought of "heading toward extinction". Its as silly at saying having >2 births per woman is "heading towards an infinite population". Should we be immediately worried that our population is infinity while our resources are finite? If not, why are we worried about extinction from basically the same point?