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Demographic collapse in advanced nations is an existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change. We need to remove as many

Demographic collapse in advanced nations is an existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change. We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing - for example changing how we work so that children are compatible with productive and fulfilling careers (and indeed lives as a whole).

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Demographic collapse in advanced nations is an existential threat to our civilization But it makes landlords and housing business owners great profits.
- KoftaBob 3y ago
  Wouldn't it do the opposite? You end up with fewer people competing for housing over time.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Not if you look at internal and external migration. Housing has gone up in the big cities of countries with declining demographics because the places where demographics are declining are villages and small towns because everyone is moving to the big cities with jobs and universities which see virtually unlimited demand irregardless of local demographics. Look at Germany, Italy, Balkans, etc. all have declining demographics ranging from slight to severe yet housing in their cities has gone up from slight to severe. Like everything in real estate, it's all about the location location location, so everything is localized not extrapolated to the whole country it's why demographics can be steeply declining but prices steeply going up in cities. Unless you want to live in desolate villages with no infrastructure or jobs, urban housing prices isn't tracking demographics. Edit: to downvoters, check the numbers please
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      Everybody would be moving to the big citiea regardless. It would just be even less affordable.
    - KoftaBob 3y ago
      I'm seeing moderate housing price increases at best in Germany and Italy, and that's generally going to happen because of inflation in general. I don't see the evidence that declining demographics are directly causing housing in cities there to get more expensive. Like another reply said, it's more likely that general movement from rural to urban is what's causing that, and that if their population growth was higher, those cities would've just gotten even more expensive than they're getting now. Germany: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1150526/annual-house-price-change-in-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1150526/annual-house-pri... Italy: https://www.immobiliare.it/en/mercato-immobiliare/ https://www.immobiliare.it/en/mercato-immobiliare/
      - Golden_Wind123 3y ago
        Japan is probably a good example for your rural to urban migration example. Anecdotally I hear that the big cities like Tokyo are becoming more expensive (as everyone moves there) while smaller cities (<500,000 people) and rural areas are becoming cheaper, but I don't have a reference or data on hand for it.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Sure, the current market is down right now due a but due to interest rates hike and the economy being shit, but check the period from 2010 to 2022 please. It went up up up despite a stagnant population.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Exactly. It’s been papered over with smaller housing groups (individuals) but at some point things just become empty and abandoned.
  - Qem 3y ago
    I fear reinforced concrete disease and sea level rise will make housing disappear at a faster rate than people for the next 100-200 years. Conventional reinforced concrete is not like traditional stone buildings that may last centuries. The rebar inside rusts on timescales about ~100 years, and many buildings built over the XX century will be in bad shape and very hard to recover by the end of this century.
dangus 3y ago
We should just find an economic system that doesn’t depend on being a generational pyramid scheme. Arguably it’s exactly the opposite of what you say: the sustainability of life on this planet depends on human population decreasing. There’s nothing particularly scary about having an older population curve, it just means that society has to adjust by having higher savings rates for individuals and government retirement programs. Considering that AI is projected to eliminate 300 million jobs globally it sounds like we don’t need to all procreate like rabbits.
- anon291 3y ago
  Indeed. Let's start by getting rid of the welfare state and bringing back the greatest incentive to child-bearing... care in old age. I'm serious. One thing I often see is complaints that the younger generation (typically millenials) are not pulling up their end of the bargain. However, neither are their parents. Typically, one would expect to become a grandparent that cares for their grandchildren. In return, your children take care of you. This is how humans have lived for generations. Yet, today, seniorhood is treated as a second adolescence. Grandparents neglect their grandchildren while parents are forced to do it all, so to speak. It's no wonder they have no time for kids. Human childbearing is exceptionally hard. It's why human males take part in the child-raising typically (women with committed men have more children on average and shorter spacing between pregnancies). Moreover, it's why natural selection has typically brought about kin groups that care for children. Social security is an affront to this entire arrangement. There's a balance to be struct between guaranteeing no one is destitute and not shifting expectations of the elderly to the point where living purely for themselves is actually considered acceptable.
  - Golden_Wind123 3y ago
    There's no need for the crypto-fash comments about government safety nets causing the downfall of the west. The grandparents barely being kept out of elderly poverty by Social Security aren't the same as the second-adolescence grandparents spending down their 401ks (based on wealth disparity, the former group outweighs the second group). It's true that grandparents don't help raise grandkids anymore, but the rise of hyper-individualism in the 1950s with the death of multi-generational households is the most obvious root cause of this. Back in the day a well off family could buy a duplex where a young family could live in one unit while the elderly parents live in the other (allowing both sides to keep their privacy), but the rise of suburbanization and the lack of sensible housing stock make this hard to pull off.
fulafel 3y ago
Where does this come from? We're currently in a 100+ year long population explosion that is wreaking havoc on the planet. Even if models predict the population growth will slow down and may turn to a decline after peaking 50 years from now, it feels quite rash to over-extrapolate and panic now about a potential eventual decline from the 15 billion peak to a genetic population bottleneck (1000-ish). The population would have to halve ~25 times which would take ~1000 years if it declined at a similar speed as it's been growing now.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  Exponential growth works just as well in reverse - the point is that our current social structures seem incompatible with even replacement levels of child birth. And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
  - fulafel 3y ago
    Yes, exponential (has been doubling every ~40 years for a long time, and a scenario of halving at the same rate) is what I was talking about above.
  - ninkendo 3y ago
    > the point is that our current social structures seem incompatible with even replacement levels of child birth. This means our current social structures need to change. We can’t have exponential growth forever. It’s literally not possible on a planet with finite resources. > And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision. Pension provisioning will suck yes. But it’s not an “existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change.” You are drastically overstating the drawbacks to population decline, as evidenced by your immediate moving of the goalposts when probed.
    - somewhereoutth 3y ago
ImAnAmateur 3y ago
Who's "we" here? Each nation has their own local issues. What would help Japan may not help another country. Talking specifics does a lot of good.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  Oh indeed, but the underlying problem is broadly the same - children are a lot of hassle and expense, and in advanced nations the calculus appears to be that they aren't worth it (to each individual). We must change that calculus, or our civilization will evaporate.
  - ImAnAmateur 3y ago
    I don't see it, in the United States, as being that severe. The housing and economic squeeze is going to change the locations that people live and may change the ways in which people live together, but I don't expect it to become a wound so long as the corrective curve is round. I expect new laws which are likely to act as a pressure valve towards this issue. If something cannot continue forever, then it won't. Population decrease may be inevitable and if so then handling it with less panic is smart.
    - somewhereoutth 3y ago
      I haven't checked the stats, but I believe the US population growth is supported by mass immigration? The US system works well for immigration, as it gives (or purports to give) opportunities to do well, while spending few resources looking after those that fail.
    - kthejoker2 3y ago
      Define "severe" https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth...
transcriptase 3y ago
Assuming population growth can be infinite because our economic systems are built on the faulty assumption that it’s not only possible but necessary is something I will never understand. Even the brightest minds don’t seem to be able to extrapolate their beliefs out to the logical conclusion that they’re describing a Ponzi scheme that will collapse eventually by definition.
- fatherzine 3y ago
  our economic system is a scam to fleece populations by shifting value attribution from moving atoms to moving money. 'brightest' minds have a vested interest to keep the system going, after all it pays their bills.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  Ideally we'd find a population level where we can sustainable co-exist with our habitat (and then perhaps go out and find new habitats). However such a balance might be hard, it is difficult to see that interest in having children in advanced economies would recover as populations crash. In fact likely as there are less people around (and a greater proportion being old), child rearing becomes more expensive to the individual. Note that economic growth is not necessarily predicated on population growth, it can also measure better use of the people we do have (hopefully in an actualization, more than an extractive, sense). People should be understood as a (in fact the most) valuable resource, not as a costly burden.
jakderrida 3y ago
> Demographic collapse in advanced nations is an existential threat to our civilization Explain why.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  Young people need take care old people Old people go Young people take job No young people bad No young people no job
  - jakderrida 3y ago
    How is that existential? If it's not a threat to our existence, it's not existential. Downvoting me doesn't change that, either, you childish dolt.
- ErasticBrub 3y ago
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  - KoftaBob 3y ago
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      - jakderrida 3y ago
ren_engineer 3y ago
>We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing - for example changing how we work so that children are compatible with productive and fulfilling careers Most European countries already support this but their birth rates are as bad or worse than Japan when excluding migrants. The only groups reproducing above replacement level are traditional Christians and Muslims, groups with an ideology that is proven by 2000+ year Lindy effect.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  I don't think we'd feel comfortable adopting a solution that is predicated on the subjugation of women, Lindy effect or no. We should find another way.
  - ren_engineer 3y ago
    realistically the solution is going to be artificial wombs, which are already being tested in Japan and the US. They'll get them in the door initially for women who can't have kids naturally or homosexual couples, but eventually it will be normalized or governments will just create as many test tube kids as needed only other alternative is a massive propaganda campaign to raise the social value of being a mother to how it used to be, where motherhood was socially seen as being far higher status than having a job for women. That's the current problem, years of women being told that "freedom" and having a job is way better than having kids. It's really not a money/stability issue, because the poorest people in Western countries have the most kids
    - somewhereoutth 3y ago
      However in many ways freedom and having a job is better than having kids, we can't really propagandize that away. What we need to do is make child birth compatible with freedom and having a job. For example free child care provision, social expectation on fathers to take a greater role in child care, less wealth inequality so that working provides more free time. Artificial wombs are straight out of Huxley's 'Brave New World' - scary how prescient that work is.
matrix87 3y ago
> We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing For example, overturning Roe v Wade I'm kind of curious what the Clarence Thomas has cooking next
faeriechangling 3y ago
Is it? We’re going to peak at 10 billion. The population seems like it could fall quite a bit before it became an existential threat. Humanity numbered in the thousands at one point I believe. Still I generally am glad Japan is going though this process as population decline is inevitable and immigration only delays it.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>Demographic collapse in advanced nations is an existential threat to our civilization But it makes landlords and housing business owners great profits.

KoftaBob 3y ago
Wouldn't it do the opposite? You end up with fewer people competing for housing over time.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Not if you look at internal and external migration. Housing has gone up in the big cities of countries with declining demographics because the places where demographics are declining are villages and small towns because everyone is moving to the big cities with jobs and universities which see virtually unlimited demand irregardless of local demographics. Look at Germany, Italy, Balkans, etc. all have declining demographics ranging from slight to severe yet housing in their cities has gone up from slight to severe. Like everything in real estate, it's all about the location location location, so everything is localized not extrapolated to the whole country it's why demographics can be steeply declining but prices steeply going up in cities. Unless you want to live in desolate villages with no infrastructure or jobs, urban housing prices isn't tracking demographics. Edit: to downvoters, check the numbers please
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    Everybody would be moving to the big citiea regardless. It would just be even less affordable.
  - KoftaBob 3y ago
    I'm seeing moderate housing price increases at best in Germany and Italy, and that's generally going to happen because of inflation in general. I don't see the evidence that declining demographics are directly causing housing in cities there to get more expensive. Like another reply said, it's more likely that general movement from rural to urban is what's causing that, and that if their population growth was higher, those cities would've just gotten even more expensive than they're getting now. Germany: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1150526/annual-house-price-change-in-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1150526/annual-house-pri... Italy: https://www.immobiliare.it/en/mercato-immobiliare/ https://www.immobiliare.it/en/mercato-immobiliare/
    - Golden_Wind123 3y ago
      Japan is probably a good example for your rural to urban migration example. Anecdotally I hear that the big cities like Tokyo are becoming more expensive (as everyone moves there) while smaller cities (<500,000 people) and rural areas are becoming cheaper, but I don't have a reference or data on hand for it.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Sure, the current market is down right now due a but due to interest rates hike and the economy being shit, but check the period from 2010 to 2022 please. It went up up up despite a stagnant population.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Exactly. It’s been papered over with smaller housing groups (individuals) but at some point things just become empty and abandoned.
- Qem 3y ago
  I fear reinforced concrete disease and sea level rise will make housing disappear at a faster rate than people for the next 100-200 years. Conventional reinforced concrete is not like traditional stone buildings that may last centuries. The rebar inside rusts on timescales about ~100 years, and many buildings built over the XX century will be in bad shape and very hard to recover by the end of this century.

dangus 3y ago

We should just find an economic system that doesn’t depend on being a generational pyramid scheme. Arguably it’s exactly the opposite of what you say: the sustainability of life on this planet depends on human population decreasing. There’s nothing particularly scary about having an older population curve, it just means that society has to adjust by having higher savings rates for individuals and government retirement programs. Considering that AI is projected to eliminate 300 million jobs globally it sounds like we don’t need to all procreate like rabbits.

anon291 3y ago
Indeed. Let's start by getting rid of the welfare state and bringing back the greatest incentive to child-bearing... care in old age. I'm serious. One thing I often see is complaints that the younger generation (typically millenials) are not pulling up their end of the bargain. However, neither are their parents. Typically, one would expect to become a grandparent that cares for their grandchildren. In return, your children take care of you. This is how humans have lived for generations. Yet, today, seniorhood is treated as a second adolescence. Grandparents neglect their grandchildren while parents are forced to do it all, so to speak. It's no wonder they have no time for kids. Human childbearing is exceptionally hard. It's why human males take part in the child-raising typically (women with committed men have more children on average and shorter spacing between pregnancies). Moreover, it's why natural selection has typically brought about kin groups that care for children. Social security is an affront to this entire arrangement. There's a balance to be struct between guaranteeing no one is destitute and not shifting expectations of the elderly to the point where living purely for themselves is actually considered acceptable.
- Golden_Wind123 3y ago
  There's no need for the crypto-fash comments about government safety nets causing the downfall of the west. The grandparents barely being kept out of elderly poverty by Social Security aren't the same as the second-adolescence grandparents spending down their 401ks (based on wealth disparity, the former group outweighs the second group). It's true that grandparents don't help raise grandkids anymore, but the rise of hyper-individualism in the 1950s with the death of multi-generational households is the most obvious root cause of this. Back in the day a well off family could buy a duplex where a young family could live in one unit while the elderly parents live in the other (allowing both sides to keep their privacy), but the rise of suburbanization and the lack of sensible housing stock make this hard to pull off.

fulafel 3y ago

Where does this come from? We're currently in a 100+ year long population explosion that is wreaking havoc on the planet. Even if models predict the population growth will slow down and may turn to a decline after peaking 50 years from now, it feels quite rash to over-extrapolate and panic now about a potential eventual decline from the 15 billion peak to a genetic population bottleneck (1000-ish). The population would have to halve ~25 times which would take ~1000 years if it declined at a similar speed as it's been growing now.

somewhereoutth 3y ago
Exponential growth works just as well in reverse - the point is that our current social structures seem incompatible with even replacement levels of child birth. And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
- fulafel 3y ago
  Yes, exponential (has been doubling every ~40 years for a long time, and a scenario of halving at the same rate) is what I was talking about above.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  > the point is that our current social structures seem incompatible with even replacement levels of child birth. This means our current social structures need to change. We can’t have exponential growth forever. It’s literally not possible on a planet with finite resources. > And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision. Pension provisioning will suck yes. But it’s not an “existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change.” You are drastically overstating the drawbacks to population decline, as evidenced by your immediate moving of the goalposts when probed.
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago

ImAnAmateur 3y ago

Who's "we" here? Each nation has their own local issues. What would help Japan may not help another country. Talking specifics does a lot of good.

somewhereoutth 3y ago
Oh indeed, but the underlying problem is broadly the same - children are a lot of hassle and expense, and in advanced nations the calculus appears to be that they aren't worth it (to each individual). We must change that calculus, or our civilization will evaporate.
- ImAnAmateur 3y ago
  I don't see it, in the United States, as being that severe. The housing and economic squeeze is going to change the locations that people live and may change the ways in which people live together, but I don't expect it to become a wound so long as the corrective curve is round. I expect new laws which are likely to act as a pressure valve towards this issue. If something cannot continue forever, then it won't. Population decrease may be inevitable and if so then handling it with less panic is smart.
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    I haven't checked the stats, but I believe the US population growth is supported by mass immigration? The US system works well for immigration, as it gives (or purports to give) opportunities to do well, while spending few resources looking after those that fail.
  - kthejoker2 3y ago
    Define "severe" https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth...

transcriptase 3y ago

Assuming population growth can be infinite because our economic systems are built on the faulty assumption that it’s not only possible but necessary is something I will never understand. Even the brightest minds don’t seem to be able to extrapolate their beliefs out to the logical conclusion that they’re describing a Ponzi scheme that will collapse eventually by definition.

fatherzine 3y ago
our economic system is a scam to fleece populations by shifting value attribution from moving atoms to moving money. 'brightest' minds have a vested interest to keep the system going, after all it pays their bills.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
Ideally we'd find a population level where we can sustainable co-exist with our habitat (and then perhaps go out and find new habitats). However such a balance might be hard, it is difficult to see that interest in having children in advanced economies would recover as populations crash. In fact likely as there are less people around (and a greater proportion being old), child rearing becomes more expensive to the individual. Note that economic growth is not necessarily predicated on population growth, it can also measure better use of the people we do have (hopefully in an actualization, more than an extractive, sense). People should be understood as a (in fact the most) valuable resource, not as a costly burden.

jakderrida 3y ago

> Demographic collapse in advanced nations is an existential threat to our civilization Explain why.

asylteltine 3y ago
Young people need take care old people Old people go Young people take job No young people bad No young people no job
- jakderrida 3y ago
  How is that existential? If it's not a threat to our existence, it's not existential. Downvoting me doesn't change that, either, you childish dolt.
ErasticBrub 3y ago
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- jakderrida 3y ago
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  - ErasticBrub 3y ago
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- KoftaBob 3y ago
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    - jakderrida 3y ago

ren_engineer 3y ago

>We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing - for example changing how we work so that children are compatible with productive and fulfilling careers Most European countries already support this but their birth rates are as bad or worse than Japan when excluding migrants. The only groups reproducing above replacement level are traditional Christians and Muslims, groups with an ideology that is proven by 2000+ year Lindy effect.

somewhereoutth 3y ago
I don't think we'd feel comfortable adopting a solution that is predicated on the subjugation of women, Lindy effect or no. We should find another way.
- ren_engineer 3y ago
  realistically the solution is going to be artificial wombs, which are already being tested in Japan and the US. They'll get them in the door initially for women who can't have kids naturally or homosexual couples, but eventually it will be normalized or governments will just create as many test tube kids as needed only other alternative is a massive propaganda campaign to raise the social value of being a mother to how it used to be, where motherhood was socially seen as being far higher status than having a job for women. That's the current problem, years of women being told that "freedom" and having a job is way better than having kids. It's really not a money/stability issue, because the poorest people in Western countries have the most kids
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    However in many ways freedom and having a job is better than having kids, we can't really propagandize that away. What we need to do is make child birth compatible with freedom and having a job. For example free child care provision, social expectation on fathers to take a greater role in child care, less wealth inequality so that working provides more free time. Artificial wombs are straight out of Huxley's 'Brave New World' - scary how prescient that work is.

matrix87 3y ago

> We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing For example, overturning Roe v Wade I'm kind of curious what the Clarence Thomas has cooking next

faeriechangling 3y ago

Is it? We’re going to peak at 10 billion. The population seems like it could fall quite a bit before it became an existential threat. Humanity numbered in the thousands at one point I believe. Still I generally am glad Japan is going though this process as population decline is inevitable and immigration only delays it.