9 ms·

Let’s step back and ask why we’re being asked to assume it would be inherently bad if the global population were to start to decline.

spurgu 3y ago
Because the economy and thus everything around you relies on constant growth. Personally I'd be happy with a world with a lot less people, finding some sort of equilibrium. But it would necessitate a lot of pain to get there.
- pupppet 3y ago
  Yep growth, a state of permanent, must-have growth. Or put another way, a world built upon the notion you must never be satisfied. Not to go all Agent Smith on everyone, but he had a point.
- croes 3y ago
  Not everything needs to grow constantly, most of the time you don't need more people, the people just need more money.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I am really not so sure. It's hard to think of a way but we'd find a way. For starters, a lot of academics and other people who currently work on relatively useless problems like the Higgs boson could actually put their mind to work on something more practical and we'd come up with all sorts of inventions to make our lives easier, and perhaps we wouldn't make the old mistakes of being very unsustainable.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andrewstuart2 3y ago
Isn't it usually because our retirement systems assume the next generation can foot the bill for the current generation since they'll be a larger generation?
- croes 3y ago
  Nope, normally rising productivity can do the same unless you don't want workers to participate on the benefits of rising productivity.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  Worker productivity is still going up. You can also just extract a larger share, it's not written in stone that 20% of gross income goes into paying pensions. There is no particular reason why that number can't be 30%. Or 40%.
  - jandrewrogers 3y ago
    For this to work you need the dwindling percentage of people working to voluntarily acquiesce to having a large portion of their income redirected to people who are not working.
    - candiodari 3y ago
      So what you're saying is that someone needs to lose something they currently have. Either people in general ... or the government. Which is what the original thesis was, I believe, that someone needs to lose. But it gets a lot worse. The problem is that growth AND decline are both exponential processes. Not just growth. Decline too. Which means whatever percentage you say has to go to taking care of old people ... give it 20 years and it'll be more. A factor more. In fact, it will quickly rise to over 100% if population doesn't stabilize. In nature, for many species the exponential nature of shrinking population causes, by itself, without other causes, extinction. Luckily, usually local extinction. Cats are a great example of this. Areas almost always have a lot of cats ... or none. If you take current examples (that are getting worse) you see that what happens is that every generation about halves. BUT 4-5 generations are alive simultaneously. So in order to keep the same level of elderly care the expenses need to double 5 times. There's a tiny problem ... even theoretically 20% expenses on the elderly can only double twice. The third time you double it, it goes over 100%. But when maintaining elderly care takes 100% of global human labor, we're only about halfway to a real declining population. Or to put it more realistically, after all humans don't just undergo natural processes (thankfully), we adapt: unless population is growing at a minimum rate, the elderly will be abandoned. As soon as it becomes clear that this cannot be avoided, if needed we'll breed humans like in the Matrix to prevent this from continuing. Why? The people making that decision ... are the ones who are about to meet that fate. This is be why a declining economy is so incredibly, incredibly destructive. Exponential growth, with a growth rate smaller than one, is a killer.
adamisom 3y ago
Because innovation will likely decrease simultaneously with needing to support a far greater fraction of unproductive retirees. I also always wonder if folks with your view see no moral issue with humanity disappearing, or with mass population decline in any way other than fewer children being born.
- hypeatei 3y ago
  Why does innovation or humanity need to exist? I don't see an obvious point or reason to life at all; much less the "growth and innovation" needed for the economy.
  - exoverito 3y ago
    If there is no innovation then standards of living will not improve, and the future will look bleak for many people. Nihilism is incredibly dangerous and desperate people often turn to totalitarian ideologies which promise meaning and purpose.
    - hypeatei 3y ago
      This assumes the current day isn't already bleak for many in our current system.
      - exoverito 3y ago
        I make no such assumption, only pointing out the obvious fact that a world of no innovation, declining living standards, and a dying population will only exacerbate bleakness. It's essentially the dystopian setting for Children of Men.
    - xnx 3y ago
      There's a lot to look forward to in a world where the natural environment isn't increasingly mined for resources and paved over. Planet Earth is an absolute Eden all we can think to do is convert all its natural wonders into materials and energy to make unsatisfying technological baubles.
jimbob45 3y ago
we're being asked Are you an anti-natalist? I've been seeing hordes of y'all popping up on reddit recently.
- EnigmaFlare 3y ago
  TIL antenatal is not written "anti-natal"! People who attend antenatal classes are certainly not anti-natalists. One of those terms should really be dropped from the language.
- switchbak 3y ago
  When I reflect on the folks I've rubbed shoulders with over the last couple decades, I think there has been this implicit anti-natal bias. I think it mostly creeped in because of environmental and social concerns, and it seems to correlate with a kind of hip urbanite mentality. It's pretty shocking to me how long it took me to actually confront these assumptions. In the 80's overpopulation seemed like one of the most pressing concerns, but the situation is a lot more context-specific and nuanced than the message I received. Many people still haven't updated their programming, and act like I'm a raving lunatic when I bring up concerns around demographics in advanced societies. This despite us knowing about this generally for a _long_ time in places like South Korea and Japan. I'm sure I have lots of other similar blind spots, but those buggers are hard to find.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    There is nothing worse than telling people who don't want to have children to have children. You do realize that we are biological creatures? If someone genuinely doesn't want to have children, then they must have overcome their evolved natural tendency and that means they probably have a very good reason. Natalists don't understand that a system of optimistic procreation also requires the children created in this process to decide whether the blood line should be continued. Parents don't know what kind of life their children are going to lead and whether those children are going to lead a life worth living or not. So the natalist is utterly, utterly dependent on the anti-natalist for his procreation strategy to be moral. The anti-natalist has the task of reducing the amount of life that is not worth living, so that only life that is worth living ends up reproducing. In short, the anti-natalist must improve life, whereas the natalist simply hopes that they give birth to an anti-natalist. For the natalist to attempt to improve life is proof that they are not a natalist.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bregma 3y ago
All Ponzi schemes rely on the influx of new capital or they collapse.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  That is true, but in this case, the collapse can be quite graceful. We'd just need to use a lot less energy and stop producing 90% of goods. The good thing is that we can get by without them.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  And pension systems are the grandest Ponzi schemes of all.
xnx 3y ago
Humans have shown themselves to be pretty clever and adaptable, so I'm optimistic we can thrive even as we unwind ourselves from the ponzi scheme of unlimited growth on a fixed planet.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Me too. In fact, I bet if push comes to shove, we will come up with solutions we simply can't come up with for now because we are comfortable. Right now, all of us are typing on some computers, comfy and thinking intellectually. If we HAD to and were pushed by the physical parameters of need, I bet our inventiveness would go through the roof and we'd solve the problem.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Unlimited growth by all practical means is probably not a problem, even with only this planet. Half of the nutrients eaten worldwide by people right now are grown with artificial fertiliser, which is made by literally sucking nitrogen out of air. Humans are making great use of resources that are utterly worthless for all other living beings, such as oil, natural gas, uranium and more. What will be the next toxic waste product that humans will harness for productive goals? And even if there is no next such resource, economic growth can be achieved using less resources by increasing efficiency. So even if humanity decided to stop increasing the resource usage right now, we would still continue to see almost limitless economic growth just by smarter ways of using the resources.
ericmcer 3y ago
Well it will suck for us, if you are 20-50 right now you better hope robotic workers will be around to support us when we are too old to be useful. In the long run yeah it will improve everyones quality of life if we can level the population out at a lower number.
- rideontime 3y ago
  Many 20- to 50-year-olds already have no hope of "retiring" in any traditional sense of the term.
sholladay 3y ago
It’s probably a good thing in almost every way except for the economics and care for the elderly, the latter of which could hypothetically be solved with robots but I think we’re still a ways out from that being practical and widespread. The economic implications could also be pretty severe. Our economy is modeled such that we prosper when money flows and there is growth. With less people to be taxed, less people to buy things, and less people putting their money in the markets, the economic engine will stall and then shrink. Everyone loses when that happens. The Great Depression didn’t happen because money literally disappeared, it was more like hoarding and stagnation. That will happen again when the population declines. That said, I’m not out here telling people to have babies just so the economy won’t crash. Boom and bust seems to be part of our nature. Perhaps eventually we will move to an economic model that is more resilient to such things but I doubt it will happen anytime soon.
39896880 3y ago
Hm, I don’t think we’re being asked to assume. FTA: >’For middle- to high-income, low-fertility countries, falling below replacement level could mean labor shortages and pressure on health care systems, nationalized health insurance, and social security programs. Meanwhile, low-income countries that still have high fertility are at heightened risk of falling further behind on the world’s economic stage, Ezeh says. “They will not be able to make the necessary investments to improve health, well-being, and education” with too few resources to support a booming population.’ That sounds pretty bad.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
You've got some good answers, but I'll add another: Fast changes to any sort of complicated system are always problematic. Going from rapid growth to decline within a couple of generations is likely to be much more problematic than the same change happening over a couple of dozen generations.
BashiBazouk 3y ago
I think it would be fantastic to drop the world population to a sustainable two or three billion. The "problem" is the house of cards built out of debt. Large debt from government borrowing to your large mortgage is that it assumes a growing economy and inflation will reduce it's relative value over time. Go the other direction and it all falls apart pretty fast. On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half. And yes, I know the numbers do not work out as linearly as the flippant comment would assume...
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  > On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half. That's nonsense. A reasonable time period for halving the population naturally would be 3 generations, or about 100 years. We already have proof it can be done faster: Britain has halved their emissions in 35 years. We need to do a lot more than halve CO2 emissions, and we need to do it in a lot less than 100 years. The goal is net zero by 2050. And while that's a very difficult goal, it's not a completely impossible goal either.
  - exoverito 3y ago
    Britain halved their emissions primarily because the West has been deindustrializing and offshoring their production to China. Global CO2 emissions have still increased significantly in the past 35 years, so these national figures are mostly just accounting tricks. Also if things get bad we can just use stratospheric aerosols to cool the Earth. Terraforming would be like a thousandth the cost of trying to completely replace all energy infrastructure by 2050. I'm not opposed to building more sensible energy production like advanced fission, but given how slow, inefficient, and expensive infrastructure has become in the West I wouldn't bet that net zero happens by 2050, especially without decimating the middle classes.
disambiguation 3y ago
"Why" is because it's an easy way to get clicks and ad revenue. Otherwise its just to soften people up to the inevitable blow.

spurgu 3y ago

Because the economy and thus everything around you relies on constant growth. Personally I'd be happy with a world with a lot less people, finding some sort of equilibrium. But it would necessitate a lot of pain to get there.

pupppet 3y ago
Yep growth, a state of permanent, must-have growth. Or put another way, a world built upon the notion you must never be satisfied. Not to go all Agent Smith on everyone, but he had a point.
croes 3y ago
Not everything needs to grow constantly, most of the time you don't need more people, the people just need more money.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
I am really not so sure. It's hard to think of a way but we'd find a way. For starters, a lot of academics and other people who currently work on relatively useless problems like the Higgs boson could actually put their mind to work on something more practical and we'd come up with all sorts of inventions to make our lives easier, and perhaps we wouldn't make the old mistakes of being very unsustainable.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

andrewstuart2 3y ago

Isn't it usually because our retirement systems assume the next generation can foot the bill for the current generation since they'll be a larger generation?

croes 3y ago
Nope, normally rising productivity can do the same unless you don't want workers to participate on the benefits of rising productivity.
formerly_proven 3y ago
Worker productivity is still going up. You can also just extract a larger share, it's not written in stone that 20% of gross income goes into paying pensions. There is no particular reason why that number can't be 30%. Or 40%.
- jandrewrogers 3y ago
  For this to work you need the dwindling percentage of people working to voluntarily acquiesce to having a large portion of their income redirected to people who are not working.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    So what you're saying is that someone needs to lose something they currently have. Either people in general ... or the government. Which is what the original thesis was, I believe, that someone needs to lose. But it gets a lot worse. The problem is that growth AND decline are both exponential processes. Not just growth. Decline too. Which means whatever percentage you say has to go to taking care of old people ... give it 20 years and it'll be more. A factor more. In fact, it will quickly rise to over 100% if population doesn't stabilize. In nature, for many species the exponential nature of shrinking population causes, by itself, without other causes, extinction. Luckily, usually local extinction. Cats are a great example of this. Areas almost always have a lot of cats ... or none. If you take current examples (that are getting worse) you see that what happens is that every generation about halves. BUT 4-5 generations are alive simultaneously. So in order to keep the same level of elderly care the expenses need to double 5 times. There's a tiny problem ... even theoretically 20% expenses on the elderly can only double twice. The third time you double it, it goes over 100%. But when maintaining elderly care takes 100% of global human labor, we're only about halfway to a real declining population. Or to put it more realistically, after all humans don't just undergo natural processes (thankfully), we adapt: unless population is growing at a minimum rate, the elderly will be abandoned. As soon as it becomes clear that this cannot be avoided, if needed we'll breed humans like in the Matrix to prevent this from continuing. Why? The people making that decision ... are the ones who are about to meet that fate. This is be why a declining economy is so incredibly, incredibly destructive. Exponential growth, with a growth rate smaller than one, is a killer.

adamisom 3y ago

Because innovation will likely decrease simultaneously with needing to support a far greater fraction of unproductive retirees. I also always wonder if folks with your view see no moral issue with humanity disappearing, or with mass population decline in any way other than fewer children being born.

hypeatei 3y ago
Why does innovation or humanity need to exist? I don't see an obvious point or reason to life at all; much less the "growth and innovation" needed for the economy.
- exoverito 3y ago
  If there is no innovation then standards of living will not improve, and the future will look bleak for many people. Nihilism is incredibly dangerous and desperate people often turn to totalitarian ideologies which promise meaning and purpose.
  - hypeatei 3y ago
    This assumes the current day isn't already bleak for many in our current system.
    - exoverito 3y ago
      I make no such assumption, only pointing out the obvious fact that a world of no innovation, declining living standards, and a dying population will only exacerbate bleakness. It's essentially the dystopian setting for Children of Men.
  - xnx 3y ago
    There's a lot to look forward to in a world where the natural environment isn't increasingly mined for resources and paved over. Planet Earth is an absolute Eden all we can think to do is convert all its natural wonders into materials and energy to make unsatisfying technological baubles.

jimbob45 3y ago

we're being asked Are you an anti-natalist? I've been seeing hordes of y'all popping up on reddit recently.

EnigmaFlare 3y ago
TIL antenatal is not written "anti-natal"! People who attend antenatal classes are certainly not anti-natalists. One of those terms should really be dropped from the language.
switchbak 3y ago
When I reflect on the folks I've rubbed shoulders with over the last couple decades, I think there has been this implicit anti-natal bias. I think it mostly creeped in because of environmental and social concerns, and it seems to correlate with a kind of hip urbanite mentality. It's pretty shocking to me how long it took me to actually confront these assumptions. In the 80's overpopulation seemed like one of the most pressing concerns, but the situation is a lot more context-specific and nuanced than the message I received. Many people still haven't updated their programming, and act like I'm a raving lunatic when I bring up concerns around demographics in advanced societies. This despite us knowing about this generally for a _long_ time in places like South Korea and Japan. I'm sure I have lots of other similar blind spots, but those buggers are hard to find.
- imtringued 3y ago
  There is nothing worse than telling people who don't want to have children to have children. You do realize that we are biological creatures? If someone genuinely doesn't want to have children, then they must have overcome their evolved natural tendency and that means they probably have a very good reason. Natalists don't understand that a system of optimistic procreation also requires the children created in this process to decide whether the blood line should be continued. Parents don't know what kind of life their children are going to lead and whether those children are going to lead a life worth living or not. So the natalist is utterly, utterly dependent on the anti-natalist for his procreation strategy to be moral. The anti-natalist has the task of reducing the amount of life that is not worth living, so that only life that is worth living ends up reproducing. In short, the anti-natalist must improve life, whereas the natalist simply hopes that they give birth to an anti-natalist. For the natalist to attempt to improve life is proof that they are not a natalist.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bregma 3y ago

All Ponzi schemes rely on the influx of new capital or they collapse.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
That is true, but in this case, the collapse can be quite graceful. We'd just need to use a lot less energy and stop producing 90% of goods. The good thing is that we can get by without them.
moffkalast 3y ago
And pension systems are the grandest Ponzi schemes of all.

xnx 3y ago

Humans have shown themselves to be pretty clever and adaptable, so I'm optimistic we can thrive even as we unwind ourselves from the ponzi scheme of unlimited growth on a fixed planet.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
Me too. In fact, I bet if push comes to shove, we will come up with solutions we simply can't come up with for now because we are comfortable. Right now, all of us are typing on some computers, comfy and thinking intellectually. If we HAD to and were pushed by the physical parameters of need, I bet our inventiveness would go through the roof and we'd solve the problem.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Unlimited growth by all practical means is probably not a problem, even with only this planet. Half of the nutrients eaten worldwide by people right now are grown with artificial fertiliser, which is made by literally sucking nitrogen out of air. Humans are making great use of resources that are utterly worthless for all other living beings, such as oil, natural gas, uranium and more. What will be the next toxic waste product that humans will harness for productive goals? And even if there is no next such resource, economic growth can be achieved using less resources by increasing efficiency. So even if humanity decided to stop increasing the resource usage right now, we would still continue to see almost limitless economic growth just by smarter ways of using the resources.

ericmcer 3y ago

Well it will suck for us, if you are 20-50 right now you better hope robotic workers will be around to support us when we are too old to be useful. In the long run yeah it will improve everyones quality of life if we can level the population out at a lower number.

rideontime 3y ago
Many 20- to 50-year-olds already have no hope of "retiring" in any traditional sense of the term.

sholladay 3y ago

It’s probably a good thing in almost every way except for the economics and care for the elderly, the latter of which could hypothetically be solved with robots but I think we’re still a ways out from that being practical and widespread. The economic implications could also be pretty severe. Our economy is modeled such that we prosper when money flows and there is growth. With less people to be taxed, less people to buy things, and less people putting their money in the markets, the economic engine will stall and then shrink. Everyone loses when that happens. The Great Depression didn’t happen because money literally disappeared, it was more like hoarding and stagnation. That will happen again when the population declines. That said, I’m not out here telling people to have babies just so the economy won’t crash. Boom and bust seems to be part of our nature. Perhaps eventually we will move to an economic model that is more resilient to such things but I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

39896880 3y ago

Hm, I don’t think we’re being asked to assume. FTA: >’For middle- to high-income, low-fertility countries, falling below replacement level could mean labor shortages and pressure on health care systems, nationalized health insurance, and social security programs. Meanwhile, low-income countries that still have high fertility are at heightened risk of falling further behind on the world’s economic stage, Ezeh says. “They will not be able to make the necessary investments to improve health, well-being, and education” with too few resources to support a booming population.’ That sounds pretty bad.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

You've got some good answers, but I'll add another: Fast changes to any sort of complicated system are always problematic. Going from rapid growth to decline within a couple of generations is likely to be much more problematic than the same change happening over a couple of dozen generations.

BashiBazouk 3y ago

I think it would be fantastic to drop the world population to a sustainable two or three billion. The "problem" is the house of cards built out of debt. Large debt from government borrowing to your large mortgage is that it assumes a growing economy and inflation will reduce it's relative value over time. Go the other direction and it all falls apart pretty fast. On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half. And yes, I know the numbers do not work out as linearly as the flippant comment would assume...

bryanlarsen 3y ago
> On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half. That's nonsense. A reasonable time period for halving the population naturally would be 3 generations, or about 100 years. We already have proof it can be done faster: Britain has halved their emissions in 35 years. We need to do a lot more than halve CO2 emissions, and we need to do it in a lot less than 100 years. The goal is net zero by 2050. And while that's a very difficult goal, it's not a completely impossible goal either.
- exoverito 3y ago
  Britain halved their emissions primarily because the West has been deindustrializing and offshoring their production to China. Global CO2 emissions have still increased significantly in the past 35 years, so these national figures are mostly just accounting tricks. Also if things get bad we can just use stratospheric aerosols to cool the Earth. Terraforming would be like a thousandth the cost of trying to completely replace all energy infrastructure by 2050. I'm not opposed to building more sensible energy production like advanced fission, but given how slow, inefficient, and expensive infrastructure has become in the West I wouldn't bet that net zero happens by 2050, especially without decimating the middle classes.

disambiguation 3y ago

"Why" is because it's an easy way to get clicks and ad revenue. Otherwise its just to soften people up to the inevitable blow.