7 ms·

Pushing baby booms to boost economic growth amounts to a Ponzi scheme

49 points by pseudolus 2y ago

alecco 2y ago
In that sense, civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Let's just give up.
- kleene_op 2y ago
  One could even argue that life itself is a Ponzi scheme.
  - WithinReason 2y ago
    The food chain certainly is
- DevX101 2y ago
  Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme. But our current financial system that has never-ending growth as an axiom, where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Never ending growth is an axiom because population growth is a given. Unless we forcibly control birth rates, that won't go away.
    - Attrecomet 2y ago
      And yet, we are discussing a movement that wants to artificially increase birth rates that have fallen too low for their tastes. It seems you don't actually need to force control birth rates, just give women agency over their own lives.
    - throwaway5752 2y ago
      Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given" it is definitely not a given. We will suffer the fate of every other organism that exceeds the carrying capacity of their environment. And right now our civilization is based on mining energy from previous hundreds of millions of years in the form of (C-H bonds) which is the definition of unsustainable. It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Essentially infinite economic growth is possible. Thought experiment: let's suppose we have a stable population that produces & consumes two things: food & TV shows. The food is sustainably produced so it doesn't contribute to economic growth or decline. But the TV shows cumulate. Therefore generation X+1 is richer than generation X since it has access to more TV shows. And "TV shows" in this thought experiment can be physical objects too. An iPhone 12 is more valuable than an iPhone 11 despite being smaller and using less resources to create. Of course we're a long way from sustainable infinite growth. But it is possible.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    > Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve. > where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork. [0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  > In that sense, civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Let's just give up. I think this is incredibly disingenuous. A steady state population that lives within the means of what the sun and planet can provide, without exceeding planetary boundaries, is an ambitious yet reasonable goal. A planet with a population that must grow forever to pay off debt today incurs against tomorrow without tomorrow's consent is simply not realistic, a "spherical cow." When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children. What does this tell us? It tells us that the global population boom was driven by lack of agency and contraceptive access for women. What did most socioeconomic systems do with this "demographic dividend"? Capitalism, leading to wealth inequality, and also incurring substantial debts to pay for the future (both financial and physical system). And now this system is in material structural peril. So, should we listen to the pro-natalism harpies that everyone should have more kids to continue to allow a suboptimal economic system predicated on returns and debt to continue to trudge on unimpeded? Or should we continue to empower women and force the economic systems to serve humans instead of using them as a resource? Managing a rapid total fertility rate decline resulting from self determination of a population cohort isn't giving up; it is living within our means as a species and respecting human rights.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    It seems disingenuous to you because you’re unfamiliar with the underlying statistics. A steady state population is what pronatalists want, and they’re generally quite comfortable with the idea that this might require structuring society to better enable women who’d like to have a child. The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      8 billion (today) to 10 billion people (~2100) is not a reasonable steady state based on all available evidence. We'll head towards half that over the next 200-250 years as total fertility rates approach 0.5-1 on average, and 4B people is certainly more approachable to support sustainably vs 8B-10B (under the assumption of living standards somewhere between Europe and the US). South Korea is at 0.72, China at 1, Japan at 1.2, Mexico City at 0.96, (all 2023 figures as of this comment) and the rest of the world is not far behind. > The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline. This gets us to steady state. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/jul/11/global-population-predictions-offer-hopeful-sign-for-planet-un-says https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/... https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/undesa_pd_2024_wpp_2024_advance_unedited_0.pdf https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve... https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  give up? you mean you wanna kys or live in dirt huts? sounds good for you, but I'm gonna go make some more bag holders
- Attrecomet 2y ago
  What a petty response to efforts to avert an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. Maybe you should just give up if that's the best you can do.
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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bpodgursky 2y ago
This is so profoundly nonsensical I can't even engage with it point by point. > Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population. But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past. not having kids is borrowing from the future to pay for your own wants now. All of civilization in all of history is a ponzi scheme, where you invest heavily in the next generation to keep it moving forward. That's not a profound takedown it's literally why you have a desk job at a computer instead of digging up potatoes to starve to death in a cave.
- jezzamon 2y ago
  It's "Ponzi" if it requires an ever increasing future population. In reality we don't, the population can stabilise at some time in the future, there may be some economic shock along the way, but we'll be fine.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    I sure hope it stabilizes at some point in the future. The world population has more than doubled during my lifetime, which seems fundamentally unsustainable if everyone is to have even half the resources consumed by the current western lifestyle.
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      As the article covers, we know it’s going to stabilize, most likely before we hit 11 billion.
- altruios 2y ago
  so you agree with the point then - that: > All of civilization in all of history is a ponzi scheme. But I don't understand how not having kids is borrowing anything from the future. Wouldn't feeding in the ponzi scheme be what borrows from the future?... It seems like you are saying two different things here.
create-account 2y ago
We shouldn’t have embraced the Haber & Bosch ammonia creation process for crop fertilisation just like that, without any baby boom control, so as to prevent an implosion like the one we’re about to live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
- shagie 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act > The Guano Islands Act (11 Stat. 119, enacted August 18, 1856, codified at 48 U.S.C. ch. 8 §§ 1411-1419) is a United States federal law passed by the Congress that enables citizens of the United States to take possession of unclaimed islands containing guano deposits in the name of the United States. The islands can be located anywhere, so long as they are not occupied by citizens of another country and not within the jurisdiction of another government. It also empowers the president to use the military to protect such interests and establishes the criminal jurisdiction of the United States in these territories. The alternative would have been the b̶a̶t̶ bird shit wars.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    The gems are always in the comments. Great find! Would make a great comedy, like Tropic Thunder. "Guano Freedom?"
- engineer_22 2y ago
  This must be sarcasm?
alexey-salmin 2y ago
Funny how everyone is obsessed with "sustainability" nowadays but you get frowned upon for mentioning unsustainable birth rates. I honestly don't understand what's the point of having sustainable energy and water sources in a society that fades away.
- bparsons 2y ago
  What population would be too much for earth? 15 billion? 100 billion? Never understood the unlimited growth argument. We aren't going to colonize Mars.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    What part of his comment implied "unlimited growth"?
  - credit_guy 2y ago
    Conversely, what population do you think would be appropriate? 5 billion, 1 billion, 100 million?
  - Longlius 2y ago
    This isn't talking about 'unlimited growth.' It's talking about sustaining our current population structure or even tapering it off gracefully rather than facing the steep decline we're dealing with now.
    - bparsons 2y ago
      Global population is not declining. It is projected to continue growing for at least another few decades.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Depends entirely on the tech. If all you have is bronze, about 10 million. If we mass produced greenhouses and tile the deserts etc., I've heard a trillion claimed as possible.
  - 2y ago
RandomCitizen12 2y ago
> The pronatalist movement is ... premised on the belief that ever-larger populations are needed to spur economic growth No, the pronatalist movement is premised on the belief that humans should not go extinct. If the entire world had the Korean birthrate (and it does seem to be moving that way), extinction would happen in 25 generations.
- dbspin 2y ago
  This is no more likely than malthusian predictions of over population leading to mass starvation. It turns out that human populations self regulate when a basic level of needs are met.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    Yes, the self-regulation mechanism is that cultures that produce too many "problem with pronatalism" articles get regulated away.
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    Agreed, but if we build an economy that maximizes extraction by artificially threatening basic needs, we could stay in the exponential decline for quite some time.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    The feedback mechanism used to be that societies with inadequate birth rates were conquered and replaced.
    - Attrecomet 2y ago
      And now, thanks to increased control over the environment due to technology and science, there are new tools in our repository that our ancestors did not have, like actually sitting down and planning how to avoid an ecological collapse -- and waging war with advanced weapons that negate a pure "breed fast" strategy. It sure would be nice if we didn't have to return to regular periods of widespread starvation like they did back in the Middle Ages, when they were too uninformed to not remove all forests and powerless to avoid staying away from the carrying capacity of their world for any amount of time.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
But unlimited immigration is not?
- engineer_22 2y ago
  Funny, the article proposes just that.
keybored 2y ago
A few years back the then-prime minister of Norway (Solberg) encouraged women to have more children. I’m not sure if there were some actual incentives. Well in any case, women writers started responding to her about how they can’t have children because X, Y, and Z. What stunned me about that was that they took the admonition seriously to begin with. That a statesperson telling you to have more children or have children at all “for Norway” was worth responding to.
- themaninthedark 2y ago
  Why? If the prime minister wants to accomplish a goal, shouldn't they outright state it and shouldn't the public respond with the blockers to reaching that goal?
  - keybored 2y ago
    Should what? Haven’t I already expressed that I think it’s absurd for them to care? Am I now, on your prompt, supposed to rattle off the reasons why they should do it when I think it’s hard to understand to begin with?
jimbokun 2y ago
[flagged]
- 3D30497420 2y ago
  Not to cherry-pick, but: > with the burdens falling most heavily on women I mean, is this not true? My understanding is US provides relatively little child support, ensuring that burden has to fall on someone. Isn't that usually the mother?
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    Why is spending time caring for your child a "burden", but having to go work for a profit driven corporation is not? Shouldn't we be giving parents (mothers AND fathers) more flexibility and freedom to choose to spend time with their children? Progressives almost always emphasize support for care outside the home and pushing to keep more parents in the corporate work force, and very little about supporting parents caring for their children inside the home. (And don't get me started on the Republicans. I am well aware they did not support extending the Child Tax Credit, while continuing to claim it was the Democrats who aren't supporting families with children.)
- throwway120385 2y ago
  There's a lot of false dichotomy in your thinking. Humans can be both good and bad. And all you're doing is taking umbrage with the arguments. If you actually listen to people espousing a lot of the ideas behind having more babies, a lot of them are misogynistic or racist.
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    So there we have it. Having babies is misogynistic and racist. Argument closed.
    - Attrecomet 2y ago
      Another disingenuous argument ignoring what was actually said. It seems you know that many pronatalists are deeply racist ("we must secure a future for the white race and out children") and view women's agency over their own bodies and lives as a fundamental problem, but are unwilling to deal with it. But luckily, you declared the argument closed before actually taking time to read the comment...
sologoub 2y ago
> But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves. High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there. Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion. [1]https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertility-rates/ https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili...
- prennert 2y ago
  I have been thinking about this a lot. Its quite easy to find arguments to having kids that bring benefits to parents and / or the parent generation in general. I dont have a philosophy background, so I would be really interested to hear arguments for what benefits an unconceived child receives from being conceived in todays world. Even when assuming that not all outcomes are necessarily going to be bad, there is a real risk that they will experience a really troubled world. What justifies exposing someone intentionally without their consent to that (any?) risk of suffering?
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    I've noticed that very few of the pronatalist ideologues focus on the lived experience of the children after they're born. They consider it very important for people to have lots of babies but absolutely no concern for the babies after they become people. Thus the massive effort to ban abortion in the US but absolutely no concern for the life of the mother. She's already been born, after all.
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
Tade0 2y ago
This is hard to read. The author suggests that the alternatives to having children are: -More immigrants -More pension contributions The former overlooks the fact that those are just someone else's children, so the suggestion appears to be to drain other countries off of their workforce - provided it even exists as fertility rates have been plummeting across the board. The latter has been, in a way, tried in some places in Europe and net effect is birth rates plummeting and an increase in illegal employment. In any case we're way past talking about going above replacement fertility - currently the conversation is focused on preventing a downward spiral that will negatively affect everyone's quality of life.
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  Increased pension contribution also assumes immigrant labor to administer care. Many people in their old age will need a lot of assistance. No amount of savings and judicious planning will help of there’s a labor shortage. We’d have to pay $1500/hour for a day nurse.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    Never mind the cost! As anyone with relatives who need care can attest, you can't really buy being treated like a human being when you're at your weakest. Having children is of course no guarantee, but relationships overall are one's best bet to have at least one person giving a damn about you.
- delfinom 2y ago
  Yea it's an article with an agenda. The western economic model has long been designed as a ponzi scheme.
- mindslight 2y ago
  It's so hard to read because the author is still thoroughly steeped in their overabstracted models - eg this whole "economic growth" thing works as a metric, but not a target. They noticed a crack starting to form in one of their assumptions, but instead of this causing them to examine the rest and wonder what else they might be missing, they're merely entertaining dropping that single one while doubling down on the rest.
drivebyhooting 2y ago
I stopped reading at the picture of a baby in the ICU. It was such a disingenuous choice that I couldn’t assume good faith any longer.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
delfinom 2y ago
>Pushing baby booms to boost economic growth amounts to a Ponzi scheme Lmao, the entire western economy is built on this premise for decades. Pensions, social security, and even 401ks. It's all passing on the bagholding to someone else. It all depends on a newer/younger generation to pay in to allow the older ones to cash out. And it all implodes when the younger can't afford to buy in because of economic wealth hoarding by the older that wants to cash out.
alecco 2y ago
They propose immigration to solve the inverting population pyramid problem. I wonder how they expect it to work in large countries like China. At the moment they would need to take over half of Africa to make the numbers work. Insanity.
alecco 2y ago
They seem to be totally OK with the population of Sub-Saharan Africa growing exponentially, though. Like they are carbon-offsetting or something. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/868e20d0-90ec-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef678d2 https://www.ft.com/content/868e20d0-90ec-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef67...
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-across-africa https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...
  - alecco 2y ago
    According to your link, their fertility rate is changing from 7 to 4. But the population keeps growing exponentially. > Having said that, the reduction in the number of children per woman does not keep the population from continuing to rise in Africa because fertility rates remain high.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Population momentum [1] [2] [3] [4]. The same reason global population is headed to 10 billion people by 2100 from 8 billion today even though the fertility rate is rapidly declining today. Think of it like the "long and variable lag" of monetary policy (where it takes time for the system to change when inputs are changed). Africa's population will continue to increase like a roller coaster peaking from historical fertility rate, and then begin the decline incurred by the current fertility rate decline. How quickly the fertility rate continues to decline in Africa is a function of how quickly the continent develops/urbanizes, and how robust women empowerment and education continues into the future. [1] https://populationeducation.org/population-momentum-explained/ https://populationeducation.org/population-momentum-explaine... [2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/international-programs/events/stiph/fertility-and-population-momentum.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/international-progr... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345894/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345894/
beaglesss 2y ago
Allow me to explain the ponzi. 1) Minimally support raising children through some token property tax etc to pretend you support the children 2) Praise children 3) Have none yourself 4) Offload most costs of raising and make childhood appropriate independence illegal so they won't be in your way, narc to CPS if they're in public without a parent and you find it a nuisance. 5) Wait for kid to be raised, tax shit out of the kid 6) Collect a full share of the social security revenue from the tax generators who's raising you mostly offloaded to everyone else.
Balgair 2y ago
So, I work with a lot of population data for worldbuilding/stats/curiosity [0]. The number one thing when modeling really anything interesting about a setting or story is (drum roll): Population Pretty much everything is keyed to population [1], and I mean pretty much everything. The number of movie theaters, the tonnage of your aircraft carriers, the walking speed in your downtowns, it's all about population. Generally, I've seen that as population rises, things get better. There are more patents per capita, better ratios of MDs to patients, more ranks in your Fire departments, etc. Yeah, there are exceptions here, but not all that many. Most things get more efficient as you get more people [2]. Your gas stations have more customers per day, your sewer lines handle more people, your libraries have more patrons per day, etc. So, when I see a lot of discourse that we somehow need to allow for less people to be alive, to encourage less births, well, that makes me a bit sad. Yes, yes, climate change, I agree, we need to desperately fix that. But from the data that I work with, all I see is that more people = good [3]. To me, the data suggests that we don't need to have less people, that would lead to a less vibrant and progressing world. What we need to figure out a way to grow our population without the effects on the rest of the world. And yeah, I know, impossible. But the data tells me that shrinking is not the way. Somehow, I feel that technology is really the best way forward. [0] Honestly, I'm a weird nerd that really just likes to play with excel sheets, graphs, and wikipedia info boxes. [1] the only thing that isn't, in my meanderings through BLS data sheets, wikipedia, etc is the number of stops on any particular subway/rail line. That's most closely correlated to population density. And, really, that's pretty much it. Just that one thing. [2] again, not population density, it's easy enough to control for that, it's just raw numbers of people from what I have seen. [3] again, generally. Not all cases, not all places, not all times.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Could it also be the data is better when there are more people? So the accuracy is lower is sparser areas? Which could hide advantages to sparse living?
  - Balgair 2y ago
    Not that I have seen. The US's BLS data is quite comprehensive. You can drill down to individual zip codes, neighborhoods, etc, some of which have very low population densities and generally low populations. I know that the French also have such detailed lists, but as my French is very poor, I'm less familiar with that data. Commonwealth countries generally are lacking in comparison in the detail of the population data they freely provide. Something about francophone countries and those like the US with a long philosophical interchange with France seems to be more 'free data' centric. Still, based on my work with such data, I don't see that a lack of data in more rural areas has much affect on the 'goodness' of things. From my work I see that it really mostly is just more people = more better.

49 points by pseudolus 2y ago

alecco 2y ago

In that sense, civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Let's just give up.

kleene_op 2y ago
One could even argue that life itself is a Ponzi scheme.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  The food chain certainly is
DevX101 2y ago
Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme. But our current financial system that has never-ending growth as an axiom, where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Never ending growth is an axiom because population growth is a given. Unless we forcibly control birth rates, that won't go away.
  - Attrecomet 2y ago
    And yet, we are discussing a movement that wants to artificially increase birth rates that have fallen too low for their tastes. It seems you don't actually need to force control birth rates, just give women agency over their own lives.
  - throwaway5752 2y ago
    Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given" it is definitely not a given. We will suffer the fate of every other organism that exceeds the carrying capacity of their environment. And right now our civilization is based on mining energy from previous hundreds of millions of years in the form of (C-H bonds) which is the definition of unsustainable. It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Essentially infinite economic growth is possible. Thought experiment: let's suppose we have a stable population that produces & consumes two things: food & TV shows. The food is sustainably produced so it doesn't contribute to economic growth or decline. But the TV shows cumulate. Therefore generation X+1 is richer than generation X since it has access to more TV shows. And "TV shows" in this thought experiment can be physical objects too. An iPhone 12 is more valuable than an iPhone 11 despite being smaller and using less resources to create. Of course we're a long way from sustainable infinite growth. But it is possible.
- mindslight 2y ago
  > Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve. > where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork. [0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
> In that sense, civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Let's just give up. I think this is incredibly disingenuous. A steady state population that lives within the means of what the sun and planet can provide, without exceeding planetary boundaries, is an ambitious yet reasonable goal. A planet with a population that must grow forever to pay off debt today incurs against tomorrow without tomorrow's consent is simply not realistic, a "spherical cow." When women are empowered and have agency, they delay having children and have less children. What does this tell us? It tells us that the global population boom was driven by lack of agency and contraceptive access for women. What did most socioeconomic systems do with this "demographic dividend"? Capitalism, leading to wealth inequality, and also incurring substantial debts to pay for the future (both financial and physical system). And now this system is in material structural peril. So, should we listen to the pro-natalism harpies that everyone should have more kids to continue to allow a suboptimal economic system predicated on returns and debt to continue to trudge on unimpeded? Or should we continue to empower women and force the economic systems to serve humans instead of using them as a resource? Managing a rapid total fertility rate decline resulting from self determination of a population cohort isn't giving up; it is living within our means as a species and respecting human rights.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  It seems disingenuous to you because you’re unfamiliar with the underlying statistics. A steady state population is what pronatalists want, and they’re generally quite comfortable with the idea that this might require structuring society to better enable women who’d like to have a child. The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    8 billion (today) to 10 billion people (~2100) is not a reasonable steady state based on all available evidence. We'll head towards half that over the next 200-250 years as total fertility rates approach 0.5-1 on average, and 4B people is certainly more approachable to support sustainably vs 8B-10B (under the assumption of living standards somewhere between Europe and the US). South Korea is at 0.72, China at 1, Japan at 1.2, Mexico City at 0.96, (all 2023 figures as of this comment) and the rest of the world is not far behind. > The status quo that we’re on track to - already guaranteed in some countries - is a moderately rapid population decline. This gets us to steady state. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/jul/11/global-population-predictions-offer-hopeful-sign-for-planet-un-says https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/... https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/undesa_pd_2024_wpp_2024_advance_unedited_0.pdf https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve... https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
zeroCalories 2y ago
give up? you mean you wanna kys or live in dirt huts? sounds good for you, but I'm gonna go make some more bag holders
Attrecomet 2y ago
What a petty response to efforts to avert an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. Maybe you should just give up if that's the best you can do.

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

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bpodgursky 2y ago

This is so profoundly nonsensical I can't even engage with it point by point. > Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population. But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past. not having kids is borrowing from the future to pay for your own wants now. All of civilization in all of history is a ponzi scheme, where you invest heavily in the next generation to keep it moving forward. That's not a profound takedown it's literally why you have a desk job at a computer instead of digging up potatoes to starve to death in a cave.

jezzamon 2y ago
It's "Ponzi" if it requires an ever increasing future population. In reality we don't, the population can stabilise at some time in the future, there may be some economic shock along the way, but we'll be fine.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  I sure hope it stabilizes at some point in the future. The world population has more than doubled during my lifetime, which seems fundamentally unsustainable if everyone is to have even half the resources consumed by the current western lifestyle.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    As the article covers, we know it’s going to stabilize, most likely before we hit 11 billion.
altruios 2y ago
so you agree with the point then - that: > All of civilization in all of history is a ponzi scheme. But I don't understand how not having kids is borrowing anything from the future. Wouldn't feeding in the ponzi scheme be what borrows from the future?... It seems like you are saying two different things here.

create-account 2y ago

We shouldn’t have embraced the Haber & Bosch ammonia creation process for crop fertilisation just like that, without any baby boom control, so as to prevent an implosion like the one we’re about to live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

shagie 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act > The Guano Islands Act (11 Stat. 119, enacted August 18, 1856, codified at 48 U.S.C. ch. 8 §§ 1411-1419) is a United States federal law passed by the Congress that enables citizens of the United States to take possession of unclaimed islands containing guano deposits in the name of the United States. The islands can be located anywhere, so long as they are not occupied by citizens of another country and not within the jurisdiction of another government. It also empowers the president to use the military to protect such interests and establishes the criminal jurisdiction of the United States in these territories. The alternative would have been the b̶a̶t̶ bird shit wars.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  The gems are always in the comments. Great find! Would make a great comedy, like Tropic Thunder. "Guano Freedom?"
engineer_22 2y ago
This must be sarcasm?

alexey-salmin 2y ago

Funny how everyone is obsessed with "sustainability" nowadays but you get frowned upon for mentioning unsustainable birth rates. I honestly don't understand what's the point of having sustainable energy and water sources in a society that fades away.

bparsons 2y ago
What population would be too much for earth? 15 billion? 100 billion? Never understood the unlimited growth argument. We aren't going to colonize Mars.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  What part of his comment implied "unlimited growth"?
- credit_guy 2y ago
  Conversely, what population do you think would be appropriate? 5 billion, 1 billion, 100 million?
- Longlius 2y ago
  This isn't talking about 'unlimited growth.' It's talking about sustaining our current population structure or even tapering it off gracefully rather than facing the steep decline we're dealing with now.
  - bparsons 2y ago
    Global population is not declining. It is projected to continue growing for at least another few decades.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Depends entirely on the tech. If all you have is bronze, about 10 million. If we mass produced greenhouses and tile the deserts etc., I've heard a trillion claimed as possible.
- 2y ago

RandomCitizen12 2y ago

> The pronatalist movement is ... premised on the belief that ever-larger populations are needed to spur economic growth No, the pronatalist movement is premised on the belief that humans should not go extinct. If the entire world had the Korean birthrate (and it does seem to be moving that way), extinction would happen in 25 generations.

dbspin 2y ago
This is no more likely than malthusian predictions of over population leading to mass starvation. It turns out that human populations self regulate when a basic level of needs are met.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  Yes, the self-regulation mechanism is that cultures that produce too many "problem with pronatalism" articles get regulated away.
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  Agreed, but if we build an economy that maximizes extraction by artificially threatening basic needs, we could stay in the exponential decline for quite some time.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  The feedback mechanism used to be that societies with inadequate birth rates were conquered and replaced.
  - Attrecomet 2y ago
    And now, thanks to increased control over the environment due to technology and science, there are new tools in our repository that our ancestors did not have, like actually sitting down and planning how to avoid an ecological collapse -- and waging war with advanced weapons that negate a pure "breed fast" strategy. It sure would be nice if we didn't have to return to regular periods of widespread starvation like they did back in the Middle Ages, when they were too uninformed to not remove all forests and powerless to avoid staying away from the carrying capacity of their world for any amount of time.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago

But unlimited immigration is not?

engineer_22 2y ago
Funny, the article proposes just that.

keybored 2y ago

A few years back the then-prime minister of Norway (Solberg) encouraged women to have more children. I’m not sure if there were some actual incentives. Well in any case, women writers started responding to her about how they can’t have children because X, Y, and Z. What stunned me about that was that they took the admonition seriously to begin with. That a statesperson telling you to have more children or have children at all “for Norway” was worth responding to.

themaninthedark 2y ago
Why? If the prime minister wants to accomplish a goal, shouldn't they outright state it and shouldn't the public respond with the blockers to reaching that goal?
- keybored 2y ago
  Should what? Haven’t I already expressed that I think it’s absurd for them to care? Am I now, on your prompt, supposed to rattle off the reasons why they should do it when I think it’s hard to understand to begin with?

jimbokun 2y ago

[flagged]

3D30497420 2y ago
Not to cherry-pick, but: > with the burdens falling most heavily on women I mean, is this not true? My understanding is US provides relatively little child support, ensuring that burden has to fall on someone. Isn't that usually the mother?
- jimbokun 2y ago
  Why is spending time caring for your child a "burden", but having to go work for a profit driven corporation is not? Shouldn't we be giving parents (mothers AND fathers) more flexibility and freedom to choose to spend time with their children? Progressives almost always emphasize support for care outside the home and pushing to keep more parents in the corporate work force, and very little about supporting parents caring for their children inside the home. (And don't get me started on the Republicans. I am well aware they did not support extending the Child Tax Credit, while continuing to claim it was the Democrats who aren't supporting families with children.)
throwway120385 2y ago
There's a lot of false dichotomy in your thinking. Humans can be both good and bad. And all you're doing is taking umbrage with the arguments. If you actually listen to people espousing a lot of the ideas behind having more babies, a lot of them are misogynistic or racist.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  So there we have it. Having babies is misogynistic and racist. Argument closed.
  - Attrecomet 2y ago
    Another disingenuous argument ignoring what was actually said. It seems you know that many pronatalists are deeply racist ("we must secure a future for the white race and out children") and view women's agency over their own bodies and lives as a fundamental problem, but are unwilling to deal with it. But luckily, you declared the argument closed before actually taking time to read the comment...

sologoub 2y ago

> But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves. High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there. Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion. [1]https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertility-rates/ https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili...

prennert 2y ago
I have been thinking about this a lot. Its quite easy to find arguments to having kids that bring benefits to parents and / or the parent generation in general. I dont have a philosophy background, so I would be really interested to hear arguments for what benefits an unconceived child receives from being conceived in todays world. Even when assuming that not all outcomes are necessarily going to be bad, there is a real risk that they will experience a really troubled world. What justifies exposing someone intentionally without their consent to that (any?) risk of suffering?
- throwway120385 2y ago
  I've noticed that very few of the pronatalist ideologues focus on the lived experience of the children after they're born. They consider it very important for people to have lots of babies but absolutely no concern for the babies after they become people. Thus the massive effort to ban abortion in the US but absolutely no concern for the life of the mother. She's already been born, after all.
smallmancontrov 2y ago

Tade0 2y ago

This is hard to read. The author suggests that the alternatives to having children are: -More immigrants -More pension contributions The former overlooks the fact that those are just someone else's children, so the suggestion appears to be to drain other countries off of their workforce - provided it even exists as fertility rates have been plummeting across the board. The latter has been, in a way, tried in some places in Europe and net effect is birth rates plummeting and an increase in illegal employment. In any case we're way past talking about going above replacement fertility - currently the conversation is focused on preventing a downward spiral that will negatively affect everyone's quality of life.

drivebyhooting 2y ago
Increased pension contribution also assumes immigrant labor to administer care. Many people in their old age will need a lot of assistance. No amount of savings and judicious planning will help of there’s a labor shortage. We’d have to pay $1500/hour for a day nurse.
- Tade0 2y ago
  Never mind the cost! As anyone with relatives who need care can attest, you can't really buy being treated like a human being when you're at your weakest. Having children is of course no guarantee, but relationships overall are one's best bet to have at least one person giving a damn about you.
delfinom 2y ago
Yea it's an article with an agenda. The western economic model has long been designed as a ponzi scheme.
mindslight 2y ago
It's so hard to read because the author is still thoroughly steeped in their overabstracted models - eg this whole "economic growth" thing works as a metric, but not a target. They noticed a crack starting to form in one of their assumptions, but instead of this causing them to examine the rest and wonder what else they might be missing, they're merely entertaining dropping that single one while doubling down on the rest.

drivebyhooting 2y ago

I stopped reading at the picture of a baby in the ICU. It was such a disingenuous choice that I couldn’t assume good faith any longer.

deleted 2y ago

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delfinom 2y ago

>Pushing baby booms to boost economic growth amounts to a Ponzi scheme Lmao, the entire western economy is built on this premise for decades. Pensions, social security, and even 401ks. It's all passing on the bagholding to someone else. It all depends on a newer/younger generation to pay in to allow the older ones to cash out. And it all implodes when the younger can't afford to buy in because of economic wealth hoarding by the older that wants to cash out.

alecco 2y ago

They propose immigration to solve the inverting population pyramid problem. I wonder how they expect it to work in large countries like China. At the moment they would need to take over half of Africa to make the numbers work. Insanity.

alecco 2y ago

They seem to be totally OK with the population of Sub-Saharan Africa growing exponentially, though. Like they are carbon-offsetting or something. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/868e20d0-90ec-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef678d2 https://www.ft.com/content/868e20d0-90ec-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef67...

toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-across-africa https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...
- alecco 2y ago
  According to your link, their fertility rate is changing from 7 to 4. But the population keeps growing exponentially. > Having said that, the reduction in the number of children per woman does not keep the population from continuing to rise in Africa because fertility rates remain high.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Population momentum [1] [2] [3] [4]. The same reason global population is headed to 10 billion people by 2100 from 8 billion today even though the fertility rate is rapidly declining today. Think of it like the "long and variable lag" of monetary policy (where it takes time for the system to change when inputs are changed). Africa's population will continue to increase like a roller coaster peaking from historical fertility rate, and then begin the decline incurred by the current fertility rate decline. How quickly the fertility rate continues to decline in Africa is a function of how quickly the continent develops/urbanizes, and how robust women empowerment and education continues into the future. [1] https://populationeducation.org/population-momentum-explained/ https://populationeducation.org/population-momentum-explaine... [2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/international-programs/events/stiph/fertility-and-population-momentum.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/international-progr... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345894/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345894/

beaglesss 2y ago

Allow me to explain the ponzi. 1) Minimally support raising children through some token property tax etc to pretend you support the children 2) Praise children 3) Have none yourself 4) Offload most costs of raising and make childhood appropriate independence illegal so they won't be in your way, narc to CPS if they're in public without a parent and you find it a nuisance. 5) Wait for kid to be raised, tax shit out of the kid 6) Collect a full share of the social security revenue from the tax generators who's raising you mostly offloaded to everyone else.

Balgair 2y ago

So, I work with a lot of population data for worldbuilding/stats/curiosity [0]. The number one thing when modeling really anything interesting about a setting or story is (drum roll): Population Pretty much everything is keyed to population [1], and I mean pretty much everything. The number of movie theaters, the tonnage of your aircraft carriers, the walking speed in your downtowns, it's all about population. Generally, I've seen that as population rises, things get better. There are more patents per capita, better ratios of MDs to patients, more ranks in your Fire departments, etc. Yeah, there are exceptions here, but not all that many. Most things get more efficient as you get more people [2]. Your gas stations have more customers per day, your sewer lines handle more people, your libraries have more patrons per day, etc. So, when I see a lot of discourse that we somehow need to allow for less people to be alive, to encourage less births, well, that makes me a bit sad. Yes, yes, climate change, I agree, we need to desperately fix that. But from the data that I work with, all I see is that more people = good [3]. To me, the data suggests that we don't need to have less people, that would lead to a less vibrant and progressing world. What we need to figure out a way to grow our population without the effects on the rest of the world. And yeah, I know, impossible. But the data tells me that shrinking is not the way. Somehow, I feel that technology is really the best way forward. [0] Honestly, I'm a weird nerd that really just likes to play with excel sheets, graphs, and wikipedia info boxes. [1] the only thing that isn't, in my meanderings through BLS data sheets, wikipedia, etc is the number of stops on any particular subway/rail line. That's most closely correlated to population density. And, really, that's pretty much it. Just that one thing. [2] again, not population density, it's easy enough to control for that, it's just raw numbers of people from what I have seen. [3] again, generally. Not all cases, not all places, not all times.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Could it also be the data is better when there are more people? So the accuracy is lower is sparser areas? Which could hide advantages to sparse living?
- Balgair 2y ago
  Not that I have seen. The US's BLS data is quite comprehensive. You can drill down to individual zip codes, neighborhoods, etc, some of which have very low population densities and generally low populations. I know that the French also have such detailed lists, but as my French is very poor, I'm less familiar with that data. Commonwealth countries generally are lacking in comparison in the detail of the population data they freely provide. Something about francophone countries and those like the US with a long philosophical interchange with France seems to be more 'free data' centric. Still, based on my work with such data, I don't see that a lack of data in more rural areas has much affect on the 'goodness' of things. From my work I see that it really mostly is just more people = more better.