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> There are two futures, both bad. Or, more likely, people are extrapolating from current trends, and those trends won’t hold. Not that long ago, people were d

> There are two futures, both bad. Or, more likely, people are extrapolating from current trends, and those trends won’t hold. Not that long ago, people were doing that extrapolation and deciding that overpopulation and worldwide famine were in our future. “The Population Bomb” was a bestselling book along those lines. The population is likely to shrink, easing strain on resources, and people will look back fondly on “the good old days” when folks had big families. Trends will shift and the population will grow again.

benchmarkist 2y ago
It's a self-correcting problem. The people who don't have children select themselves out of the gene pool and are replaced by those who do have children.
- debesyla 2y ago
  It's debatable if choice/want/accident of having children is based on genetics.
  - benchmarkist 2y ago
    It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies. If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.
    - notahacker 2y ago
      > It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have less children, which has very little to do with their genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not "replacement" with children who are genetically determined to be fecund.
      - benchmarkist 2y ago
        Humans are animals and animals which do not replicate are selected out of the gene pool. There is nothing to argue here.
        notahacker 2y ago
        Nobody is taking issue with the fact that humans that do not replicate do not pass on their genes They are taking issue with the ludicrous assertion that falling birth rates are "self correcting" because the offspring of people who do replicate are somehow genetically predisposed to have more children to "replace" them.
        benchmarkist 2y ago
        Either they'll have children or they won't and the ones who do will replace the ones who don't. It's like I said, whatever people perceive to be a problem is not actually a problem because it corrects itself without any interventions.
        amanaplanacanal 2y ago
        It depends on what you consider the problem to be. I personally didn't think there is a problem, but if you define the problem to be "population decline until there are no people left", your solution doesn't work. Unless maybe you consider other mammals to be people too.
        benchmarkist 2y ago
        I haven't defined any problems or solutions but certain people do seem to have defined the problem like you have. What I said specifically was that whatever people perceive to be a problem with the global human population is self-correcting (from a biological perspective) because those who voluntarily choose to not procreate will be replaced by those who are more than happy to have as many children as possible. If someone has a different perspective on this then they are welcome to make their version of the problem explicit and concrete and explain what exactly they propose as a valid intervention for fixing it. I suspect and am almost certain they have not thought about the issue as rigorously as they think and are simply parroting popular talking points they've seen and heard on social media platforms about the impending collapse of civilization caused by declining birth rates.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      The pool of replicators can prune itself in many ways (indeed, it must), but that doesn't mean that those prunings are having any effect on the pool of genes. The relative frequency of fertility-relevant alleles is just as likely to remain stable. It's called Hardy Weinberg equilibrium and it's the default state for large populations that are not experiencing predation or expanding into new niches.
      - benchmarkist 2y ago
        That's good to know.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Personality traits are a whole lot more heritable than it's fashionable to admit.
    - Someone 2y ago
      Birth rate doesn’t seem to be very heritable, given the amount it can change over relatively short periods of time. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File%3A1910-_Fertility_rate_-_United_States.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File%3A1910-... shows it going from 8 around 1940 to 12 around 1957 and back down to 7 around 1972 in the USA.
  - ashoeafoot 2y ago
    If you are barking mad ane propagate , i choose you, evopokemon
- bawolff 2y ago
  That's oversimplifying. Do the people who don't have children send resources to relatives who do? Making the family more succesful? Not to mention it isn't a binary really. There is a middle ground of simply having less children. A family that has a single child is still below replacement and quite different from a family with 5. Regardless, genes are still being passed on.
  - benchmarkist 2y ago
    Sounds like you agree that there is no problem.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      If by problem you mean some variant of: humans are going to stop having babies and go extinct, then yes, i agree that is rediculous. However i disagree with the mechanism you propose. Having less children can be evolutionarily advantous in some circumtances. People will have less children when it makes sense, and have more children when conditions change and that make sense.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - benchmarkist 2y ago
        Great, it's always good to reach a clear resolution.
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    Do you see this happening a lot on modern industrial societies?
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      Modern industrial societies (with strong womens rights) are a relatively new thing. We'll adapt. Most likely by making it much easier to have and raise children so that educated, rich folks don't avoid it so long.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  I believe you are describing the plot of Idiocracy.
  - benchmarkist 2y ago
    I'm not making any value judgements. Intelligence is not necessary for replication.
- Qem 2y ago
  If natural selection were that effective, no species would ever go extinct. And yet most do. Relying on natural selection to shrug off problems is like making lottery tickets your retirement plan.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  Strongly disagree with that take. Genetics can only have a minor influence on number of offspring, because the genetic makeup of basically every industrialized nation did not change completely within 20 years. If there was no other factor apart from genetics, it is decidedly unclear if that could stabilize population numbers on its own. But it won't have to, almost for certain, because non-genetic mechanisms will balance this in all likelyhood ("organized" incentives from states and also emerging ressource over-supply), and those mechanisms will work MUCH faster than genetics ever could.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    He's not saying that genetics caused the problem, but that natural selection will solve the problem. Natural selection also need not be obviously genetic. For example certain religious groups maintain very healthy fertility rates, while secular populations tend to have quite poor fertility rates. So this logically leads to an outcome very few would intuitively expect - the percent of humanity that is religious will likely increase over the coming decades and centuries. Also collapsing populations will lead to resource scarcity. One of the many negatives of low fertility is that you end up with far more elderly than working age people. Any given market will also naturally decrease in size, all other things being equal. These factors, amongst others, will completely wreck economies which may well end up creating a vicious cycle against fertility. Another reason I think 'organized incentives' will be unlikely to achieve much is that Scandinavia had been at the forefront of fertility collapse in Europe and they have both an exremely strong social safety net as well as great minimum maternity benefits. Clearly there are other factors than economic inability driving people to go childless or to only have 1.
  - Animats 2y ago
    Japan and France have tried incentives, with little effect. Japan is even cutting their social security payments to pay for increased subsidies for children.[1] France has a benefit scheme for parents with two or more children.[2] It's about EUR75 per month, so not that big. [1] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/06/3918e2481936-japan-enacts-child-care-law-to-tackle-declining-birthrate.html https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/06/3918e2481936-japa... [2] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F13213?lang=en https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F13213?...
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  In humans, memes are a stronger driver of fertility than genes. It is a self correcting problem, but that's because having more children than you can support is an antimeme. Even if they survive and reproduce, they won't pass on the "large family" trait.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  I don't think the predisposition to have children is genetic though. At least not mostly. It's more an effect of circumstances and living conditions. A lot of people just had kids as a retirement fund (basically still the case in poor countries) or because it was pushed on them by religion. Personally I just think it's just a lot of hassle and I don't think it adds much value to my life. Others will of course differ in opinion hugely. One thing is sure to me though, humanity isn't going to die out. Our planet is overpopulated as it is.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jvanderbot 2y ago
I believe we're in a correction period. All through history it was dangerous and debilitating for women to have children. As women's reproductive and voting rights and freedom increased (a nanosecond ago history wise), more couples self-selected out of that and if they had kids they had them later. Myself and my spouse included. Add to that - it's expensive and difficult to raise kids without support. Either you buy support or you neglect huge opportunities and say near parents. Right now, we pay more for our nanny than we do for our house, and combined both are pretty huge chunks of our income - and we're both fairly successful professionals. Eventually, there will be better resources for working couples to have kids. It's a fairly easy problem to solve: More childcare options, more housing supply (so its cheaper to live), and more childcare workers by e.g., reducing regulations and improving immigration policy. USA has no reason to do this - we have good demographics b/c of immigration and (frankly) Calthocism and its ilk. When I married into a catholic family I inherited 100s of cousins, and there's 1000s of relatives in our state now.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > More childcare options, more housing supply (so its cheaper to live), and more childcare workers by e.g., reducing regulations and improving immigration policy. USA has no reason to do this - we have good demographics b/c of immigration and (frankly) Calthocism and its ilk. How do you square this with huge childcare costs in the US? The costs come from childcare ratios and liability, and those regulations are there for a reason. Where are all the workers going to come from? Won’t the growing and politically powerful old population want workers for their needs/wants?
Mistletoe 2y ago
Population shrinking is going to annihilate the current economic system we have where everyone puts their retirement into stocks. Then the shell-shocked people will be even more poor and unable to afford having children. You have to have new entrants to the pyramid to buy the stocks that the people all want to sell to finance their retirement. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-009-9179-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-009-9179-9 Places like Japan and Korea aren’t having the sort of birth rate turnaround you are discussing.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  The neocapitalist system needs to change anyway. As it's been going ever more wealth is ending up with ever fewer people and that can't possibly end well. It never has in history.
dustypotato 2y ago
There are very few if not zero number of countries going back to replacement levels after they fell from it. The world on average is getting richer and richer countries have falling birthrates
ANewFormation 2y ago
But you don't need to extrapolate. Current rates are far more than sufficient for catastrophe. It's merely that the effects of dangerously high fertility rates are immediate while the effects of dangerously low fertility tend to lag the advent of said reduction by around 60 years. So for instance Japan is still living the good times relative to what's yet to come since they collapsed in the 80s. South Korea hasn't even begun to really feel the consequences of their actions since they only collapsed in the 90s. And places like Finland or the Western world in general only collapsed even more recently. But collapsed they have. And because our fertile window in life, for women at least, closes long before we die - most, if not all, of these places will, unavoidably, see dramatic population declines, screwed age ratios (with consequent impacts on the labor/retiree pool/costs), shrinking economies, and so on. And we're left to rely on some ever smaller generation(s) down the line to start having large families in this context.
- mountainb 2y ago
  It will be "fixed" by just killing off old people in large numbers through some combination of high pressure euthanasia campaigns and denial of healthcare subsidies. Just no one wants to be honest about it. Our political culture is not a high integrity, high honesty culture but one that relies on a lot of indirect communication and symbolism. In this the west has become a lot more like east Asian stereotype. So in my view this crisis will be solved, just not in a way that people want to acknowledge. A lot of the nonserious "attempts" to address the issues are just performances to make it look like the facially palatable policies have been tried before they inevitably fail.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    It's not the most intuitive thing, but how long we live has no long term impact on population levels. Think about a fertility rate of one - this means each successive generation will be half the size of the one prior. This makes simplified population sims very simple because it's simply powers of 2. If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years. You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction. I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.

benchmarkist 2y ago

It's a self-correcting problem. The people who don't have children select themselves out of the gene pool and are replaced by those who do have children.

debesyla 2y ago
It's debatable if choice/want/accident of having children is based on genetics.
- benchmarkist 2y ago
  It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies. If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    > It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have less children, which has very little to do with their genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not "replacement" with children who are genetically determined to be fecund.
    - benchmarkist 2y ago
      Humans are animals and animals which do not replicate are selected out of the gene pool. There is nothing to argue here.
      - notahacker 2y ago
        Nobody is taking issue with the fact that humans that do not replicate do not pass on their genes They are taking issue with the ludicrous assertion that falling birth rates are "self correcting" because the offspring of people who do replicate are somehow genetically predisposed to have more children to "replace" them.
        benchmarkist 2y ago
        Either they'll have children or they won't and the ones who do will replace the ones who don't. It's like I said, whatever people perceive to be a problem is not actually a problem because it corrects itself without any interventions.
        amanaplanacanal 2y ago
        It depends on what you consider the problem to be. I personally didn't think there is a problem, but if you define the problem to be "population decline until there are no people left", your solution doesn't work. Unless maybe you consider other mammals to be people too.
        benchmarkist 2y ago
        I haven't defined any problems or solutions but certain people do seem to have defined the problem like you have. What I said specifically was that whatever people perceive to be a problem with the global human population is self-correcting (from a biological perspective) because those who voluntarily choose to not procreate will be replaced by those who are more than happy to have as many children as possible. If someone has a different perspective on this then they are welcome to make their version of the problem explicit and concrete and explain what exactly they propose as a valid intervention for fixing it. I suspect and am almost certain they have not thought about the issue as rigorously as they think and are simply parroting popular talking points they've seen and heard on social media platforms about the impending collapse of civilization caused by declining birth rates.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    The pool of replicators can prune itself in many ways (indeed, it must), but that doesn't mean that those prunings are having any effect on the pool of genes. The relative frequency of fertility-relevant alleles is just as likely to remain stable. It's called Hardy Weinberg equilibrium and it's the default state for large populations that are not experiencing predation or expanding into new niches.
    - benchmarkist 2y ago
      That's good to know.
- lmm 2y ago
  Personality traits are a whole lot more heritable than it's fashionable to admit.
  - Someone 2y ago
    Birth rate doesn’t seem to be very heritable, given the amount it can change over relatively short periods of time. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File%3A1910-_Fertility_rate_-_United_States.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File%3A1910-... shows it going from 8 around 1940 to 12 around 1957 and back down to 7 around 1972 in the USA.
- ashoeafoot 2y ago
  If you are barking mad ane propagate , i choose you, evopokemon
bawolff 2y ago
That's oversimplifying. Do the people who don't have children send resources to relatives who do? Making the family more succesful? Not to mention it isn't a binary really. There is a middle ground of simply having less children. A family that has a single child is still below replacement and quite different from a family with 5. Regardless, genes are still being passed on.
- benchmarkist 2y ago
  Sounds like you agree that there is no problem.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    If by problem you mean some variant of: humans are going to stop having babies and go extinct, then yes, i agree that is rediculous. However i disagree with the mechanism you propose. Having less children can be evolutionarily advantous in some circumtances. People will have less children when it makes sense, and have more children when conditions change and that make sense.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - benchmarkist 2y ago
      Great, it's always good to reach a clear resolution.
- elzbardico 2y ago
  Do you see this happening a lot on modern industrial societies?
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Modern industrial societies (with strong womens rights) are a relatively new thing. We'll adapt. Most likely by making it much easier to have and raise children so that educated, rich folks don't avoid it so long.
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
I believe you are describing the plot of Idiocracy.
- benchmarkist 2y ago
  I'm not making any value judgements. Intelligence is not necessary for replication.
Qem 2y ago
If natural selection were that effective, no species would ever go extinct. And yet most do. Relying on natural selection to shrug off problems is like making lottery tickets your retirement plan.
myrmidon 2y ago
Strongly disagree with that take. Genetics can only have a minor influence on number of offspring, because the genetic makeup of basically every industrialized nation did not change completely within 20 years. If there was no other factor apart from genetics, it is decidedly unclear if that could stabilize population numbers on its own. But it won't have to, almost for certain, because non-genetic mechanisms will balance this in all likelyhood ("organized" incentives from states and also emerging ressource over-supply), and those mechanisms will work MUCH faster than genetics ever could.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  He's not saying that genetics caused the problem, but that natural selection will solve the problem. Natural selection also need not be obviously genetic. For example certain religious groups maintain very healthy fertility rates, while secular populations tend to have quite poor fertility rates. So this logically leads to an outcome very few would intuitively expect - the percent of humanity that is religious will likely increase over the coming decades and centuries. Also collapsing populations will lead to resource scarcity. One of the many negatives of low fertility is that you end up with far more elderly than working age people. Any given market will also naturally decrease in size, all other things being equal. These factors, amongst others, will completely wreck economies which may well end up creating a vicious cycle against fertility. Another reason I think 'organized incentives' will be unlikely to achieve much is that Scandinavia had been at the forefront of fertility collapse in Europe and they have both an exremely strong social safety net as well as great minimum maternity benefits. Clearly there are other factors than economic inability driving people to go childless or to only have 1.
- Animats 2y ago
  Japan and France have tried incentives, with little effect. Japan is even cutting their social security payments to pay for increased subsidies for children.[1] France has a benefit scheme for parents with two or more children.[2] It's about EUR75 per month, so not that big. [1] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/06/3918e2481936-japan-enacts-child-care-law-to-tackle-declining-birthrate.html https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/06/3918e2481936-japa... [2] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F13213?lang=en https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F13213?...
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
In humans, memes are a stronger driver of fertility than genes. It is a self correcting problem, but that's because having more children than you can support is an antimeme. Even if they survive and reproduce, they won't pass on the "large family" trait.
wkat4242 2y ago
I don't think the predisposition to have children is genetic though. At least not mostly. It's more an effect of circumstances and living conditions. A lot of people just had kids as a retirement fund (basically still the case in poor countries) or because it was pushed on them by religion. Personally I just think it's just a lot of hassle and I don't think it adds much value to my life. Others will of course differ in opinion hugely. One thing is sure to me though, humanity isn't going to die out. Our planet is overpopulated as it is.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jvanderbot 2y ago

I believe we're in a correction period. All through history it was dangerous and debilitating for women to have children. As women's reproductive and voting rights and freedom increased (a nanosecond ago history wise), more couples self-selected out of that and if they had kids they had them later. Myself and my spouse included. Add to that - it's expensive and difficult to raise kids without support. Either you buy support or you neglect huge opportunities and say near parents. Right now, we pay more for our nanny than we do for our house, and combined both are pretty huge chunks of our income - and we're both fairly successful professionals. Eventually, there will be better resources for working couples to have kids. It's a fairly easy problem to solve: More childcare options, more housing supply (so its cheaper to live), and more childcare workers by e.g., reducing regulations and improving immigration policy. USA has no reason to do this - we have good demographics b/c of immigration and (frankly) Calthocism and its ilk. When I married into a catholic family I inherited 100s of cousins, and there's 1000s of relatives in our state now.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
> More childcare options, more housing supply (so its cheaper to live), and more childcare workers by e.g., reducing regulations and improving immigration policy. USA has no reason to do this - we have good demographics b/c of immigration and (frankly) Calthocism and its ilk. How do you square this with huge childcare costs in the US? The costs come from childcare ratios and liability, and those regulations are there for a reason. Where are all the workers going to come from? Won’t the growing and politically powerful old population want workers for their needs/wants?

Mistletoe 2y ago

Population shrinking is going to annihilate the current economic system we have where everyone puts their retirement into stocks. Then the shell-shocked people will be even more poor and unable to afford having children. You have to have new entrants to the pyramid to buy the stocks that the people all want to sell to finance their retirement. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-009-9179-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-009-9179-9 Places like Japan and Korea aren’t having the sort of birth rate turnaround you are discussing.

wkat4242 2y ago
The neocapitalist system needs to change anyway. As it's been going ever more wealth is ending up with ever fewer people and that can't possibly end well. It never has in history.

dustypotato 2y ago

There are very few if not zero number of countries going back to replacement levels after they fell from it. The world on average is getting richer and richer countries have falling birthrates

ANewFormation 2y ago

But you don't need to extrapolate. Current rates are far more than sufficient for catastrophe. It's merely that the effects of dangerously high fertility rates are immediate while the effects of dangerously low fertility tend to lag the advent of said reduction by around 60 years. So for instance Japan is still living the good times relative to what's yet to come since they collapsed in the 80s. South Korea hasn't even begun to really feel the consequences of their actions since they only collapsed in the 90s. And places like Finland or the Western world in general only collapsed even more recently. But collapsed they have. And because our fertile window in life, for women at least, closes long before we die - most, if not all, of these places will, unavoidably, see dramatic population declines, screwed age ratios (with consequent impacts on the labor/retiree pool/costs), shrinking economies, and so on. And we're left to rely on some ever smaller generation(s) down the line to start having large families in this context.

mountainb 2y ago
It will be "fixed" by just killing off old people in large numbers through some combination of high pressure euthanasia campaigns and denial of healthcare subsidies. Just no one wants to be honest about it. Our political culture is not a high integrity, high honesty culture but one that relies on a lot of indirect communication and symbolism. In this the west has become a lot more like east Asian stereotype. So in my view this crisis will be solved, just not in a way that people want to acknowledge. A lot of the nonserious "attempts" to address the issues are just performances to make it look like the facially palatable policies have been tried before they inevitably fail.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  It's not the most intuitive thing, but how long we live has no long term impact on population levels. Think about a fertility rate of one - this means each successive generation will be half the size of the one prior. This makes simplified population sims very simple because it's simply powers of 2. If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years. You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction. I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.