4 ms·

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

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.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Or just cut all the socialized medical programs old folks disproportionally rely on while telling everyone in the group that you aren’t. Hmm, which is what the current plan for the next US president seems to be….
  - ashoeafoot 2y ago
    It has. If you are born into work camp slave status, doomed to starve to keep the gerontocropolis warm, your motivation to put kids into that labour camp will be below zero.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  This is very topical in the UK at the moment, as Parliament has just voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its second reading in the Commons. What that means is that it will probably soon be possible for individuals who are slowly dying to request their own euthanasia. There has been a lot of debate in the press and online (and no doubt also in private across the whole country). The arguments range from the risks of potential cooercion to the morality of a 'coup de grâce'. Yet your point is also pertinent, as 'quality of life' often has as much to do with the quality of care as it does with the affliction itself, and quality of care is largely down to how much society pays for it.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    There's also many old people that are so demented they're just sitting in a chair drooling, totally unaware of their surroundings. They receive as much care as they can get but it's not really improving their quality of life. They basically exist only as a reminder for the people that knew them. I do think that euthanasia would make sense in these cases. The real person, their mind, has died a long time ago, it's just their body that lives on. Of course the decision should be up to these people (while they're still capacitated) and their family. It shouldn't be imposed on them. But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.
    - seabass-labrax 2y ago
      > But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that. In such a situation I'd be inclined to agree. I think my question is rather how many of the candidates for humane euthanasia would be in that condition if preventative healthcare was better. Clearly there will be some people whose conditions could not be prevented by any medical intervention, but cuts to healthcare funding would probably result in more people getting terminal illnesses in total. Witnessing the suffering of patients is a big part of reminding people why healthcare is important (which of course is why medical charities advertise in this way). Thus, personally, my chief concern is that compassionate euthanasia could end up hiding fixable problems in our healthcare system.
wkat4242 2y ago
The idea that populations always need to grow is so American. Or really religious in general, many religious groups in Europe also proclaim this. It's important to realise that this is the method of survival of religions, this is why it's so ingrained in their dogma. The organism of religion depends on it. However it's totally unsustainable. Sure, countries like Japan will have a tough time as the bulk of the ageing population matures but after that they will be in a better position for a stable occupancy. Less pressure on resources and housing, more ecological sustainability. Our planet really doesn't benefit from having many billions of us around. And many of the problems we see, like climate change and pollution, are a direct result of that.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  Fertility changes are exponential. They can be approximated (assuming a population with a common fertility rate among generations) as having a fertility_rate/2 scalar impact on population per 20 years. So imagine a fertility rate of 1. The scalar would be 1/2 so the population would declining by about 50% every 20 years. And this doesn't stop until you go extinct or start having more children. And you'd have to start having more children in the midst of economic collapse. So think about a period of just 80 years, a single human lifetime - that would be a decline of 1-(1/2)^4 = 15/16ths of your previous population. The US would go from 345 million to 22million, about the size of Sri Lanka or Chile. And you're right religious groups do retain healthy fertility rates, so we're bee-lining to a world where secular educated individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool, while highly religious, less educated individuals are thriving. Guess what the world would thus look like in the future and how concerned it might be with your issues of choice, like climate change. Children are essentially your voice in the future - have no children, have no voice.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  Which religious groups in Europe proclaim that populations always need to grow? I am not qualified to speak about America, but the claim does not ring true to me as a European. Even if they are promoting population growth, they must be doing a bad job of it. An article from 2015[1] shows that religious groups are shrinking quickly in Europe, and that their fertility rate is only slightly higher than that of the group of 'unaffiliated' individuals. The population growth in total is also slowing, if not actually on a downward trend[2]. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/europe/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/europe/ [2]: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-europe/ https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-e...
ashoeafoot 2y ago
Most woman in the free world, vote for oppression with their feet.

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.
- lazide 2y ago
  Or just cut all the socialized medical programs old folks disproportionally rely on while telling everyone in the group that you aren’t. Hmm, which is what the current plan for the next US president seems to be….
- ashoeafoot 2y ago
  It has. If you are born into work camp slave status, doomed to starve to keep the gerontocropolis warm, your motivation to put kids into that labour camp will be below zero.
seabass-labrax 2y ago
This is very topical in the UK at the moment, as Parliament has just voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its second reading in the Commons. What that means is that it will probably soon be possible for individuals who are slowly dying to request their own euthanasia. There has been a lot of debate in the press and online (and no doubt also in private across the whole country). The arguments range from the risks of potential cooercion to the morality of a 'coup de grâce'. Yet your point is also pertinent, as 'quality of life' often has as much to do with the quality of care as it does with the affliction itself, and quality of care is largely down to how much society pays for it.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  There's also many old people that are so demented they're just sitting in a chair drooling, totally unaware of their surroundings. They receive as much care as they can get but it's not really improving their quality of life. They basically exist only as a reminder for the people that knew them. I do think that euthanasia would make sense in these cases. The real person, their mind, has died a long time ago, it's just their body that lives on. Of course the decision should be up to these people (while they're still capacitated) and their family. It shouldn't be imposed on them. But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    > But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that. In such a situation I'd be inclined to agree. I think my question is rather how many of the candidates for humane euthanasia would be in that condition if preventative healthcare was better. Clearly there will be some people whose conditions could not be prevented by any medical intervention, but cuts to healthcare funding would probably result in more people getting terminal illnesses in total. Witnessing the suffering of patients is a big part of reminding people why healthcare is important (which of course is why medical charities advertise in this way). Thus, personally, my chief concern is that compassionate euthanasia could end up hiding fixable problems in our healthcare system.

wkat4242 2y ago

The idea that populations always need to grow is so American. Or really religious in general, many religious groups in Europe also proclaim this. It's important to realise that this is the method of survival of religions, this is why it's so ingrained in their dogma. The organism of religion depends on it. However it's totally unsustainable. Sure, countries like Japan will have a tough time as the bulk of the ageing population matures but after that they will be in a better position for a stable occupancy. Less pressure on resources and housing, more ecological sustainability. Our planet really doesn't benefit from having many billions of us around. And many of the problems we see, like climate change and pollution, are a direct result of that.

ANewFormation 2y ago
Fertility changes are exponential. They can be approximated (assuming a population with a common fertility rate among generations) as having a fertility_rate/2 scalar impact on population per 20 years. So imagine a fertility rate of 1. The scalar would be 1/2 so the population would declining by about 50% every 20 years. And this doesn't stop until you go extinct or start having more children. And you'd have to start having more children in the midst of economic collapse. So think about a period of just 80 years, a single human lifetime - that would be a decline of 1-(1/2)^4 = 15/16ths of your previous population. The US would go from 345 million to 22million, about the size of Sri Lanka or Chile. And you're right religious groups do retain healthy fertility rates, so we're bee-lining to a world where secular educated individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool, while highly religious, less educated individuals are thriving. Guess what the world would thus look like in the future and how concerned it might be with your issues of choice, like climate change. Children are essentially your voice in the future - have no children, have no voice.
seabass-labrax 2y ago
Which religious groups in Europe proclaim that populations always need to grow? I am not qualified to speak about America, but the claim does not ring true to me as a European. Even if they are promoting population growth, they must be doing a bad job of it. An article from 2015[1] shows that religious groups are shrinking quickly in Europe, and that their fertility rate is only slightly higher than that of the group of 'unaffiliated' individuals. The population growth in total is also slowing, if not actually on a downward trend[2]. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/europe/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/europe/ [2]: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-europe/ https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-e...

ashoeafoot 2y ago

Most woman in the free world, vote for oppression with their feet.