For e.g NOx with a high half-life, you are probably right that we are still increasing pollution. For short half-life pollutants like SO2 and CO, I would expect this means the actual atmospheric levels are decreasing.
Yes, we should change the units to have a more rational approach, that doesn't boil down to a new version of first world colonialism that tells the undeveloped world they missed the boat and now can't catch up because we've already wrecked the environment on their behalf.
So, if you want to care about the environment, and the state of the developed world, you're going to need to allow for compromise to exist. If you refuse this compromise, yes, you are incidentally approaching the same outcome the eugenicists want.
> that doesn't boil down to a new version of first world colonialism that tells the undeveloped world they missed the boat and now can't catch up because we've already wrecked the environment on their behalf.
When the first world started burning oil and coal, solar panels and nuclear reactors didn't exist. Now they do, and undeveloped countries don't have to invent them again in order to use them. This is cheaper than what first world countries have to do because they don't have to pay to build a coal-fired power plant only to shut it down while it's still functional and build a solar farm to replace it. They can just start with the solar farm.
There is 1 single earth, its not getting bigger nor smaller. Dont know about you but I couldnt care less about some pollution per capita or similar. What about pollution per km2, or m3 of water? Nobody is stating goal is 0 or we failed.
Not sure why you try to divert discussion that way, its too obvious and not working.
We have on a small scale. Methane is escaping as the permafrost thaws. Boreal forests are also burning down as their climate warms. Reduction in polar ice changes the albedo of the earth to reflect less heat.
At a certain point sufficient warming could trigger a cascade. So far we haven't done that, but it's incorrect to say there's been no release of stored CO2.
Agree, but it’s like hurling toward a brick wall at 100mph instead of previously 110mph and saying “we’ve reached peak risk”. Sounds a lot better than “we’re braking but currently we are still going to hit the wall and life expectancy of passengers still currently is measured in second”, but what we need is to push people to brake more, not sugar coat the situation.
Doesn’t really matter here, I’m talking about the pollution the article is referring to. I am simply discussing the concept of reaching a peak in pollution vs. a peak in emission of the same pollutants.
Putting the above aside though, I would disagree. Everything is subjective except math (and even there, I think there’s a debate), but I would definitely not classify pollution as _highly_ subjective, that makes it sound it belongs to the category of things that particularly lack consensus, which is definitely not the case amongst the scientific community. Not to say there’s 100% agreement on all things, but I think there’s a broad consensus.
I’m no climate scientist but I would think it’s similar to toxicity/poisoning. You can die from water intoxication but certainly you need it to live as well. So no, I don’t think it’s subjective. It seems to me that if something is capable of causing harm in a certain amount, it’s poisonous/pollution/toxic.
Can't say for sure until another few years have passed, nonetheless every country in the world has coal on hold or in decline save for India and China.
China is the largest producer of renewable technology and energy (?), India is building out the worlds largest solat array farm (albeit "only" good for 16 million households).
China still builds more coal power, but they intend to use it only as a backup for when renewables are not producing enough. The YouTube channel Just Have a Think did a video on China's energy future recently, highly recommend checking it out (sorry for not linking directly, writing on my phone).
China has domestic coal reserves, so they build coal. It's the same reason as West Virginia and just as bad.
If you have any amount of energy storage then the time delay doesn't matter. You turn on the alternate generation method when the storage is starting to run down. It doesn't matter if it takes an hour to come up to temperature because you still have two hours of storage left.
The actual problem is that "shortfall" is a relative concept. Do you have to burn coal because it's cloudy all week, or just because you spent a lot of resources building coal-fired power plants instead of solar panels or wind turbines or nuclear reactors? How often are you going to run the things?
The economics of building and maintaining an entire fleet of coal power plants to use only in a demand emergency is extremely poor. Like you're better off spending half the money on nuclear reactors you can run 100% of the time and the other half on electrifying transportation so you can have a huge demand buffer in the form of vehicle batteries and then get people who only drive a few miles per day to delay their charging by a few days through pricing because a full charge lasts them three weeks anyway.
If you don't want to be dependent on foreign gas (in case you want to invade a neighbor for example) and you have coal at home it makes a lot of sense.
In the same way that your local power plant isn't solely responsible for the pollution created in heating surrounding homes, it's probably not reasonable to look at the places that have done the fabricating, weaving, injection molding, spinning, etc for the rest of the world as being the major center of pollution.
China specifically is decarbonizing fast, and at some expense to their own economy over the last decade or so.
Regarding China: China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Construction began on 70 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in China, up four-fold since 2019, says GEM's annual report on the global coal power industry China started construction on 70.2 GW of new coal-power capacity last year, almost 20 times the rest of the world's 3.7 GW.
That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.” https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants#....
By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year. IE adding ~20GW in December has 1/12th impact in 2023, but it’s now online for the next ~25 years. Which is why some predictions have China using less coal in 2024 despite bringing new power plants online in 2023.
China alone represents 30% of the world’s electricity production/consumption so it has real impact, but they just don’t have the natural gas supplies which the US has used to ween itself off coal.
Apparently part of the issue is that the Chinese grid is very badly managed.
They can build physical grid connections much more easily than we can manage (for the usual values of “we”), but they manage interprovincial transmission according to fixed schedules rather than responding to demand.
Undoing dumb rules that favour existing vested interests is hard everywhere.
I mean, the US doesn't exactly cover itself in glory in its own utility regulations. "cost-of-service" regulation means that monopoly utilities are allowed to charge such that they make a regulated rate of return on the cost of providing the service. So the more they increase their costs, the more money they are permitted to make!
"Relatively easy" is a poor phrasing choice on my part. It's still very hard, but it's one of the easiest in a list of really hard tasks. Solving climate change involves a lot of really hard problems.
Also critically they don’t have to build these coal plant to be economically used in the same way as free market states do. They’re building them mostly as a hedge - if they end up barely used , which is likely given renewable trends, that’s ok for state owned power. It makes everything a bit more expensive, but you can’t exactly vote for an alternative.
If they need to get used a lot for whatever reason, no one is unhappy either, you avoid shortages and discontent.
Whereas coal stopped being built in market economies roughly as soon as it became uneconomical.
If a state gov made choices that made power way more expensive than it should be, and people get upset enough it theoretically could hurt them in an election. I realize this hasn’t happened in California but it’s possible
> That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.
That doesn't sound all that misleading then? If they've installed 20 times more coal generating capacity than the rest of the world and are operating it 50% of the time then they're still adding 10 times more emissions than the rest of the world combined, and that's assuming the rest of the world will all be operating their coal-fired power plants fully 100% of the time.
> By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year.
217 GW of nameplate capacity or of average generation? These are very different numbers for solar because of the low capacity factor.
China is simultaneously also adding much more solar, wind and nuclear power than any other country, plus much of the new coal construction is also meant to replace old, horrifically inefficient/polluting ones.
Also China's population are moving from the frozen north to the warm south, construction standards are increasing (better insulation), cooking is being outsourced (fewer kitchens), and they lead the world in mass transit / ride hailing / vehicle sharing / portable e-vehicle (scooter/wheel types). China has possibly reached peak personal vehicle. Local governments frequently spray water along main roads to bring down air pollution levels - surprisingly effective for PM2.5 - and most cities are pushing industrial land use far out of town.
If I am not mistaken, a good portion of these newly constructed coal plants are meant to replace existing ones that are obsolete and inefficient. It would be hard to judge its impact on net pollution without relevant data on plants retired.
I think the characterization that a turning point has occurred is perfectly supportable.
The article never even tried to say anything other than that it only just barely happened 11 minutes ago and a few metrics metrics don't show a clear past peak yet.
Do you believe what you wrote here is a constructive, insightful comment? The comment you are replying to addressed that even India and China are building renewables.
It requires very little energy for you to spread negativity but potentially thousands of people then have to internalize it. Why choose to do that?
Like burning coal, your negativity pollutes the environment of HN and the internet at large.
Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly. I had always thought that low birth rates were a problem for only countries like Germany, Spain, Japan, etc. (at least for the time being).
Seeing countries like India even out (and even going under replacement rate) gives me some heavy pessimism about population graying. I had always thought that heavy swingers like them would carry on the whole growing population thing for a good few more decades.
Looks like we're more or less on a crash course in the next few decades, especially with lifespans moving as they are.
I've seen estimates on Earth's carrying capacity range form less than a billion to a trillion, all just depending on what you think technology and science can do in the future (think massive arcologies, super efficent AIs, giant space solar panels, and advanced molecular nanotech), and how resilient nature is.
What can be said with confidence is that the Earth currently grows enough food to support 10 billion people, when some people back in the 60s and 70s predicted massive starvation and shortages would have happened long before that.
We still won't reach peak population until 2060 at the earliest, and more likely around 2100. [1] has a good graph by region on page 4, and a graph for world population near the end. Most regions haven't reached their population peak yet and subsaharan Africa is still growing strongly.
Of course a lot of this is just delayed by higher life expectancies. Aging populations will require major social reforms in our lifetime, and I don't think society is really prepared
I think you're looking at peak population, while they are talking about peak number of children. According to some reports, the number of children has already peaked[1]. The remaining growth is just momentum from past births.
People live for 80-100 years, so the population will gradually tick up. But once the very top-heavy global population pyramid begins to die off, things get extremely ugly, extremely quickly. In our lifetimes, we are going to see a horrific amount of elder poverty.
Countries like India, all of South East Asia, all of LatAm, a good amount of North Africa... all below replacement and falling fast. Argentina's incoming preschool class in 2024 is 30% smaller than the class of 2020. That's how quickly this is happening.
The key phrase in your problem statement is "more value", which assumes that all value can be projected onto a single axis. Typically [1], this means that you can assign a dollar value to any change in the physical world [2].
The "debate" for many people is whether this simplistic economic model can be used at all. They say that value is multi-dimensional, and those value dimensions are not fungible. Concretely, if making a medicine factory results in the extinction of a specie, you can't say that it is okay, because the benefit of the former is incomparable to the loss of the latter.
Coming to population, more humans mean more destruction of ecosystems. And it is not clear whether destroying ecosystems can be fungibly compared to the additional human economic value those extra humans create. It's not about more or less, it the incomparability of the two.
[1] but not necessarily what you meant
[2] Just to be clear, the economics discipline already has a wealth of research that humans cannot in fact consistently assign absolute or relative dollar values to the same thing. Yet our political-economy and popular conceptions have this as a central assumption.
Thanks for putting this so well, I think that is the divide as well. I've struggled to express this idea without being too offensive to the "liability" camp but i think you've made it more clear and less emotionally charged
The way the burdens and assets scale is non-linear. There's no reason to expect that we always or never want the population to go up, regardless of current population.
And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very very fast. The burdens are really piling up.
I'm not saying we need less population at present.
I'm just saying that at some point the cost outweighs the benefit. And humanity has been trying pretty hard to go toward that point.
Do you really think it will always, always be better to have more people? If you say no to this, then you don't get to say we're on different sides of the line. If you say yes, then you need to explain how that's physically possible.
Not that there is anything wrong with disagreeing with me on this.
Two point as a taste:
1. One way more people is always better is in invention. Ten billon heads invent more than one.
2. People always worry that with more people there will be food shortage. They are also always empirically wrong. Because food is made by people! Twice as many people means twice as many farmers!
Inventions are great but they can only do so much to improve land use.
I don't think we even have a way to put one billion people to work on optimized farms. More labor won't lead to more full mouths.
As an example of costs catching up, going from 20% of land to 30% of land needing to be optimized farms used to feed people directly? That's easy enough, and those numbers would support more people than we have today. Going from 80% to 90%, however, is extremely worrying. And we could go from the former to the latter and past it very fast too.
“Number of humans” is a nonsensical metric because it doesn’t acknowledge the systems that humans comprise. For example, we depend on the young to earn/work and the middle aged to earn/work/invest to support the old/disabled. What happens when there are fewer young people, and then fewer middle aged people, to support the old /disabled not in just a few pockets of the world but in many countries all at once is still very much unknown.
It’s not the number of humans, it’s the age distribution of those humans + where they live.
Put another way: you can “feel” like the world needs fewer people, but you’re probably not going to like what your world looks like when that desire comes true.
> The issue is that a lot of countries have based everything around growth, including population
And it is very, very ,very clear this is a horribly stupid and shortsighted thing to do. It is simply impossible to have constant growth, clearly it is unsustainable.
The system HAS to change. It might be from a slow and steady decline, or it might be a very abrupt change, but it's going to change one way or another.
Yeah, I've never understood the panic over a declining birth rate. Are we to be scared that long after we're all dead and gone there would only be several billion humans on this planet?
The concern is increasing taxation of the young, productive population to sustain the old, non productive population causing political turmoil and decreasing national competitiveness on the global scale.
Clearly the old people of the future(us) will fight for their pensions in the thunderdome. Which also perfectly explains a lot of the ads I got recently about very muscular old guys
Really, they will fight in the voting booth. Imagine US politics right now, but the boomer generation is 3x as big. That is going to be reality in most democracies in the next 20-40 years.
Good point, young people just out of college who have lived off of their parents and the government for a quarter of a century might get upset about having to support non-productive people.
People will finally figure out that they're only productive for about a half their lives, and that it's not just the last quarter that they need help with, it's also the first.
The real problem is the transition period where there are more unproductive people than not, because the stock of existing people is still here. That's why a crashing population is bad.
The question is if the complex society we have built actually requires growth to maintain it. In other words, our society requires 0.6 lives of work rather than 0.5.
If this is the case, even a steady state would mean a lowered standard of living.
It's hard to know, as our societies have decided to reduce costs on the front end (lowered birth rate) rather than on the back end (decreased longevity). That's understandable as someone who is never born doesn't suffer, but it's the worse solution from a social maintenance standpoint.
The impact won't just be after we're dead, we're simply going to have less warm bodies to provide us care when we're seniors and retired than exist today. Schemes like social security, pensions, etc which are financed by new entrants into the system will also become fiscally unviable and benefits WILL be reduced.
Population increase (and the increase of its increase) has always been a constant for as long as I've lived so yes I suppose. I don't think we are prepared for the spout of working-age people to start slowing down (especially with the population of the elderly only getting higher).
Assuming we only get this planet though, I suppose it couldn't've gone like this forever haha.
it's scary because our form of capitalism (growth capitalism) is not the right type of capitalism for that situation. And, policymakers don't seem to fully grasp that you need to prepare ahead for demographic shifts (for example, china deciding to try to goose population growth by substituting one-child for "please make the state three+ babies" as if that doesn't only help after at least two decades)
Humanity will eventually go extinct, but birth rates would need to decline much further or stay this for a very long time before it’s a meaningful issue.
Further, people alive in 2300 will be decedents of people who chose to have kids generation after generation despite living in an industrialized environment. That self selection both in terms of DNA and culture means a population bounce back becomes increasingly likely over time especially as fewer people means less pollution and less competition for resources.
Humanity might even end up cycling through industrialization, collapse, hunter gatherers, agriculture, industrialization, multiple times before settling on some stable equilibrium. You just can’t extrapolate exponential curves indefinitely when they depend on the population size.
I mean yeah. Not existing has a utility value of 0. You can make the same argument for people who don't exist yet. Is it infinite utility to go around as a government and force people to pump out 100 babies a year? Since not existing is so bad?
TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV, since the optimal solution seems relentless expansionism like a virus.
> I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV
I do, because second-person collectively-singular Humanity is a living thing all its own, and the more humans there are the more alive We are. Your argument is the anthropological equivalent of “640K ought to be enough for anybody”.
Having more than 640Kb of RAM isn't a good in of itself, it's only good in that applications arose which required more RAM.
Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's something that needs higher population.
I don't see how higher population necessarily makes humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems like saying that an individual human is more human if they weigh more.
So by the tyranny of exponential growth, we should just start building massive breeding factories and forceably enslaving people randomly matching them to have children? Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.
In your world governments forceably breed humans like chickens in massive factory farms churning out people to the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't want to live there and I sure as hell don't find it moral.
Why not encourage through policy and taxation changes? Invest in culture that promotes. Restructure society to encourage having babies at an earlier age.
Since that's nearly certainly less efficient at population expansion compared to physical violence. Conservatively, modern humans seem to settle at having 2~4 children per woman but historically it was not uncommon to have families of size exceeding 10.
The whole point is that if you accept the fact that expanding population is good a priori, this leads to stupid conclusions by the tyranny of exponential growth. Who cares if the average person is a slave when you have several hundred billion of them. Who cares if mothers die horribly after being forced to carry child after child.
Personally I think the only consistent viewpoint is some form of logarithmic population * average well being metric to measure utility. From that perspective, I have no clue how a policy maker should act today. Hopefully smarter minds than mine figure it out!
> Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.
Maybe if you're evil enough to not care about any individual human's quality of life. Is there a word for the logical fallacy where you argue against the most absurd possible interpretation of a person's beliefs in order to feel no guilt for disregarding them?
The idea is that due to exponential growth, amortized over long enough times, the utility of a person's happiness right now is 0 compared to the utility of filling the planet with lets say hundreds of billions of people with barely alive standards of living. Even if an individual persons life is 100x worse than present day, it doesn't matter since there are billions more of them.
This is the standard issue with any aggregate utilitarianism theories of morality.
Conventional wisdom on population growth is that it’s a solved problem and that the population will inevitably stabilize or decline. I say let’s not count our chickens just yet. There are still countries and groups where the growth rate hasn’t stabilized at all, and even if these are small today, exponential growth means they soon won’t be. Population growth will continue until everyone agrees it shouldn’t.
Due to the dynamics of demography, a population is either exponentially growing or exponentially shrinking. A stable population is an unrealistic goal.
You’ll have to provide a lot more context for this to be believable. Maybe it is an unrealistic goal for animals who aren’t interested in having a stable global population.
Note the "current population" factor in that. As long as the number of births depends on the current population (i.e. anyone has a chance to give birth), this equation will result in an exponential curve. If the fertility rate is greater than replacement rate (that "deaths" term that I've handwaved away), the population will exponentially grow. If it's less than the replacement rate, the population will exponentially decay. But it is necessarily exponential, because it's a constant rate multiplied by the current population, and if you remember your calculus, an exponential is defined by a constant growth rate.
There's a whole subfield of population dynamics, and I remember lots and lots of predator/prey models, resource constraint models, etc. from my applied calculus class. Some of those do have non-exponential growth curves, eg. a basic 2-species predator/prey model gives rise to sinusoidal population curves as the increase in prey leads to an increase in predators, which results in more of the prey being killed and eaten, which results in a decrease of food, which results in the predators dying off. But what they all have in common is death rates that are proportional to some function of the current population. In other words, you have to kill off proportionally more of the current population based on how many people they are, something which would be ethically unacceptable to most humans. If you just have natural deaths (i.e. a death rate proportional to Pop(t - life expectancy)), you always get either exponential growth or exponential decay, because that's the way the math works.
I suppose there was one other population curve that gives a sigmoid function (i.e. a logistic curve that asymptotically approaches a limit but never reaches it). This is what you get when there is a natural resource limit to giving birth, i.e. when instead of births being fertility rate * total population, it's fertility rate * (exponentially decreasing fraction of the population). Many people find this scenario ethically challenging as well: in plain English, it means that only the elite can afford to have kids, or alternatively - cap the number of houses so that only the top X families can have a house and raise a child, and then create social stigma around having kids when you cannot afford those increasingly scarce markers of stability. It is disturbingly close to reality, though.
Right, but what most people mean by stable population is a population that doesn’t fluctuate outside of a range. A population that grows and shrinks but has some kind of negative feedback that causes it to oscillate around a value, is stable enough, even if the local behavior of the curve is exponential.
That sort of sinusoidally oscillating population is certainly possible, but be careful what you wish for. The negative feedback, as far as population is concerned, is "death". Before the exponentially-growing post-Industrial population, we'd have periodic wars/famines/plagues that result from the population of an area outgrowing its local carrying capacity. That's not generally considered a good thing.
Death is not the only thing to inevitably reduce population - there's also taxes. As in, give subsidies to childbearers in eras where the population is too low, and take them away when the population gets too high.
The problem with taxes & subsidies is that their discriminatory power is not as great as policy makers would like to believe. They tend to either not work at all, or they work too well and overshoot the target. (This is the issue with many other economic interventions as well.)
Economists like to pretend that everything is a continuous function of price, but this very rarely reflects real markets. Most utility functions are step functions; there is some point at which changing your behavior becomes economical, and above it everybody switches, while below it nobody switches. People can either afford to raise a child in the lifestyle they expect, or they can't - and many of the sacrifices in lifestyle don't move the needle in fundamental living costs. For having a child, that point appears to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you make childcare and college free and give 2 years of maternity leave and ensure that you can buy a 3BR+ house on an average income, then sure middle-class people will start having kids again. All the middle class people will start having kids again, because they all face the same economic constraints. And then you'll have fertility > 2 again, and the population will start exponentially growing.
You could have a large per-child subsidy and cap at 2, but this also is a lot harder to generate the desired effect than expected. Accidental pregnancies are a thing. Twins are a thing. Infertility is a thing. Careers are a thing. People who want to remain childfree regardless of cost are a thing. If you cap at 2, you'll get a fertility rate under 2 because of all these other considerations.
And this is what's playing out empirically across many countries right now. A lot of European countries have generous subsidies for childbearing; they still find that they can't raise the fertility rate above 1.5 or so. China lifted its one-child only policy, moving it to 2 children in 2016 and 3 children in 2021, and finds that fertility still collapsed (even after instituting subsidies) and they can't convince people to have babies. There are significant non-monetary costs to parenthood; it's a whole other lifestyle, and the money involved needs to be pretty large to alter that.
Luckily there are many fertility rates that are indistinguishable from "stable population" over a span of a couple generations, say 100 years or so. That means there is plenty of time for policy shifts to incentivize or disincentivize having children.
At current fertility rates, Europe's population is going to halve in 3 generations, and who remains is going to be quite old on average. I don't know your age, but if you're young enough this will happen within your lifetime. It's not a distant and abstract problem.
I am not accounting for immigration of course, but from the wider point of view, immigration is musical chairs. Sri Lanka is well below replacement and still falling fast. Who is going to immigrate there? Ditto for most other countries.
It’s nothing about agreement. Everywhere has declining birth rates once they hit a modern standard of living for at least a couple of generations. Not because people think fewer children are a good idea, but because having many children in modern world is unpleasant and very few want more than two.
I think it mostly has to do with increasing desires for a high standard of living when it becomes possible and the pressure of high density cities making lots of kids an unattractive prospect.
While we do observe a trend towards lower fertility rates as wealth/health/modernity increases, this isn’t universal. For example, there is a big gap between the fertility rates of religious and non-religious people in the arguably modern USA. It only takes one such group to carry on the tradition of exponential growth.
There is a lot of panic over shrinking population where people project it out 1000 years and find there are only like 5 people left in the world.
Steady state population should be the long term goal, at least until we start moving into orbital colonies or something. But unfortunately that's an anathema to growth oriented economies which makes it the bad guy in economics and politics.
At fertility rates of 1.6, it takes just 25 generations for the global population to go from 8 billion to 900k. Just 10 generations for the global population to drop below 1 billion. Pretty scary stuff.
assuming fertility rates stay constant, which they rarely have. 250 years is a lot of time for things to change. (and of course there's no need for fertility rates to grow to as high as they have been historically, due to the massive drop in child mortality).
The issue isn't just the total number, it's the demography. The population is getting very old at a breakneck speed. I'm not sure how healthcare and pensions are supposed to be provided for old people when the tax base gets smaller and smaller every year. The end result is pretty terrible elder poverty.
Not to mention the changing political dynamics of having a lot of old people outnumber younger people by 2 or 3 times in the voting booth. The gerontocracy is bad enough now. Imagine it 3x worse.
Looks fine to me. What's your definition of "old" here? Are you specifically worried about Korea like you mentioned in another post?
I'd worry about the implications of a global 1.6 birthrate if they were actually going to happen. I don't think that's very likely, though. I don't know if we're even going to get down to 2.
Since the mid 1980s, the median age in Italy has gone from 34 to 46 and the trend is accelerating. This is despite massive immigration. Expect this to happen everywhere in the next 40 years. India and China are already below replacement. All of LatAm, Europe, and South East Asia as well.
Unless someone thinks of a democratic, scalable solution it's going to be a lot of pain for a lot of people for a long time.
This is exactly my point. People assume that human behavior won't change if the population starts shrinking noticeably, especially if that shrinkage results in reduced housing pressures.
Moving to orbital colonies won't save you in the long term if growth remains exponential. You can expand at most in a sphere growing at the speed of light so at O(t^3). Eventually the O(c^t) population growth will outpace the rate of expansion.
I mean Japan hasn't been doing great but it's been doing fine, so I don't think the end of growth has to mean anything but a period of stagnation. The economy will be fine.
Korea also has a cultural practice of extreme ageism. So much so that the elderly are frequently impoverished to the point of food insecurity and committing suicide by jumping from bridges.
I think your source's claim that "The planet will never see more babies than it has in 2013" is open to question.
To just use the US as an example: mainstream Americans have a declining fertility rate, and we have no reason to think that is going to reverse in the foreseeable future. Immigrants have higher fertility, but they tend to converge to the mainstream after a generation or two. So, that seems to support the article's contention, at least for the US – and if we look at other countries, we observe things are broadly similar, so that in turn supports that contention for the planet as a whole.
However, we also observe in the US small, ultra-conservative religious minorities, such as the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who still have a high fertility rate, and also have high youth retention (80-90% of their children will stay in the group as adults). Now, even though these groups are a tiny percentage of the population, the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3 centuries, they could be the majority of the US population, which could then result in a national baby boom. And, eventually, as they spread across the globe (they exist to varying degrees in other countries too), a global baby boom. So 2013's "peak baby" may end up being surpassed.
Of course, there is no guarantee that is going to happen – maybe they'll get to a certain size, and then they'll stop growing. And of course, it is physically impossible to sustain exponential growth indefinitely. However, it remains a possible future that they won't stop growing until after they've gotten so big that 2013 turns out not to be the year of "peak baby" after all. Maybe it will actually be 2213 or 2313 instead. Our descendants (if one happens to have them) will find out.
> Maybe it will actually be 2213 or 2313 instead. Our descendants (if one happens to have them) will find out.
Peak-anything is just shorthand for "the first peak on record" because our culture and ability to record-keep has only really existed in a population and resource boom period.
I agree that circumstances might mean that the global peak baby might be 200-300 years away, but the thing that makes the current round of peak-anything relevant is that we don't know how our social and economic systems will function when certain things are in long-term decline (even if they do pick up again in a few hundred years).
If we knew what a few centuries of low birth rates or low oil consumption looked like, we wouldn't be nearly as interested in what "peak-those-things" means, the same way we're not all that interested in specific market peaks because we understand the boom/bust cycles and long-term productivity increases, etc.
> Peak-anything is just shorthand for "the first peak on record" because our culture and ability to record-keep has only really existed in a population and resource boom period.
Humans are presumably always going to want babies. There's nothing to really replace them.
On the other hand, coal/oil/pollution all seem highly likely to be a transient phase of industrialization. There's no reason to think we should ever go back to burning coal or oil once we have renewables.
Oil is tricky in that we do like plastic and there's no obvious alternate material, but the amount of oil needed for plastic will be minuscule compared to the amount of oil burned as we bootstrap to renewable energy sources.
> the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3 centuries, they could be the majority of the US population
It's so unhelpful to speculate about what the world will be like 100 years from now.
Think about what things were like in the 1920's and how unrecognizable the world is by comparison. Then, consider that technology is being developed significantly more quickly than it was in the 1920's.
> the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3 centuries,
I don't know if any realm of human sciences where extrapolating exponential growth yields trustworthy results, outside maybe of wealth accumulation, and even then not for 2 centuries.
I never claimed that it is inevitable that they'll sustain their current growth rate for the next 2-3 centuries, only that it is entirely possible. And I don't see why it wouldn't be. If you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York/New Jersey, I don't see how they'd hit any natural barriers to their continued growth until they are many times larger than they are now, at which point they'd be a serious challenger for becoming the population majority.
The main ways it might not happen would be if either (1) they (gradually or suddenly) abandon their current culture for a less fertile one, (2) mainstream society persecutes them sufficiently. Both are entirely possible, but neither is anywhere near certain.
The situation for the (Old Order) Amish is more difficult, since – unlike ultra-Orthodox Jews – they'll run out of enough land to sustain their agrarian lifestyle, and will have to transition to a more urban one. While the more urban lifestyle of ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrates it is possible for insular high fertility religious minorities to exist in an urban setting, there is a real risk that they might lose their fertility and/or their insularity in the process.
Also, people often bring up the problem Israel has with many ultra-Orthodox Jews not working and relying on government subsidies to live. That is much less of a problem in the US than it is in Israel, so the sustainability of that lifestyle is less of a barrier to future growth in the US than it is in Israel. Furthermore, the fact they manage to grow so much in the US without doing that, means being forced to stop doing that isn't necessarily going to stop their growth in Israel either.
Consider a place like Kiryas Joel, New York: in the 2000 census it had a population of 13,138; by 2010 it had grown to 20,175 (a 53.6% increase over the decade); by 2020 it had grown to 32,954 (a 63.3% increase over the decade); the US Census Bureau’s 2022 estimate is 38,998 - 18.3% in only two years. The vast majority of that growth is due to births not migration. It is now the largest municipality in its county, and also its MSA - in 2023, the White House renamed the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown MSA to the Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh MSA, in recognition that it has overtaken Poughkeepsie proper as the MSA’s most populous municipality (although greater Poughkeepsie is still larger)
And Kiryas Joel is expanding in its de facto area: as its spiritual leader, Satmar Rebbe Aron Teitelbaum likes to say, its “holy borders” go further than its legal boundaries under New York state law, although very likely the legal boundaries will at some point grow too. And, there are similar ultra-Orthodox communities in other parts of New York state, and also in New Jersey (especially Lakewood)
Ultra-orthodox communities (like everyone else in the modern world, with vanishingly few exceptions) are entirely dependent on the broader society/economy. Under the implausible scenario where they approached a majority of the population, they'd inevitably (a) diffuse much more broadly into the rest of the population, and (b) make their current set of organizing practices unsustainable, without any persecution involved.
Of course they are going to have to change as they grow. The question is how big the changes will be.
We already see this in Israel - a big increase in Haredi women pursuing secular careers. In other communities worldwide, that development ended up significantly undermining the patriarchal culture and producing a demographic transition to lower fertility. But, will it necessarily have the same consequences for the Haredim? We will have to wait and see: maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Precedent would suggest the Haredim won’t be able to avoid that outcome, but the situation on the ground suggests that maybe they will
I’m not claiming any of this is inevitable, only possible, plausible. Nobody knows for certain what the future holds-we shall find out
Almost anything is "possible", but this seems entirely implausible, based on extrapolation that goes at least an order of magnitude beyond anything supportable by evidence or careful argument. Can you name any other examples of this happening throughout history, in the US or anywhere else, where a completely self-isolated tiny minority group took power and displaced everyone through "out-procreating" them?
To be honest I really dislike this kind of vague speculative fearmongering when targeted at specific minority groups, which seems extremely dangerous. It historically blends right into overt bigotry and sectarian oppression.
The US has a long, proud tradition of all sorts of unusual sects and cults trying to do their own thing, often in somewhat closed communities, sometimes to the dismay of their neighbors, sometimes failing pretty badly, but usually without really breaking fair laws or causing serious mischief to anyone else (but also occasionally breaking a lot of laws and hurting people; the police should go after such cults). We all owe quite a few of the rights we take for granted to the hard struggle of some of these groups to make their own choices.
>Can you name any other examples of this happening throughout history, in the US or anywhere else, where a completely self-isolated tiny minority group took power and displaced everyone through "out-procreating" them?
Kiryas Joel NY, Lakewood NJ, certain parts of Brooklyn. They basically have their own government, and they have far less state government oversight due to politicians not wanting to go against them.
They drive around NYC with vehicles that look like cop cars, acting like cops, which would get most other groups charged with impersonating a government official. They elect themselves to the school board and vote to prioritize funding for their group’s children, and deprioritize funding for any other group’s children. Etc etc.
Not that they are the only group to have done it, but these are your easy to google examples.
> To be honest I really dislike this kind of vague speculative fearmongering when targeted at specific minority groups, which seems extremely dangerous. It historically blends right into overt bigotry and sectarian oppression.
Basically, I'm repeating the contention of sociologist Eric Kaufmann's book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth–that in the long-run religious (ultra-)conservatives will dominate due to high birth and retention rates.
It isn't "fearmongering", because that assumes one is presenting a takeover by religious conservatives as negative. One might view it as positive. One might view it as neutral. I'm not presenting any value judgement of it here.
The contention isn't about any religious group in particular, it is about ultra-conservative religious groups in general. Ultra-Orthodox Jews happen to be the clearest example of the phenomenon, but there are other candidates – Old Order Amish, Latin Mass Roman Catholics, Salafist Muslims, etc.
Personally, I doubt ultra-Orthodox Jews will ever single-handedly takeover America, because in the scenario I am talking about, there will likely be other (non-Jewish) ultra-conservative religious groups, with which they'll share power. But I do think it plausible that in 2 or 3 centuries from now, North America will be a much more reliigious and much more conservative place than it is today. Not certain, of course, but plausible.
Putting aside the considerable statistical skepticism, the natural next question we all have at noticing these trends is - is there any way for secular society to get some of the "special sauce" these ultra-religious groups have, before the aggregate supply of everything starts to fall?
Secular pronatalism doesn't seem like it has a lot of staying power with most people as an ideology. But I've been on board for a long time, and so have a lot of my friends. So maybe the best answer is the common sense one: Wait a few generations for all those not susceptible to the secular pronatalism mind virus to select out of the gene pool, and hope society doesn't crumble under its own technical debt in the meanwhile.
I’m sceptical about how successful secular pronatalism can be. Large families, generation after generation, can come at a substantial personal cost, and it is a difficult sell for individuals if it is just a matter of principle, as opposed to something backed by promises and threats of post mortem reward and punishment. Furthermore, many religious pronatal groups reduce defections by socially ostracising and demonising defectors, making defection expensive. That kind of behaviour is much easier to justify given religious premises than secular ones. So I doubt secular pronatalism is ever going to be as successful as religious pronatalism. At its best, it might see some success under particularly favourable circumstances, but religious pronatalism will thrive in far less favourable conditions
True, true. The evil vizier-economist's answer would be to notice that statisticians tend to estimate the value of a human life at around $10 million on average, and then notice that raising a child in the United States costs a paltry $250,000 or so over 18 years, and finally start to wonder how they can facilitate smoothing out that discrepancy across space and time to the parents' benefit. I"m not crazy enough to think far along those dimensions, but there is a big mismatch here that I think would be core to any secular solution to the problem.
I was recently buying an older car and calculating out how much buying a newer car with more safety features was worse by assigning a value to my life/health and the risk of death and the risk of injury. I see used cars which generation over generation have major safety upgrades which, if you value your life at 10 million would probably save you 10 grand or so over the life of the car, having a gulf in price of a few thousand, and most of that value difference wasn't because of the safety features.
I guess it's possible people are just ignorant, but in general I see people especially men acting recklessly enough with their lives that they seem to not ascribe the highest values to them. They would rather have a shorter life where they have more money and other things.
On the other end of the spectrum, I probably give much more inherent value to my life than the average person (probably closer to 20m than 10m, if I were to spreadsheet it out) and it drives a lot of risk-averse action on my part.
Driving was one I decided on early: I didn't get a driver's license until 25, to get well out of the danger zone for auto accidents; and then less than a year after I got it, I moved to Finland (an uncommonly safe country in its own right) and I've been living off of public transit and bike paths that aren't thin painted lines next to motor traffic ever since.
To be successful, I think we need to bring back the "it takes a village to raise a child" mentality. We need to take some of the burden off of the parents.
Not going to happen to a large capacity under multicultural societies; no matter how hard you indoctrinate children, humans will retain their racial-tribal differences and will tend to segregate if not forced together by economics and state violence.
In the context of this discussion and skissane’s comment, religion is the tapestry of traditions/“beliefs” that bind a tribal group together.
I write “beliefs” in quotes because there are beliefs (i.e. assumptions) that people might have philosophically on how they model the world, and there are “beliefs” that people espouse they have as a means to bond with other members of the tribe.
I don't see it as all that hard to imagine secular pronatalism. You just need the non-parents to subsidise the parents. We saw several examples of this under communism.
Secular pronatalism as an ideology is new to me, but obviously the main limiting factor in fertility rates globally is just a mismatch in the lifestyle of the modern luxury-expecting freedom-enjoying individual vs the self sacrifice needed to do child raising. I would say a significant part of that is financial and time-related, both things which have obvious political, not ideological, solutions. Fighting the ideology of individualism with an ideology of self sacrifice did not work for climate change and will not work for pronatalism.
I often joke to my peers: it doesn't matter what I invest in, my best financial decision was buying a house, my worst financial decision was having kids, the rest is just screwing around in the margin.
The special sauce seem to be forbidden contraceptives and limited opportunities.
Yes, there's also a kind of mandate in the bible to be fruitful and multiply, and the fact that if you grow up in a larger family you tend to have a larger family, but I would bet the other factors matter more.
Pronatalism doesn’t belong to religion especially. People didn’t used to have a lot of kids because God told them to, they had a lot of kids because they were free labor.
In that way, the pendulum is already starting to swing the other way in the US with the loosening of child labor laws.
Secularly, though, we’d have to do something to make it not hellishly expensive and inconvenient to have children. The US can’t even extend the child tax credit, much less fix healthcare, housing, education, food deserts, or childcare all at once.
Are you and your friends men? Unfortunately, the people who truly produce the next generation are largely absent from places like Hacker News, and history seems to show that, once they have any other options, spending 15-30 of their prime years doing the energetic equivalent of 40 consecutive Tour de Frances 9 months out of every 18, while being entirely dependent on a physically larger, stronger person who may or may not have legal and/or social sanction to beat you, is less appealing than living the way you and I live, as we please.
I'm guessing the only thing that will ever reverse this will be the invention of artificial wombs.
For what it's worth, I'm personally on board with having as many children as possible. Life is a cherished miracle. But I also can't bear children and take no risk in this endeavor.
I find it funny when men talk about having as many kids as possible when they take on 0% of the health risk, have no expectation of quitting their job, and statistically have a low chance of becoming a single parent.
Seeing it from the side of a Woman, it's no wonder birth rates are declining.
It definitely makes the policy predictions for how countries are going to deal with this much bleaker. Many countries have tried the carrot for years now. Get ready for them to start using the stick.
>Unfortunately, the people who truly produce the next generation are largely absent from places like Hacker News, and history seems to show that, once they have any other options, spending 15-30 of their prime years doing the energetic equivalent of 40 consecutive Tour de Frances 9 months out of every 18, while being entirely dependent on a physically larger, stronger person who may or may not have legal and/or social sanction to beat you, is less appealing than living the way you and I live, as we please.
Whoa that reads almost as loaded as my reply:
I suspect collapse of nativity is why Feminism(tm) kills civilizations throughout antiquity.
> Wait a few generations ... and hope society doesn't crumble
We don't have a few generations until we are beyond the point where we can mathematically recover unless we develop economic mass adult-cloning technology and develop the psycho-social faculties to integrate that into a healthy (enough) society. The world won't end, but let's just say hyper-advanced visions of the future seem unlikely at this point.
Kiryas Joel, New York, is growing over 50% per decade. That is not consistent with “net result 0”.
If you look at the actual statistics on the growth of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the US and Israel, and Old Order Amish in the US, the actual figures are inconsistent with “net result 0”
>the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3 centuries, they could be the majority of the US population, which could then result in a national baby boom.
Only if their reproductive habits do not change in that time. Hard to project out 3 centuries with a good deal of accuracy.
The fact that these are still very much niche interests after many generations indicates that the social indoctrination processes needed to maintain such cultures are not scalable.
> The fact that these are still very much niche interests after many generations indicates that the social indoctrination processes needed to maintain such cultures are not scalable.
In 2023, Israel contained over 1.28 million ultra-Orthodox Jews, 13.5% of Israel’s population. It is estimated that by the end of this decade, it will be over 16%. [0] By shortly after 2065, it is estimated that 50% of Israeli children will be Haredi. [1] I think this is counterevidence to your claim - the social indoctrination processes necessary to maintain Israeli ultra-Orthodox Judaism have already scaled to over 1 million people, and are projected to scale much further than that
So in % terms not even a rounding error of the global population by 2085. These religious communities rely on both cult-like indoctrination and quasi-incestuous family networking in tandem to survive. We are not going to see Amish or ultraorthodox Jewish populations taking over the world.
Refusal of enlistment is not essential to the Haredi lifestyle, and so it seems plausible their resistance to that might gradually weaken
There is already a minority of them, the Hardal (Nationalist Haredi), who are happy to enlist, but whose birth rates, retention rates, and general lifestyle, are similar to the Haredi mainstream
I mean mainstream American society of secular to moderately religious people, as opposed to ultra-religious minorities such as ultra-Orthodox Jews or Old Order Amish
I mean the term quite broadly and inclusively, since many of the big divides within American society (ethnicity, race, politics, class) make a relatively modest difference to fertility rates, and those differences appear to be shrinking over time
Just a friendly reminder to modern Progressives that (on average) you will not be in the future described by parent because you were tricked into an anti-natalist posture and will fail to reproduce adequately. It's a problem which kills itself in time so long as the problem doesn't ideologically metastasize into competiting populations.
Their theory also depends on the children of the "conservatives that have the most kids" remaining conservative, which I haven't observed among my own social group. My friends that had the most conservative parents (ex: Jehovah's Witnesses) went the furthest in the opposite direction, becoming progressives who don't want many (or any) kids.
Personally, I'd rather have fewer kids and be able to give them more attention and resources.
Some ultra-conservative groups have >80%, even >90% youth retention – such as Older Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews. Jehovah's Witnesses youth retention is a lot lower – I've heard claims it is less than 50%, that on average more leave than say.
Plausibly, being much closer to mainstream culture makes it much easier for people brought up JW to leave, whereas people raised in communities where English isn't even their first language, find that much harder.
friendly reminder to you: you won't be in the future either. because all humans have short lifespans. having children won't change that. enjoy the ride, whatever that means to you
Anyone one to watch is 'peak road' or peak transport.
Most countries continue to steadily expand transport infrastructure. Returning some of that back to a natural state, or just abandoning it, does happen but remains very rare.
My problem with the “peak population” hypothesis is that all of the non-breeders will eliminate themselves from the gene pool soon. All of us that have kids for whatever reason chose to reproduce despite the abundance of modern society. Also the groups that have many kids (the Amish have 7 children on average, and you also have Mormons and Orthodox Jews) will expand exponentially.
> Also the groups that have many kids (the Amish have 7 children on average, and you also have Mormons and Orthodox Jews) will expand exponentially
I agree with your overall point, and about the Amish and Orthodox Jews (especially the ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic/Haredi).
However, for Mormons, I'm not sure that is true. Mormons, in the US at least, have plummeting fertility rates, and also a lot of problems with retaining their younger members. They don't belong to the same category as Amish and ultra-Orthodox do, they are converging to the American secular mainstream while those groups remain on a clearly different trajectory from it.
When I say "Amish" I mean "Old Order Amish". Mennonites have both lower fertility and lower retention, so their demographic future is less bright overall.
That said, there is a subgroup of the Mennonites, the Old Order Mennonites, who have fertility and retention much closer to that of the Old Order Amish. The Wenger Mennonites, in particular, are rather similar in those measures. But only around a third of Old Order Mennonites are Wenger, and only around 15% of Mennonites in the US are Old Order.
Something affecting Mormon fertility rates specifically is the dramatic increase in housing costs in the “Mormon Corridor” (the inter mountain us west strip of geography where most Mormons live). It’s simply too expensive for most young Mormon families to live the lifestyle they used to; with large homes and large families.
That area of the US has some of the most newly unaffordable areas in the country
It’s also possible that secular society creates effective off-ramps to convert the hyper-religious to secular values. I’m uncertain if this will work given how successful the in-group remains despite the internet and modern social media.
Many ultra-Orthodox Jews use "Kosher Internet filters" – filters that block content that isn't approved by their rabbis. In Israel, you can buy "Kosher phones" which have this software pre-installed by the telco and locked down so you can't remove it.
People assume that technology necessarily encourages secularism, but it doesn't inevitably do so. Technology also makes possible new methods of social control which can be used to suppress secularism.
Who is to say children today will have children of their own tomorrow? People who are choosing not to have kids “leaving the gene pool” (you say it as if they are some filth to be done away with) doesn’t change anything.
The people of typical child rearing age today grew up in the "16 and pregnant" era, where having children was demonized. They were told that to have children was a failing, and that they should focus on their career instead – that was the key to a successful, happy life. Social pressure is a hell of a drug.
Is that fashion going to remain, though? Everything goes out of style eventually. I think we are already seeing some cracks where people are starting to question why having children is so "wrong". Nothing happens overnight, but I'm not so sure the children today will grow up in that same environment.
I think the economics trump the social factors mostly. It seems to take ever more education in order to grasp at an ever more ephemeral stability, and children need a decade or two of stability when growing up. I can’t imagine anyone will be encouraging their 16 year old daughters to have children any time soon.
It is true that once you are rich enough you no longer need children to help support the family unit as was an imperative historically (and still in the poor parts of the world), so we cannot discount the economics. That is no doubt why it became the fashion. It was a demonstration of how rich we've become. A display of human progress and achievement.
But I see some change in sentiment around questioning what good is being rich if you can't enjoy it with your children. It is not happening overnight by any stretch of the imagination, but I think the tides are slowly starting to turn.
I look back at Leo Tolstoy's "A Confession" and I think that it's a bit more complicated than that. He summed up my own thoughts quite well more than a century before I was even born.
> No matter how often I may be told, "You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live," I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false. The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing -- art as I called it -- were no longer sweet to me. "Family"... said I to myself. But my family -- wife and children -- are also human. They are placed just as I am: they must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge leads them to the truth. And the truth is death.”
> Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them?
Once upon a time there was no choice if you wanted to survive yourself. The world was too much for the feeble man without their help. Indeed, the rich now have the luxury of relying on "corporations" to stand in for where children were once necessary. But then you're ultimately back to square one: Why should you love, guard, bring up, and watch the corporations?
There is no free lunch. You are going to put in the effort either way, but at least children might also provide some happiness along the way. The "corporations" seem to just draw ire. We didn't recognize that for a long time, but I do see a shift starting to take place.
I think we are just all different - I can't imagine children bringing me any happiness; I felt the way Tolstoy did already when I was a young child. Interestingly, my grandmother once told me she only had children because of social expectations, and I can say that her children were absolutely aware of that. For me, the philosophical reasons were enough; the monetary savings are in a sense a bonus, but for others economics may be the main force preventing them from having children which is indeed sad in its own way I suppose.
> but for others economics may be the main force preventing them from having children
Economics never prevents having children. As before, only the rich even get the luxury of choosing to not have children. But the rich could have children too if they so choose. Their fear of children making them look poor under the whims of today's fashion is an entirely self-imposed limitation.
Good for them if that's what they want to do. No judgment on anyone's personal life choices. But I maintain that an increasing number of people are starting to question if that is what is right for them. I agree that what is right for an individual is not universal. Some people will truly not want children, but many more feel pressured to not have children due to the prevailing fashion trends. I see change afoot among the latter group. Having children is slowly starting to become "cool" again.
Fundamentally I just disagree with you I think; I'm not seeing any signs that trends in fertility are turning around, and I think if anything it was social pressure that was holding the numbers up to begin with. I'm certainly willing to admit that I could be wrong on that though; the millennials, a large echo generation from the boomers (myself among them) are hitting the age where it becomes a sort of "now or never" proposition and anecdotally, I do see some people considering it. But I also think that religion is one of the big drivers of social pressure for fertility, especially in the US, and you can see it continue to collapse which I think is a sign of the way things are going.
> I'm not seeing any signs that trends in fertility are turning around
I'm not sure how you could. The sentiment is only just starting to change as far as I can tell. It is too late for the current crop of young-ish adults. But I don't see the next generation, of what generation there is, coming up in the same environment where having children is demonized and seen as something reserved for the poor. For them, I fully expect having children will be the display of wealth; the "cool" thing to do.
We see over and over and over again that the rich use their resources to set themselves apart from the poor in some way and then the poor try everything they can to emulate them. It is a tale as old as time. In this instance we saw the rich start to afford the luxury to choose to have children, and poorer people have been on the quest to copy them ever since. But now we're nearing a critical mass where the world has become rich enough that even the poorest people are now able to start thinking about foregoing having children. That signals that the current fashion trend is on the outs.
I'm starting to see a shift towards "Look at how rich I am. I can afford to have children and you can't!" You even alluded to that same shift in a previous comment, so it seems you're seeing it too. And we should expect something of the sort as it is the natural progression of fashion.
The problem is the lack of stability not wealth, though wealth should contribute to stability.
Housing and transportation continue to dominate American household budget.
Now, I did read that somebody suggesting that it's not cost but density that reduces population fertility. I would wonder if that just means we need to provide more spaces for families within cities.
Children are resilient. Hell, we've raised children through terrible wars and famines. Being born into a relatively peaceful era and the wealthiest time in history is about as stable as it gets.
You may have a point that potential parents are putting pressure on themselves to be the perfect soccer mom and dads, carting their kids around in their Escalades, and then returning home to sleep in their mansions, and if they end up anywhere short of that they are not worthy of having children. But that's just part of the fashion du jour. Children don't need or even care for any of that.
> I did read that somebody suggesting that it's not cost but density that reduces population fertility.
I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that cost is a factor. Sure, there is that study that suggests it costs ~$10,000-20,000+ per year to raise a child, but when you look closely the cost is for things like buying a bigger house. You don't need a bigger house to raise children. Look at what American settlers raised children in: Tiny, single room log cabins. And they had, on average, eight children living in them!
The density suggestion is interesting, although I'm not sure it tracks. For example, the least dense US states, Maine and Vermont with only ~35% urbanization, have lower fertility than New York and California with ~90% urbanization. I expect what was noticed is merely correlationary as urbanization and the general ability to opt to not have children are both not realistic until a society reaches a certain level of wealth. In other words, the societies that are rich enough to opt to have few children are also more likely to be urbanized.
But humans are social creatures. And it hasn't been socially acceptable to have children in the modern age, at least not until you are into your 30s, at which point go ahead, society gives the green light (It will even start to cry: "Why haven't you had children yet???") – but by then, good luck having more than approximately one child before biology puts an end to the party.
I believe that the stability being spoken of here is in the micro-environment of the household, and primarily concerns two things: first, the parents’ ability to provide for the children and keep a roof over their heads, and second, the parents’ emotional stability.
The latter is often closely tied to the former. When things get rough, things can get ugly. Tensions build and emotions run hot which at best makes for a less-than-stellar environment for kids to grow up in and at worst can lead to violence or divorce. Many young adults experienced this first hand in their childhood and want to avoid inflicting these situations on any potential children of their own.
As such, a lot of people who’d otherwise be parents have held out because they fear these scenarios playing out. For most, the goal probably isn’t to be perfect or raise their children in the lap of luxury, but simply to wait until they’re reasonably confident that they’ve precluded financial disaster for the most part and that hardship and struggle won’t be commonplace.
I don’t think that’s bad or wrong, and in fact I feel is thoughtful and responsible. With all this in mind, if an individual or group wants to look at turning around birth rate numbers, they would do well to address the issues that prevent young adults from feeling financially secure in this way.
> they would do well to address the issues that prevent young adults from feeling financially secure in this way.
To be fair, that does appear to be happening, if slowly. The largest financial drain on young people, college, has shown decline over the past several years. There is still a lot of social entrenchment to overcome, though; like trying to convince marriage hopefuls that they don't need to buy an expensive diamond.
> They were told that to have children was a failing
Were they? High-achiever families routinely demonize having relationships at 16 but then turn it around VERY QUICKLY after getting that college degree and want their children to get married and have kids before 30.
(That said many high achievers themselves don't actually want to have kids, despite family pressure to have kids at 30.)
>The people of typical child rearing age today grew up in the "16 and pregnant" era, where having children was demonized. They were told that to have children was a failing, and that they should focus on their career instead – that was the key to a successful, happy life. Social pressure is a hell of a drug.
You could almost call that a genocide... if the originator of that messaging authored it to cause a birth collapse. Throw in every public policy decision made to economically destroy single-earner households and it really almost starts looking like genocide (or democide?)...
If you don’t reproduce then your genes are not passed on. You have self-selected not to be part of the human race any longer.
My hunch is that the people who still decide to reproduce, despite all the reasons people who advocate for not having children talk about, likely have some sort of genetic predisposition for reproduction - a strong innate need.
After all the non-breeders die off, the future belongs to the reproducers.
What a wild take. This is like claiming gay people will "die off" in 2 generations because they don't reproduce.
1000 years ago some subset of people chose not to have children, and humanity did just fine, and that same group of so-called "non-breeders" still exists today. Therefore we can conclude it's not purely a matter of genetics. There are a huge number of reasons people make that choice. People even change their minds during their life. It's not just a YES/NO switch in your genetic code somewhere.
> 1000 years ago some subset of people chose not to have children, and humanity did just fine, and that same group of so-called "non-breeders" still exists today.
There have always been, and always will be, people who don’t have kids, for a whole host of reasons.
But that’s not the argument (or at least, not the steelman version of it, as opposed to the strawman one) - the argument is that if there are certain heritable traits that discourage people from having children, then all else being equal, natural selection will cause the frequency of those traits to decline over time, albeit often not to zero.
The all else being equal part is very important. In a society with strong social pressure to reproduce, a trait which makes people less likely to want children may not be strongly selected against - because the social pressure to reproduce means desire to have children only has a small impact on the odds of actually having them - whereas in a society which is much more individualist, it may have much more of an impact, so the selective pressure against that trait may be much stronger. And of course, a trait which produces less desire for children might nonetheless be selected for because it produces some other countervailing advantage
Still, I think the argument does have some weight - that in contemporary Western society where reproduction is far more of a voluntary choice than it once was, biological and cultural factors which encourage reproduction are going to be selected for to a much greater degree than they were in the less individualist societies of decades and centuries past, where less such encouragement was needed
>This is like claiming gay people will "die off" in 2 generations because they don't reproduce.
It's a serious and interesting question as to why evolution tolerated/encouraged homosexuality in a small but significant proportion of the population. If you have the time, this article gives a good overview of the discussion [1].
Depending on your answer to that question - along with your views about how evolution affects modern humans another - it's natural to think about homosexuality will occur in future humans.
Could we have more, less or about the same of it? Will everybody be bisexual? How might medical fertility treatments affect the outcomes? It's an open field of ideas.
I don't think nature promoted it, but that it is a maladaptive corruption of mating systems which isn't serious enough to result in its cause disappearing from the gene pool.
If evolution is sensitive enough to give us two kidneys via some indirect impact on the number of reproductive offspring we create, why can’t it drive a “software” change to give people the desire to have heterosexual sex?
The best answer I can think of is that sexuality is somehow very fragile for evolution to calibrate, so even natural selection isn’t powerful enough to select heterosexuality reliably.
But it’s hard to argue that persuasively with a biological basis which we don’t yet have.
Compared to the other evolutionary arguments for homosexuality it also doesn’t scale well to other non reproductive sexual behaviours.
On the one hand, you'd expect humans (animals) to have completely bred out all forms of infertility -- except that there are non-heritable causes of infertility. (In fact, all causes of infertility must be non-heritable, or at least not inherited! :)
On the other hand, it's surely true that characteristics which deprioritize or diminish the likelihood of reproduction are bred out, however incompletely. Whether it's a sense of taste that enjoys poisons, a risk-taking brain that kicks in before fertility, homosexuality (in males at least), or just not wanting children.
These characteristics are bred down to a sustainable level, obviously. But they are clearly not bred out fully, nor are they consistently bred "up".
In many traditional societies, there is strong social pressure for marriage and children, arranged and semi-arranged marriages, etc - such that a person’s sexual orientation may not make much difference to their odds of heterosexually reproducing. Some people might enjoy heterosexual reproduction and others might endure it but they’ll do it all the same. So that would limit the selective pressure against genes that increase the likelihood of homosexuality
In the mainstream contemporary West, if heterosexual reproduction doesn’t appeal to you, then you just don’t do it-so selective pressure against those genes may exist to a degree that it formerly did not. On the other hand, the new possibilities for non-heterosexual reproduction (such as IVF, sperm/egg donation, surrogacy) might counteract that.
Not just in terms of selecting genes, but also selecting cultures.
If allele A causes increased desire to reproduce than allele B, then in a society in which reproduction is viewed as an optional extra, all else being equal, allele A is likely to predominate allele B over time. Conversely, in a more traditional society in which everyone is subject to a strong social expectation to reproduce, allele A would have far less of an advantage over allele B.
An allele might lead to increased reproduction indirectly rather than directly. For example, if an allele makes a person more likely to be religious, and if religious people are more likely to have kids, then even though that allele does not directly impact desire to reproduce, it may be selected for due to its indirect impact on reproduction.
That's genetics; coming to culture: if subculture A puts higher emphasis on reproduction than subculture B, then all else being equal, in the long-run subculture A is likely to outnumber subculture B, irrespective of any genetic factors. However, defections from subculture A to subculture B may erase much of its innate demographic advantage. This suggests in the long-run, the most demographically successful subcultures will be those which combine sustained high fertility with sustained insularity (social barriers to defection to other subcultures)–which is exactly what we observe with groups like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews.
It’s surprising to me why my parent comment was down voted. It’s simple biology and mathematics. If you want culture to survive (if what is most important to you is cultural values) you must have a society with children in order to impart those values. There is no future for a society that discourages children.
> After all the non-breeders die off, the future belongs to the reproducers.
I suspect it was downvoted because that line suggests dismissal or contempt for people who don't have children.
There are many people across all generations who haven't had children (either by choice or because they were unable for various reasons), and their lifespans and social contributions are no more or less on average compared to people that do have children.
Ironically, "breeder" is (or used to be?) a slang denigration of heterosexuals, within the homosexual community.
I didn't interpret the original comment as contemptuous of either opinion. But it is undeniable that both groups are sensitive about their choices (or unfortunate inability to choose differently).
That isn't really how that works at all. If you have a brother and a sister who both have male and female children, that's basically the same genetic line going on.
The only exception I can think of is if you have some mutation they didn't. But in that case if you're aware of the mutation the consequences are likely to be awful, which is a great case for not having biological children.
From my perspective, the only reason they are resistant to societal factors that drive people to have less kids is that their strong religious values (which are held together by their strong communities). So this really begs the question of what society will look like if the only people who will be breeding in the future are those who form tight communities that promote relatively religiously extreme values (that happen to include having lots of children).
This is a pretty "icky" comment. Naming specific groups that will be growing exponentially has echos of less savory characters using these arguments for political gain.
It is very unlikely that any group will have long term exponential growth. As pointed elsewhere where this type of growth doesn't scale. The groups you mention have been around for centuries and they haven't become dominant. Social cohesion falls apart over time.
If we could keep running this era of civilization forever, Matrix style, I'm sure that would be true. But how many more generations will there be before AI+biotech lead to us, I don't know, 3D-printing people? The old laws might not have many cycles left to go before the new ones show up...
My problem with it is that it is a public policy failure. Capitalism and perpetual economic growth fundamentally needs more people.
At some point economies will do the math and public policy and figure out how to keep the expansion going.
The US hasn't done it because Mexican immigration fills the gaps. But Germany, China, Russia, and (holy crap) South Korea (although I suspect South Korea will absorb a shitton of North Koreans some day when the regime collapses).
What happenes when biotech extends human life and achieves the artificial womb? Go ahead, say its impossible.
If the future is agrarian, extremely-religious people living a very low-productivity lifestyle of essentially subsistence farming, then that’s probably actually a nice balance for the Earth and humanity. However it really doesn’t feel like that’s where things are headed in spite of the current demographic trends you note. In a sense, I think that’s the way the Americas were before Columbus re-united them with the old world.
I don't know about great for humanity, but sustainable probably. I sit behind a keyboard for a living; while I might harbor some romantic notions about a pastoral life, deep down I know I'm not cut out for it. And the heat index where I live now gets into the one-teens every summer so I really don't think I'm cut out for it.
Also, I'm not one to complain about downvotes - I can take my knocks, but I'm a bit surprised that my comment is rather disliked; it's just my thought at that moment.
Hopefully peak plastic pollution, anyways. Plastic is a very useful substance, the issues are that it is made from fossil fuel and that its pollution is significant. If we capture carbon and then use that carbon as a feedstock to create plastic in a form that won't end up as a pollution (aka not plastic bottles or synthetic fleece) we can turn it into a positive.
It's not. We need a sustainable size of population. Unlimited population growth is not sustainable. It doesn't mean that we are going to die out. It just means that there are as many newborns as old people dying. Check out this good old Hans Rosling video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78
Even if we are close to peaking emissions, we must consider the phenomenon of accumulation. Given that CO2 has an effective lifespan of around 100 years and methane about 10 years in the atmosphere, reductions in emissions now will still result in these gases accumulating and impacting the climate for decades to come.
No, even if you emit less, you are still 'accumulating', but at a slower rate. And previously released methane is still converting to co2 in the atmosphere, for decades to come.
No they won't. Only the first derivative of greenhouse gases ('emissions') will peak. Greenhouse gases itself will only peak after the world achieves net-zero.
Since you're being pedantic, greenhouse gases don't have an infinite lifetime in the atmosphere so they will start going down slightly before we hit net-zero.
I hope most understood that I meant to say peak greenhouse gas emissions.
And ironically decreasing coal and fuel pollution decreases albedo causing faster warming which will persist for a few decades until things balance out. Less pollution is good, particularly when it comes to reductions in sulphur dioxide from bunker fuel and PM2.5 from coal emissions, but it does have side effects amounting to a couple of degrees Celsius of warming according to recent papers. Hanson's "Global Warming in the Pipeline" is a sobering read.
“Peak pollution” sounds like the amount of pollution in the environment will actually _decrease_ going forward.
That is simply not true, it will continue to increase, just slightly less fast.
Sorry if I don’t feel euphoric right now.