Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]).
We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again.
It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.
Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
> imagine the state of society when that starts happening
The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.
Saying society is going to collapse due to population decline is about as absurd as saying society will collapse due to overpopulation.
What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.
We understand the implications, but I would not want anyone to bring forth children that are unwanted, thus bringing more unhappiness into those parents' lives (and their surrounding community).
Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.
Current global population is ~8 billion. Momentum will take us to ~10 billion by 2100. Will it be a challenge to manage this rapid population decline and attempting to provide real, meaningful community support [1] and social systems [2] to potential parents to encourage them to have children (in order to raise the total fertility rate to a steady state level)? Certainly, without any doubt or hesitation. We spent up a credit card balance of sorts with a ballooning global population, that debt will need to be paid back in various ways. But extinction? Hardly.
> I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement.
That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.
1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.
> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'
If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.
> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.
There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.
> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?
Even if it was the case, would it be a problem? What is more important, having less humans being happy or more humans having a crappy life. Why should specie survival be more important than overall happiness of those that would have lived?
This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state.
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
Agreed that affirmative happiness is very hard to think about as a target.
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]).
We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again.
It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.
Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
> imagine the state of society when that starts happening
The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.
1 reply →
Saying society is going to collapse due to population decline is about as absurd as saying society will collapse due to overpopulation.
What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.
2 replies →
We understand the implications, but I would not want anyone to bring forth children that are unwanted, thus bringing more unhappiness into those parents' lives (and their surrounding community).
Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.
Current global population is ~8 billion. Momentum will take us to ~10 billion by 2100. Will it be a challenge to manage this rapid population decline and attempting to provide real, meaningful community support [1] and social systems [2] to potential parents to encourage them to have children (in order to raise the total fertility rate to a steady state level)? Certainly, without any doubt or hesitation. We spent up a credit card balance of sorts with a ballooning global population, that debt will need to be paid back in various ways. But extinction? Hardly.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-...
[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-...
> I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement.
That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.
1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.
> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'
If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.
> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.
There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.
> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?
> speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
Western civilization was always a good idea, never achieved, and they have had their day
Even if it was the case, would it be a problem? What is more important, having less humans being happy or more humans having a crappy life. Why should specie survival be more important than overall happiness of those that would have lived?
This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state.
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
> Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on
Could you explain to me how this is not another name for happiness?
5 replies →
Agreed that affirmative happiness is very hard to think about as a target.
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
1 reply →
> when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric?
Happiness is not a metric, cannot be measured, and is one of the most important things
Despite it being unmeasurable we know that economic security increases it
"Happiness", not "perpetual state of unbridled ecstasy"
Presenting dire conclusions without providing a shred of substance?