Comment by bluescrn
8 hours ago
May not be a problem if the trend continues that wealthy/high-consumption cultures choose to stop reproducing?
8 hours ago
May not be a problem if the trend continues that wealthy/high-consumption cultures choose to stop reproducing?
Birth rates are dropping across the board. It's not just the wealthy countries.
In the abstract we have to pick one crisis or the other, but the real world is messy. Global warming has momentum, and so does population despite what look like reliable projections of population decline in many places. In other words we could see negative impacts from both without them canceling each other out.
> In other words we could see negative impacts from both without them canceling each other out.
See William Gibson's concept of Jackpot.
That started in my country 75 years ago.
Not a single year has our population dropped. We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
When that too stops so does the music as a baffling amount of the economy and society and it's support systems is predicated on endless inflationary growth. Frankly nobody in this game of musical chairs will fix it till it hits.
> Not a single year has our population dropped. We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
That'll only be feasible for so long, since birth rates are dropping pretty much everywhere.
Not really. If economic activity with a material basis increases faster than the reproduction rate decreases, you'll still see an overall increase in resource extraction.