> A combination of rapid economic development, very high levels of education among young adults, very competitive labor market, long work hours, unaffordable housing, traditional gender norms and persistent gender inequalities in work and family life have created a perfect storm — conditions that make it very difficult for young people to marry and pursue their fertility plans
and the second one:
> The research I have been conducting with my colleagues shows that the appeal of marriage and having children has been vanishing among the young adults and many of them are likely to stay unmarried, childfree and without a partner.
And this is very real. Men increasingly don't want to marry because they perceive the current system as unfair. Women increasingly don't want to marry because they don't want to settle for anything less than a certain threshold that is increasingly difficult to find. This trend is clear everywhere in the West.
As a father of 2, my fate is sealed. But I can totally understand the above points as being true.
Being a parent is the most difficult, most expensive and longest job I've ever taken on. And I've moved around the world by myself, which is a joke in comparison.
On paper, children do not make sense what-so-ever. Thankfully, in reality, I cannot imagine living one day without my kids. They give me life, strength and purpose like nothing ever has.
The thing is it's a hard mode that's gotten harder. All my family in the generations above me had way more kids than me. Maybe it's an anomaly due to survival rates jumping, but even my aunt has six kids. It didn't seem to be such a burden until very recently. Even cousins who are older than me and make less money seem to be able to have more kids.
You're right about purpose though. I don't know what I'd do without them.
I have a number of friends who are just straight up single, never had a girlfriend (or boyfriend, friends are both genders), never even tried, live alone despite having plenty of means. It's like a sort of secular monk. So in a way I get it, but also in a way I could never do it.
Having kids is actually playing rather than being a bystander for the vast majority of people. How many people actually have an impact that actually means anything to the future otherwise? Vanishingly few.
Exactly. I refuse to take part in what currently is trending towards a global concentration camp, nobody excluded, and I refuse to throw more bodies into it. If anything, I'd adopt a child that already exists. I pride myself more in the things I don't do than the things I do. You may say that doesn't have an impact, but it makes a universe of difference for myself.
Every single human being alive today owes his/her very existence to an uninterrupted chain of such achievements going back to the beginning of life on this planet.
Do we need to record these in encyclopedias? That would be silly. Are they extremely important for us? No kidding. Is failing to "continue the habit" exiting the long game and electing not to play any more? I would say so.
Quite the opposite of that, IMHO. I would regard my having children as both the most challenging and most fulfilling thing I ever did in my life - way above what I thought would take that spot for me (things like business ventures, career, adventures, extreme endeavors and achievements).
You as an individual would have the same impact as your individual children would?
But yes, keeping a population going that will continue to work and support society is important, but don't forget that you are having a positive impact there as well.
> They give me life, strength and purpose like nothing ever has.
Congratulations! You've discovered the meaning of life, ie reproduction.
It's so fulfilling because it's what you're programmed to do, as an organism.
Living things (as a group) exist only to reproduce, nothing else matters, and everything they do is geared to toward it. If an individual doesn't follow that goal, it is removed from the gene pool, and those that reproduce fill the vacuum.
Of course human vanity and ego will insist there is something higher (thus things like religion), but there isn't.
It is survival of the species that counts, and the 'geological' timescales over which it does. Some individuals from that species reproducing is obviously a requirement - but only as a means to an end.
Whether individuals reproduce or not, usually doesn't matter much unless you have really small # of individuals left and it's "have babies or go extinct".
At this point, one could well argue that our species has a better shot at (longterm) survival when fewer individuals reproduce, vs. when our numbers keep increasing. If so, depopulation would enhance chance of our species' survival.
I only partly agree with your comment, because the dilemma is false. All living organisms reproduce and humans as mammals are no exception. At the same time, you can almost feel it's not all.
If you stop to think about the original cause, things get very complicated (if you adopt Penrose's thesis regarding Big Bangs, there is no original cause). If you start to analyse the macro- (dark energy and maybe dark matter) and especially microcosm (all things quantum), suddenly ordinary perception collapses. Even plain old relativity with time-space curvature seems at odds with what we are used to perceive. So maybe, just maybe, it's not so far-stretched to think the so-called objective reality is a kind of hologram or whatever we call it. I'd say it's far more probable than just believing everything is accidental and has little purpose (e.g. just reproducing and that's all).
As a married man, I feel that anything that is unfair between me and my wife is totally up to us - I don’t feel that the system itself puts me at a disadvantage.
See the sentence after that. You’re already married, but in today’s market, increasingly few people want to be married and have kids, women of reproductive age even less so than the average person. As a man, if that’s the goal of a relationship, unless you get very lucky, you’ll have to partner with someone who either earns less than 60% of your income, is relatively less fit than you, spends money at an unsustainable rate, hasn’t developed the social/psychological skills to be ready for kids, or some combination of these (perhaps all of them). Seemingly the only consistent way around this is to come from a wealthy family. (I’ve finally found an exceptional partner who I think I’m on a good track with, but there are still lots of compromises and issues, and I would not have found her without paying a matchmaker $5k+.) It does all seem a bit unfair, because it is, but I’ve accepted with time is that life just isn’t fair. Things were a lot more unfair for women just a few decades ago, when they routinely settled for alcoholics who beat them (and worse) just to have families.
I thought my comment clearly described the problem as a result of our socioeconomic environment, so I’m curious: what led you to that conclusion? I love women, and most of my closest friends are women (who either don’t want kids, are too old for them, already had them, or can’t afford them). And, having talked extensively with them about this, as well as my various partners over the years, basically all of us have agreed that if you’re a man and want kids, you’re going to have to make a lot of unfair compromises to do so. And again… this is because of capitalism, not because of whatever it is you’re thinking. I am curious to know what that is, though, and how I could have better communicated my point to you!
Perhaps it is the increased pressure on men to be more involved in household routines traditionally performed by women like washing dishes, cooking meals, cleaning house, caring for children, etc, yet there is no equal pressure on women to be more involved in household routines traditionally performed by men like being the primary breadwinner, household repairs, auto repairs, financial management, lawn maintenance, etc.?
Oh, of course. Communication is arguably the key factor in maintaining a strong relationship.
However, there is an imbalance in societal pressure for men to change which can affect how others view the relationship. Have you ever heard someone say “she should help her spouse repair the cars more” or “can you believe she hasn’t cleaned those gutters yet”?
The marriage institution in most countries puts men at serious disadvantage in case of divorce - which is where a pretty large chunk of marriages end up.
There are two aspects here. One is child care, although here I think the USA does much better than many other countries where the judge simply gives the children to the mother by default, and often even very strong arguments don't help.
The other issue, probably more relevant, is that you split all you have in half (roughly). In theory, it is to make up for the fact that the woman has to deal with childbirth and all the consequences, including missed opportunities. In practice it means that even if you don't have any children, you need to give her half of everything if she decides so. Some people consider it very unfair, but of course every situation is different.
The fact is, women file for divorce more often than men, and not everybody is comfortable with a prenuptial agreement arguing that marriage is based on trust, and if you don't have that trust at the beginning, why to marry at all?
In Washington state at the very least this isn't true. The default parenting division is 50:50, and there would need to be strong extenuating circumstances for a parent that wants 50% parental time to not get it. In my experience men are less likely to seek 50%.
Equal co-parenting is hard, it pretty much requires that you live in or near the same school district as your ex. Being a weekend or summer co-parent doesn't have the same constraints.
It won't be the right solution for every case, but it is always available.
I know several single dads raising kids with little or no co-parent from the mother, but it is the exception, I know far more who went with "every other weekend plus one midweek night"
At least in Germany, AFAIK you only split in half what you earned during the marriage - and that seems fair. Like two founders getting 50% of a startup.
I don't know, none of this strikes me as a big reason not to start a family with a partner that you see eye-to-eye with.
> The overpopulation story is old, visceral and hard to refute.
The overpopulation story is a joke, and has been since the many failed predictions of "The Population Bomb" made it anathema in the academic and political worlds.
There's nothing here or in any of the data that suggests anything other than an overshoot of a couple billion people, followed by a gradual decline into a steady state population.
The overall doomerism about "overpopulation" or sudden, drastic shifts in population numbers is just that, doomerism.
I don't understand, where did you find any study that proved that the capacity of feeding would grow with population ?
It's easy to judge in hindsight, but 30 years ago, long before the current slowing of population growth, you had legitimate rights to worry about food production capacity increase, it _has_ a limit.
Nowdays, given food inflation is partially due to shortage not only because of war, but instability in production. India just banned rice export. You're really that sure of your opinion ?
To be fair, mass misery is very real: starvation, thirst, poverty, forced migration, etc. It's just a "local" problem and internal so "doesn't count" to the popbomb deniers.
Also, it's worth nothing that modern economic growth models pretty much all depend on population growth, so steady state population is a recipe for economic stagnation. Obviously, technology disrupts this but our economic systems aren't setup for that, e.g. UBI.
Finally, climate impact is tied to population: fewer people, less impact.
> To be fair, mass misery is very real: starvation, thirst, poverty, forced migration, etc. It's just a "local" problem and internal so "doesn't count" to the popbomb deniers.
Those have all been problems even with far lower population levels. By many statistics people worldwide have never been better off. Life expectancy, lower rates of military conflicts, etc are all generally improving.
My point is that billions of people make it harder to avoid and some these problems. Mathematically, 10,000 people in one area can be airlifted out of a problem or have supplies brought in. 10,000,000 people are not easily moved or supplied.
Where is this "steady state" coming from? Without feedback control, population growth is an exponential process that's inherently unstable, either growing or shrinking. What's the feedback here? Malthusianism provides the feedback with increase in death rate; what's the feedback to overcome a decline in birth rate?
Have you looked at the news regarding record temperatures, floods, drought, wildfires, crop failures, antarctic sea ice decline, insurance being unavailable in certain areas, etc?
Insurance not being available could also be impacted by the huge increase in replacement costs due to inflationary pressures on real estate and repair costs; it could also be a conscious move to pressure lawmakers to pass more favorable laws. It could also be due to the increased populations moving to areas like coastal Florida where hurricanes have been sweeping in for thousands of years or Colorado where wildfires are part of the lifecycle of forests.
Temperatures have fluctuated throughout history as have the ice levels in the arctic regions. People are certainly a factor, but there are general trends and cycles that earth follows as well. Depopulation may not greatly impact these incidents.
Interesting article, but it's missing the true dynamics. One of the interesting things in the past few years we've seen is evolution and population dynamics on a very fast and very relevant scale with COVID. You'd see case numbers going up and down, but since mid 2021 or so, the main thing driving rates was the reproduction number of the most contagious variant in existence. At times you'd see the overall case counts going down, but one particular variant growing quickly, and you would know that very soon the number was going to go up again. The dynamics of viral and human populations are not so different.
Groups that have a reproduction number less than 1 (same as TFR<2) will die out. Those that have a reproduction number greater than 1 will grow and come to take over. Right now, the populations that have R>1 are largely in Africa. That said there are little pockets in R<1 countries that are R>1. In the U.S. for example you see groups like the Amish and the Mormons. As long as there's enough food and no wars or mass oppression, groups with R>1 will eventually constitute effectively the entire population.
Now, of course, humans are more complicated than viruses. Viruses don't have beliefs or values that can be transmitted to the next generation, just genes. For this to work for humans, the humans have to pass along their pro-kid value system to the next generation. Some groups will do this, and some won't, but the world is big enough that there will be groups that do manage to do this, and they will inherit the Earth.
This line of thinking is common but highly flawed. If it were true, everyone would be super religious just because their ancestors were.
In reality there are several issues:
- People have minds of their own and can willingly choose to leave a group. You see this all the time with Mormons for example. In order for such a group to eventually dominate, they need to grow even faster to compensate for this natural "leakage".
- "As long as there's enough food and no wars or mass oppression" seems like an extremely optimistic assumption.
- Reproduction rate is not constant. It is quite possible that R will be low for a couple of decades or centuries before rising again (and possibly falling again even later). Trying to predict long term trends by linearly extrapolating the current value of such a highly variable metric is not going to work in any complex system.
> This line of thinking is common but highly flawed. If it were true, everyone would be super religious just because their ancestors were.
Most people of the world did not have access to super effective birth control until recent decades. And most women did not have complete agency until recent decades.
That requires ideas to be easily transmissible. You absolutely have regimes and cults that work hard to shield their members from being "infected" by outside ideas by instilling that those are a heresy and ultimately the source of bad things.
Historically, cities usually had R < 1. Cities were unhealthy places, and the urban poor had fewer opportunities to provide for their children than the rural poor. Regardless, people continued to migrate to cities for economic opportunities, and cities were the places where social and cultural developments happened.
Parents passing their values to their children does not seem to be the right model. Children choosing from the available opportunities is a bit better. Groups with high fertility rates tend to export people, because there is not enough room for the excess children in their ancestral culture. The ones who leave tend to be the ones who did not fit into the culture anyway, and they often adopt new values and a new way of life.
> Groups that have a reproduction number less than 1 (same as TFR<2) will die out.
But will they really? Fertility rates are hard to predict and I feel like at a certain point a society might deurbanize with people moving to the countryside and have more children again. Maybe it's at 100 million, maybe at 10 million population, but I just can't fathom a 100 million society just going to zero or even the hundreds of thousands. Maybe I don't understand the dynamics.
> Ask yourself is it more likely a young girl is going to the city or to the countryside?
At this point that is quite unlikely but still >0. But I also think the argument is quite myopic. There's a definite mental health crisis among young people and especially women, which could possibly be attributed to the lack of purpose that is a consequence of modern life, so a countermovement in at least part of a population is not unthinkable. And that's just one possible thing that could trigger such a shift.
I would wager a guess that in most (if not all) of those countries, a relatively large % of children die young.
That is: population growth in those countries could be much less than fertility rates suggest.
Whether that situation improves, will vary per country. But where it does, you'll likely see an overshoot caused by families-with-many-children that now survive until they get older, before women start having fewer children.
See eg. some of Hans Rosling's videos for a nice illustration of these dynamics.
> But where it does, you'll likely see an overshoot caused by families-with-many-children that now survive until they get older, before women start having fewer children.
That's what happened to India. Fertility rate: [1] Population: [2] Infant mortality rate.[3]
China imposed a one-child policy for a while to prevent such an overshoot, and it worked.[4] India had only 2/3 the population of China in 1960; now India has more people. Probably more than India can support in current climatic conditions.
These numbers are wildly improbable. A multitude of HackerNews in this very comment section assure me that having a child in the US is "financially impossible", but the US is significantly wealthier than any of these nations on a per-capita basis.
If it's too expensive to have children on a software engineer's salary, it's prima facie way too expensive to do it on a Somalian subsistence farmer's salary.
Since HackerNews is never wrong, I can only conclude that these fertility rates are inaccurate.
Kids are useful to farmers; they add laborers, increasing output. Kids are less useful to software engineers; the kids are a cost center and demand time away from the software engineer’s gaming and tinkering allotment.
This article doesn't seem to consider the role of natural selection on birthrate, but presumably this will act to arrest the decline eventually? Presuming individual desire to reproduce is variable and can be influenced by your genes, then individuals with a stronger desire to reproduce will be overrepresented in each new generation. Individuals for whom birth control is less effective, who stay fertile longer, etc. will presumably also be overrepresented. At some point I would expect this to lead to a return to growth.
As the article states there are not a lot of books on the topic but one I read recently was "Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" by Paul Morland.
The fixation with N, the size of the human system is absurd, when for all practical purposes the two attributes that really matter are
i) the impact of each individual on the biosphere (human - external interactions, or h-e) and its long term biophysical stability and
ii) the internal relations of individuals (human - human interactions, h-h, also known as economics, politics etc.) and its long term socioeconomic stability
Alarmism regarding either over or under population usually has hidden agendas and unspoken assumptions as to what is desired state of the human system and the stability or continuation of certain past and current arrangements, the dominance of certain tribes over others etc.
What complicates the discussion is the enormous unevenness in the distribution of both important factors mentioned above and the resulting wealth and quality-of-life gradients across the planet. In turn this results from the (relatively) slow timescale of technological diffusion which involves complex cultural phenomena and conflicts.
A cursory discussion of the intricate web of social dynamics, dependencies and inequalities and how they affect "N". When people complain about how "expensive" it is to raise kids we need to recognize the changing meaning of "raising kids": from the pool of cheap labor that this was historically, to the growing amount of individual attention lavished on kids in the developed world today. Yet that attention requires societal resources. Between parents, various providers and (potentially) a subsidy from the commons some economic equilibrium must be found. On the other hand why would economically active parents not be able to "afford" raising kids to the available and desired standard? One factor (among many) might be that their own economic output is devalued as a result of others doing the same work while aspiring to a lower standard of living.
Back to the question of optimal N. In a sustainable global economy (conditioning on meeting the h-e, h-h challenges to an adequate degree) I suspect that N is actually irrelevant within a very broad range. In a sense the attention we pay to population numbers is a measure of how primitive our societies.
For the unlimited population growth people, I have one question:
What is the carrying capacity of earth if not 8 billion. 16 billion? 80 billion? What quality of life is available on an earth with 80 billion people?
If you live in western North America, it is easy to think we have a bunch of empty space available everywhere, but this is not the case on the rest of the planet.
There’s a lot of empty space everywhere. Entire continents are mostly empty. You may have a preference to leave those continents uninhabited, but if humans need the space they’ll use it. It will be a lot easier to colonize the Australian Outback and Antarctica than Mars.
Better yet, learn to live within our means and leave these spaces as they are.
To the question asked, 4 -6 billion seems a better range than > 8 billion as our current numbers and expected near future demands are straining resource and energy supplies, piling on waste and taking down non human planet cohabitors.
Food and water are not significant obstacles for a rich society. Desalination would increase the price of water from 0.2% of GDP to 2%. Greenhouses produce 1000x as many calories per acre for 10x the price per calorie. (And a 10x of ingredient prices would only double the final cost)
If we manage to phase out meat consumption, and with it the need to raise farm animals, switching to a full plant-based diet, and improved public transportation to the point car use become an exception, I bet the planet could hold twice the current population without significantly raising environmental impact. We waste a lot of resources feeding and sheltering cattle and automobiles instead of people.
I think the entire longtermism thing is at the heart something that Camus discusses in the Myth of Sisyphos: We will ultimately all die and be forgotten, what good is struggling, working and living?
That is the absurd condition every human being finds themselves in. Camus sees two solutions that have been suggested so far in philosophy:
Suicide (which he rejects outright as too easy and lazy) and a "leap of faith". The "leap of faith" consists in finding by passion some irrational, maybe larger purpose outside of what can personally be known or experienced, a belief that negates this absurd condition. Historically, this is the domain of religion and spiritualism.
Longtermism seems to me just that: an existentialist escape from nihilism by the promise of some kind of vague purpose with vague metrics and an unknown, irrational payoff you will never know (at least for those subscribing to it without motives of profit).
> many demographers still believed that the very low fertility rates then prevalent in Europe ... would eventually ... converge close to two children per woman
Well, wont it? We've not seem European population (as opposed to fertility rate) drop significantly enough for us to determine whether or not there's a bounce-back.
> Fertility is plummeting in places as varied as etc. etc.
Well, if a country has a lot of people, living in relative concentration (cities), and in various kinds of duress - does that not make sense? In other words, and focusing just on the population size: Why would drops in fertility stop because of its own self rather than the population size/density?
> it imposes unmanageable strains on a society.
This is a bit like asking whether accelerating your car does not make you worried about relativistic time dilation.
I mean, sure, if fertility were to drop to half-replacement for a couple of decades there would be strains; but even those would be manageable. The post is discussing a fantastical situation. Especially since a large drop in _population_ would spur an increase in fertility by the increased availability of accommodation, potential useful work etc.
> The question is what happens if young Koreans get accustomed to living single and child-free lives.
Ah, now we're getting to the crux of the matter. Well, the author is conflating several things:
1. bearing children or not
2. raising one's children or not
3. being a single adult or living in a couple (or larger sexual-familial arrangement)
(1.) and (2.) have always been in merely partial correlation for men, nor have (1.) and (2.) - not even (2.) and (3.), although (2.) does imply not-(3.) almost always. As for women - recent decades have seen a great increase in women raising children alone, for better or for worse. Finally, in many societies, children are raised more communally beyond a certain age.
But even having said that - I am willing to acknowledge the theoretical danger of societies cultivating individuals to be emotionally detached, locked in their individual homes, and reclusive sans Internet - leading also to them not having kids. But talk about that, man, don't beat around the bush!
> general public is not clamoring for action... people ... are focused on immediate headaches such as inflation, housing costs or employment.
That _is_ clamoring for action! And by the way, it's interesting to check whether a part of the cause for reduced fertility is how Capitalist society now squeezes so many more work hours from women. Yes, it's more egalitarian, and that's a good thing IMHO, but instead of having women working for a wage (close to) full time, the (alienated) work week should be lower for both men and women.
> On the Left, it is too often dismissed as a non-issue or welcomed as a step toward degrowth – one whose environmental benefits will surely outweigh any social costs.
Many, if not most, on the Left [1] is typically quite concerned about the effects of changes such as demographics on individuals and communities. So, even while welcoming population leveling off in general, it's unfair to suggest that social costs are ignored. At least this is an over-generalization.
----
[1] - I don't mean cultural identity-politics like the US democratic party. But then, the question of what constitutes "The Left" can launch a thousand threads.
> Our zero is for optimism. The notion that the externalized thoughts we write today may survive myriad years to a time when that fifth digit becomes significant.
The Long Now Foundation is dedicate to "fostering long term thinking". The date format they use is one attempt to head off the Y10K problem. See also RFC 2550 Y10K and Beyond for an alternate discussion.
The thing is that when I write 2023, I am not asserting that this is a four digit year. It's an integer whose decimal representation requires four digits.
Similarly when I say "the Kingdom of England became a single state in the year 927", I am not asserting that I'm using three digit years. However, if I said that this event happened in 0927, then it does look like I'm doing four digit years.
It's the leading zeros that are associated with problematic ways of writing years. Two digit years have the leading zero for the first 9 years of the century (and the last year of the previous), like 00 for 2000 and 03 for 2003.
Without the leading zero, 3 refers to Year 3 of our Common Era. The leading zero in 03 turns it into a partial, context-sensitive year understood as 2003.
The 0 in 02023 does the same thing; it perpetrates some Y-something problem, in this case Y100K. In the year 102023, if people are around, some of them might use 02023 to mean 102023. When they mean the 2023 A.D. they will use 2023, and when they mean 12023, 22023, 32023, ... they will use exactly those forms.
The silly zero people ain't thunk this through real well.
I really can't see it as a problem. This can and of course, because there are so many nations in the world, will without doubt be fixed by a rather small and comparatively insignificant step to authoritarianism - on the historical scale of calamities of the XX century with Nazis, Commies, Mao, Pol Pot and whatnot - completely insignificant. Probably even less distressing that a relatively trivial Trump and his loyal "red hats" story.
Governments will simply hire women to have children and pay them for that. There are so many poor women, especially many of those who missed their chance to get married due to perceived overabundance of men brought by Tinder - by the time they are ready to settle, it's too late and the government will be right there to offer an alternative.
There is no objective issue with fertility. If there is, IVF is a well-debugged and cheap technique that easily scales. Nothing prevents these women from having 6-10 children for a living. Economy won't crumble from that either, costs are easy to calculate and completely acceptable. It can be compensated by withdrawing all other benefits, tax breaks and support to families, because that won't be necessary anymore.
Surely when some country starts doing it first, it will be met with outrage. But then a question will hang in the air - what do we do next? Bomb them? An idea too awkward to even suggest. Just let them make a quantum leap in development over everyone else simply for being too uppity? Also a hard sell. Eventually everyone will have to adjust their value system and do the same. It will be a much much smaller step to the right to make than say, legalisation of gay marriage we all just witnessed, was a major step left. It doesn't even mean directly breaking anyone's rights. Not nearly as bad as say China's one-child policy.
I quite seriously don't see a slightest problem about it. It will be cheaper than most welfare states' spending and it will create enough people to make another forms of welfare unnecessary: economic growth will provide enough to old generation through stocks appreciation, and fierce competition will force young generation to learn and develop skills. It's the numbers game after all.
> A combination of rapid economic development, very high levels of education among young adults, very competitive labor market, long work hours, unaffordable housing, traditional gender norms and persistent gender inequalities in work and family life have created a perfect storm — conditions that make it very difficult for young people to marry and pursue their fertility plans
and the second one:
> The research I have been conducting with my colleagues shows that the appeal of marriage and having children has been vanishing among the young adults and many of them are likely to stay unmarried, childfree and without a partner.
And this is very real. Men increasingly don't want to marry because they perceive the current system as unfair. Women increasingly don't want to marry because they don't want to settle for anything less than a certain threshold that is increasingly difficult to find. This trend is clear everywhere in the West.